The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I spoke yesterday of certain happenings in history which lead over our study of the life and being of man to the spiritual worlds and I referred to two early epochs of history (the Egypto-Chaldean and the Greek) in this connection. I told you how the ancient Initiates sought to give guidance to men not only in matters of religion but in other domains too, including that of social life, by calling to their aid Spiritual Beings who are connected with the inbreathing. And we heard that these Beings in turn are connected in the cosmos with what is manifest, externally, in the Moon and its light. Certain Moon-Beings, in times when such intervention had become necessary, namely in the Egyptian epoch, were used by the Initiates in order to give direction to the religious and the social life in ancient Egypt and to other spheres too, of ancient historical development. We also heard of the importance assumed in Greek culture by Luciferic Beings, elementary Beings who were used by the Greek Initiates, for example by the Initiates of the Orphic Mysteries, as their helpers in the inauguration of Greek art.

I indicated that even today, to those whose perceptive faculty is deeper and more inward than is normally the case, the traditional heads of Homer in sculpture give the impression of a kind of listening, of hearing that is also touching, of touching that is also hearing. Homer listens to those Spiritual Beings of the air who use the state of equilibrium between the inbreathing and the out-breathing of man to create a rhythm between the breathing and the circulating blood. The Greek hexameter is based upon the wonderful ratio of number existing between the rhythm of the breathing and the pulse in the human being, as indeed are all the measures of Greek verse which, for this reason, as well as being creations of man have also been created by the mysterious rhythm which surges and shimmers through the cosmos. I said that when the Greeks speak of the lyre of Apollo, we can picture its strings being according to the impressions which came to men from this composite rhythm.

Since those days humanity has entered upon a quite different phase of evolution, the characteristics of which I have described from many points of view. Since the fifteenth century, mankind has been laid hold of by the intellectualism which now has sovereign sway in all human culture and civilisation, and arose because an older form of speech—the Latin language in its original form, which was still connected with that hearing of rhythm in the Graeco-Roman epoch of which I have spoken—continued far on into the Middle Ages and became entirely intellectual. In many respects the Latin language was responsible for educating man to modern intellectualism. This modern intellectualism, based as it is upon thoughts that are dependent entirely upon the development of the physical body, exposes the whole of mankind to the danger of falling away from the spiritual world. And it can be said with truth that as earlier creeds speak of a Fall into Sin, meaning a Fall more in the moral sense, so, now, we must speak of the danger to which modern humanity is exposed, the danger of a Fall into Intellectualism.

The kind of thoughts that are universal today, the so-called astute thoughts of modern science to which such great authority is attached—these thoughts are altogether intellectualistic, having their foundation in the human physical body. When the modern man is thinking, he has only the physical body to help him. In earlier periods of earth-existence, thoughts were entirely different in character for they were accompanied by spiritual visions. Spiritual visions were either revealed by the cosmos to man or they welled up from within him. On the waves of these spiritual visions, thoughts were imparted to men from out of the spiritual world. The thoughts revealed themselves to men and such “revealed” thoughts are not accessible to intellectualism. A man who builds up his own thoughts merely according to the logic for which modern humanity strives—such a man's consciousness is bound to the physical body. Not that the thoughts themselves arise out of his physical body—that, of course, is not the case. But modern man is not conscious of the forces that are working in these thoughts. He does not know what these thoughts are, in their real nature; he is entirely ignorant of the real substance of the thoughts that are instilled into him, even in his school days, by popularised forms of science and literature. He knows them only in the form of mirrored pictures. The physical body acts as the mirror and the human being does not know what is really living in his thoughts; he only knows what the physical body mirrors back to him of these thoughts. If he were really to live within these thoughts, he would be able to perceive pre-earthly existence, and this he cannot do. He is unable to perceive pre-earthly existence because he lives only in mirrored images of thoughts, not in their real substance. The thoughts of modern man are not realities.

The element of danger for modern evolution lies in the fact that whereas, in truth, the spiritual, the pre-earthly life, is contained in the substance of the thoughts, the human being knows nothing of this; he knows the mirrored pictures. And, as a result, something that is really attuned to the spiritual world falls away. These thoughts are attuned to and have their roots in the spiritual world and are mirrored by the physical body; what they mirror is merely the external world of the senses. In respect of the modern age, therefore, we may speak of a Fall into sin in the realm of intellectualism. The great task of our age is to bring spirituality, the reality of the Spirit, once again into the world of thought and to make man conscious of this. If he wants to live fully in the modern world, a man cannot altogether rid himself of intellectualism, but he must spiritualise his thinking, he must bring spiritual substance into his thoughts.

Because this is our task, our position is the reverse of that of the Initiates of ancient Egypt. The Initiates over in Asia, before the Egyptian epoch, were able, because men were endowed with the old clairvoyance, to utilise the intermediate state of consciousness between sleeping and waking to have as their helpers the Moon-Spirits who lived in the inbreathing. But during the Egyptian period men gradually lost this old clairvoyance and the Initiates were forced to provide for their helpers dwelling places on the earth, because these Moon-Spirits had, as I said yesterday, become homeless. I told you that the dwelling places provided by the Egyptian Initiates for these Moon-Spirits were the mummified bodies of men, the mummies. The mummies played a part of the greatest imaginable importance during the Third Post-Atlantean period of evolution, for in the mummies there dwelt those elementary Spirits without whose help the Initiates on earth could do very little to influence the social life of men. In more ancient times still, it had been possible to enlist the help of the Moon-Spirits living in the inbreathing of men for the spiritual guidance of earth-evolution; and when this was no longer possible a substitute was created in ancient Egypt by making use of the Spirits who had a dwelling-place in the mummies.

Today we are in the opposite position. The Initiates of Egypt looked back to what had been possible in a past age and were obliged to create a substitute. We, in our day, have to look towards the future, to that future when once again there will be men who live in communion with the spiritual world, who will bear the impulses of their morality in their own individuality, who live in the external world as I have described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by saying that moral impulses must be born in the individual and from the individual work out into the world. This is possible only when the out-breathing of men is such that the air exhaled by an individual who has within him quickened moral impulses, impresses the images of this morality into the external life of the cosmos. Just as with the inbreathing, as I described yesterday, the cosmic ether-forms enter into man and work for the preservation of his organs, so what develops within the individual himself must enter as an impulse into the out-breathing and pass, together with the out-breathed air, into the external cosmos. And when in a distant future, the physical substance of the earth disperses into cosmic space—as it will do—there must exist a life that has taken shape in the cosmic ether out of these images of moral Intuitions that have passed into the ether with the out-breathed air. As I have described in Occult Science, when the physical substance of the earth is dispersed in the universe, a new earth, a “Jupiter” planet will arise from the densified forms out-breathed by individuals in times to come. Thus we must look towards a future when the out-breathing will play a role of predominating importance, when the human being will impart to his out-breathing those impulses whereby he is to build a future.

New light can here be shed upon words from the Gospel: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My words will not pass away.” I have often indicated the meaning of this passage, namely, that what surrounds us physically, including the world of stars, will one day no longer exist; its place will be taken by what flows, spiritually, out of the souls of men to build the future embodiment of the earth, the Jupiter embodiment. The words: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My words will not pass away”, may be supplemented by saying: Men must be so permeated with Christ that they are able to impart to the out-breathed air the moral impulses quickened within the soul by Christ's words—impulses which will build the new world out of the forms proceeding from the human being himself.

Since about the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, elementary Spiritual Beings from other worlds have entered into the sphere of the earth—Beings who were not previously there. We may call them Earth-Spirits, in contrast to the Moon-Beings who in the epochs of ancient India and ancient Persia fulfilled an important function and who then, having become homeless on the earth, took up their abode in the mummies; in contrast also to the daemons of the air who played an important role in ancient Greece and to whom Homer “listened”. We can speak of elementary Earth-Spirits in contrast both to the Moon-Beings who lived in the inbreathed air and to the Air-Beings who moved, in their cosmic dance, in the state of balance between inbreathing and out-breathing, and were mirrored in Greek art. These Earth-Spirits will one day be the greatest helpers of the individual human being with his own moral impulses—they will help him to build a new earth planet out of his moral impulses. We can call these helpers “Earth-Spirits”, elementary Earth-Spirits, for they are intimately connected with earthly life. They expect to receive from earthly life a stimulus that will enable them to undo their activity in the future incarnation of the earth. As already said, these Beings have come into the sphere of earth-evolution since the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. In public lectures, as well as elsewhere, I have emphasised that remnants of the old clairvoyance persisted for some time after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. In those days there were still external institutions, ceremonial cults and the like, by means of which these Beings who had come into the sphere of earth-evolution maintained their footing—if I may use a trivial expression. The particular tendency of these Beings is to help man to become very individual, so to shape the whole organism of a man who has within him some strong moral idea that this moral idea can become part of his very temperament, character and blood, that the moral ideas and individual moral quality can be derived from the blood itself. These elementary Earth-Beings can render significant help to men who are acquiring individual freedom in ever-greater measure. But a great and powerful obstacle confronts these Beings.

If, instead of speaking from theories—theories are never to be taken quite seriously—we speak about the spiritual world from actual experience, we can hardly refer to these Spiritual Beings in any other way than that in which we refer to men, for they are present on the earth just as men are present there. Thus we can say: These Beings feel especially deflected from their aim by the factor of human heredity. When the superstition of heredity is very potent, this runs counter to all the inner inclinations and propensities of these elementary Beings who are by nature turbulent and passionate. When Ibsen brought out a work like his Ghosts, which helped to make heredity a fixed superstition, these Beings were roused to fury. (As I said, you must get accustomed to hearing them spoken of as if they were men). Let me express it pictorially. Ibsen's disheveled head, his tangled beard, the strangely wild look in his eyes, his distorted mouth—all this comes from the havoc wrought by these Beings because they could not endure Ibsen, because in this respect he was one of those typical moderns who persist in upholding the superstition of heredity. Those who fall victim to this “ghost” believe that a man inherits from his parents, grandparents and so on, propensities in his blood of which he cannot get rid, that his particular constitution is due entirely to inherited qualities. And what in Ibsen came to the fore only in a grotesque, poetic form and also with a certain grandeur—this tendency pervades the whole of modern science. Modern science does indeed suffer from the superstition of heredity. But the aim that ought really to be pursued by modern man is to free himself from inherited qualities and abandon the superstition that everything comes from the blood flowing down from his ancestors. Modern man must learn to function as an individual in the true sense, so that his moral impulses are bound up with his individuality in this earthly life, and he can be creative through his own, individual moral impulses. The Earth-Beings serve this aim and can become man's helpers in pursuit of it.

But in our modern world, circumstances for these Earth-Beings are not as they were for the Moon-Beings who, having become homeless, were obliged to find dwelling places in the mummies. These Earth-Beings to whom we must look as the hope of the future, are not homeless in humanity but they wander about like pilgrims gone astray, meeting everywhere with uncongenial conditions. They feel constantly repelled, most of all by the brains of academic scholars, which they try at all costs to avoid. They find disagreeable conditions everywhere, for belief in the omnipotence of matter is altogether abhorrent to them. Belief in the omnipotence of matter is, of course, connected with the “Fall” into intellectualism, with the fact that the human being holds fast to thoughts that are, fundamentally, of no significance because they are only mirror-images and he is quite unconscious of their real nature and content.

Just as the Egyptian Initiates were obliged to wrestle with the problem of how to bring down the Moon-Beings who had become homeless, so it is our task now to help these other Spirits to find the earth a fruitful, not an unfruitful field. The worst possible rebuff for these Beings is constituted by all the mechanical contrivances of modern life that form a kind of second earth, an earth devoid of Spirit. The Spiritual indwells the minerals, plants and animals, but in these modern mechanical contrivances there are only mirrored thoughts. This mechanized world is a source of perpetual pain to these Beings as they wander over the earth. Complete chaos prevails in the out-breathing of men during the hours of sleep at night. These Beings who should be able to find paths in the carbonised air out-breathed by men, feel isolated, cut off by what intellectualism creates in the world. And so, much as it goes against the grain, much as modern man struggles against it, there is only one thing to do, namely, to strive to spiritualise his actions in the external world. This will be difficult and he will have to be educated up to it. Modern man is extremely clever, but in the real sense he knows nothing, for intellect alone does not create knowledge. The modern intellectual, surrounded by his mechanical contrivances in which mirrored thoughts are embodied, is well on the way to losing his real self, to knowing nothing of what he really is. Inner reality, inner morality in his intellectual life—that is what modern man must acquire, I will tell you what I mean by this.

Human beings today are exceedingly clever but there is really not much substance in their cleverness. Every imaginable subject is talked about, and people pride themselves on their talk. Examples lie very close at hand. A curious one in European literature is a volume of correspondence, in Russian, between two men—Herschenson and Ivanow. The literary setting is that these two men live in the same room but they are both so clever that, when they are talking, their thoughts jostle to such an extent that neither of them listens to the other; they are both always talking at the same time. I can think of no other reason why they should write letters to each other, for there they are, in the same square room, one in one corner and the other in the corner opposite. They write letters to each other—very lengthy letters containing a vast number of words but no real substance whatever. One of them says: We have become much too clever. We have art, we have religion, we have science—we have become terribly clever ... The other man, reading these remarks, is merely astonished at the stupidity of the writer, although he is, admittedly, clever in the modern sense. But in his own view he has become so clever that he doesn't know where to begin with his cleverness and he longs to return to times when men had no ideas about religion, no science, no art, when life was entirely primitive. The second man cannot agree, but his opinion is that as this whole medley of culture develops it must abandon certain fundamental ideas if anything at all is to result from it. The two men are really talking about nothing, but they pour out floods of clever words. This is only one example and there are many such.

Intellectualism has reached such a pitch that this kind of discussion is possible. It is just as if a man is proposing to sow a field with oats ... it never occurs to people that it is up to them to sow seeds in culture and in civilisation—they merely criticize what has been and what ought not to have been and what, in their opinion, ought to be different ... Very well, then, a man is proposing to sow a field with oats and he discusses with someone else whether this would be a good thing to do. They begin to debate: Ought one to sow oats here? Once upon a time the field was sown with corn. Ought one to show oats in a field that was once sown with corn, or has the field been spoilt by having had corn on its soil? Were there not people living near the field who knew that the field contained corn? And is not the thought that one should now sow oats somewhat marred by the fact that certain people knew that corn had been sown in the field? These people may have been pleasant people. Should one not also take into account that the people who knew about the corn in the field were quite pleasant? ... and so on, and so on. This is more or less the kind of talk that goes on; because what nobody realises is that his task is to sow the oats! Whatever the value of our culture—whether one desires to return to the condition of Adam or that the world shall come to an end—a man who has something real to contribute to culture will not sit down and write letters to his neighbour in the style of the correspondence of which I have spoken. This sort of thing is one of the worst products of modern mentality; it is symptomatic of the deplorable state of modern cultural life.

These things must be faced fairly and squarely. People who hold a certain position in life are often capable of doing a great deal; but the important thing is that they should do what is right at each given opportunity. There are innumerable possibilities for action at this very minute—11:45 a.m., 23^rd September, 1922—but it is up to every individual to do what the particular situation demands of him. This principle must also operate in the life of thought. People must learn that certain thoughts are impermissible, and others permissible. Just as there are things that ought to be done and things that ought to be left undone, so people must learn to realise that by no means every thought is permissible. Such an attitude would bring about many changes in life. If it were universally cultivated, newspapers written in the modern style would be practically impossible, for those who discipline themselves at all would turn their back upon the thoughts voiced in such newspapers. Just as there must be morality in men's actions in the world of practical affairs, so, too, morality must pervade the life of thought. Today we hear from everyone's lips: This is my point of view, I think so-and-so ... Yes, but perhaps it is not at all necessary to think it, or to hold such a point of view! In their life of thought, however, people have not yet begun to adopt moral principles. They must learn to do so and then we shall not be treated to floods of pseudo-thoughts as in the correspondence I have mentioned ... All these things are connected with the fact that intellectualism has diverted men right away from the Spirit, from understanding of the truly spiritual. A good example of this is ready to hand, and I will give it to you, before speaking in the lecture tomorrow, about what must come to pass in order that intellectualism may be prevented from ousting men altogether from the world of realities.

A certain Benedictine monk, by the name of Mager, has written quite a good little book about man's behaviour in the sight of God. This little book only goes to show that the Benedictine Order was a magnificent institution in the period immediately after its foundation, for the influence of the rules of the Order of St. Benedict is still strong in the writing of this modern monk. One can really have a certain respect for this little book (it is not expensive as prices go nowadays, for it came out in a cheap edition) and, in comparison with much of the trash that is published today, it can be recommended as reading matter. It really is an example of the best writing emanating from those particular circles, although all such literature is, of course, antiquated, quite behind the times. And now this Benedictine monk has also felt inspired to speak about Anthroposophy. So do all kinds of people, and from every possible angle! They cannot be expected to abstain from this in their thoughts because they do not realise that they have no understanding whatever of Anthroposophy. It must be admitted, however, that what Mager writes about Anthroposophy is by no means in the worst category, and it is useful to consider his book because it is characteristic of the intellectualism prevailing in our time. Mager says: The anthroposophist tries to develop his faculties of knowledge so that he can actually behold the spiritual. Certainly, Anthroposophy aims at this and can, moreover, achieve it. Alois Mager admits that it would be an extremely good thing if men could really unfold perception of the spiritual world, but he maintains that they are incapable of this. He is even of the opinion that it is not, in principle, impossible, but that the general run of human beings cannot attain real vision of the spiritual world. He proves that he is not, fundamentally, opposed to this aim, because he says: Two men were actually able to develop their faculties of cognition to such an extent that they could gaze into the spiritual world: Buddha and Plotinus.

It is very remarkable that a Catholic monk should hold the view that the only two men really able to see into the spiritual world were Buddha and Plotinus—Plotinus who is naturally regarded by the Catholic Church as a visionary and a heretic, and Buddha, one of the three great figures whom, in the Middle Ages, the faithful were made to abjure. Nevertheless, Mager says of Buddha and Plotinus that their souls were capable of looking into the spiritual world. He uses a strange picture as a comparison, very reminiscent of modern trends of thought, especially of militaristic thought. He compares the spiritual world with a city, and those who desire to approach it he compares with soldiers who are storming this Divine City. He says it is as if an army had equipped itself to storm a city; but only two of the bravest soldiers succeed in scaling the battlements, and so the attack collapses. During the World War, how often did we not read, in the communiqués, of attacks collapsing ... and today a Benedictine monk speaks of knowers of the Spirit as soldiers who want to storm the city of the spiritual life, but the attack fails, with the exception of what the two valiant soldiers, Buddha and Plotinus, were able to achieve. Mager, you see, is simply not able to admit that man can approach the spiritual world; his intellectualism makes him incapable of it. One is surprised, however, at his refusal to admit that any Christian can draw near to God with real knowledge. Being quite sincere in this respect he would naturally be obliged to reject a book like my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for its aim is to show that the individual, out of himself, can give birth to moral impulses in the truest sense. Mager's view is that this can never be, for he maintains that when the human being is left entirely to his own resources, nothing spiritual can come out of him. Therefore he says that both private and public life will, as time goes on, be based wholly on the precepts of the Gospels. He means, in other words, that without understanding what the Gospels actually say, private and public life will be organised according to Gospel precepts—which are beyond the grasp of human powers of knowledge.

It is really not to be wondered at, when, with the intellectualism of today, Mager says: It is my innermost and well-founded conviction that Steiner's Anthroposophy can only be described as a clever systematising of hallucinations into a picture of the world, as a materialisation of the spiritual ... It is grotesque that this should come from a man who, in himself, is honest and sincere and is by no means among the most trivial thinkers of the present day. In order to do him justice I told you that quite recently he wrote a good little book. This critique of Anthroposophy is his latest production. Think once again of the sentence: It is my innermost and well-founded conviction that Steiner's Anthroposophy can only be described as a clever systematising of hallucinations into a picture of the world, as a materialisation of the spiritual ... My reply would be: “Very well, let us assume that you are in earnest about your conceptions of God and of the Spirit. You must place the spiritual somewhere when you aspire to reach it ... but you do not admit that man's powers of knowledge are capable of this. Why, then, are you a priest, desiring to dedicate your whole life to the service of the spiritual? You admit that the material proceeds from the spiritual. If, now, someone attains to a knowledge of the Spirit, what is the nature of such knowledge?” Those who adhere merely to knowledge of the material, well, they have the material before them and the spiritual amounts only to a number of thoughts. But a man who truly turns to the spiritual experiences its reality. Within the spiritual, the things that can be seen with physical eyes are present only as indication. Father Mager regards this as hallucination, so he says that Anthroposophy systematises hallucinations. His view is quite understandable, because in speaking of the spiritual we cannot speak as we do about a material table that the eyes can see and the hands can touch. A material object exists in the spiritual merely as indication, and so it seems to Mager to be hallucination.

And now let us go further, and say to him: “You, Father, are dedicating your life and service to the spiritual and you most certainly acknowledge that the creator of the material is the spiritual. What, then, is the world in your view—materialisation of the spiritual? Yes, but this is exactly what you censure in Anthroposophy! You speak of a picture of the world that is a materialisation of the spiritual, but you believe for a fact that this world has been created out of the Spirit, through materialisation. This is what Anthroposophy tries to fathom. Your strongest censure of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy takes in earnest something that you, yourself, ought to take in earnest, but are not willing to do so. That is why you censure Anthroposophy. According to your view, the God in whom you believe must surely once have taken a materialisation of the spiritual in earnest! Otherwise there would have been no Creation. Are you, therefore, taking your religion in earnest when you censure Anthroposophy for trying to grasp how the spiritual can gradually become the material?”

Into what an abyss we gaze when we see how a man like this approaches Anthroposophy! This man is really clever, moreover he is not like others who are all cleverness and nothing else; he knows a little and has also learnt how to think. But just realise what his judgement of Anthroposophy implies and you will understand what kind of fruit is produced by intellectualism, even when it is dedicated to the service of the Spirit today. You will realise, too, that this intellectualism must be superseded by methods differing from those adopted by the priests of Egypt to overcome the spiritual dilemma that had arisen in their epoch. Of the Powers to which intellectualism must turn we will speak in the lecture tomorrow.

A wise man of ancient Egypt once spoke to a wise man of Greece words to this effect: You Greeks are a people who live only in the present, without taking history into account. You speak of what is happening immediately around you and give no thought to how the present has been taking shape since primeval times.

What did the Egyptian sage mean by this? He wanted to convey that the thoughts of the Egyptians were concerned with great problems of the cosmos, with the evolution of the earth through different forms, and that the Greeks, at most, had only pictures of these things in myth and saga. But in reality the Egyptian sage wanted to indicate what had resulted from the use made of the mummified human being, as I have been trying to explain in the last two lectures. The Egyptians set out to bring into the rhythm of inbreathing, impulses derived from certain Spiritual Beings for whom dwelling places had been created in the mummies. Let us try to picture as clearly as possible the significance of the mummy in days when Egyptian Initiation-culture was at its prime.

The mummy was the human being after the spirit-and-soul had departed from his physical form. While a man is alive, the forces active in his etheric organism, his astral organism and Ego, work within this form. The form is irradiated and permeated by the human “tincture” proceeding from the blood and the rest of the organism. The mummy was bare form, a form that could exist on earth only because the human being exists on earth. The Egyptian Initiates used this form—in which the soul and the spirit were not actually present—in order to acquire a power which, without the cult of the mummy, they could not have possessed.

We must try to picture times when the life of soul was quite unlike that of today. Before the Egyptian epoch, all the ideas and thoughts of man, all the experiences of his inner life, were imparted to him directly from the spiritual world. Even when immersed in his thoughts, therefore, he was living in revelations of the spiritual world. In the days of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian civilisations, all the thoughts of man were revelations from the spiritual world. No thoughts were stimulated in him by the external world, by plants, animals or other human beings. His life of soul was replete with thoughts proceeding from the Spiritual and they shed abundant light upon the world. Man lived in communion with the plants and animals and he also gave them names. But these names, too, came to him as revelations from the Gods. When, in the epochs of ancient India and ancient Persia, man gave a name to a flower, it seemed to him that a divine voice said to him distinctly: This is the name by which the flower is to be known. When he gave a name to an animal, he was conscious of hearing inwardly: This is the name by which the animal is to be known. In the civilisations of ancient India and ancient Persia, all such names came to men via their inner life of soul.

In the civilisation of ancient Egypt it was different. Clairvoyant experiences were now fading more and more into twilight and man no longer had clear perception of what was being revealed to him from the spiritual world. As a result he felt it increasingly necessary to live in communion with external nature, with the kingdoms of the animals, the plants and the minerals. But this, too, was out of his reach, for the time was not yet ripe. It was to come in the real sense only after the Mystery of Golgotha. The development of the human being in ancient Egypt had not reached the point where he could have lived in direct communion with the external world. He was obliged, therefore, to mummify the human body. For out of what was present in the mummified form from which the soul and the spirit had departed, he could receive enlightenment about nature around him, about the plants, the animals, the minerals. The first facts of knowledge about these kingdoms of nature came to man from the Spirits who spoke to him from the dwelling places provided for them on earth in the mummies. In the days when the Gods ceased to speak to man from the super-sensible world, he had recourse to helpers who were now able to live on the earth because the human form was preserved by mummification.

But the matter was full of complication. True, it would have been possible for the Initiates to receive from the Moon-Beings indwelling the mummies, enlightenment upon what should be introduced into human life and directives for the guidance and education of men. But because the necessary faculties of soul were still undeveloped, it would not have been possible, even for the Initiates, to obtain, without further measures, enlightenment on nature, on the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals, from the Moon-Beings in the mummies. And yet in this very domain the Egyptians were great. With the help of the culture connected with the mummies, they founded, for example, a wonderful art of medicine.

Of course, when a “clever” man of today interprets these things, he says: By preserving the mummies, the Egyptians obtained knowledge of the various organs and founded a science of anatomy, not merely of medicine. This, however, is an illusory conception. The truth is that purely empirical research and logical deliberation would have been no use to the Egyptians for their intercourse with the external world was not of this character; it was much more delicate, much subtler. But something was achieved by this careful preservation of the mummified form, namely, that the souls of the Dead were fettered for a time to their mummies.

Herein lies the dubious character of Egyptian culture, a perpetual reminder that it was a culture in decline, in degeneration, and cannot be said to represent a golden age in human evolution. It was a culture that encroached upon the super-sensible destinies of men, for human souls after death were fettered, as it were, to the preserved, mummified form. And whereas through the Spiritual Beings indwelling the mummies, directives for human affairs could be received, it was not possible to obtain enlightenment about nature, about the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms directly, but only indirectly, in this sense, that the Moon-Beings were able to communicate secrets of nature to the human souls still fettered to the mummies. And so it was from the human souls lingering with their mummies that the Initiates of Egypt, in their turn, obtained enlightenment about the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals. A strange atmosphere pervaded Egyptian culture. The Initiates said to themselves: Before death our bodies are not suited to receive enlightenment about nature; a science of nature is beyond our reach; this can come only later, after the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place; our bodies now are unsuitable. Nevertheless we need enlightenment. As human bodies now are, men can acquire knowledge about nature only after their death. They live in the midst of nature here, but they cannot use the body in order to form concepts about nature. After death, however, such concepts can arise. Let us therefore detain the Dead for a period in order that they may give us enlightenment about nature.

Thus a dubious element was introduced into the historical development of humanity through Egyptian culture. Chaldean culture held aloof in this respect and was, so to speak, a culture of greater purity.

Now all these things—modern science, of course, will regard them as so much fantasy, but modern science holds the same opinion of a great deal that is true—all these things were known, particularly, to men of Hebrew antiquity. Hence the aversion to Egyptian culture indicated in the Old Testament although, through Moses, many elements of Egyptian culture found their way into the events there recorded. The Old Testament indicates the kind of attitude that prevailed in regard to all those things I have described as typifying Egyptian development. The attitude of the Initiates in ancient Egypt was this. They said: In order to acquire the powers that are essential for the direction and education of men, we must create external means since inner means are no longer available to us. But we must also anticipate something that will arise only in the future, namely, a science of nature. And there is no other way of achieving this than by letting the Dead, whom we fetter to their mummies, impart it to us. Time ran on and the Mystery of Golgotha took place. By the fourth or fifth century A.D., the old constitution of the soul, with its pictorial conception of the world, had completely passed away. Indications were already appearing of an epoch when men were to form their concepts of outer nature from outer nature herself and moreover when they would be capable of doing so. The whole organisation of man was inwardly transformed. He felt more and more that his soul remained empty when he waited for thoughts and ideas to be revealed to him directly out of the spiritual world. And so he turned to the observation of external phenomena; he formed his concepts and ideas from observations and, later on, from experiments. The process was exactly reversed.

And now, once again it was a matter of acquiring by other means something that was no longer within the reach of man's own powers. More and more since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., it has been borne in upon men that a future must come when, despite the gift of intellect and the capacity to form thoughts and ideas about external nature through the intellect, this intellect must be spiritualized, so that thoughts will once again lead directly to Divine-Spiritual reality and the power inherent in such thoughts pass into the out-breathing. But this power has not yet come into existence. For the time being we have recourse only to the intellect that is bound up with the physical body.

Certain traditional conceptions which today have almost entirely died out and of which history knows nothing, were alive all through the early Middle Ages, from the fourth and fifth to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even later, although hidden in obscurity. Men now proceeded to make “mummies” of a certain kind, out of these conceptions—mummies that are analogous to those of Egypt although they take a different form and the analogy is not perceived. Modern humanity could have gained nothing by preserving the human form in the mummy, as was the custom in Egypt. What modern humanity preserved, was something different, namely ancient cults, mainly pre-Christian cults. And particularly since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the birth of a completely intellectualistic culture, ancient ceremonies and rites were preserved in all kinds of occult Orders. Wonderful cults of antiquity, occult rites and ceremonies have been continued in Orders and Lodges of different kinds. They are mummies, like the mummies of human beings in ancient Egypt, as long as they are not irradiated and quickened by the Mystery of Golgotha. There is a very great deal in these cults and ceremonies, but of the wisdom they contained in ancient times only dead elements have been preserved, just as the mummy preserved the dead form of man. And in many respects it is so to this very day. There are innumerable Orders where ceremonials and rituals of all kinds are enacted; but the life has gone out of them, they are mummified. Just as the Egyptian felt a kind of awe when he gazed at a mummy, so in modern man there is not exactly awe, but a feeling of uneasiness perhaps, when he comes across these mummified procedures in his civilisation. He feels them to be something mysterious, as the mummy was felt to be mysterious.

Now just as among the Initiates of Egypt there were some who acted unlawfully, who used the information conveyed to them by the Spirits indwelling the mummies to give false instruction and direction to humanity, so in the mummified ceremonies of many occult Orders an impetus is given to introduce a false twist here or there in the guidance of mankind. I told you that something made possible by mummification of the corpse, passed into the human being by way of the inbreathing. As I said yesterday, the Spiritual Beings needed by the Egyptians had no dwelling-place on earth. And this was provided by the mummies. Those Spiritual Beings and forces which by way of the out-breathing are to bear the inner configuration of man into the ether-world, find no paths in the everyday world, but they are able to move along paths created in these ceremonies—even though they are not understood and are mummified.

In the epoch of Egyptian civilisation, the Moon-Spirits found themselves homeless during the hours of the day. The Spirits who work in the out-breathing of man, these elementary Earth-Spirits who are to be the helpers of mankind today—they have no dwelling-place by night, but they slip down into these ceremonies and ritualistic enactments. There they find paths and are able to live. During the day it is still possible for these Beings to live as it were an honourable existence, for by day the human being thinks, and his intellectualistic thought-forms are passing outwards all the time with the breath as, driven through the cerebral fluid, through the spinal canal, it is then again exhaled. During the hours of night, however, when a man is not thinking, no thought-forms go forth from him; there are no little “ether-ships” upon which the Earth-Spirits can go forth into the world in order to impress man's form into the cosmos of ether. And so ways and directions for the Earth-daemons have been created through these mummified ceremonies. What is contained in all kinds of occult Orders, especially since the birth of modern intellectualism, has a basis similar to that of the cult of the mummy in Egypt, which so suddenly made its appearance. For the human being cannot have knowledge of outer nature without knowledge of himself and of his own form. When the Egyptians set out to acquire a knowledge of nature, they were able to have the mummified human form before them. When it behooved men of the modern age to find something that is not merely passive, ineffective thought elaborated by the intellect but that can really go forth into the world and produce an effect there, then they were obliged to surround themselves with symbolism, symbolism which points to what should really take shape within them in a spiritual sense.

These ceremonial forms and enactments in Lodges and Orders are devoid of soul—the soul has departed from them. As little as the soul of a man indwelt his mummy, as little does there inhere in these ceremonies the power of soul that once was present when they were conducted by the Initiates of olden time. Spiritual life pulsated through the ceremonies when they were being enacted among the ancient Initiates—a spiritual life flowed out from human beings into the ceremonies. In those days, man and the ceremony were one. Think, by way of comparison, of how externalised the ceremonies have become in Orders of the modern age!

The modern man cannot get beyond his intellect. I told you yesterday how even a Benedictine Father, whose vocation it is to be a servant of the Spirit, how even he cannot get away from intellectualism. Modern man cannot find his way out of intellectualism any more than the ancient Egyptian could find his way into it. The ancient Egyptians needed the souls of men already dead in order that a science of nature might be imparted to them. The man of modern times needs something that again imparts to him a spiritual science, a knowledge of the Spirit, because as yet he is unable to unfold this himself.

Now quite apart from the many occult Orders which have become pure mummies, have no deep background, and are carried on more out of a liking to dabble in mysteries, we find that as late as the first half of the nineteenth century there always existed, as well as these others, very earnest and sincere Orders, in which more was imparted than, for example, an average Freemason today receives from his Order. The Orders to which I am referring were able to impart more, because certain needs prevailed in the spiritual world among Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi who are of less interest to us on the earth but very important in our pre-earthly existence. Certain Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, too, have needs of knowledge, and can only satisfy them by letting human beings reach over, probingly as it were, to these genuine occult Orders before they have come down from pre-earthly into earthly existence. It has actually happened that in connection with certain Lodges working with ancient ceremonial forms, men of vision have been able to assert: Here there is present the soul of a human being who will descend to the earth only in the future. Before the man is born, the soul may be present in such a Lodge and, through their feelings, men can acquire a great deal from this source. Just as the human soul hovered around the mummy, was still bound in a sense to the mummy, so in certain occult Lodges the spirits of human beings not yet born hover in a kind of anticipatory existence. What happens in a case like this does not stimulate intellectual thoughts, for modern men have these thoughts naturally and need no such stimulus. But when they are working in their occult Lodges with the right mood of soul, they can receive communications from human beings not yet born, who are still in their pre-earthly existence and who can be present as a result of the ceremonies. Such men feel the reality of the spiritual world and can, moreover, be inspired by the spiritual world.

There is something in the biography of Goethe which strikes anyone who has a feeling for such things as very significant, particularly when it is mentioned by people who, although they do not know the whole truth, none the less indicate it out of a kind of half-conscious knowledge. Karl Julius Schröer, of whom I have often told you, was quite remarkable in this respect when he was speaking of Goethe. Again and again when he was lecturing on the works and biography of Goethe, a striking phrase would fall from his lips. Schröer would say: “Goethe experienced that once again and the experience rejuvenated him.” Schröer spoke of Goethe as a personality who, say at the age of seven, had had a certain experience; then at the age of fourteen, perhaps, he experienced something different, but the second experience really brought him back a little nearer childhood. Goethe became younger, was rejuvenated. At the age, say, of twenty-one, he was again rejuvenated. Schröer depicted Goethe as if, from stage to stage, he was constantly being rejuvenated.

Study Goethe's biography with care and you will find clear indications of this. Even when he had become a corpulent official in Weimar with a double chin, even in the days when in his dealings with certain people he was a surly, morose old man—and there is much to suggest that in his intercourse with others he was anything but pleasant—even then, in advanced age, Goethe underwent a rejuvenation. It would have been impossible for him, at a great age, to write the second part of Faust if he had not been thus rejuvenated. For about the year 1816 or 1817, Goethe was not a personality from whom one could have expected anything like the second part of Faust, which was written from the year 1824 onwards. A rejuvenation had actually taken place. Moreover Goethe himself had an inkling of this, at any rate in his younger years, when he depicts Faust being given a draught of youth. It is really part of his own biography.

When we investigate what was responsible for this, we realise that it was Goethe's membership of a Lodge. Other venerable figures of Weimar, perhaps only with the exception of Wieland, Chancellor von Muller and one or two others, were ordinary members of the Lodge like many bona fide officials in Weimar. It was their habit to go to Church on Sundays and also be members of the Lodge—the contrast did not worry them! It was the custom in such circles. But it was different in Goethe's case, different too, in the cases of Chancellor von Muller, Wieland and one or two others. They actually experienced these rejuvenations because in their souls they had intercourse with men as yet unborn. Just as the priests of the temples in ancient Egypt had intercourse with the souls of men after their death, so persons such as I have named had intercourse with human beings still living in pre-earthly existence. And from this existence before birth, human beings can bring spirituality into the world of the present. They bring, not intellectualism, but spirituality, which a man then receives through his feelings and which can pervade his whole life.

Thus it may be said that the first elements of intellectual thinking unfolded by mankind in the course of evolution, were learnt by the Egyptians from the Dead, And the first elements of spiritual truths, which have been learnt again by men in the modern age, were acquired from unborn human beings by certain outstanding personalities out of the Initiation-teachings given in occult Orders. Study Goethe's works and again and again you will find flashes of spiritual wisdom which he is not able to express in the form of thoughts but which he clothes in pictures often reminiscent of symbols used in occult Orders. The pictures came to Goethe in the way described. And there are many other such cases.

Now these unborn human souls can give enlightenment only about spiritual truths which can be experienced in the non-earthly world—about the things of heaven and what lies out-side the actual arena of earth-evolution. But because the elementary Earth-Spirits find a foothold in the ceremonies, communications can be made by the Unborn to these Earth-Spirits. And if there is anyone present at the ceremonies with a gift for hearing from the Earth-Spirits what has been communicated to them by the Unborn, such men can, in their turn, give voice to what the Unborn say to the Earth-Spirits. Think of the wonderful understanding of nature possessed by Goethe and by other men in those days, for example, the Danish writer Steven, or men like Troxler, or Schubert who wrote so prolifically on the subject of dreams and whose best inspirations came from the Nature-Spirits. And there were many others—more numerous in the first half of the nineteenth century than later on—who are examples of what came to men by this means. Often, too, something else happened. Communications made in this way by the Unborn to the Nature-Spirits did not always result in the voicing of spiritual secrets of nature. In some human beings these communications became part of their very soul. The forces of the Nature-Spirits were received into their individual qualities of soul and this expressed itself in the style in which such men wrote. Anyone who has a feeling for such things today will realise that the very style of historians such as Ranke or Taine or a typically modern English historian, is intellectualistic. Ranke's style in itself is intellectualistic. The sentences are strung together in an intellectualistic way; the subject is cleverly placed, the predicate just where it should be, and so on. It is all so clever that even a schoolmaster could be satisfied with it, but compare this kind of style with that of Johannes Muller in his twenty-four volumes of world-history: that is a style ... well ... as though an angel were speaking. And in other domains too, in the eighteenth century, many things were written in a style which has no trace of this lack of individuality, this irritating objectivity, but on the contrary, has a quality which makes us feel that elementary forces of nature are streaming through the writer, so that his style seems to flow from the cosmos, from the universe. In such cases something resembling what went out from the mummies to the Initiates of ancient Egypt, comes to modern man. These are facts of great significance, taking place behind the veils of outer history, and they must be recognised by anyone who desires really to understand the evolution of humanity. And so, although these things have remained unrecognised for a time because nowadays there are no ears to hear them—we see how preparation was made for the spiritual power that must enter into and live within the intellect in future ages if humanity does not wish to take the path leading towards the decline of the West depicted by Spengler.

The ancient Egyptians mummified the human form. Since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., humanity has mummified ancient cults, making it possible, in this way, for forces from beyond the earth to work in the ceremonial of these old cults. Human beings themselves contributed little to these cults; but superhuman beings often contributed a great deal. It is the same with cults of the Churches, and those who have vision of realities can often dispense with the person who stands in the flesh before the altar, because—apart altogether from the officiating priests—they are able to perceive the presence of these Spiritual Beings in the ceremonies.

When we think about these things, it will be clear to us that if we really desire to approach what is all around us spiritually, quite a different kind of language is necessary from that to which modern man is accustomed. Nor shall we be surprised at the appearance of a work like Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache, which sets out to prove that the ideas men have conceived of Spiritual Beings are words and nothing more. And if words are not to be believed, then, obviously, one cannot believe in Spiritual Beings. Such is the purport of Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache.

Yes, but as far as a large proportion of modern humanity is concerned, Mauthner is quite right. A large proportion of modern humanity has nothing but words with which to speak of the super-sensible. Here, unfortunately, the Kritik der Sprache is right. What is necessary is that real spiritual substance shall again be brought into words. And so it was also necessary in the course of historical evolution that during a period when men themselves were unable to lay hold of this spiritual substance, it should be continued and developed for them by superhuman Beings and by unborn human beings, just as intellectuality was prepared for the Egyptians by those who had already passed through death. The Egyptians received from the Dead the intellectuality in which we are now steeped. We, in the present age, have to learn or at least study by way of the now mummified cult, the spirituality we have not yet acquired—for cult has many things to tell us. Through this different kind of mummy we must supplement our intellectual knowledge with the spirituality of the future. Mummified enactments have taken the place of the mummified human being; mummified ceremonies have superseded the mummified human form.

In this way we must study what proceeds behind the veils of world-history; otherwise every account of the flow of history remains a jumble of external, seemingly fortuitous happenings. But they are not fortuitous when their background is known and understood; they become so only if men refuse to recognise their background. They throw up waves, as it were, of which man believes that each is separate and distinct from the other, whereas the truth is that they all surge upwards together from the depths of an ocean. In reality, processes in history are waves thrown up to the surface, into the sphere of man's life, from the depths of a spiritual sea of world-evolution. In each historical fact we should perceive one such wave, and abandon the belief that one wave arises fortuitously by the side of another. Each wave, that is to say, each historical fact, arises from spiritual depths of that historical evolution which flows onwards eternally, from age to age.

I have been speaking to you about the secrets connected with the mummy and with cult and rites, indicating how the mummy enshrined secrets of antiquity before the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas cult and ceremonial rites in their more modern forms enshrine secrets whose full significance will be revealed only in the future. Today and tomorrow I want to add something to what has already been said and to begin with I will give you a picture in the form of a kind of narrative.

If you had been able to participate in many a scene in the Mysteries during a certain epoch of Egyptian development, in times when the custom of the mummification of bodies was at its height, you would have experienced something like the following. The Priest-Instructor in the Mysteries would have tried, first, to explain to his pupils that in the human head all the mysteries of the world lie concealed, in a very special sense. He would have bidden them regard the earth, the dwelling-place of man, as a mirror, a reflection of the whole cosmos. In very truth, everything that exists in the cosmos is also to be found in the earth itself. Looking upwards to the world of stars, we see the moon as our nearest neighbour among the heavenly bodies. Think of the earth and the moon circling around the earth.¹ We can picture the course taken by the moon as it moves around the earth and all that lies between the earth and the orbit of the moon. Those who rightly understand how to interpret what they find when they dig down into the earth, will say: What is present in the environment is mirrored, and condensed, in an outermost layer of the earth itself.

And now take another planet, which together with the earth, circles round the Sun. We can picture this planet, Venus, and its path. This sphere is filled with delicate, aeriform, etheric substance. Again a lower layer in the earth must be pictured as a reflection of what is outside in the cosmos. Proceeding in this way we have the whole earth as a mirror image of the universe, remembering that what exists out yonder in a state of extremely delicate, ethereal volatility is condensed and still further condensed when it is found in the earth's strata. Thus at the centre of the earth, the outermost periphery of the universe would be condensed into a single point.

In the epoch to which I am now referring, the Initiate of Egypt spoke to his pupils of those things I have very briefly outlined. But the Initiate also said to his pupils: To understand the interaction between the cosmos and its mirror image, the earth, let us study the human head. The human head is formed in the mother's body through the combined working of the whole universe and the earth. But—so the Initiate would have said to his pupils—no observation of the human head can, in itself, enable us to understand its real nature, for the head in itself does not reveal its secrets. It contains innumerable secrets and mysteries but they remain concealed.

The human head is active from the earliest period of germination in the body of the mother until death but it does not contain within itself the effects of its own activity. The mystery of the human head is that it is infinitely active, but the effects of its activities are to be found in the other parts of the organism, not in the head itself.

An Egyptian Initiate would have spoken to his pupils just as I am speaking to you now, except that he would, of course, have used the forms of expression current in those days.

Diagrams were sketched on the blackboard, of circles one inside each other, the smallest indicating the earth in the centre and the larger circles the paths around the earth of the moon and other planets with their interpenetrating spheres

He would have made the following intelligible to his pupils. When the human eye looks at a colour, the perception of the colour gives rise to a change in the brain. What is thus produced in the human eye, with the resulting change in the brain is, in truth, a deed of the outer world. The processes that take place in the brain itself are deeds of the outer world. But the brain itself does something. When the brain receives a colour-impression from outside and a nerve-process arises inwardly as a result, the brain brings about something in the astral body and Ego. The actual effect of this, however, manifests in the other parts of the organism, not in the brain itself. Whereas the working of the external world results in a change in the brain, the brain, for its part, works, for example, upon the heart or upon some other organ of the human body. You can only perceive what the human head does when you know exactly what happens in the human physical body—so would the Initiate have spoken to his pupils.

The Egyptians had knowledge of these things, but because the possibilities that had existed in still earlier times were no longer at their disposal, the Initiates were obliged to adopt methods different from those used by the Initiates of ancient Persia or ancient India. The Initiates of ancient India let their pupils carry out exercises of Yoga, made them breathe in a particular way; and by transforming the breathing process into a sensory process the pupils acquired knowledge of the human physical body. And how did they acquire it?

We know that when man breathes in, the breath-impulse passes through the lungs into the whole of the body, through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breath-impulse combines with the other processes there, and then recoils. It was this recoil that the pupil of Yoga observed. The breath-impulse passes first into the lungs, through the spinal canal into the brain, and there expands; then it recoils and passes through the different organs, into the chest, and so on. Observing the recoil of the breath downwards into the organism, the pupil of Yoga was able to watch what the brain was doing in the chest, in the abdominal organs and so on. In the recoil through the spinal cord and the expansion through the whole body, the pupil of Yoga was able to observe what the head brings about in the organism. Such was the art connected with the breath, in times when the breathing process was made into a sensory process, when through observation of the breathing, a human being could answer for himself the question: How does my head work in my organism?

I told you in the last lecture that at a certain stage of the Egyptian epoch, this art had been lost and the Egyptian Initiates were obliged to resort to other means. The Initiates of Egypt led their pupils to the mummies, taught them to mummify the human organism, taught them, through observation of what was there presented to them, something that had once been learned by inner means, through contemplation of the breathing process. But I told you, too, that although the pupils of the Egyptian Initiates were no longer capable of following these spiritual processes, which are revealed as the deeds performed by the brain in the human organism—and that was the point of importance—nevertheless the Initiates were helped, as they spoke to their pupils, by the spiritual Moon-Beings. These spiritual Beings who would otherwise have wandered homeless about the earth, found dwelling places in the mummies. These were the Beings who could be observed, whose speech was still understood in that period of ancient Egyptian development and through whom the first science of nature was imparted. What the pupil of Yoga was able to perceive inwardly, through cultivation of the breathing process—these things were now taught somewhat in the following way. The Initiates would say to their pupils: The human head is involved in a constant process of dying. It is really dying all the time, and every night the organism must make efforts to counteract this dying process in the head. But what the head does during this dying process between birth and death results in the influx of new life into the other organs of the body, so that inasmuch as the forces of these other organs—not their substance, of course, but their forces—are sent on into the future, during the period between death and a new birth they become head, the head of the next earthly incarnation. But the Initiates impressed upon their pupils the necessity of understanding what is contained in the actual forms of the organs, and it was for this reason that such scrupulous care was given to the preservation of the mummies. By way of the forms in the mummy, the Moon-Spirits were able to reveal the secrets of the organs, their connection with the human head, and how they bear within them those forces of germination by means of which they become head in the next earthly life. Such was the teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt to their pupils, by means of the mummy.

At a certain period, then, it became necessary to teach in an external way what had once been inner teaching in the days when the Yoga philosophy and religion were at their prime. This, indeed, was the great transition that took place from the culture of ancient India and ancient Persia to that of Egypt: what had once been a teaching by inner means was now taught by external means.

The teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt was brought to a majestic climax when they said to their pupils: And now steep yourselves in the plastic quality of the forms lying before you in the mummy. Here you have very faint indications of that which during the life of man on earth is perpetually passing away, namely, the inner components of the human head. But you have before you in great clarity and precision the forms of the rest of the human organism. Contemplation of the mummy will not help you to study the life-processes, or the perceptive processes; but the plastic quality of the forms of the inner organs of the human body, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the stomach, and so forth—all this you can study from the mummy. Try to picture the following. During life, the breath is drawn back into the head and then streams out into the organism. In this breath there is a plastic force, which has the tendency to shape the breath into the form of a mummy. The breath, in its drive from the head towards the body, has the tendency towards mummy-formation. And it is only because the body works against this impulse and brings about out-breathing, that this “nascent” mummy is transformed back again. Thus what is seen streaming from the human head into the other part of the organism, taking shape there as the breath passes onwards, is a form like the mummy, a form that takes shape rapidly. In that the breath is breathed out, it dissolves again. All that remains of it is a form of appearance of the etheric body, which is almost always there, notably during waking life. Observation of the etheric body gives the feeling that from the head outwards the etheric body is trying all the time to form itself into a mummy and is in turn dissolved into a kind of resemblance with the human physical organisation. The inner, plastic force of the human etheric body tends to make it assume the form of a mummy, and then to dissolve this form again so that finally the etheric body resembles the physical organism. This was taught as an apotheosis of all the manifold teachings given by the Initiates of ancient Egypt to their pupils with the help of those super-sensible, elementary Beings whom we may call the Moon-Spirits.

The Egyptian Initiates directed the attention of their pupils especially to the past, to the inner experiences of human beings in very ancient times. This, in truth, was the essence of Egyptian culture, which for us today is so fraught with riddles. Sphinxes, pyramids, mummies—they are all enigmas. But these enigmas are unveiled to spiritual science when we know that the sphinxes represent forms that were actually visible to men in the time of Atlantis, and when we remember that the teachings concerning the mummy given by the Egyptian Initiates to their pupils were an echo of the Yoga teaching imparted, for example, by Initiates of ancient India to their pupils. It was not difficult for an Initiate of ancient India to give such teaching because in those remote times the slightest impetus would enable a man to perceive within a human physical organism this momentary birth of the ether-mummy and its retransformation.

It is deeply interesting to contemplate how these mysteries were unveiled in the Egyptian centres of instruction where such intimate connections were thus established with death. Through the methods adopted in Egypt, death preserved forms, which, during life, are hidden from observation but of which there must be knowledge if the being of man is to be truly understood.

The mummies were displayed before the eyes of the ancient Egyptians and I have told you that there is something analogous for human beings who have lived since the Mystery of Golgotha. For them, cults and rites in many forms have been preserved. I told you that at the time when men needed such forms, they began to “mummify” ancient cults and rites. In its first, faint beginnings, this custom arose in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., but it comes more and more to the fore with the passage of time. In occult and other Brotherhoods, rituals are studied and enacted, but there is never anything essentially new in them. Ancient forms, ancient rituals, are preserved. Indeed those whose task it is to preserve these rites and ceremonies, who have to lead them, lay great stress upon the fact that the ceremonies and customs date back to very ancient times, that they have been preserved from remote antiquity. But we never find that the ceremonies or the effects produced by the rituals are really understood.

To “understand” such rites and ceremonies—what does this really mean? What does it mean to understand the nature of acts performed in rites and ceremonies? To answer this question we must go back to the times, say, of ancient India and ancient Persia and try to discover how ceremonies and rites were understood then. A man today is aware of a difference when, let us say, he touches a rose made of papier-mâché and when he touches a real rose. He is also aware of the difference, through his sense of smell, when he is near a rose. He is aware of the difference and says that the papier-mâché rose is a dead object whereas the rose picked from the rosebush is alive. In very early times, dating back to four or five thousand years before Christ, a man with true perception of the world seeing someone working with a machine or tool, say for cutting wood, would have called this a “dead” process; for even with the eye of spirit he would have seen not the physical substance but a kind of dead, shadow-image. But in ritualistic and ceremonial enactments he saw Spiritual Beings from the surrounding elementary world approaching and pervading all the forms and actions of the rite. He beheld spiritual reality in these enactments.

If you were to ask people today whether they have ever seen Spiritual Beings weaving and streaming through rituals and ceremonies in Churches or Lodges, you would find that this is never the case. In these ritualistic enactments today there is no more spiritual life than there was life in the Egyptian mummy of the human being who had been mummified. But inasmuch as these rituals were preserved, as the form of the human body was preserved in the Egyptian mummy, inasmuch as human enactments and rites were preserved by tradition—“mummified”, as it were—something was preserved that can and will be wakened into life when men have discovered how to bring into all their deeds the power that streams from the Mystery of Golgotha.

Men today have very little understanding of how to draw into their actions the power of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through the centuries, however, there were always individuals here and there who had some conception—even if not so clearly as in earlier times—of how the spiritual impulse that can live in the human being may be guided into all his actions, and of how the human being himself can be an intermediary between the Spirit and what comes to pass through him in the outer world. The right impulse must, of course, be at work before this can happen. Think of a man like Paracelsus. He was one of those isolated individuals who had an inkling, at least, that the spiritual must so live among men that it streams out from them into their actions. There is a great difference between man's mode of life today and what Paracelsus, for example, desired. Today people make a sharp distinction between certain domains of their life. For instance, they practise medicine, but according to materialistic conceptions. A doctor today may, of course, also be a religious man or woman in the modern sense; but the two domains are separated. Medicine is practised on the basis of materialistic principles and people seek what their souls need in an entirely separate sphere of religion—into which, as a result, a highly egoistical element finds its way. People only turn to religion when they want to know what is to become of them after death or how what they do tallies with what a God would be able to make of their deeds. Paracelsus had a very different attitude. He wanted to be a man of piety and religion as a doctor. He wanted each medical, each therapeutic deed also to be a religious deed. He regarded what he did with a sick man as the union of an external, human deed with a religious act. To Paracelsus, healing was still a sacred enactment and it was his constant ideal to make it so. His contemporaries had little understanding of this and today there is even less. It makes one's heart ache to hear the tradition which still persists in Salzburg, that Paracelsus was a drunkard and that returning to his house late one night in a state of intoxication, he met his death by falling over a rock and breaking his skull. If the real truth were told, one would, of course, have to point to the work of his enemies. Paracelsus' drunkenness was less responsible for his broken skull than were people who then proceeded to spread the fairy-tale about his habits.

Customs today are less violent in such matters—less violent but not so very different. A time will come when a deeper conception of the cult and of all ceremonial enactments will take root in men. And then the true teachers will be able to reveal to their pupils something similar to what was revealed by the Initiates of Egypt with the help of the mummy. The Egyptian Initiate was able to make his pupils realise that they could behold in the mummy something, which in still earlier times, became actual experience through transformation of the breathing process into a sensory process. And so, when the cult can once again be truly understood, those who possess this understanding will be able to make clear to their pupils that enactments in sacred cults and rites have an immeasurably greater significance for the cosmos than deeds performed by men in the external world with mechanical tools or the like. Tools, as you know, also play a part in cult and ritual. When true ceremonial, true ritualistic enactments are again established in place of what is customary today, Initiates will be able to say to their pupils: An enactment in cult or rite is a call to the spiritual Powers of the universe who through the deeds of men should be able to unite themselves with the earth. Such an enactment, performed according to a true rite, is different from an act of a purely technical nature. An act that is purely technical or mechanical, however, does bring something about, for with machines many things can be made and used in life. Clothes, for instance, are made with a sewing machine. The clothes are worn and eventually wear out. This is what happens to the products of machines. But it is not so with sacred enactments. I told you in the last lecture that provided a man has the requisite faculty and the true conception of sacred enactments, he can come into contact with spiritual Beings who are as closely connected with the earth as the Spirits who spoke to the Egyptians out of the mummies were connected with the moon. Through machines, through external technical devices, man comes into contact with the physical nature-forces of the earth. Through the sacred enactments of cult and ritual he comes into contact with the elementary-spiritual Powers of the earth, with those Powers who point the way to the future.

And so in times to come an Initiate will be able to say to his pupils: When you participate truly in a sacred enactment of cult or ritual, you are engaged in something of which the materialist says that it has no reality, or, if he is a cynic, he will say that it is all child's play. Nevertheless the enactments of a true rite contain spiritual power. The elementary spiritual Beings, who are evoked when such a rite is enacted, have need of the rite because from it they draw nourishment and forces of growth.

A time will come when the earth will no longer exist. Everything that is around our physical senses, everything that is present in the kingdoms of minerals, plants, animals, in air and clouds, even the radiance of the stars ... all this will pass away and, as I have described in An Outline Of Occult Science, the earth will prepare to pass over to the Jupiter embodiment. This future Jupiter planet will be a subsequent incarnation of the earth just as our own future earthly life will be a reincarnation of our present existence, save that the periods of time involved are immeasurably longer. Of the substance present today in minerals, plants, animals, in wind and clouds, not a single particle will remain in that distant future. The processes set up by machines and technical devices will have performed their task—and they too will have become things of the past. But within what was once earth, within what was once external, technical civilisation, something different will have been prepared.

Think of the earth and within it the different processes of nature and plant life. Machines are there, with all that they bring about on the earth; animals and the physical bodies of men move over the earth ... All this will pass away. But on this earth, in future time, sacred rites will be enacted out of a true understanding of the spiritual world. Through these rites and sacred enactments, elementary spiritual Beings are called down. As I have said, a time will come when the material substance in minerals, plants, animals, clouds, the forces working in wind and weather and also, of course, all the accoutrements used in rites and ceremonies, will pass away, will be dissipated in the universe. But the spiritual Beings who have been called down into the sphere of the rites and sacred enactments—these will remain when the earth approaches its end. They will remain, in a state of more perfect development, within the earth, just as in autumn the seed of next year's plant is concealed within the present plant; just as the dry, withered leaves fall away from the plant, so the substance in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms will disintegrate in the universe, but the perfected elementary Beings will be there, living on into the Jupiter existence as a seed of the future.

And so once again an Initiate will be able to bring the teaching given to his pupils to a grand climax. He will be able to say: “Just as the Initiate of Egypt, standing before the mummy, was able to explain to his pupils all the mysteries of the human head and therewith all the mysteries of the earth and the cosmos around the earth, I am able to explain to you how the earth will arise from its destruction—rise again through the spiritual Beings who develop onwards to the future in cults and rites enacted with true understanding.”

In the evolution of our epoch this conception has a glorious beginning. It can be pictured as follows. Human beings satisfied their hunger and thirst by what lay on the tables before them. But there came the Being Who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, Who gathered His closest disciples around Him and said: “Here is bread, here is wine. Do not now look upon what your outer eyes see in bread and wine, upon what your tongue can taste and your physical body digest. All that is earthly bears within it the seeds of decay. But if you have within you the true impulse you can permeate earthly substance with the Spirit of the earth. For then it is no longer bread, nor is it wine, but something that can live in the inmost depths of man himself, something that lives and has its being in his body and that he can spiritualise and that will be carried over into the future when everything on the earth has passed away.” Christ entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and in his whole being, Jesus of Nazareth was spiritualised. He could point to bread and wine, saying: “This is not the true form of bread and wine. Their true form is what indwells the human being—this is My Body, this is My Blood.” And the words receive their full significance from those other words of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My Words will not pass away.”

I have said many times: The kingdom of plants, of animals, of minerals, all that lives in wind and storm, in clouds—even the radiance of the stars—will be dispersed and scattered; not one particle will remain. But what man prepares spiritually—this will remain.

In earlier times of the evolution of humanity it was known that words contain Spirit. The modern view is that when we speak, movement is brought into the air through the speech-organs and these movements then beat upon the drum of the ear [(Trommelfell, drum of the ear, so-called because the modern view is that the movements of the air, “drum” or beat upon the membrane.)], the nerves begin to move, and there the process ends. In earlier times it was known that words enshrine the movements of elementary Spirits, that forces in words spoken in sacred ritual, for example, stream into the external action and that the Spirit living in man unites with this external enactment. Thereby the elementary Spirits who are developing onwards to the future enter, in actual presence, into the sphere of the sacred rite. Men who understand these things can realise what the “word” signified in olden times. Today it means little more than “noise and smoke”, and Goethe was justified when he used the expression Schall und Rauch. But in days of yore the “word” signified the indwelling Spirit, not the abstract, conceptual properties, but the spiritual reality inherent in the word. In the word there is much that is spiritual. Christ indicates that the life with which man imbues the word is contained in what comes to pass in sacred enactments of rite and cult, namely, a process whereby elementary Spirits are borne on-wards to the fulfilment of their existence, and He said:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My Words will not pass away.”

And now think of the beginning of St. John's Gospel: “In the Beginning was the Logos, the Word ...” The Logos is the Christ. What, then, are the Bread and the Wine in the service of Holy Communion? The Bread and the Wine are the Body and Blood of the Logos. And as we have heard, the Logos relinquishes what is transient, seizes what is in the becoming, prepares what is to come.

Thus we can point to the Mystery of Golgotha as a glorious climax, just as teaching in days of old culminated in the revelation of the ether-body assuming the shape of a mummy and then immediately changing into a form resembling that of the human physical body. But I have emphasised over and over again that man will have to re-establish his connection with the spiritual world if the earth is to attain its goal. Just as the predecessors of the Egyptians, perceiving the breath and its expansion in the organism, inwardly experienced a nascent mummy-formation and its immediate re-transformation, so, in the future, men must perceive in the out-breathing process, in the passing of the out-breathed air into cosmic space, the communication to cosmic space of what takes shape within the human organism, the spiritualisation of the environment through the human being himself. The ancient Egyptians said: The mummy represents a form which the human being strives inwardly and spiritually to assume with every indrawn breath. Initiates of the future will say: Every out-breathing is a manifestation of man's striving to become a cosmos, a whole world. Contemplation of how the inbreathed air surges down from the head into the organism—this brings understanding of the human being. Contemplation of how the indrawn air is breathed out again by man into the world—this can bring understanding of the cosmos. Understanding of the cosmos will be born when Imaginative Knowledge is able to span the world; with Imaginative Knowledge we can also recognise what the human being himself sends forth into the external world with his out-breathing. It is what he is preparing for the future.

Thus what man does in the course of history and what comes to pass in the cosmos are interwoven, intermingled. Without realisation of this there can be no understanding of the world, for history must be studied in its cosmic aspect and historical happenings must reveal to us the workings of the cosmos.

We have been hearing in recent lectures how fundamental impulses in the development of history are expressed in such phenomena as the strange custom in Egyptian culture of mummifying the human body and in the modern age the preservation of ancient cults—which is also a kind of “mummification”, in this latter case of ceremonies and rites.

Thinking again of Egyptian culture as expressed outwardly in the phenomenon of mummification, we will combine the picture thus outlined with a theme of which I have spoken recently and have frequently expounded here, namely, the theme of ordinary human thinking, how this thought-activity is exercised by man, how he gradually unfolds the faculty of thinking during childhood, becomes to a certain degree accomplished in it during his youth and then puts it into operation until his death. This thinking, this intellectual activity, is a kind of inner corpse of the soul. Thinking, as exercised by the human being in earthly life, is viewed in the right light only when it is compared, as far as its relation to the true being of man is concerned, with the corpse left behind at death.

The principle, which makes man truly man, departs at death, and something remains over in the corpse, which can only have this particular form because a living human being has left it behind him. Nobody could be so foolish as to believe that the human corpse, with its characteristic form, could have been produced by any play of nature, by any combination of nature-forces. A corpse is quite obviously a remainder, a residue. Something must have preceded it, namely, the living human being. Outer nature has, it is true, the power to destroy the form of the human corpse but not the power to produce it. This human form is produced by the higher members of man's being—but they pass away at death.

Just as we realise that a corpse derives from a living human being, so the true conception of thinking, of human thought, is that it cannot, of itself, have become what it is in earthly life, but that it is a kind of corpse in the soul—the corpse of what it was before the human being came down from worlds of soul-and-spirit into physical existence on the earth. In pre-earthly existence the soul was alive in the truest sense, but something died at birth, and the corpse, which remains from this death in the life of soul, is our human thinking. Those who have known best what it means to live in the world of thought have, moreover, felt the deathlike character of abstract thinking. I need only remind you of the moving passage with which Nietzsche begins his description of philosophy in the era of Greek tragedy. He describes how Greek thought, as exemplified by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides or Heraclitus, rises to abstract notions of being and becoming. Here, he says, one feels the onset of an icy coldness. And it is so indeed.

Think of men of the ancient East and how they tried to comprehend outer nature in living, inwardly mobile pictures, dreamlike though these pictures were. In comparison with this inwardly mobile, live thinking, which quickened the whole being of man and blossomed forth in the Vedanta philosophy, the abstract thinking of later times is veritably a corpse. Nietzsche was aware of this when he felt an urge to write about those pre-Socratic philosophers who, for the first time in the evolution of humanity, soared into the realm of abstract thoughts.

Study the sages of the East who preceded the Greek philosophers and you will find in them no trace of any doubt that the human being lived in worlds of soul-and-spirit before descending to the earth. It is simply not possible to experience thinking as a living reality and not believe in the pre-earthly existence of man. To experience living thinking is just like knowing a living human being on earth. Those who no longer experienced living thinking—and this applies to Greek philosophers even before the days of Socrates—such men may, like Aristotle, have doubts about the fact that the human being does not come into existence for the first time at birth. And so a distinction must be made between the once inwardly mobile and living thinking of the East wherewith it was known that man comes down from spiritual worlds into earth-existence, and the thinking that is a corpse, bringing knowledge only of what is accessible to man between birth and death.

Try to put yourselves in the position of an Egyptian sage, living, let us say, about 2000 B.C.. He would have said: Once upon a time, over in the East, men experienced living thinking. But the Egyptian sage was in a strange situation; his life of soul was not like ours today; experience of living thinking had faded away, was no longer within his grasp, and abstract thinking had not yet begun. A substitute was created by the embalming of mummies whereby, in the way I have described, a picture, a concept of the human form was made possible. Men trained themselves to unfold a picture of the dead human form in the mummy and began, for the first time, to develop abstract, dead thinking. It was from the human corpse that dead thinking first came into existence.

The counterpart of this in modern times is that in occult societies here and there, rituals, cults and ceremonial enactments once filled with living reality have been preserved as dead traditions. Think only of rituals that you may have read, perhaps those of the Freemasons. You will find that there are ceremonies of the First Degree, the Second Degree, the Third Degree, and so forth. All of them are learnt, written or enacted in an external way. Once upon a time, however, these cults were charged with life as real as the life-principle working in the plants. Today, the ceremonies and rites are dead forms. Even the Mystery of Golgotha was only able to evoke in certain priestly natures here and there, those inner, living experiences which sometimes arose in connection with rites of the Christian Churches after the time of Christ. But up to now mankind has not been able to infuse real life into ceremonies and rites—and indeed something else is necessary here.

All present-day thinking is directed essentially to the dead world. In our time there is simply no understanding of the nature of the living thinking which once existed. The intellectualistic thinking current since the middle of the fifteenth century of our era is, in very truth, a corpse and that is why it is applied only to what is dead in nature, to the mineral kingdom. People prefer to study plants, animals and even the human being, merely from the aspect of mineral, physical, chemical forces, because they only want to use this dead thinking, this corpse of thoughts indwelling the purely intellectualistic man.

In the present series of lectures I have mentioned the name of Goethe. Goethe was, as you know, a member of the community of Freemasons and was acquainted with its rites. But he experienced these rites in a way of which only he was capable. For him, real life flowed out of the rites which, for others, were merely forms preserved by tradition. He was able to make actual connection with that spiritual reality of being, which flowed in the way described from pre-earthly into earthly existence and which, as I said, always rejuvenated him. For Goethe underwent actual rejuvenation more than once in his life. It was from this that there came to him the idea of metamorphosis¹—one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of modern spiritual life and the importance of which is still not recognised.

What had Goethe actually achieved when he evolved the idea of metamorphosis? He had re-kindled an inwardly living thinking, which is capable of penetrating into the cosmos. Goethe rebelled against the botany of Linnaeus in which the plants are arranged in juxtaposition, each of them placed in a definite category and a system made out of it all. Goethe could not accept this; he did not want these dead concepts. He wanted a living kind of thinking, and he achieved it in the following way. First of all he looked at the plant itself and the thought came to him that down below the plant develops crude, unformed leaves, then, higher up, leaves which have more developed forms but are transformations, metamorphoses of those below; then come the flower-petals with their different colour, then the stamens and the pistil in the middle—all being transformations of the one fundamental form of the leaf itself. Goethe did not say: Here is a leaf of one plant and here a leaf of another, different plant.² He did not look at the plant in this way, but said: The fact that one leaf has a particular shape and another leaf a different shape, is a mere externality. Viewed inwardly, the matter is as follows. The leaf itself has an inner power of transformation, and it is just as possible for it to appear outwardly in one shape as in another. In reality there are not two leaves, but one leaf, in two different forms of manifestation. A plant has the green leaf below and the petal above. Intellectualistic pedants say: “The leaf and the petal are two quite different things.” Nothing could be more obvious, as far as the pedants are concerned, for the one form is red and the other green. Now if someone wears a green shirt and a red jacket—here there is a real difference. As regards clothing, at any rate in the modern age, philistinism prevails and is, moreover, in its right place. In that domain one cannot help being a philistine. But Goethe realised that the plant cannot be comprised within such theories. He said to himself: The red petal is the same, fundamentally, as the green leaf; they are not two separate and distinct phenomena. There is only one leaf, manifesting in different formations. The same force works, sometimes down below and sometimes higher up. Down below it works in such a way that the forces are, in the main, being drawn out of the earth. Here the plant is drawing forces from the earth, sucking them upwards, and the leaf, growing under the influence of the earth-forces, becomes green. The plant continues to grow; higher up the sun's rays are stronger than they are below, and the sun has the mastery. Thus the same impulse reaches into the sphere of the sunlight and produces the red petals.

Goethe might have spoken somewhat as follows. Suppose a man who has nothing to eat sees another who has quantities of food and gets envious, literally pale with envy. Another time someone gives him a blow and then he reddens. According to the principle that speaks of two distinct and different leaves, it might be argued: Here are two men—two, because one is pale and the other is red. Just as little as there are two men, one who is red on account of a blow and the other who is pale because of envy—as little are there two leaves. There is one leaf; at one place it has a particular form, at another place a different form. Goethe did not regard this as particularly wonderful for, after all, a man can run from one place to another and the men you will see in different places are certainly not two different persons. Briefly, Goethe realised that this observation of things in strict juxtaposition is not truth but illusion, that there is only one leaf—green at one place, red at another; and he applied to the different plants the same principle he applied to the several parts of the single plant. Think of the following. Suppose some plant lives in favourable conditions. Out of the seed it forms a root, a stem, leaves on the stem, then petals, stamens and pistil within the stamens. Goethe maintained that the stamens too are only different formations of the leaf. He might also have said: Intellectualists argue that, after all, the red petals are wide and the stamen as thin as a thread, except perhaps for the anther at the top. In spite of this, Goethe maintained that the wide flower petal and the slender stamen are only different formations of one and the same fundamental leaf. He might have asked: Have you not noticed some person who at one time in his life was as thin as a reed and afterwards became very stout? There were certainly not two different people. Petals and stamens are basically one, and the fact that they are situated at two different places on the plant is immaterial. No man can run swiftly enough to be in two places at once, although the story goes that a clever banker in Berlin when he was being pestered on all sides, once exclaimed: “Do you think I am a bird which can be in two places at once?” ... A human being cannot be in two places simultaneously. The point here is that Goethe was seeking everywhere for manifestations of the principle of metamorphosis, of the unity within multiplicity, of the unity within the manifold. And thereby he imbued the concept with life.

If you grasp what I have now said, my dear friends, you will grasp the idea of Spirit. I have said that the whole plant is really a leaf manifesting in different formations. This cannot be pictured in the physical sense; something must be grasped spiritually—something that transforms itself in every conceivable way. It is spirit that is living in the plant kingdom. Now we can go further. We can take a plant that is normal and healthy because its seed has been properly placed in the earth, it has absorbed the gentle sun of spring, then the full summer sun and has been able to develop its seeds under the weakening sun of autumn. But suppose a plant exists in such conditions of nature that it has no time to develop a root, an adequate stem, leaves or petals, but is obliged to unfold very rapidly—so rapidly indeed that everything about it lacks definition. Such a plant becomes a mushroom, a fungus.

There you have two extremes: a plant that has time to differentiate into all its detailed parts, to develop roots, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit; and a plant placed in such conditions of nature that it has no time to form a root, with the result that everything about it remains indication only; it cannot develop stem and leaves, and is obliged to unfold rapidly and without definition the principle underlying the formation of petals, fruit and seed. Such a plant only just manages to take its place in the earth and unfolds with amazing rapidity what other plants unfold slowly. Think, for example, of the corn poppy. After slowly putting out its green leaves it can proceed to unfold its petals, then the stamens, then the jaunty pistil in the centre. But a mushroom must do all this very rapidly; there is no time for differentiation, no time for exposure to the sun, which would bring the beautiful colours, because the sun is absent during its brief period of development. In the mushroom we have a flower without definition; development has taken place far too rapidly. Here, too, there is fundamental unity. Two quite different plants are basically the same.

But before all this can be really thought through, one must change a little, inwardly. An intellectualist—Goethe might have said, a “rigid philistine”—looks at a poppy with its sappy, red flower and well-developed pistil in the centre. What he really ought to do is at the same time to look at a mushroom and keep the concept he has formed of the poppy so mobile and flexible that he is able to see within the poppy itself, in tendency at least, some kind of mushroom or toadstool. But that, of course, is asking too much of a pedant. You will have to place before him the actual mushroom so that his intellect may drag itself away from the poppy without inner exertion, without being kindled to life—for all he need do is to incline his head very slightly. Then he will be able to visualize the one object beside the other separately, and all is well!

Such is the difference between dead thinking and the inwardly alert, live thinking unfolded by Goethe in connection with the principle of metamorphosis. He enriched the world of thought by a glorious discovery. For this reason, in the Introductions to Goethe's works on Natural Science which I wrote in the eighties of last century, you will find the sentence: Goethe is both the Galileo and the Copernicus of the science of organic nature, and what Galileo and Copernicus achieved in connection with dead, outer nature, namely, clarification of the concept of nature to enable it to embrace both the astronomical and the physical aspects, Goethe achieved for the science of organic nature with his living concept of metamorphosis. Such was his supreme discovery.

This concept of metamorphosis can, if desired, be applied to the whole of nature. When a picture of the plant-form came to Goethe out of this concept of metamorphosis, it immediately occurred to him that the principle must also be applicable to the animal. But this is a more difficult matter. Goethe was able to conceive of one leaf proceeding from another; but he found it much more difficult to picture the form of one of the spinal vertebrae, for instance, being metamorphosed, transformed, into a bone of the head—which would have meant the application of the principle of metamorphosis to the animal and also to the human being. Nevertheless Goethe was partially successful in this too, as I have often told you. In the year 1790, while he was walking through a graveyard in Venice, he was lucky enough to come across a sheep's skull, the bones of which had fallen apart in a way very favourable for observation. As he examined these animal bones the thought dawned upon him that they looked like spinal vertebrae, although greatly transformed. And then he conceived the idea that the bones, at least, can also be pictured as representing one, basic bone-creating impulse, which merely manifests in different forms.

With respect to the human being, however, Goethe did not get very far because he did not succeed in passing on from his idea of metamorphosis to real Imagination. When real Imagination advances to Inspiration and Intuition, the principle of uniformity is revealed still more strikingly. And I have already indicated how this uniformity is revealed in the being of man when the concept of metamorphosis is truly understood. When Goethe contemplated the dicotyledons and visualised the flowers of such plants in simpler and more and indefinite forms, he could finally see them as a mushroom or fungus. And from this same point of view, when we study the human head, we can conceive of it as a metamorphosis of the rest of the skeleton.

Try to look at one of the lower jaws in a human skeleton with the eye of an artist. You will hardly be able to do otherwise, than compare it with the bones of the arm and of the leg. Think of the leg bones and arm bones transformed and then, in the lower jaws, you have two “legs”, except that here they have stultified. The head is a lazybones that never walks, but is always sitting. The head “sits” there on its two stultified legs. Imagine a man in the uncomfortable position of sitting with his legs bound together by some kind of cord, and you have practically a replica of the formation of the jaws. Look at all this with the eye of an artist and you can easily imagine the legs becoming as immobile as the lower jawbones—and so on.

But the truth of the matter is realised for the first time when the human head is conceived as a transformation of the rest of the body. I have told you that the head of our present earth-life is the transformed body (the body apart from the head) of our previous earth-life. The head, or rather the forces of the head, as they then were, have passed away. In some cases indeed they actually pass away during life! The head—I am speaking, of course, of forces, not substances—the forces of the head are not preserved; the forces now embodied in your head were the forces which were embodied in the other parts of your body in your previous life. In that life, again, the forces of the head were those of the body of the preceding life; and the body that is now yours will be transformed, metamorphosed, into the head of the future earth-life. For this reason the head develops first. Think of the embryo in the body of the mother. The head develops first and the rest of the organism, being a new formation, affixes itself to the head. The head derives from the previous earth-life; it is the transformed body, a form that has been carried across the whole span of existence between death and a new birth; it then becomes the head-structure and attaches to itself the other members. Accepting the fact of repeated earthly lives, we can thus see the human being as a metamorphosis recently perfected. The idea of plant-metamorphosis discovered by Goethe at the beginning of the eighties of the eighteenth century leads on to the living concept of development through the whole animal kingdom up to the human being, and contemplation here leads on to the idea of repeated earthly lives.

Goethe's participation in the ceremonial enactments of the cult to which he belonged was responsible for this inner quickening in his life of thought. Although it was not fully clear to his consciousness, he nevertheless had an inkling of how the human being, still living entirely as a soul in pre-earthly life, carries over forces which have remained from the bodily structure of the previous earth-life and which, having entered into the present life, develop within the protective sheaths of the mother's body into the head structure.

Goethe did not know this consciously but he had an inkling of it and applied it, in the first place, to the simplest phenomena of plant life. Because the time was not ripe, he could not extend the principle to the point that is possible today, namely to the point where the metamorphosis of the human being from one earth-life over to the next can be understood. As a rule it is said, with a suggestion of compassion, that Goethe evolved this idea of metamorphosis because, owing to his artistic nature, something had gone wrong with him. Pedants and philistines speak like this out of compassion. But those who are neither pedants nor philistines will realise with joy that Goethe knew how to add the element of art to science and precisely because of this was able to make his concepts mobile. Pedants insist, however, that nature cannot be grasped by this kind of thinking; strictly logical concepts are necessary, they say, for the understanding of nature. Yes, but what if nature herself is an artist ... presuming this, the whole of natural science which excludes art and bases itself only upon the concepts of logical deduction might find itself in a position similar to one of which I once heard when I was talking to an artist in Munich. He had been a contemporary of Carriere, the well-known writer on Aesthetics. We began, by chance, to speak about Carriere and this man said: “Yes, when we were young, we artists used not to attend Carriere's lectures; if we did go once, we never went again; we called him ‘the aesthetic rapture-monger’.” Now just as it might be the fate of a writer on Aesthetics to be called a “rapture-monger” by artists, so, if nature herself were to speak about her secrets she might call the strictly logical investigator ... well, not a rapture-monger, but a misery-monger perhaps, for nature creates as an artist. One cannot order nature to let herself be comprehended according to the laws of strict logic. Nature must be comprehended as she actually is.

Such, then, is the course of historical evolution. Once upon a time, in the ancient East, concepts and thoughts were full of life. I have described how, to begin with, these living concepts became actual perception through a metamorphosis of the breathing process. But human beings were obliged to work their way through to dead, abstract concepts. The Egyptians could not reach this stage but forced themselves in the direction of dead concepts through contemplating the human being himself in the state of death, in the mummy. We, in our day, have to awaken concepts to new life. This cannot happen by the mere elaboration of ancient, occult traditions, but by growing into, and moreover elaborating, the living concept which Goethe was the first to evolve in the form of the idea of metamorphosis. Those who are masters of the living concept, in other words, those who are able to grasp the Spiritual in their life of soul—they are able, out of the Spirit, to bring a new and living impulse into the external actions of men. This will lead to something of which I have often spoken to Anthroposophists, namely, that men will no longer stand in the laboratory or at the operating table with the indifference begotten by materialism, but will feel the secrets revealed by nature to listening ears as deeds of the Spirit which pervades and is active in her. Then the laboratory table will become an altar. Forces leading to progress and ascent will not be able to work in the evolution of humanity until true reverence and piety enter into science, nor until religion ceases to be a mere bolster for human egoism and to be regarded as a realm entirely distinct from science. Science must learn, like the pupils of the ancient Mysteries, to have reverence for what is being investigated. I have spoken of this in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact. All research must be regarded as a form of intercourse with the spiritual world and then, by listening to nature we shall learn from her those secrets, which in very truth promote the further evolution of humanity. And then the process of mummification—which was once a necessary experience for man—will be reversed. The Egyptians embalmed the human corpse, with the result that even now we can witness the almost terrifying spectacle of whole series of mummies being brought by Europeans from Egypt and deposited in museums. Just as human thinking was once rigidified as the outcome of the custom of mummification, so it must now be awakened to life.

The ancient Egyptians took the corpses of men, embalmed them, conserved death. We, in our day, must feel that we have a veritable death of soul within us if our thoughts are purely abstract and intellectualistic. We must feel that these thoughts are the mummy of the soul, and learn to understand the truth glimpsed by Paracelsus when he took some substance from the human organism and called this the “mummy”. In the tiny material residue of the human being, he saw the mummy. Paracelsus did not need an embalmed corpse in order to see the mummy, for he regarded the mummy as the sum-total of those forces which could at every moment lead man to death if new life did not quicken him during the night.

Dead thinking holds sway within us; our thinking represents death of soul. In our thinking we bear the mummy of the soul which produces precisely those things that are most prized in modern civilisation. If we have a wider kind of perception, the kind of perception, for example, which enabled Goethe to see metamorphoses, we can go through rooms where mummies are exhibited in museums and then out into the streets and see the same thing there ... it is merely a question of the level from which we are looking, for in the modern age of intellectualism there is little difference—the fact that mummies do not walk as human beings walk in the streets, is only an externality. The mummies in the museums are mummies of bodies; the human beings who walk about the streets in this age of intellectualism are mummies of soul because they are filled with dead thoughts, with thoughts that are incapable of life. Primordial life was rigidified in the mummies of Egypt and this rigidified life of soul must be quickened again for the sake of the future of mankind. We must not continue to study anatomy and physiology in the way that has hitherto been customary. This was permissible among the ancient Egyptians when corpses of the physical human being lay before them. We must not further mummify the corpse of abstract soul-life we bear in our intellectualistic thinking. There is a real tendency today to embalm thinking so that it becomes pedantically logical, without a single spark of fiery life.

Photographs of mummies are as rigid and stiff as the mummy itself. A typical standard work today on some branch of modern knowledge is a photograph, an image of the mummified soul; in this case it is the soul that has been embalmed. And if doubt arises because as well as the intellect which is certainly mummified, human beings have other characteristics, all kinds of bodily and other urges, for instance, so that the picture of the mummy is not very clear ... nevertheless it is there, unmistakably, in standard text books. The embalming process in such writings is very perceptible. This embalming of thought must cease. Instead of the embalming process applied by the Egyptians to the mummies, we need something different, namely, an elixir of life—not as many people think of this today, as a means of perfecting the physical body, but in a form which makes the thoughts alive, which de-mummifies them. When we understand this we have a picture of a profoundly significant impulse in historical evolution. It is a picture of how spiritual culture was once rigidified in the embalming of mummies and of how an elixir of spirit and soul must be poured into all that has been mummified in modern man in the course of his education and development, so that culture may flow onwards to the future. There are two forces: one manifests in the Egyptian custom of embalming and the other in the process of “de-embalming” which modern man must learn to apply.

To learn how to “de-embalm” the dead, rigid forces of the soul—this is a task of the greatest possible significance today. Failure to achieve it produces phenomena of which I gave one example here a short time ago. A man like Spengler realised that rigidified concepts and thoughts will not do, that they lead to the death of culture. In an article in Das Goetheanum I showed what really happened to Spengler. He realised that concepts were dead, but his own were not living! His fate was the same as that of the woman in the Old Testament who looked behind her. Spengler looked at all the dead, mummy-like thoughts of men and he himself became a pillar of salt. Like the woman in the Old Testament, Spengler became a pillar of salt, for his concepts have no more life in them than those of the others.

There is an ancient occult maxim that “wisdom lives in salt” ... but only when the salt is dissolved in human mercury and human phosphorus. Spengler's wisdom is wisdom that has rigidified in salt. But the mercury that brings the salt into movement, making it cosmic, universal—this is lacking; and phosphorus, too, is lacking in a still higher degree. For when one reads Spengler with feeling, above all with artistic feeling, it is impossible for his ideas to kindle inner enthusiasm, inner fire. They all remain salt-like and rigid and even produce a bitter taste. One has to be pervaded inwardly by the mercurial and phosphoric forces if it is a question of “digesting” this lump of salt that calls itself The Decline of the West. But it cannot really be digested ... I will not enlarge upon this particular theme because in polite society one does not mention what is done with indigestible matter! What we have to do is to get away from the salt, away from rigidity, and administer an elixir of life to the mummified soul, to our abstract, systematized concepts. That is the task before us.

• 1. See The Mystery of the Trinity lecture II, by Rudolf Steiner
• 2. Sketches of leaves of various shapes were made on the blackboard.

In the last few lectures we have been studying impulses of far-reaching influence in the historical evolution of humanity—great impulses which are like the tracks of stars across history, illuminating our understanding of particular events. Knowledge of an epoch in history can only be external and superficial if the underlying impulses are not perceived and understood. For these impulses are real powers; they work for the most part, and they work most powerfully, through the unconscious forces of the soul; what transpires outwardly and in full consciousness is only to be perceived in the right light when its origin can be traced back to them.

We will think of an event or, more precisely, a series of events well known to history and of profound significance in the whole life of the West during the Middle Ages—a series of events which, in the outer world, ended in a comparatively short time, after about a century or a century and a half, but the effects of which continued and (to those able to understand the deeper currents in the flow of world-history) have continued to this day. I refer to the Crusades which began in the eleventh century—1096 is the year usually assigned—and as a series of outer events continued until the year usually given as 1170. But we find that even external history mentions all kinds of enterprises and institutions that developed out of the Crusades.

We hear, for example, of the Templar Knights, who first assumed their real significance in outer life during the time of the Crusades. We hear, too, of Orders like that of the Knights of St. John, later the Knights of Malta, and others. Things that were inaugurated by these communities of secular and spiritual life, and thus sprang from the spirit pervading the Crusades, subsequently developed in such a way that, while their provenance in the Crusading spirit was less and less remarked, their effects and influences were clearly present in the life of the West.

Thinking, to begin with, of the external course of history, we know how the Crusades originated. Needs of the soul led adherents of Christianity in the West to believe that pilgrimages to Palestine would imbue their Christian impulses with fresh vigour; but they encountered obstacles, because Palestine and Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of a people of very alien character, namely, the Turks. The maltreatment inflicted by the Turks upon these pilgrims to Jerusalem had provoked an outcry all over Europe and from this was born the mood and spirit which gave rise to the Crusades—a mood which had been present for a long time, although in a different form. We see how men gave vent to this mood by demanding the liberation of the Holy Places of the West, the Holy Places of Christendom, from Turkish oppression.

We hear how Peter of Amiens, himself a victim of this oppression, traveled through Western Europe as a pilgrim and by his fervent preaching won over many hearts to the project of liberating Jerusalem from the Turks.

We know too that, to begin with, this led to no result. But soon a whole number of Knights in the West, gathering together under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon in the first real Crusade, succeeded in liberating Jerusalem, for a time at least, from the Turks.

The course of these events requires only brief mention, for the story is familiar enough in history. The really important thing is to study with insight and understanding what was working more or less unconsciously through human souls, in such a way that again and again, and for a long period of time, numbers of men, in most cases with extraordinary devotion and valour, set out upon these journeys to the East, these seven Crusades, under the leadership of the most distinguished princes of the West. The real question is this: Whence came that first fiery enthusiasm which swept across Europe, especially at the beginning of the Crusades? Once the ball had been set rolling—if I may so express it—interests of a different sort crept in, from the fourth Crusade onwards. There were European princes who went to the East with quite other motives, to enhance their power, their prestige and the like. Nevertheless the beginning of the Crusades is an historical event of prime importance. We cannot fail to be impressed by the spectacle of this mighty force prompting a large part of European humanity to an undertaking linked, as they felt, with the most sacred concerns of the heart. Men felt that these sacred concerns were vitally connected with the liberation of Jerusalem from the Turks, in order that Christians in Europe desirous of visiting the Grave of the Redeemer might find their ways cleared.

The dry, prosaic accounts of the historical facts to be read in books do not, as a rule, convey any real impression of the fire of enthusiasm that flamed up in Europe when that noble company of knights set out on the first Crusade, nor of the re-kindling of this enthusiasm by the ardour of men like Bernard of Clairvaux and others. There is an awe-inspiring grandeur about the birth of the Crusades, and we cannot help asking ourselves: What impulses were working in the hearts and souls of Europeans at that time—what were the impulses out of which sprang the spirit of the Crusades?

These impulses can only be rightly understood if we trace their development back through the centuries. A pivotal point in history and one which throws a flood of light upon subsequent happenings of incisive importance in Europe, is the reign of Pope Nicholas I, approximately in the middle of the ninth century, between the years 858 and 867. Before his inner eye, Nicholas I perceived three streams of spiritual life—three streams confronting him like great question marks (if I may use the term) of civilisation.

He saw the one stream moving as it were in spiritual heights, across from Asia into Europe. In this stream certain conceptions innate in oriental religion are making their way, in a much modified and changed form, across Southern Europe and Northern Africa, to Spain, France, the British Isles and especially to Ireland. In view of what will presently be said, I will call this the first stream. Springing from the Arabian regions of Asia, it flows across Greece and Italy but also across Africa into Spain and then upwards through the West. But its influence also rays out, in different forms, towards other parts of Europe.

Little is said of this stream in the tale told to us as history. We will speak today only of two characteristic features of this stream—which was immeasurably deep in content. One of these is what may be called the esoteric conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. I have often spoken to you of the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha held by those in whom vestiges of the ancient, pre-Christian Initiation-knowledge survived. There is an indication of this in the Bible itself—in the coming of the three Magi or Kings from the East. With their knowledge of the secrets of the stars they foresee the approaching Christ Event and set out in search of it. Pre-eminently, therefore, the three Magi are examples of men concerned less with the earthly personality of Jesus of Nazareth than with the all-important fact that a Spiritual Being had descended from worlds of spirit-and-soul, that Christ had come to dwell in the body of Jesus of Nazareth and would impart a mighty impulse to the further evolution of the earth. These men viewed the Event of Golgotha from a wholly super-sensible standpoint. Vision of the super-sensible truth was possible to men in whom the ancient principles of Initiation had been kept alive, for comprehension of this super-sensible Event, unintelligible in the natural and historical life of the earth, could be achieved with the help of this ancient Initiation-knowledge.

But it became more and more difficult to keep alive these ancient principles of Initiation and therefore more and more impossible to find appropriate language in which to convey how Christ had come down from super-sensible worlds, had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how His Power continues to work through all the subsequent evolution of the earth. Men simply had no means of so shaping their concepts and ideas that they could find words to convey what had actually come to pass through Christ and through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so in order to clothe this Mystery in words, men were forced more and more to pictorial forms of presentation. One such is the story of the Holy Grail, of the precious Cup, said, on the one hand, to be the Cup in which Christ Jesus had partaken of the Last Supper with His Apostles, and, on the other, the Cup in which the Roman soldier at the foot of the Cross caught the blood flowing from the Redeemer. This Cup was then carried by Angels ... and here is the touch of the super-sensible, tendered in faltering words, for what the old Initiates could have conveyed in clear concepts could now only be conveyed by pictures ... this Cup was carried by Angels to Mont Salvat in Spain and received there by the noble King Titurel; he built a Temple for the Chalice and there dwelt the Knights of the Holy Grail, keeping watch and ward over the treasure that shields the impulse flowing onwards from the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so we have there a deeply esoteric stream, passing over into a mystery. On the one side we perceive the influence of this deeply esoteric stream in the founding of academies in Asia, where men studied the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, endeavouring to understand the Event of Golgotha with the aid of Aristotelian concepts. Later on, in European civilisation, we see attempts made in such a poem as Parsifal to convey the living content of this esoteric stream in pictures. We see this same living content shimmering through the teachings that arose especially in the Schools of Ireland. We see too how the best elements of Arabian wisdom flowed into this stream but how, at the same time, Arabian thought introduced an alien element, coarsened and corrupted over in Asia by Turkish influence.

Of the character imparted to this first stream by the Arabian influence and by its advance from the East towards the West, we shall speak later, when the other streams have been considered. To indicate the fundamental character of this stream, one would be obliged to say: Those who were connected in any real way with this stream of spiritual life, held that the one and only way of salvation—and an echo of this is heard in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal—lay in rising above the sensible and material into the super-sensible, in having at any rate some vision of the super-sensible worlds, in letting man share in the life of the super-sensible worlds, in bringing home to him that his soul belongs to a stream not immediately to be perceived by senses directed to terrestrial events.

The feeling characterizing this gaze upward into super-sensible, super-earthly regions was that, in order to be a full human being, man must belong to worlds transcending material existence, worlds whose happenings are hidden, as were the deeds of the Knights of the Grail, from the outward eye. The Mystery implicit in this stream was felt to be somehow imperceptible to the eyes of sense.

This, then, was the first stream, barely felt and yet looked at askance in Rome at the time of Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century. The whole tendency in Rome was to regard it as an inimical influence and one to which it would be unwholesome for Western humanity to yield. In the religious and intellectual life of Europe there must be nothing of the esoteric, nor anything even faintly deriving from the esoteric—such was the attitude.

This was the first and assuredly the most awe-inspiring question before Nicholas I, for he also discerned the grandeur of this stream of spiritual life. Although much dimmed since the third or fourth century (when a society had actually been founded in Italy for the extermination of all paths to spiritual knowledge) its radiance still shone, by way of many hidden embrasures, into the hearts of men, revealing itself now here, now there. What broke through in this way into the experience of men, often from mysterious strata underlying the progress of history, was denounced as heresy. The feeling also prevailed that the esotericism still faintly glimmering in this stream could no longer find its way into those concepts which, in the culture of Latin Rome, had departed more and more from the inwardness of Greek thought with its oriental colouring and had adopted the forms of Roman Rhetoric—in other words, had become formal and exoteric.

Yet on the other hand, among individuals and communities denounced as heretical sects, this stream flashed into life with tremendous power.

The second question of world-history before the soul of Nicholas I was this. All the knowledge gathered hitherto by the Catholic Church forced him to the conclusion that the Europeans of the West were incapable of bearing the great spiritual tension that is evoked in the souls of men if they are to scale the heights of spiritual, esoteric understanding.

A great uncertainty weighed upon the soul of Nicholas I. What will happen if too much of this esoteric-spiritual stream makes its way into the souls of the people of Europe?

In the East itself, greater and greater confusion had crept into what had once been the esoteric content of this stream. It was over in far-off Ireland that it maintained its purest form and for some time there were Schools in Ireland where the holy secrets were preserved in great purity.

But—so pondered Nicholas I—this is useless for the people of Europe. Nicholas I was, in reality, only repeating the view previously held by Boniface in a somewhat different form, namely that owing to their intrinsic character the people of Europe were not adapted for the inflow of spiritual life into their souls. And so the strange position arose that in the East the real, esoteric substance died away. Human beings living in the East and also in the East of Europe, in the regions of present-day Russia, could make no contact in their souls with this esoteric substance. But over in the East, purely in the form of feelings, and in so far as these feelings had not been utterly exterminated by the gradual advance of the Turanian peoples—the Turks—over in the East men had a dim feeling that the sublimely esoteric, which is not to be comprehended by the dawning intellect, flows in cult and ritual; but only when the cult has at the same time an actual centre in the outer world, a geographical centre.

And so in the East of Europe, while the esoteric, spiritual reality was forgotten, men turned to cult and ritual, clinging with greatest intensity of feeling to what they held to be the very heart and core of the cult: the Grave of the Redeemer.

Hard by the Grave of the Redeemer in Jerusalem was the place where He had celebrated the Last Supper with His Apostles, that Eucharistic meal that in metamorphosis became the Death on Golgotha, was consummated by this Death and then lived on—in the central rite, but also in the whole ritual—in the Mass.

In their estrangement, because they failed to reach an esoteric understanding of the spiritual reality, men gave their hearts to cult and ritual, and to that with which the cult was outwardly connected: the Grave of the Redeemer and the Holy Places in Jerusalem. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem came to be regarded as crowning all the solemn ceremonies, wherever they were celebrated. For the individual man, the ceremonies and ritual were to receive their crowning triumph when, having poured his very heart into what he had experienced in image in the ceremonies, he himself went forth on the pilgrimage to the Grave of the Redeemer.

Certain schools here and there in Asia were still able to grasp the concepts that, under tremendous stress, had been unfolded by the ancient Egyptians from contemplation of the mummy, of the mummified human corpse, but this knowledge had passed from the ken of the general population. Human understanding was incapable of grasping what is at once the Mystery of Man and of the Divine World.

And so in the days of Pope Nicholas I, the farther one looked to the East, the more clearly did one see this inward, heartfelt veneration of the cult; men clung passionately to the cult and to all the experiences evoked by the sacred acts, regarding as the crowning triumph of these experiences, indeed as the supreme act of worship, the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre.

Looking over to the East from ninth-century Rome, in the days of Nicholas I, there arose the picture of the one influence—of which Nicholas I and his counselors said: This is not for the peoples of Europe, for the peoples of Middle and Western Europe—for they have too much of the intellect that is now storming into human evolution to be able to cling, with whatsoever fervour of the heart, to the mere contemplation of the ceremonial acts and to the actual pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. In the people of Europe there is too much of the dawning intellect to enable them in this way to be fully Man. It was perceived that although this was possible in the East, it was not to be expected of the peoples of Middle Europe and the West.

Meanwhile the first great question still remained. Terrible danger seemed imminent if Europe were swept by the stream charged with such deep esotericism, with so much that can be fully grasped only by a spiritualised thinking.

Let me put it like this. Looking from the Rome of Pope Nicholas I towards the West, danger loomed. Looking towards the East, again danger. The stream outspread in the East and making its way far into Europe was seen, in reality, as a series of streams, as the stream of the esoteric cult in contrast to the other (Western) stream of esoteric life. Middle Europe must not, dare not be seized by either stream ... this, or something like it, was what was being said at the Papal Court of Nicholas I. What, then, must be done? The great treasure perceptible to those truly belonging to this first esoteric stream must be clothed in dogma. Words must be found, formulae coined and proclaimed; but the possibility of understanding through actual vision of what was thus proclaimed must be withheld from men.

The idea of Faith was born—the conception that without providing them with the means of vision, men must be given in the forms of abstract dogma, those things in which they can believe.

And so a third stream arose, taking hold of the religious and also the scientific life of Middle and Western Europe. The onset of the intellect was opposed by dogmas, dogmas that could not be described as vision restated in ideas, but such that the element of vision had departed from them; they were simply believed.

If that esoteric stream which penetrated to Ireland and died away in later times had been pursued in deed and truth, the souls of those belonging to it would inevitably have experienced union with the spiritual world. For the great question living in this esoteric stream was in reality this: How is the human being to find his orientation in the ether-world, in the etheric cosmos? The visions, which also included the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha as I described it just now, were connected with the etheric cosmos. Here, then, the great question was that concerning the nature of the etheric cosmos.

But in the middle stream which until far into the Middle Ages was clothed for the most part in Latinised forms of thought, the knowledge bearing upon the etheric cosmos became the content of dogma.

Just as in the West the question concerning the mystery of the etheric cosmos was an unconscious one, so in the East there had arisen the great, unconscious question as to the nature of the etheric organism, the etheric body of man.

Unconsciously astir in all those trends of feeling and knowledge in the East, which poured into cult, ceremony and ritual, was the question: How is man to adjust himself to the workings of his etheric body?—Just as in the South and West the question was: How is man to adjust himself to the etheric cosmos?

In earlier times the truth of the super-sensible world had been within man's reach as an outcome of his natural, dreamlike clairvoyance. It was not necessary for him to become conscious of the etheric in the cosmos and in his own being. A significant feature of the modern age was the great question which now arose concerning the nature and content of the etheric world—in the West, the question as to the etheric cosmos, in the East as to man's own etheric body.

The question concerning the etheric cosmos demands the exercise of supreme spiritual effort. A man must unfold thought to its highest potency if he is to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos. In the lecture yesterday I told you that the way is opened up by study of Goethe's conception of plant-metamorphosis, but that this must pass on to the mighty metamorphosis that leads over from one earthly life to the next.

But in Rome, especially at the time of Pope Nicholas I, this was considered to be full of danger ... the living content of this stream must be stifled and concealed.

The Eastern stream too was involved in the struggle concerning the etheric world but particularly the etheric nature of man, the etheric body of man. With his physical body, man lives in contact with the outer world of nature, with the animals, plants and minerals, the machines and the like. But to live in and through the etheric body during his existence here on earth is only possible for man by the external means presented by ceremony and ritual, by participation in happenings and actions which are not, in the earthly and material sense, real. In the East, men longed to share in these acts in order that they might thereby experience the inner nature and working of their own etheric organism.

In the Rome of Pope Nicholas I, this too was considered unsuitable for Europe. It was decided to retain in the West only what the intellect had formulated into a body of dogmas—wherein super-sensible truths are matters of faith alone, no longer of actual vision. The dogmas were then promulgated over wider areas of the West and the esoteric stream was entirely obscured. The inner attraction to cult and ritual that had characterized Eastern Europe was also thought to be out of keeping with the nature of the peoples of Middle and Western Europe, and from this was born the modified form of the cult which now exists in the Roman Catholic Church.

If you compare the cult and ritual of the Eastern Church, the Orthodox Russian Church, with the form of cult practised in the Roman Catholic Church, you will perceive this difference: in the Roman Catholic Church it is more of the nature of a symbol for the eyes to contemplate; in the East it is something into which the soul penetrates with ardent devotion. In the West, men grew increasingly aware of the need to turn away from the cult—wedded as it now was to dogmatic interpretation—to the dogmas, and from the dogmas to explain the cult. In the East, cult and ritual worked as a power in themselves and what found its way over to the West was gradually confined within the externalised forms preserved in various occult communities. These communities exist to this very day and though emptied of all the esotericism of olden time, still play no insignificant apart in affairs.

How to inaugurate in Europe a form of cult which does not, as in the East, take hold of the etheric nature of the human being, and to establish a system of dogma which would make it unnecessary for men to direct their gaze to the spiritual world ... how to inaugurate a twofold stream of this character—such was the third great question confronting Nicholas I. And at this he laboured. The outcome of it all was the complete severance of the Eastern, Greek Church, from the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in what I have indicated, lie the inner reasons.

All that I have just been describing to you was still clearly perceptible in the middle of the ninth century, at the time of Pope Nicholas I. In the West, vestiges of esotericism still survived. In Spain particularly, but also in France and in Ireland, esoteric Schools existed. There were men who could still look into the spiritual worlds, whose understanding of Christianity derived from actual vision. Later on, nothing remained of this earlier power of vision, save a hint, save those mysterious, repeated glimpses of the Holy Grail or its secular reflection and counterpart, the Round Table of King Arthur. There men did feel the presence of something actually connected with vision of worlds beyond the earth, with living experience of these worlds.

Middle Europe, extending into those regions of the West where esotericism still survived, was the home of devout belief sustained by dogmas, combined with a world of ceremonies and rites not quite connected with the human etheric body. Of what was living in the East, I have already spoken. Any true portrayal of the life of soul as it was in Europe during the ninth century, would have to include description of these three different moods-of-soul in their many variations.

The account given by history is but a cursory, superficial expression of what was actually reigning in the depths. But as time went on, the esoteric stream was followed by a current, which in the forms of Arabian thought was becoming increasingly exoteric and formal. What men over in Asia had made of the Aristotelian teachings—that too flowed over in the wake of what had once been a very spiritual understanding, and under this influence the content of this esoteric stream became more and more materialistic. Already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries we see how esotericism begins to flicker out, to melt away as it were; this esoteric stream itself takes on a materialistic mode of thinking, that mode of thinking which in later metamorphosis becomes the materialism of natural science—which has its real origin in Arabian thought.

The middle stream—actually brought into being by Nicholas I but previously fostered by Boniface and supported by the Merovingians and Carolingians—although for long centuries bearing faint traces of the influence exercised by the Grail and other sacred lays in turning the eyes of soul to the super-sensible world, this middle stream tended more and more to introduce the element of materialism into cult and dogma. The older and purer conceptions of Transubstantiation, of the celebration of the Mass, for example, were followed by those crude, materialistic conceptions, which alone could have resulted in controversy over the Eucharist. When these quarrels arose they were proof of the fact that men no longer understood the Eucharist as originally conceived. Indeed it is a mystery that can be understood only in the light of spiritual knowledge.

And so materialism found its way into the stream that had flowed across to the West from the South and East; it found its way into the middle stream, and, fundamentally, also into the Eastern stream. The waves of materialism were surging on—and everywhere men strove to dam them back as best they could.

We pass now from the ninth century, from the days of Pope Nicholas I, to the eleventh century. We must picture the three great question marks standing like three terrible powers, soul-torturing powers, before a man like Pope Nicholas I. For he could not say—as in Congresses later on, when frontiers were drawn on maps according to opinions based upon external considerations—he could not say: I decree that there shall be a frontier here, and another frontier here ... for souls cannot be divided off in this way. What he could do was to indicate lines of direction and impart to the middle stream a certain strength, and herein his genius was particularly effective. Nevertheless the mood prevailing in the East spread far, far into the West. What mood? The mood in which the etheric organism of man is set aflame from within by the sacred acts of cult and ritual and in which, in a way more characteristic of Western Europe, these acts were now linked with their centre in Jerusalem.

With all the ardour for pilgrimage and the intense yearning towards the real centre in Jerusalem, Peter of Amiens, with less effect at the beginning, and then, later on, Bernard of Clairvaux with veritably blinding fervour, preached the Cross. With this mood of ardour in Europe there mingled the remains of the stream which had been kept alive in the West by the cult of the Grail, by the Arthurian cult—the remains of the esotericism which had here found its outlet ... and there arose the picture of Man in his physical form as a being to whom the earth is not really earth, but a particular place in the cosmos.

Some such conception was alive in the world of chivalry and knighthood or at least in that part of it that took shape in Western and Middle Europe and allied itself with the Crusading Spirit. And as a faint undertone only, but as the Crusades proceeded steadily increasing in strength, there mingled with this mood the temper of mind that had been engendered by Nicholas I as appropriate for European civilisation.

That is why there is something about the Crusades not fully to be explained by later circumstances. For the middle stream spreads out; beside it remains the stream belonging to the East of Europe, regarded in Europe itself as a backward tendency in religion; and the Western stream converts itself into branches of the occult, esoteric life, into all kinds of occult societies, Masonic Orders and the like. In the world of Scholasticism, the middle stream finally lays hold of science too, and then of the child of Scholasticism: natural science in its later form.

The spirit inspiring the Crusades cannot be understood by those who look only at what happened in later times; it can be understood only by those who perceive the effects of these impulses from the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who grasp the full significance of the question with which Nicholas I, in the ninth century, was so profoundly concerned: How can happenings in the outer world in which the human being himself participates, pre-eminent among them being the sacred acts of the cult, how can these be brought into connection with the living flow of spiritual life, with the life of the Spiritual Beings? In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the problem had already been set for the peoples of Europe. Just as on the one side they had lost the realities contained in cult and ritual, so too, on the other side, they had lost the realities yielded by spiritual vision. Just as in the East the realities of cult and ritual vanished into the mists of Asia and the conquests of the Turks sealed off the holy place around which the acts of the Christian cult must be centred, so, if I may speak in metaphor, did the esoteric secrets contained in the Western stream disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. And there arose as a reaction the mood, which asked: How are the sacred acts of the cult, with their centre in Jerusalem, to be infused with spiritual life?

Anyone who reads the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux can feel to this very day how on the one hand, fervent devotion to the cult, to the outer symbol in which the esoteric is contained, speaks from his lips, and how, on the other hand, his heart is fired through and through by all that was once astir in the esotericism of the West.

Resounding in the tone and tenor of the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux, not in what he actually says but in the artistic grandeur and majesty of his utterances, are those mysteries which the etheric cosmos would fain reveal to man and can no longer reveal, and on the other side all that strives, from out of the earth, to work in man's own etheric body. That is what drives men over to Asia, seeking for what they had lost in the West.

Esotericism, however, was really the driving force. By making a new link with the Grave of the Redeemer, men desired to glimpse again what the West had lost. The tragedy of the ensuing age was that this was not understood, that there were no ears ready to listen, let us say, to Rosicrucianism—I mean Rosicrucianism in its genuine form—which sought for Christ in heights of the Spirits, not at the physical grave.

Now, however, the time has come for mankind to realise that just as those who after the Redeemer's death came to the tomb, were told: He Whom ye seek is no longer here, seek Him elsewhere, so, too, it was said to the Crusaders: He Whom ye seek is no longer here, seek Him elsewhere.

The age is upon us when He Who is no longer here must be sought elsewhere, when He must be sought through a new revelation of the spiritual worlds. That is the task of those who are living at this present time and of that I wished to speak to you, in connection with our recent studies.

One can express the facts of the spiritual world in different ways, illuminating them from the most diverse sides. This sometimes sounds different. But it is precisely through these various illuminations that the facts of the spiritual world are fully presented to the soul. And so this evening, in a slightly different language and in a different light, I will share some of the things I have discussed in the last two lectures in the Goetheanum building for the human being's experience between death and a new birth.

We have heard how the human being initially, when the physical body has fallen away from him, enters into a state of cosmic experience. After the physical body has fallen away, he still carries his etheric organism within him; but he no longer feels, as it were, within this etheric organism, but he feels himself spread out soulfully into the world. But in these cosmic expanses, over which his consciousness is now beginning to spread, he cannot yet clearly distinguish the entities and processes from one another. He has a cosmic consciousness, but this cosmic consciousness still has no inner clarity. And besides, in the first days after death, this consciousness is occupied by the still existing etheric body. What is lost first is that in man which is bound to the head organization. I do not want to say anything ironic, but something very serious: one loses one's head, also meant in a spiritual sense, first of all when one passes through the gate of death. The head organization ceases to function.

Now it is precisely the head organization that mediates thinking in earthly existence. It is through the head organization that man forms his thoughts during his earthly existence in a certain activity. One loses the head organization first when one has passed through the gate of death, but one does not lose one's thoughts; they remain. They only become interspersed with a certain liveliness. They become dull, dusky, spiritual entities that point one out into the world. It is as if the thoughts had detached themselves from the human head, as if they still shone back on the last human life, which one experiences as one's etheric organism, but as if at the same time they would point to the world. One does not yet know what they want to tell us, these human ideas, which were, as it were, harnessed and penned up in the head organization and are now freed and point out into the world wide.

When the etheric body has dissolved for the reasons and in the way I characterized yesterday over at the building site, when the cosmic consciousness is no longer banished in this way to the last course of earthly life - in the other way, which I also characterized , it remains transfixed for the time being. When this etheric body has also been released from the human being, then the ideas that have been wrested from the head organization become, as it were, brighter, and one now notices how these ideas point one out into the cosmos, into the universe.

It is the case that one comes out into the cosmos in such a way that, initially, the plant world of the earth is the mediator. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that the plants covering the ground at the place where one died are the ones that prepare the way out, but when we look at the plant world of the earth, it presents itself to the spiritual vision in such a way that what the physical eyes see is only a part of that plant world. I will draw what is taking place in a schematic way on the board (see drawing). Let us assume that this is the surface of the earth; plants grow out of the earth's surface (green). It is, of course, drawn out of all proportion, but you will understand what I mean. One follows these plants with the senses to the flowers (red). The spiritual view of these plants, however, shows that this is only part of the plant world, that from the flowers upwards an astral event and weaving begins. In a sense, an astral substance is poured out over the earth, and spiral formations (yellow) arise from this astral substance. Wherever the earth provides the opportunity for plants to arise, the flowing over of these astral world spirals gives rise to plant life.

These world spirals now surround the earth everywhere, so you must not believe that the downpouring, downshining and downglittering of these astral world spirals is only where plants grow. It is present everywhere in different ways, so that one could also die in the desert and yet have the opportunity to encounter these plant spirals as they pour out into space.

These spirals of vegetation are the path by which one moves from the earth to the planetary sphere. So, in a sense, one slips out of the earthly realm through the spiritual extensions of the plant world of the earth. This becomes wider and wider. These spirals expand more and more, becoming wider and wider circles. They are the highways out to the spiritual world. But one would not get out there, one would have to stand still, so to speak, if one did not gain the possibility of having a kind of negative weights, weights that do not weigh down, but weights that push one up. And these weights are the spiritual contents, the ideas of the mineral formations in the earth, especially of the metals; so that one moves out into the world on the plant paths and is supported by the power that carries one from the metals of the earth to the planet stars. All mineral formations have the peculiarity that the ideas inherent in them carry us to a particular planet. Thus, let us say, we are carried by tin-like minerals, that is, by their ideas, to a particular planet; we are carried to a particular planet by what is in the earth as iron, that is, by the idea of iron. What the physical human being takes in from the mineral and plant world during his earthly existence is taken over in his spiritual counter-images, guiding the human being after death into the world's vastness. And one is really carried into the planetary movements, into the whole rhythm of the planetary movements through the mineral and plant kingdoms of the earth.

By gradually expanding one's consciousness to include the entire planetary sphere, so that one is aware of the planetary life in one's own inner world of the soul, one passes through the entire planetary sphere in this way. If there were nothing in the planetary sphere except the outpourings of plant and mineral existence in its vastness, one would experience everything that can be experienced in the secrets of the mineral and plant kingdoms. And these secrets are extraordinarily manifold, magnificent, powerful, they are full of content, and no one need think that the life that begins there for the spiritual person when he has left his physical organism is somehow poorer than the earthly life we spend from day to day. It is manifold in itself, but it is also majestic in itself. You can experience more from the secrets of a single mineral than you experience in earthly life from all the kingdoms of nature combined.

But there is something else in this sphere, which one passes through as the planetary sphere. These are the lunar forces, the spiritual lunar forces, which were characterized in the last 'Days'. The lunar sphere is there. However, the further one enters into an extra-terrestrial existence, the weaker and weaker its effectiveness becomes. Its effectiveness announces itself strongly in the first times, which are counted in years after death; but it becomes weaker and weaker the more the cosmic consciousness expands. If this lunar sphere were not there, one would not be able to experience two things after death. The first is that entity which I mentioned in the last days and which one has developed oneself during the last earth life from the forces which represent the moral-spiritual evaluation of one's own earth life. One has developed a spiritual being, a kind of spiritual elemental presence, which has as its limbs, as its tentacle formations, what is actually an image of the human moral-spiritual value. If I may express myself in this way: a living photograph, formed out of the substance of the astral cosmos, lives with the soul, but it is a real, living photograph on which one can see what kind of person one actually was in one's last life on earth. This photograph is in front of one as long as one is in the sphere of the moon. But in addition, in this sphere of the moon, one experiences all kinds of diverse elemental beings, of whom one very soon notices that they have a kind of dream-like but very bright dream-like consciousness, which alternates with a brighter state of consciousness, which is even brighter than human consciousness on earth. These entities oscillate, as it were, between a dull, dream-like state of consciousness and a brighter state of consciousness than that of a person on earth. You get to know these entities. They are numerous and their forms are extremely different from one another. In the condition of life I am now describing, these entities are experienced in such a way that when they enter a duller, dream-like consciousness, they float down to the earth, as it were, through the moon's spirituality, and then float back again. A rich life presents itself from such figures, floating down to earth and back again, flowing up and down, as I have just described. One learns to recognize that the animal kingdom on earth is related to these formations. One learns to recognize that these figures are the so-called group souls of the animals. These group souls of the animals descend. This means that some animal form wakes up on the earth below. When this animal form is more in a state of sleeping below, then the group soul comes up. In short, it can be seen that the animal kingdom is related to the cosmos in such a way that within the lunar sphere is the living environment for the group souls of the animals. Animals do not have individual souls, but whole groups of animals, the lions, tigers, cats and so on have common group souls. These group souls just lead their existence in the lunar sphere, floating up and down. And in this up and down floating, the life of the animals from the lunar sphere is brought about.

It is a law of the world that in this sphere, where we find the group souls of the animals, that is, in the lunar sphere, our moral-astral counterpart also has its life. For when one then, with cosmic consciousness, lives one's way further out into the cosmic expanses, one leaves behind in the lunar sphere, as I have described it, this living photograph of what one has achieved as a moral-spiritual being during one's last life on earth and also in earlier ones. In this way, one enters the planetary sphere, experiencing the plant, mineral and animal worlds. One is still absorbed in the lunar sphere, but in this way one lives one's way into the planetary sphere. One experiences the movements of the planets. One has stepped out into the cosmos on the paths of the plant being. One has been carried by the ideas of the mineral, especially the metallic beings. One feels that a particular kind of plant on Earth is an earthly image of what leads one there as a spiral path that widens more and more, let us say to Jupiter. But the fact that one is led to Jupiter depends on experiencing the idea of a particular metal and certain minerals of the Earth in a living way.

Once the path of the plants has led one to a planet – one always has with one the idea of the mineral on the earth that carried one out – one has arrived at the planet in question, then this idea that carried one out of the mineral, this idea that has become ever more and more alive, begins to resound in the planet in question. So that after death one experiences a gradual development along the lines of the plant kingdom, the mineral inner beings experiencing themselves in ideas that are more and more alive. These ideas become spiritual beings. When the one living idea arrives at one planet and the other at another planet, the mineral ideas that have now become spiritual beings feel at home. One type of mineral feels at home in Jupiter, the other type in Mars, and so on. And that which was only regarded as inconspicuous on earth now begins to resound in the respective planet when it has arrived, and to resound in the most diverse ways. So that what has mineral images on earth, which can only be seen with the senses, can now be heard resounding from the interior of the planets and in this way one lives into the harmony of the spheres. For in the universe, in the cosmos, everything is connected internally. What grows out of the ground down here on earth as the plant world is a reflection of what connects the earth to the planetary system as if along plant pathways. What is in the ground as a mineral is actually only an inconspicuous image of what works as a force up along the plant paths, but what has its home outside in the planets and what introduces world tones into the planet, which combine to form a great world harmony.

Thus, when one understands what is here on earth, one speaks the truth when one says to gold: I see in gold, which shines with its own peculiar color, the image of that which, in the sun, resonates a central cosmic tone for my soul when I have carried it up into the sun along certain plant pathways.

When a person has gone through this, when what I have described as necessary in the last days occurs, then the possibility begins for him to rise above the planetary sphere and enter the sphere of the fixed stars. He can only do this by extricating himself from the lunar sphere. This must, as it were, remain behind him. But what he experiences in the way described in the planetary sphere, what he experiences as the sense of the mineral-metallic realm of the physical earth, what he experiences as the guiding directions of the plant world of the earth, all the magnificent things he goes through there, are disturbed in a certain way disturbed by the impacts of the lunar sphere, it is darkened for him in a certain way by the fact that he experiences the elemental beings that belong to the animal kingdom and that, in addition to those actually quite harmonious movements in which they ascend and descend, thus in addition to these vertical movements, also have horizontal movements. In these horizontal movements, which are carried out by the group souls of the animals within the sphere of the moon, terrible archetypes for disharmonious, discrepant forces in the animal kingdom take place. There are terrible, savage struggles between the group souls of the animal kingdom. Through this impact of the lunar sphere into the planetary sphere, what can otherwise be experienced in inner peace and with dignity and majesty through the archetypal nature of the plant and mineral kingdoms is disturbed to a certain extent.

When the human being escapes from the lunar sphere and enters the sphere of the fixed stars, then what remains for him is a cosmic memory – we can call it that – of these powerful, majestic experiences of the planetary sphere with the archetypal nature of the earthly mineral and plant kingdoms. This remains with him as a memory. And he enters into a world of spiritual beings, of which, as I have already said, the physical, sensory image is the constellations of the stars, those star constellations which, when understood in the right way, are the expression, so to speak, the written characters from which one can experience the peculiarity, the deeds and the volitional intentions of the spiritual beings in the sphere of the stars. In a sense, one now experiences by vision the spiritual beings that do not walk on earth in physical bodies, which can only be experienced in this sphere of the stars. And one enters this sphere in order to penetrate one's own being with the deeds of these divine spiritual beings, within the same, one's own being with the cosmic consciousness – which has now expanded, for which spatial vision has passed over into a qualitative vision, for which temporal vision has passed over into simultaneity.

While here on earth we are enclosed in our own skin and the other human beings outside in theirs, doing what they have to do, while we are all next to each other here on earth, in this sphere of stars we are not only in each other as human souls, but we are also such that our cosmic consciousness expands and we feel the entities of the divine spiritual world within us. Here on earth we say “we” to ourselves, or rather, each of us says “I”. Out there, he says “I” by which he means: Within this my I, I experience the world of the divine-spiritual hierarchies; I experience them as my own cosmic consciousness. This is, of course, an even more powerful, expansive, diverse, meaningful and majestic world of experience that one now enters. And when one becomes aware of the forces that play into the soul of man from the most diverse entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, then one sees: they are forces that all interact, having cosmic intentions, which all, so to speak, aim at one point. One's own spiritual and soul activity is interwoven with the intentions of the divine spiritual hierarchies and their individual entities. And everything in which one is enveloped, into which one's own cosmic activity, felt within and encompassed by cosmic consciousness, passes, all this ultimately aims at constructing the spirit germ, as I have described it, of the human physical organism.

Indeed, the ancient mystery centers spoke of a profound truth when they said that man is a temple of the gods. What is built first in mighty, majestic grandeur out of the spiritual cosmos and then contracts into the human physical body, so as to be transformed that one no longer recognizes the original image, the mighty, majestic original image, is actually what the context of the divine-spiritual hierarchies builds in order to have its goal in this building.

This sphere of experience is such that, when we are in this sphere, we see the cosmos, which we see from the inside when we are in the earthly position, from a point from which we look out in all directions, from the outside. For when we enter the sphere of the stars, we feel even at the moment when we have snatched ourselves from the sphere of the moon that we are outside in the universe and actually looking at the cosmos from the outside.

I will try to sketch what is taking place (see drawing). Let us assume that the Earth is here. Of course, the proportions are not correct, but we will understand each other. We look out into the vastness of the cosmos. We see stars wandering outside, the planets, and the fixed stars are outside. Here on Earth, our consciousness is concentrated as if in a small point (red). We look out centrally into the universe. In the moment when we have escaped from the sphere of the moon, we arrive with our consciousness in the sphere of the stars. But we pass, as it were, only through the sphere of the stars, guided by the memory that remains to us from the experiences of the planetary sphere, and enter the sphere beyond the stars.

In this sphere beyond the stars, space no longer actually exists. Of course, when I draw here, I have to draw what is actually qualitative in spatial terms. I can then draw it like this: While our consciousness on earth is, as it were, concentrated at this point as our ego (red), it is peripheral when it has reached beyond the sphere of the stars (blue). We look inwards from each point (blue arrows). This looking is only represented in the image of space. We look inward. If we have the constellation of Aries here (red at the top left) and if we see the sun (yellow) standing in the constellation of Aries from the earth, so that the sun, as it were, covers the constellation of Aries for us, and if we then go out into space, we see Aries standing in front of the sun. But to understand from the cosmic consciousness means something else: to see Aries standing before the Sun — than to look with the earthly consciousness and see the Sun standing before Aries. We see everything spiritually in this way. We look at the universe from the outside.

And in the development of the spirit germ of the physical organism, we actually have the powers of the spiritual-divine beings within us, but in such a way that, basically, we feel outside the whole cosmos, which we experience from the earth. And now, in our cosmic consciousness, we experience being with the divine-spiritual beings.

When we then look back and see, as it were, the constellations — but all in a qualitative rather than a spatial sense — above the sun, one time this, the other time that, then we recognize in what we are experiencing, by connecting it with the memory we have of how the metals and minerals, after the plant paths had been completed, had sounded in the planets, then we experience that this sounding, which was initially a world music, is transformed into the cosmic language, into the Logos. We read the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings among whom we are by experiencing the individual signs of this cosmic writing: The standing of Aries before the Sun, the standing of Taurus before the Sun and so on — by experiencing how this takes place and how the sounds that the metals make in the planets resonate with this writing. This instructs us how to work on the spiritual germ of the physical organism on earth.

As long as we are in the lunar sphere, we have a vivid feeling for this photograph of our moral and spiritual life on earth. We have a vivid feeling for what is going on among the group souls of the animals. But these are a kind of demonic, elemental entities. Now that we find the zodiac on the other side of the sun, we are learning to recognize what we have actually seen. For the memory of these animal forms, of these group soul forms of the animals, remains with us into the beyond of the sphere of the stars, and we make the discovery that these group souls of the animals are, so to speak, lower — if one human language), are the caricatured after-images of the magnificent forms that now permeate our cosmic consciousness beyond the sphere of the stars as the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies.

Thus, outside the sphere of the stars we have the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, and within the sphere of the stars, insofar as it is interspersed with what spiritually belongs to the sphere of the moon, we have the caricatures of the divine-spiritual entities in the group souls of the animals. When I say caricatures, please do not take this in a pejorative sense. What a caricature is in the human-humorous-artistic view is, of course, something extraordinarily trivial compared to the grandiose caricature of the divine spiritual beings in the world of the moon sphere, which is at the same time the world of the group soul beings of the earthly animal kingdom. We owe an extraordinary debt to the experience we have in this sphere. I have already mentioned this in a more conceptual form in the last few days, now I would like to express it more in an imaginative way.

Imagine the human being is up there (see drawing on page 19, red). He looks back here. His actual area of perception of his spiritual and soul world is beyond the star sphere. This is where he has the field of his current activity. It is like standing on a high mountain, with sunshine above and fog below. In this cosmic experience, you have the entire surging, struggling, and discordant group soul of the animals below, but also their harmonious ascent and descent. Like a multiform mist, it propagates itself down below, lives itself out down there. And while gazing at the constellations, beholding the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while reading the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while learning in cosmic consciousness to understand how the temple the temple of the gods, this spirit germ of the physical body, has its secrets in itself, those secrets that correspond to the pure world of extra-terrestrial and extra-lunar existence, one looks down and sees what is going on in the sphere of spirituality of the animal kingdom. And by looking down as if from a sun-drenched mountain peak into a lower mass of fog clouds, one has the same experience as one has in cosmic thoughts: If you do not take with you all the strength with which you have now imbued yourself from this divine spiritual world as you descend back down, you will not emerge unscathed from this world of the foggy clouds of animal group souls. There you will find the image of your previous earthly life with a moral and spiritual evaluation. This will be floating in the fog down there. You have to take it up again. But there will be all the group souls of the animals, wildly rushing into each other; there will be all the wild hustle and bustle. You must take such strong powers with you from your beyond the sphere of the stars that you can take these powers of the group soul nature of the animals as far away from your destiny as possible. Otherwise, just as matter attaches itself to a crystal, what these group souls of the animals cosmetically exude towards your moral-spiritual core of being will attach itself to you. And you will have to take with you everything that you cannot then hold back through the powers you have accumulated, and you will have to integrate it as all kinds of urges and instincts for your next earthly existence.

However, one will only be able to draw from the hereafter the forces of the sphere of the stars that one has made oneself capable of drawing by developing in the inclination towards Christ, in the inclination towards the Mystery of Golgotha, in the truly religious, not in the egoistic religious, permeation of the soul in the sense of the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” This makes one strong to penetrate beyond the sphere of the stars, in the company of the divine spiritual beings, with those forces that one has to take with one as one's destiny core when going back down through the sphere of the moon from that which which is grouped in the disharmonious, discrepant play of the spiritual-animal environment and permeates this spiritual-soul core.

If one wants to describe what the human soul experiences between birth and death, what unites it with itself, what it incorporates into its perceptions, feelings and impulses of will, then one must describe the earthly world around the human being. But if one wants to describe what the human being experiences between death and a new birth, then one must describe what the archetypes of what is on earth are. If one wants to know what the minerals really are, then one must hear their essence resounding in the life between death and a new birth from the planets. If one wants to know what the plants really are, then one must study the essence of what grows out of the earth in a faint afterimage in the plant, on the paths that lead from the plant kingdom out into space and that are traced in the forms of plant formations. If one wishes to study the animal kingdom, one must become acquainted with the ebb and flow of the group souls of the animals in the sphere of the moon. And when one has extricated oneself from all this, when one has entered the sphere beyond the world of the stars, only then does one learn to recognize the actual secrets of the human being. And one learns to look back on all that one has experienced in the archetypal worlds of the mineral, the plant, and the animal.

One carries this out into those regions of the cosmos where one not only recognizes the actual secrets of the human being, but also experiences them vividly and is active in shaping them. One carries into these regions, like a cosmic memory, everything one has experienced with reference to minerals, plants and animals on the ascent. A rich and varied life takes place in the confluence of these memories and what one sees as the secrets of human existence, what one actively experiences and participates in, and in the confluence of this memory and this activity. And it is this varied life that a person goes through between death and a new birth.

Today I would like to continue the meditation I undertook yesterday by bringing it even closer to the human being himself. You can well imagine that what one is actually trying to depict through such a description is so rich and varied inwardly that any such description, like yesterday's, which covers such wide areas, can only grasp the matter from one point of view, and that a feeling for what is actually intended by such a description can only arise from descriptions from the most diverse points of view.

When we consider the human head formation, the head formation, we must be clear about the fact that this head formation does not only concern the externally observed head, limited downwards by the neck, but also the processes that take place in the human head, the internal organ processes. These are mainly present in the head as head processes, but they continue throughout the organism; so that essentially the head organization is found in the whole human being, but outwardly it reveals itself primarily in the head. The same applies to the chest organization, which essentially comprises breathing and blood circulation. This too extends into both the head organization and the metabolism and limb organization. We can speak of the human being in such a way that we distinguish between its individual organizational elements, but we must be clear about how they interact in the whole person.

If we now consider the organization of the human head, it undergoes quite different metamorphoses than the other parts of the human organism when passing through the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In the head we have an actual reproduction of that cosmic which, as a spirit germ, develops through such activity as I have characterized yesterday and already on the previous days. In the human head we have the complete reproduction, filled with material substance, of the universal whole.

If we could study the human head not with a physically constructed microscope but with our spiritual and soul abilities to enlarge, we would find the whole cosmos reproduced in its physical, etheric, astral and ego structure. We actually carry this entire cosmos within us, and most of it in our head organization. It is also true for this head organization that, between death and a new birth, the human being, in union with higher spiritual beings of the upper hierarchies, works out what will find the continuation of its development within human inheritance, which, so to speak, has been brought to a certain point by the human being himself in union with the beings of the higher hierarchies in the spiritual world, falls into the physical world and continues its development in the mother's organism through conception.

What we see as head formation has actually emerged from the cosmos, so that it itself comes down to earth in an astral state, which it finally reaches through the processing of the human being, and there, before conception, up to the physical state of development, , so that later on that which has now been left behind by the human being itself is clothed with an etheric body, after it has first cast off the germ of the physical body in the spiritual, and can then in turn connect with this spirit germ that has become physical.

But now it is the case that during the waking state, on a small scale, we are constantly continuing what we have accomplished on a large scale, in the universal between death and a new birth in union with divine spiritual entities. This activity, which is carried out here, takes place, so to speak, behind the ordinary human consciousness.

I would like to sketch this out for you. If we look at the human head of a normally functioning person, the following appears to the spiritual view: While we are awake, while the impressions of the external world are constantly approaching the human head through our waking state, everything that lives in the sense perception takes place for the consciousness. I would like to characterize what lives in sensory perception by first drawing the eye (see drawing), the nose, where the olfactory sensations take place, palate, mouth, where the taste experiences take place. This part, marked in red, is intended to schematically represent everything that a person actually experiences in their ordinary consciousness. But in the world of facts that takes place in a person, not only that takes place. You know, of course, that the brain is structured in the most diverse ways. I will only hint at this schematically (blue-green). What is combined and structured here in the brain is an image of the whole universe, the whole universe contracted into a small size and lined with earthly substances. The fact that this brain, in its ego part, its astral and etheric part, is then lined with physical earthly substance means that the earth, with its forces and components, has influence over this part of the human being.

While our sensory perception is taking place, while the colors flood in and form internally into images, while the auditory impulses vibrate through the human organism and form through the structure of the auditory organ into auditory perceptions, while a similar thing happens with taste, smell and tactile perceptions, while this whole waking experience is maintained by the influence of the external physical-sensory world, it comes to life as a force within the unconscious parts of the human head organization. And while we perceive a color, hear a sound or have a taste perception, we unconsciously work to create an afterimage of, say, Jupiter's position in relation to the sun or to Mars (yellow). We are mapping a cosmic relationship within our own being. Throughout our waking life, something happens that we accomplish behind our ordinary consciousness: the reproduction of cosmic activity. What is accomplished behind our ordinary consciousness is nothing other than the echo of what we go through cosmically between death and a new birth or conception. There we have gone through it on a large scale, in the universal. We have gone through it in the spiritual, unperturbed by the earthly substance. We did not need to take off the earthly substance in fine portions, wrap it around axes in spiral lines and so on. We did everything in a spiritual substance. The spiritual-divine powers of the highest hierarchies accompanied us in our work. What we accomplished in their community, we do here in an unconscious way, by surrendering to the sensory perceptions in our brain, by reproducing what we have done outside in a spiritual way with spiritual beings in an earthly way with earthly substances. Through this activity, we carry our pre-earthly life into our earthly life and into our physical organization.

What we see through colors, hear through sounds, smell through scents, is there for us during our earthly existence. What takes place in the background are thoughts that have an ethereal vitality, which in the materiality of the brain have only their physical expression. The essential thing that matters is what ethereally weaves in the finest substantiality of the brain. There, living thoughts weave into each other. Our thoughts are, after all, only reflex images that are formed in this inner cosmos, where what we receive from outside reflects back and then becomes conscious to us. But what I have just described takes place behind the level of memory. Nothing needs to take place behind an ordinary mirror; but behind the mirror that reflects our abstract ideas back to our consciousness through our brain, an entire world existence is reflected in miniature in every single person. And these living thoughts that we develop are for the third hierarchy, for the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, the same as our abstractly reflecting thoughts are for us. Behind our consciousness, through our humanity, the third hierarchy unfolds its activity. There the essences of the archai, archangeloi and angeloi develop what must and can only be accomplished by placing the human being in the cosmos and on the earth. In the formation of his brain, he not only develops a mirror that reflects his ordinary earthly consciousness, the abstract ideas, but within the head something takes place that the hierarchy of the angels, archangels, and archai has to carry out on earth and through earthly existence. This is an event that is just as much connected with earthly existence as another event.

You can characterize earthly existence in such a way that you say: through the minerals this and that happens; through the plants it happens that they bloom, bear fruit; through the animals, yet another thing happens. Through man, the angeloi, archangeloi and archai pour their activity into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. But this happens indirectly through the subconscious activity of the human head organization.

Our earthly existence is not exhausted by the blossoming of plants and the running around of animals, but continues into a spiritual existence. Beyond plants, beyond animals, beyond man, there is an activity of the angelic world, the spiritual world, the third hierarchy, and this activity is possible through the human mind.

I was able to point out to you yesterday that there is something astral about a plant (see drawing) when it grows out of the earth (green and pink). So we also have an astral form above it, a higher spiritual form (yellow) than is represented in the plant blossom itself. Thus the activity of the human head continues into the spiritual, and if we seek where it continues to, we find the activity of the beings of the third hierarchy in connection with earthly existence.

This activity also has a very deep significance in cosmic evolution. In the background of one's own human existence on earth, in the background of what man must do without knowing it in his organic activity, the beings of the third hierarchy are his helpers. Man dies in his earthly existence. We have considered dying and sought to understand it. But what dying is for man, that is for the entities of the third hierarchy, submerging in human nature. If they only had this, this submerging in human nature, their consciousness would fade away; they would lose their entity. They must nourish their entity again and again, as it were. The entity of these creatures of the third hierarchy must be nourished from the substance of the world.

Now, as I said before, what is woven behind human consciousness are primarily etheric forms. Even during our earthly existence, there is not such a sharp boundary between the inner human ether and the outer cosmic ether that what is produced by human thoughts, by this human work of the brain behind the conscious thoughts, does not vibrate out into the cosmic ether. Man is actually surrounded around his head by the vibrations that are generated in the cosmic ether through his head activity, which is accomplished in union with the beings of the third hierarchy. And when man passes through the gate of death, then it is as I said yesterday: that the head activity drops away first, also in relation to the etheric. But in reality this means that whatever takes place in the head, even as subconscious matter, first disperses rapidly in the cosmic ether. Everything that is brought about by man in this way takes shape in the World Ether, and the beings of the third hierarchy feed on these shapes. Thus the beings of the third hierarchy, on the one hand, help man in relation to his head organization, and on the other hand, they themselves develop through what is accomplished within this head organization.

The fact that man is interwoven with the evolution of the earth during his earthly existence means that these entities of the third hierarchy also come into contact with earthly existence through him. Otherwise these entities of the third hierarchy would belong to a world from which they could not come into contact with earthly existence at all. But they must draw their spiritual nourishment from earthly existence in the way described. Thus man is included in a cosmic activity mediated by these entities of the third hierarchy. This cosmic activity passes, as it were, through his being. Of the higher entities standing directly above man, these beings of the third hierarchy are the least powerful. They could not transform what vibrates out into the world from man and should become his spiritual nourishment, if it were quite foreign to their nature. That is why it is also the case that what arises through the human head organization as a human effect is mixed as little as possible with what the human being is through his other being. Our thoughts remain logical even when a person accumulates much evil in terms of morality through his life. Thoughts remain cool towards the other human being. They remain cool to such an extent that they can become the aforementioned nourishment for higher beings.

If everything that a person has in his emotions were also to pass over into these living thoughts, which take place behind consciousness, then the angels, archangels and so on would not be able to absorb that either. It would be useless nourishment for them. It does, however, play into our ordinary reflected thoughts, whether we are moral or immoral beings. But if I now express the matter in localized terms, which can only be in the form of a suggestion: what takes place there in the back of our heads, behind ordinary consciousness, that is something that remains, so to speak, innocent, untouched by human moral aberrations. These human moral aberrations only exert an influence on the cosmic ether and on the cosmic astrality to the extent that the soul of the human being is bound to the chest, respiratory and blood circulation systems. In a sense, the head is a pure image of the cosmos. And what happens during life on earth as an image of universal cosmic activity behind the ordinary consciousness, where worlds are continually being formed and destroyed, what goes on there, is present in a certain purity in relation to the rest of human nature. But it is nevertheless the case that if one could, as it were, turn one's eyes around and they would become spiritually seeing, and these eyes, turned around in their cave and having become spiritually clairvoyant, could look back into the interior of the human cranial cavity, they would see stars shining continuously, stars that are in motion in relation to each other, a world of fixed stars. A whole little cosmos would become visible.

The human chest is organized differently from the human head. The place where breathing and blood circulation take place as a rhythmic human being is also influenced by the cosmos, but earthly conditions have a much greater influence there. They change much more what comes in from the cosmos as a replica. When our lungs are active, we could see what is going on inside the lungs as a star, as a planet, as a solar and lunar world, if we could, as it were, turn around and see what is only lined with earthly matter in its etheric-astral existence. But earthly conditions continually interfere with this inner existence. Here the earth itself has a much greater influence. You must bear in mind that only something as fine as what the eyes make of the world of colour, what is made out of the world of sound by the body, plays a direct, immediate role in the organization of the head for the formations that I have just described. This blends in with cosmic activity. And only that which is brought about by the rest of the organism through the breath, through the blood that also functions in the brain, is pushed in. This is precisely the material that fills it. It pushes itself in. But the configuration, the sculpture, this inner sculpture that takes place there, is thoroughly an afterimage of the cosmic. The earth has little influence there.

The chest organism is in a completely different situation. The chest organism takes in the air we breathe and processes it. This is something that is in the immediate vicinity of the earth, that does not enter the human organism in such a fine way as what the eyes make of colors. The air we breathe is coarser than the colored light that enters our organism. Therefore, the coarser inhaled air has a much stronger, more transformative influence on everything that is present in the chest organism as a reproduction of cosmic processes. And just wait until we look at the blood circulation! All human foodstuffs play a role in the blood circulation. They are first absorbed as food, changed by the digestive and nutritional activity, and sent into the circulating blood.

When the blood reaches the head, it is in an extremely refined state, one that the ancient intuitive art of clairvoyance correctly called a phosphoric state. It is an extraordinarily refined state. Here the reproduction of cosmic activity has power over matter, so that matter cannot unfold its own forces. If any salt that enters the brain wants to unfold its own forces, it is drowned out, overgrown by the directions and activities that the reproduction of the cosmos exerts in the even thicker blood circulation that takes place in the chest organs. In the chest organs, what comes from within the person has a much greater influence. There, what replicates the cosmos is changed in a much stronger way. And that is why, when you look at the human chest organization with a spiritual eye, it presents itself as I can roughly characterize it in the following way (see drawing).

You can see how an image of the cosmos really does light up during inhalation. In the brain you can actually see an entire cosmos at play. This is only interrupted for the brain during sleep. Here, sleep does not interrupt anything, but the matter itself is constantly interrupting itself. Seen with spiritual eyes: the chest organization shows stars, and also shows star movements, but backwards in distortion and becoming quite indistinct towards the front. In a certain respect, man is also an after-image of the cosmos in terms of his chest organization, insofar as there are processes on our earth that depend entirely on the regular course of the year and the months. The plants come out and then pass away again. There is regularity. In the plant forms, those spiral paths that I have described unfold. There is a mineral tendency, which is admittedly spread over long periods of time, but which also occurs in a certain way in cosmic regularity. Certain changes take place in the air currents above the earth, which we can observe, for example, in the metamorphoses of the change in weather that occurs over the course of the year. But everything that is irregular in cloud formation, everything that is actually changing weather, falls into this. The whims of meteorology fall into this. The whims of meteorology fall into the cosmic.

Thus, in the human chest, with respect to what is connected to the back, there is a distorted cosmos, a cosmos that gives the impression as if we took our cosmos, which surrounds us, once at night , one giant tugging on one side, another giant tugging on the other, so that instead of a rounded cosmos we would get an elongated cylinder, somewhat thicker in the middle. Thus, in the mind's eye, the Cosmos appears to be receding, and towards the front it appears to be in confusion. Just as what is happening above the earth's surface is changeable, so the Cosmos appears to be in confusion towards the front. The whole thing is such that the Cosmos sometimes shines, sometimes disappears: it shines with inhalation and disappears with exhalation. Just as a person causes physical processes in himself through breathing, inhaling causes the distorted cosmos to shine, while exhaling causes it to darken.

The Indian yogi sought to relive this shining and darkening of the distorted cosmos through his yoga exercises. And from this he then tried to deduce the real form of the world by what he perceived in this way, by breathing in a lively manner until he had a perception of this inner distorted cosmos, and then by reflecting on it, he was able to explore it. Thus, as chest people, we also experience the cosmos a second time, but in a sense as if in a struggle against chaos. And we experience the cosmos a third time, and in such a way that it actually appears quite indistinct. This is because it is integrated into the human metabolic and limbic systems. It is hardly recognizable to what extent what is astral and, according to the I-being, integrated has emerged from the cosmos. That is why, during the lectures I have given here, I had to call what is incorporated “embryonic,” because it is actually an evolving cosmos. It is only when the human being moves his limbs or when the metabolism is active that what appears to be an evolving cosmos behaves very similarly to that in which it is immersed. When I lift a leg, the spiritual essence of this third human limb, as it were, strikes into the leg movement and into the inner processes that arise in connection with the leg movement.

Schematically, I have to draw this third thing (see drawing) in such a way that there is no longer any sign of a cosmos like this, as it is clearly present in the human head organization, as it is present in the distortion, weakened in relation to the spiritual light, clouded, both in the arm organization and in the leg organization and in the nutrition organization (red). In fact, everything is still in a state of cosmic nebula. We can study cosmic nebulae out in the far reaches of space. But with spiritual vision we can also study the world nebulae on a small, microcosmic scale when we look at the third part of the human being, the limb-metabolic system, and when we see how this nebulous structure (bluish) is embedded in the stars (yellow), as if they wanted to emerge as a halo of light, but then immediately fade away at the moment of emergence. We can see how this is completely overwhelmed by what emanates from the earth. The chemical affinities, the chemical forces of the earth's substances play a major role in this.

During a person's life on earth, it is much more important how the individual earth substances relate to each other in their chemical forces than how what a person has brought with them from the cosmos relates. Nevertheless, the human being is also related to spiritual worlds through this part of his organization. He is related to spiritual worlds through his chest organization in that a spiritual hierarchy plays into his chest organization just as it does into his head organization. In the case of the head it is the third hierarchy; in the case of the chest organization it is the second hierarchy: the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. These develop through the earthly human being a cosmic activity in which they make use of what is taking place in the human chest organization. And their activity is such that it is much more spiritual than the activity of the third hierarchy; this third hierarchy can therefore bear what arises in the material image. Therefore, in the human head formation, one really has a material image of the cosmos. Here in the chest organization, there is a distortion for the very reason that the material does not become a faithful replica of the cosmos, so that it can be destroyed again and again, and also dissolved. The cosmic formation is not completed. So there is the earthly, which plays a strong role, and the cosmic, which is not finished in man, remains cosmic, so that a cosmic activity permeates man, insofar as he breathes, insofar as he has a circulation, in which the entities of the second hierarchy work, weaving and floating. And into this, man inserts that living photograph of which I spoke yesterday and in previous lectures, which is an image of his moral and spiritual qualities.

Thus, because man has lungs and the processes of the lungs continue as the breathing processes, because he has a circulation and what is affected by the circulation vibrates into the world ether and even into the world astral, he is enmeshed in the activity of the second hierarchy. His being itself creates cosmic effects, and the beings of the second hierarchy are integrated into what is accomplished cosmically through him. But into this, the further his earthly life progresses, man pushes more and more, the living image of his moral-spiritual qualities, this elemental being, of which I have told you that it is produced by man during his earthly life. Incidentally, every night this elemental being moves out of the person a little, and one can see the activity carried out by the second hierarchy in it. When you are awake, it moves back into the person, and the waking activity further intersperses it with the moral and spiritual evaluations of the person's quality.

The first hierarchy is now connected with the activity that takes place in the metabolic-limb man. The connection is primarily with seraphim, cherubim and thrones. Here man is most physical, most devoted to physical forces. The cosmic plays into him only as a mist. But into this, which is present in him as a faint cosmic activity, which is permeated by a strong, intense material activity in chemistry, in physical action, the activity of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones flames and undulates and pushes into it. For these, through their spirituality, master the strongest material substance, and it will be the entities of this Hierarchy that will one day transform the earthly processes of chemistry, of the physical itself, from the earth form into the form of Jupiter, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”. But into this activity, which actually takes place in the cosmic, is inscribed during earthly life that which has been touched by the will part of the soul, as I have explained in the other lectures, and in which cosmic processes are involved in loose compositions with the actually earthly and the chemical and physical processes that overwhelm the cosmic.

In the limb metabolism system (see drawing), I would say that the earth is in its full possession of the human being. During the earthly course of life, the earthly predominates over the cosmic in this part. In the chest organization, the cosmic balances the earthly. In the head organization, the cosmic predominates. But the head organization can only be connected to the lowest kind of beings of the higher hierarchies. Where the earth predominates, the strongest spiritual beings work in man, because he is more torn from the earth of his being: seraphim, cherubim and thrones.

And when man passes through the 'gate of death', when the physical organism falls away, that which is only a nebulous spiritual being is taken up into the activity of the seraphim, cherubim, thrones and gradually woven into them. But that which was previously formed in the chest organism as the living image of the moral and spiritual man sinks down into this activity. That which was only, I might say, in the current of the middle hierarchy, now enters into the current of the first hierarchy. Thus it acquires greater intensity in the context of the Cosmos, so that man develops his karma as a living elemental being in its middle link. This is then taken over by the current of the first hierarchy. And while man lives through the time between death and a new birth, while he, as I have described to you, frees himself from his karmic image, ascends to the world where he can actually work together with higher beings on the spiritual archetype of the physical organism, while man experiences all this, which he then finds again in this image when he descends, something else is also taking place. While the human being enters the spirit world from the soul world and dwells there, that living image of his self-made destiny is in the meantime being led back by the beings of the highest hierarchy, the seraphim, cherubim and thrones, to the second hierarchy and finally handed over to the third hierarchy, the angels, archangels and archai. On descending again, the human being takes up this image, which he left with the first hierarchy, from the third hierarchy. When he now enters life again, it is incorporated into what takes place between the third hierarchy, the angeloi, archangeloi and archai, and his head organization. Everything that man has produced through his most earthly being and handed over to the cosmos after death, everything that man has developed within himself through having a substance organization dominated by the earth, everything that he must hand over after death to the seraphim , cherubim and thrones, and what he lets flow into the cosmos in this way, he actually receives again in the way in which the angels, archangels and archai work through his head organization in a new life on earth. Man hands over to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones that which he has prepared for himself as his destiny, and receives it again from the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. These carry it over into the activity that he will carry out in a new life on earth. In this way, what he handed over to the first hierarchy when he left his last life on earth is taken up into his new earthly destiny from the hand of the third hierarchy.

So you see that you can only understand the universe as a whole if you place the connection that our senses can survey and our minds can think into the context that arises from real vision. For there not only growing plants appear, not only water in cloud formations, in currents, there not only physical stars appear, there the whole cosmos appears in its living activity, spiritualized by a series of hierarchies, which also exercise a physical activity, an activity that permeates and surges through this physical activity. And events of a kind take place that, while man experiences existence between death and a new birth, his human destiny passes from the hand of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones to that of the angeloi, archangeloi and archai. In this way, each person receives what he or she is destined to experience in a new life. What a person has left to the highest hierarchy, he or she receives back from the hand of the third hierarchy, and together with the third hierarchy, he or she must bring it back into the world balance through balancing deeds during his or her earthly existence.

I have often pointed out that an ancient wisdom present in mankind can be characterized by the fact that through this ancient wisdom, people were aware that they were citizens of the universe, not merely of the earth. Take a mental look at what is present in the consciousness of thinking humanity today and what is present in the consciousness of those who, from certain scientific backgrounds, reflect on the human being's place in the world. Both are actually the same. For just as the broad masses of people in primeval times on earth thought and felt what was taught in the mysteries, in the mysteries that were the centers of the surrounding culture and civilization, so today people in wide circles absorb what is taught and researched in the profane mysteries of the present, at the universities and colleges. Just as the mysteries of ancient times were related to the beliefs of the general population, so too are the universities of today related to the general public. What the ancient teachers in the mysteries believed about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the zodiac, was naturally believed by the masses. What the professors of the universities and colleges say and do not say about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the moon, is believed by the masses. The fact that the entire wisdom about man is exhausted by pointing out that man has gradually developed physically from his animal ancestors is a one-sided, a very, very one-sided truth; it does not exhaust the real facts. But modern people relate to their initiates, to the university professors, as the ancients related to their initiates in the mysteries. There is actually no particular psychological difference between these two relationships. It is just that the ancients knew: All that is in man is connected not only with what develops on earth, but with what is seen by the eye into the space of the stars. That which takes place in man, even physically, is connected with the activity of the sun and the other planets belonging to the solar system.

If you read my “Occult Science in Outline”, you will see that through that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which this “Occult Science” wants to serve, this consciousness of people is to be restored, that the human being not only has a relationship to the earth, but also to extra-terrestrial worlds. It is pointed out that our Earth itself is only a temporary embodiment of that which was there before in its essence as the Moon, as the Sun, as Saturn, and it is pointed out that the human being continues to develop and that these further developmental forms of the human being will be connected with future developmental forms of the Earth planet, with Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. Thus that which belongs to man is raised up out of the merely earthly. Man's gaze is again directed from the earth to the Cosmos. This is one of the facts which humanity must again become aware of if it is not to degenerate on earth: that man belongs to the Cosmos, that man is connected in his inner being with extra-earthly spheres.

Why is this knowledge necessary? It must be known because self-knowledge is necessary; not the self-knowledge that consists of brooding over one's own dear self, but the knowledge of man as a universal being. This self-knowledge must spread; it must become general and ever more general. For without a grasp of the human being, there will be no support for him, especially no psychological support in the future of human development. But it cannot be a matter of merely brooding a little over the subordinate, chaotic human being; rather, it must be a matter of concretely surveying this inner human being in his structure, just as one does not characterize the outer nature merely by saying: nature, nature, nature! but by pointing out: there are plants, there are animals, and distinguishing the individual species and varieties within the individual plants. In the same way, within the soul of man, one must distinguish above all the individual metamorphoses of this soul life. Now let us characterize these individual metamorphoses of the soul life, I would say, the one side of it. First, there is the metamorphosis of our soul life that is most closely connected with our physical body, that is most dependent on our physical body. It is the soul faculty that we denote by the term memory or the ability to remember. Through memory, we are able to renew the experiences of our individual life. Through memory we are able to draw a thread from a certain moment, which lies two, three, four years or even longer after birth, to the phenomena of the respective present moment, and man would be inwardly ill if this thread were to be torn. I have already explained this several times. If we had to look back on a part of our lives in such a way that we would lose the memory of certain events, the context of our experiences would not be there. And that would mean that we would be ill in our sense of self. But on the other hand, a person will at least be able to know how strongly memory is connected to his physical constitution. One need only remember the fact, which I have often mentioned and which is actually widely known, that when we suffer from insomnia or when we are prevented from sleeping properly by external events, our memory suffers. This and much else that can occur in cases of illness proves how memory depends on the physical constitution.

What we call our intelligence is less dependent on this bodily constitution, and thus more independent of it. However, this intelligence is still very much dependent on the bodily constitution. After all, memory only relates to the individual. We have intelligence in common with other people, at least to a high degree. Of course, one person is more intelligent, the other less so; each usually considers himself the most intelligent; but in general one can say: the fact is that one person is more intelligent, the other less so. But a certain uniformity of human intelligence is emerging. While everyone has their own memory content that no one else can see into, and while this memory content is very individual, the content of intelligence is something more common to humanity. It is simply less bound to the physical constitution of the human being. The physical constitution of the human being is actually only like a mirror to what unfolds as intellectual processes. Anyone who claims that the processes in the human nervous system, in the brain, cause thoughts, is saying no more than someone standing in front of a mirror and saying to themselves, “Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz,” and saying, “The mirror has produced Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz.” Just as the mirror relates to the images of the three named individuals, and just as the three named individuals are also outside the mirror and actually have nothing to do with it other than being reflected by the mirror, so too does the intellect have to do with the brain only insofar as it is reflected for our consciousness by the brain; but the processes of the intellect itself are outside the brain. We would know nothing of the processes of the senses if we had no brain. The processes of intelligence would not be reflected in our brain. But these intelligent processes themselves are a being outside the brain, which is only mirrored by the brain.

And then we come to the third faculty of the human being, which is at least to a large extent most independent of our bodily constitution. But people believe it least of all, because they consider it to be most dependent on our bodily constitution. This is the activity of the senses. Take the eye. The eye itself as such has nothing to do with the processes that are the visual processes. The visual processes are much less bound to the tool of the eye than the intelligent processes are to the tool of the brain. What the eye has to do with seeing is something quite different. The processes that occur in our consciousness as the content of seeing have nothing to do with the eye. What happens in the eye merely causes us to be present with our consciousness, with our ego, during the visual processes. Please note this fundamental, but not easily grasped, difference.

Take, for example, a person who has lost both eyes due to some disease. He has not lost the visual process as such, but he has lost the perception of what the visual process is through his ego. His ego knows nothing about it. The ego knows nothing of what the visual process is. It is simply the ego that is excluded from the visual process. What happens can be compared to the following.

Suppose you have three telegraph stations, A, B, C; at each telegraph station you have a telegraph operator. When the man at A telegraphs to €, the man at € can read what is being telegraphed from A to C. There is no question of the Morse apparatus at A producing the content of the telegram. It is only the mediator. The Morse telegraph in C cannot read either, but it mediates. But if apparatus B is switched on in the A-C path, then the man operating B can sit down and listen or read along; he only needs to let the stripe run so he can read along. B is then switched on in the path of the current that conveys the contents of the telegraph. But the content that goes from A to C has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the Morse telegraph at B. They are only perceived because the device is switched on.

Of course, if the apparatus is not switched on, one cannot perceive the processes. It is the same with the human eye. What is going on in the eye has nothing to do with seeing in terms of inner truth. The eye is only switched on to the processes. And because the eye is switched on to the processes, the I can watch the processes of seeing. But the eye is not at all what actually conveys or brings about the content of the visual processes or does something with them. It is only the receiving apparatus for the I. One could say, without running the risk of being thought paradoxical, that the human brain, which today is equipped with a somewhat thick brain, finds the following paradoxical: Our sense organ of sight has nothing to do with seeing, but everything to do with the fact that our I knows about seeing. Sensory organs, as we have them today, that is, the higher sensory organs, are not there for seeing, but rather they are there so that the I can know about seeing. I would even like to write this sentence on the board: Higher sensory organs are not there to mediate sensory processes, but rather so that an I knows about sensory processes.

We have the three so-called higher soul activities: memory, intelligence, and sensory perception and activity. The I is involved in them; it is most strongly involved in the memory with its physical body, less strongly in the intelligence, and least strongly in the sensory activity.

What I have described to you now comes from the following. Memory was not always in man as it is today. It has developed. And what was at the basis of the development of memory was an essential activity of man during the last embodiment on earth, preceding our earth, the old moon time. At that time memory was a kind of unconscious, dream-like imagination. “Dream-like imagination was memory. The fact that our bodily organization on earth has become what it has become is the living dream-like imagination, of which the soul being of man was completely filled during the old moon time, has become what is now our memory.

During the old sun time, when we had no physical body at all as we have now, when we were still those beings that I have described in my “Occult Science”, our intelligence was dormant inspiration. This dormant inspiration then developed further and is now our intelligence. But during the old Saturn, our sensory activity was quite dull intuition. Again, you can find the more precise description in my “Occult Science”. And this dull intuition has developed into our present-day sensory activity.

Now one might ask: Why do people have such a hard time grasping such extraordinarily important truths? And if someone imparts them to them, why do they resist them so much? Yes, you see, there are reasons for this in the nature of things themselves. We have had a vague intuition during the old Saturn time. This has gradually developed further and further and has become our sensory activity. But actually today we can only prove that one sensory activity has developed relatively most perfectly from the disposition of the old Saturn sensory activity, and that is hearing. Hearing had its clearest disposition in the old Saturn sphere. Vision arose somewhat later — you can read about these things in my 'Occult Science' —, mainly during the time of the sun. But from this you can already see that, while the first foundation was laid on the old Saturn time in the form of a dull intuition, later on new sense faculties are constantly being added. On the Sun, new sensory abilities were added that are not yet as developed as those from Saturn. On the Moon, new sensory abilities were added again, and on Earth itself, again. On Earth, the sense of touch was added, which is actually the most imperfect of the senses. If we were to recognize the sense of touch purely, we would still describe it today as a dull intuition in the physical body, a low, dull intuition.

It is similar with the sense of smell. There is something extraordinarily peculiar about it. I would recommend to those of you who like to do such things: pick up a psychology or physiology, especially a psychology, a soul science, as they are written today; they all write about sensory activity. What is written there about the activity of the senses — for the unprejudiced person it applies only to the sense of touch. You may remember what I said in my “Theosophy” about the relationship of the higher senses to the sense of touch, which Goethe also noted. Our learned gentlemen want to describe the senses, but they only describe that part of the senses that has arisen directly on the earth, that has received its first impulse on the earth. This applies, for example, to seeing, as when you strike your fist on the eye, you could almost say literally. Because what is described in the psychology is not seeing, but what is described would arise if you punched yourself in the eye; hence the nice theory that has emerged of the so-called specific sensory energies, which in the case of the eye does not come from seeing, but from the fact that when you strike the eye, you see all kinds of sparks. These learned gentlemen describe something that works like a fist to the eye, quite literally. And they want to understand vision through this.

One understands the activity of the senses only when one regards it in connection with what is no longer there at all: Saturn development, sun development, moon development. One understands human intelligence only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the development of the sun, the moon. One understands memory only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the old development of the moon. And from the earth, one only understands the appropriation of sensory activity, of intelligence, of memory by the I, because the I has only been incorporated into the human being during the time on earth. And the organs that have been formed in the human being during the time on earth are not there at all to convey his higher soul abilities, but to convey that these higher soul abilities reveal themselves in an I. We have eyes for an ego, ears for an ego, a nose for an ego, not a nose for smelling, which would be most correct, because it has been formed during the time on earth; but it is also no longer quite correct, because it will change during the time on earth. But we don't have eyes to see and ears to hear; we have ears so that a self can know something of what is going on in the ear, like a Morse telegraph is switched on here so that someone, not the Morse telegraph itself, can know something of what is being negotiated between A and C. By still saying today that we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and by clothing everything in this kind of language, we are talking about something that has no reality at all. We talk constantly in illusions, we talk in untruths. We do not know what we actually have our whole physical organization for. We do not have it to mediate the higher soul activities, but we have it so that the I can learn something from these higher soul activities. Our whole physical being is an image of the I. And we are constituted as we are because we are an I. In our outer form we are meant to become aware of the outer image of the I. For our body, as we now carry it, we have only received through the earth. And it is unthinkable that what the earth has not given us should be derived from the events of the earth, that the cause of it should be sought in the events of the earth.

Just as we have been able to point out that for our memory activity the old moon development is the decisive factor, because the predispositions were formed in it, and we have been able to point out that for our intelligence the old sun development is the decisive factor, because the first predispositions were formed there, and so on to Saturn activity, we must also point out that these higher soul abilities have something to do today with the beings of the higher hierarchies, and in such a way that our memory activity has something to do with the hierarchy of the Angeloi, our intelligence with the Archangeloi, our sensory activity with the Archai.

And this brings me to an important chapter of spiritual knowledge. Suppose you reflect on memory, on the ability to remember, in human self-knowledge. You say: I turn my inner organ, my soul organ, to the ability to remember. But when you look at it with full consciousness, you have to look at it in such a way that you say to yourself: In this whole activity, in this process of remembering, the Angelos lives and weaves within. Now try to remember something that happened to you yesterday, any event. You have allowed an inner soul process to unfold. In what is unfolding, and in that a yesterday's thought arises in you, a yesterday's experience reveals itself anew to you in memory, an angel is at work in it. And when you reflect intelligently - however, it must be intelligently, that is, with inner activity, not a mere brooding, not what most people call intelligent thinking, which is only the boiling of memories, where people let the memories boil out of their bodies, thinking only begins when one actively grasps the thoughts inwardly - when one develops an inner activity, then an archangel is present. And if you listen and look around, you must say: in my ears, in my eyes, there are the thrones of the archai, the spirits of time. If you ask yourself: where are the spirits of time, the archai, which rule the successive world ages of the earth? Then you should not look for them in completely unknown areas, you should look for them in the sensory organs of people. That is where they are. A decadent time, in terms of the abilities of the soul, sought the gods up there above the blue, which does not actually exist. If man asks: Where then are the spirits of time? — they sit in his eyes, in his ears, there they have their thrones.

This is illuminated from another side, which I once made clear to you by pointing out that in man himself are the localities from which the events of nature are controlled. If you have the formulas recited in certain secret societies and interpret them correctly, you will find that these formulas, handed down from very ancient times, point to truths such as the ones I have now developed before you; that man is the temple for the gods that stand above him, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. He is so in the most literal sense. For if one asks: Where do the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai dwell? - I must say: In the organs of human memory, human intelligence and human sensory activity. Man is, if you speak in a real language, you have to say that, really spirit-filled, that is, filled with spirits. The Church did not want people to realize that, so at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869 she forbade knowing or believing anything about the spiritual; she established the dogma that man consists only of body and soul. This human being is a very, very complicated creature, and if, let us say, for example, one were to stand on a distant star and observe the processes of the earth from a different point of view, the mineral kingdom would immediately disappear; it would only appear as a luminous shine. Little of the plant kingdom would be perceived, and not much of the animal kingdom either. From the outside, the individual human beings would not be perceived, but the thrones in the universe would be there and occupied by the angels, archangels and archai. And a being with the necessary ability to see from a distant star would say: The Earth is a body in space that is the dwelling place of archai, archangels and angels. In the language of the gods, this would mean that the earth is the dwelling place of the spirits of time, archangels and angels. In the everyday language of people, this means: Man has sense organs, tools of intelligence and a memory constitution. But humanity is called upon to really get to know man, to seek out the real relationship of this man to the spiritual world.

The pendulum swing of civilization has been different up to now. People have studied the chemical substances that make up food in order to find out what a person absorbs through food. The relationships between the body and the matter of food and so on have been investigated. It has been said: What is out there in the various plants or in the various animals enters the human being; sometimes it is active outside in the cabbage, sometimes in the ox, sometimes it is active inside the human being and constitutes him. — So you see an ox outside, you look at it. Then you see a human being and know that he has eaten the beefsteak that was made from this ox, and you follow the part that the beefsteak that he has eaten, which was still active in the ox outside a number of days ago, plays in the inner workings of the human being; that is the relationship between the physical and the natural world. There one follows how the beefsteak, which was sitting in the ox's loins, is later inwardly active in man.

This has now been sufficiently pursued, and from it a world view has been brewed that has caused the pendulum of the human world view to swing to one side. Now the pendulum must swing to the other side. Now we must know that the soul of man is also related to the spiritual world, to spiritual substances. And what spiritual substances are, archangels, archai, angels, they are within man, as the ox is within man when he eats his beefsteak, in his body. Today's science admits the one, the other it still laughs. But for the further development of humanity, it is necessary that man knows just as much about his relationship to the angel as he knows today about his relationship to the ox or to cabbage – I mean the physical cabbage!

We are at this turning point in time, that there is indeed a need for the development of humanity to turn to what plays out of the spirit into the soul, after we have long enough directed our attention one-sidedly to what plays out of the physical world into the bodily side of man. For the human being who begins to develop today, it is no longer enough to convey certain religious truths to him in a dogmatic and abstract way, as in the confessions of the past. Today's human being has occupied himself with reflecting on the relationship between his earthly body and the spiritual. This earthly body initially only has a relationship to the ego. We will get to know other relationships tomorrow. But that which appears in our earthly body, the constitution for the ability to remember, is related to the hierarchy of the angels. That which is embedded in this earthly body as the constitution for intelligence has relationships to the world of the archangeloi. That which manifests itself in our higher senses, namely that which arises in our higher art, has a relationship to the world of the archai, the spirits of the age. We human beings must become capable of more than just generalizing about the existence of a spiritual world; we must become capable of sensing the concrete relationships between human beings and this spiritual world. We must become capable of sensing how that which echoes within us as hearing is a series of facts that permeate our world and in which the archai are active. We must become capable of grasping that while we are thinking, we dwell in a world that is permeated and permeates the archangeloi; while we are remembering, we dwell in a world that permeates and is permeated by the angeloi; and when we become aware of our self, for which we always most fully use our body, it is a revelation of our self. Only then are we in the world in which man lives and moves. In the Greek mysteries, they still said: If you approach the Guardian of the Threshold, you learn to recognize what is in man in a higher way. This side of the threshold, you only get to know thoughts that remind you of past experiences. On the other side of the threshold, you are surrounded by the beings of the world of the angels. On this side of the threshold one learns to recognize the intelligent being; on the other side of the threshold one perceives how the archangeloi surround one. On this side of the threshold one perceives the external sensory world; on the other side of the threshold one knows how, through our eyes and ears, the spirits of the times enter and leave.

It is necessary to ensure that this awareness is awakened in man, whether he is simply related to the spiritual world by his constitution. But this must be awakened in a concrete way for the individual organs. Man must learn to feel himself in a spiritual world, whereas the world view that has reached its climax today only makes him feel that he lives in a physical world. This feeling that one lives in a physical world would have to dominate man completely if the event of Golgotha had not occurred. That man can develop back to an awareness of his spiritual relationship is due to the mystery of Golgotha. But one must seek out of one's own free inner drive what one owes to the mystery of Golgotha. Christianity presupposes freedom.

What we can know about the relationship between human beings and the spiritual world can actually have a practical effect on us. And the educational principles we want to apply at the Stuttgart Waldorf School are based on the awareness that human beings are more than just a synthesis of external natural processes. Education and teaching should be such that we are aware that within us is not only the baby that is growing physically and that, when it is weaned, gradually absorbs cabbage and oxen, but that is the soul being, in which, little by little, the beings of the higher spiritual world have a share. And by teaching in an educational way, we guide the activity of the beings of the higher hierarchies into the developing child. Man should not just learn to kneel at the altar and pray for his selfishness; man should learn to make a service out of everything he does in the world. Today, it is an urgent task to convey to people that everything they do in the world must be a service to God. But those who do not want to let people partake in these higher tasks of humanity oppose this.

Yesterday, while I was in St. Gallen trying to develop the activity and fruitfulness that can flow from spiritual knowledge in relation to the field of education, I was told that we have now reached the point where the clerical newspapers in St. Gallen have not only not included a text note for this lecture, but have not even accepted an advertisement for it, thus refusing to include an advertisement for it. This opposition is becoming more and more well organized. They understand organization on their side. I only want to make you aware of the fact that resistance to the truth becoming established in the world will become more and more pronounced. I will gradually inform you of these things. I do not want you to remain unaware of this small fact either, so that you may feel that little by little it will not be a task for sleeping souls to stand up for the Christ-Truth, but that it will increasingly become a task for waking souls. Organizations are also needed to be able to deal with the organization on the other side. We will talk about this further tomorrow.

I shall very briefly draw attention once more to what I presented to you here yesterday, because today I shall have further things to add that relate to the human being. What I had to say to you yesterday was as follows: We first turned our attention to the three faculties of the human soul that are more devoted to knowledge. We pointed out that there are essentially three cognitive faculties in the human soul: first, what is the faculty of memory, then what is intelligence, and finally what is sensory activity. Now I drew your attention to the fact that these three soul faculties can only be understood by looking at their development. In order to understand memory, which is relatively one of the more recent abilities of the human being, we must turn our gaze back to times when the Earth was not yet what it is today, when the Earth was undergoing its development as the Moon, which preceded the Earth. So that the first rudiments of what has now become our faculty of memory are to be sought in the ancient lunar period and there appeared, not as memory, but as the dream-like imagination that pervades the human being, which I have often described in other contexts. What was dream-like imagination in the ancient moon period in the beings from which man developed has become the faculty of memory in the earth period. This memory, as I have already mentioned, is more closely interwoven with the physical body than are the other cognitive faculties of the soul. Intelligence is less closely interwoven with the physical body. It is more detached from it, as I described yesterday. But to discover its first rudiments, one must go further back than the old moon time; one must go back to the old sun time and then find the first rudiment of what is present in us today as intelligence in dormant inspiration. As for that which is most divorced from our physical nature, as I explained yesterday, one must go back furthest, although one is least inclined to believe this from the materialistic point of view of our time: for sensory activity, one must go back to the old Saturn time. And one finds as the first origin of this sensory activity, both beings, from which man was later formed, a dull intuition.

Furthermore, we have seen that by carrying these three soul abilities within us, we are at the same time the hosts for beings of higher hierarchies in the organization that underlies these soul abilities. So that through the organization of our sensory activity, we are the hosts of the archai, the spirits of time. They live in our humanity. Through that which we have in us as intelligence, insofar as this intelligence is bound to the mirroring apparatus in us, which reflects back to us our concepts, our ideas, but which come from the spiritual world, and thus brings them to our consciousness, we are the hosts of the archangeloi. And through that which works in our organization and mediates our memory, we are the hosts of the angeloi. Thus we are related to the past through our cognitive abilities, and we are related to the beings of higher hierarchies through our cognitive abilities.

According to an old custom, these three abilities of man are called the upper abilities. And if I am to sketch the human being schematically for you, if I am to present the image of the human being to you as in a diagram, then I would have to draw the following as this diagram of the human being. I would have to start by drawing the faculty of sensory activity. I will try to do it like this, by making a white background (see drawing, hatched in white). I would first have to draw the sensory activity schematically in the human organization, and to get the right proportions, I would have to draw it like this (blue). The main sensory activity is, of course, developed in the head. Although the whole person is imbued with sensory activity, I would first like to draw the main sensory organization here (blue).

If I wanted to draw in the intelligence, I would have to draw it in the following way to make it visible: sensory activity more outward (blue); the intelligence (green) has its mirroring apparatus more in the brain. Deeper down, what underlies memory is already very much connected to the physical organization. In reality, memory (red) is connected to the lowest nervous organisms and to the rest of the organism. I could then create transitions between sensory activity and intelligence by drawing this (indigo) here as a transition. You know that we also have concepts and ideas that are, so to speak, of a descriptive nature. While I have to draw the sensory activity as such in blue, I would have to draw an indigo here as a transition. For the more abstract concepts I would have to draw green, and for that which is in us as memory-based concepts, I would have to draw yellow as a transition from green to red through orange. In this way, I would have to draw the human being in its organization in relation to the ability to perceive, going from the outside in. In the succession of these colors, if you imagine the organization of eyes and ears with blue nuances and that the activity of the senses passes over into the intelligence, the indigo towards the green, lightening through the yellow to the red towards the memory, you get a kind of scheme that, however, very strongly reflects the reality of what the human soul's cognitive abilities or cognitive abilities are.

Now, in human nature, everything plays together in a mess. That is what makes it so difficult for the materialistically thinking person, that in human nature everything plays together in a mess. You can't neatly separate one thing from another in space. In human nature, too, it is not so clearly defined, but if one wants to draw schematically, one can still get a relatively clear picture of all sorts of things. Thus, one can indeed see that the ability to remember is related to the ability to think through their inner properties in the same way that the color red relates to the color green; and just as green relates to blue, so does intelligence relate to the activity of the senses. Now, however, we have other abilities in the human soul, abilities that are more or less bound to physical corporeality in the strictest sense in us as earth people. Feeling belongs to these first. While memory, intelligence and sensory activity are bound to the awakening consciousness in stages, feeling is already something very 'dreamlike' in the human being. I have often explained this. While memory is something that developed in the distant past on the old moon, intelligence on the sun, sensory activity on Saturn, feeling, as we have it today, belongs to the human being on earth. It is essentially something that is bound to the human earthly organization. What we as terrestrial human beings received as an organization actually made us sentient beings in the first place. But just as memory is something that has gone beyond its first disposition and has come to a higher level of development on Earth, and if one has enough of a supersensible vision to recognize that memory is, so to speak, an old human ability, one recognizes that feeling is only present in its disposition. If we look at what the human being calls feeling today with the necessary understanding, we can see that in the future it will develop into something quite, quite different. Just as if, as an observer during the old moon time, we had looked at dreaming imagination and said to ourselves: This will later become the memory of man. In the same way, when we look at feeling today, we must say, understandingly: When the earth will no longer be, but something else will have come out of it, when the earth will have become the future Jupiter, then feeling will have become what it can become. Today, feeling in man is still only embryonic, something that exists as a germ. What it can become will only arise out of feeling. Thus, in feeling, we carry within us something that relates to what it becomes on Jupiter, just as a child in the womb relates to the human being born into the world. Our feeling is embryonic, and it will only later, during the Jupiter period, become that which will flourish as a complete, fully conscious imagination.

Another soul faculty that is tied to our organization is desire. This desire is still much more embryonic than feeling. Everything in our world of desire will only become what it is now germinating towards during the future Venusian age. Today our desires are very closely bound up with our physical organization. They will become detached. Just as our intelligence was bound during the old sun time to the physical organization of the sun, as I have described it in my “Occult Science in Outline”, so is the world of desires of man today bound to the physical organization. It will appear detached from the physical organization during the future Venus period, and it will then appear as fully conscious inspiration.

Among our soul abilities, the will is most embryonic. In the future, the will is called upon to become something very powerful, something cosmic, through which the human being will belong to the whole cosmos in the future, will be an individual being and yet will live out his individual impulses as a fact of the world. But this will only be during the volcanic age, when the will will be fully conscious intuition.

Upper abilities

Lower abilities: Social World

Thus, through our feelings, desires and will, we once again belong to the future. These abilities lie within us in that they prepare the human being for his future being. But here too we stand in a relationship with the world in which these abilities of the human being have their relationships to the environment. Just as, in relation to the spiritual environment, memory, intelligence and sensory activity are related to the angels, archangels and archai, so feeling, desire and will are related to the physical environment, but in such a way that our feeling is related to the world that surrounds us that during our time on earth it gradually consumes the mineral world. All that is the mineral world around us will disappear at the end of the earth's time, and the forces that will consume the mineral world from the human being are the forces of feeling. So we must assume a special relationship between feeling and the mineral kingdom (see diagram). We must assume a special relationship between desire and the plant kingdom. Just as there will be no mineral kingdom on Jupiter, which, as the future planet, will be the next embodiment of our Earth, because during its time on Earth feeling will have consumed the mineral kingdom, so during the Venus period there will no longer be a plant kingdom because human desire during the Jupiter period will have consumed this plant kingdom, and human will during the Venus period will have consumed the animal kingdom. And when the time of Vulcan comes, the future incarnation of Vulcan on our Earth will no longer contain the three kingdoms, but only that part of the present kingdoms that will have become of the human kingdom.

In response to what I have just told you, people may come from the present and say: I am not very interested in what I once was with my memory, with my intelligence and with my sense of being on the good old Saturn and the Sun and the Moon; I am pleased with my existence as an earth dweller, what do I care about what the things that I no longer know anything about went through on earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth? I am not interested in that! And I am certainly not interested in what will become of my feelings, which interest me very much now, on Jupiter or even on distant Venus, what will become of my desires there. These desires drive me now, but I am not yet interested in Lady Venus, because she is not present, and I am only interested in present ladies. And so, right, only with the will in such a distant, distant future!

Certainly, many people in the present feel this way, and culture is very, very much in favor of oversleeping everything that wants to assert this knowledge from the present, that they would not want to wake up to these insights. But human development will not be guided into the future without having such insights. For it is profoundly true that in the human organism, in the physical, in the soul, in the spiritual organism, everything works in confusion; but one must also be able to distinguish the things. Just as the higher abilities could be schematically recorded, from sensory activity to memory, so I can now draw in the lower abilities that are specifically formed on earth (see drawing on page 213). I must then do this in the following way: a somewhat deeper red (unfortunately I do not have the differences here) would correspond to our feeling. But this feeling extends into the intelligence, into the sensory activities everywhere, and also through the memory. I would then have to draw an actual red-violet when I draw the activity of desire. And if I wanted to draw the will as it is today, I would have to draw a blue-green. So that man is a dual being, an upper man (circle at the top), who is essentially a knower, and a lower man (circle at the bottom), who is essentially a desirer, feeling and willing regarded as the two poles of desire.

Now, in the earthly human being, what is the lower human being actually works its way into the upper human being, both the wanting and the desiring and the feeling work into the upper human being (arrow pointing up T). In other words, our sensory activity is such that we have in it everything that has gradually emerged from the dull intuition of ancient Saturn. But if we were to carry within us, through our eyes and ears, only that which comes from the dull intuition of ancient Saturn, we would be very dry beings. We would perceive the outer world as if through senses that worked automatically. We would think soberly and dryly about this outer world, and we would remember what we have experienced without warmth. That we experience what we have experienced as our own affair, that we do not merely look into our experiences with indifference and remember them, looking at our personal life like the individual stones of a kaleidoscope, is what makes our remembered thoughts, our intelligent being, our sensory perceptions, our feelings, desires and wills arise. When we look at things externally, we like them. We like them through our desire, through our feeling or through our will. When we think, we do not just think soberly and dryly, but we bring a certain enthusiasm into our ideas. We would not bring this into it if we only had what the sun has given us as intellectual power; we have this in our thinking because the earth has endowed us with will, desire and feeling, even if these are now embryonic. The same applies to the ability to remember. Those abilities that are called the lower abilities, because they are more closely connected with the body, always play a part in our higher soul abilities. Let us hold on to that for the time being. The lower soul faculties of will, desire and feeling shine through and glow in our higher soul faculties, which would place us in the world like dried-out intestines if they were only what they have become through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we become warm, feeling human beings, even when we think. There are, however, a great many people today who strive for objectivity by throwing feeling and desire out of their intelligence; but this is either merely an illusion, if people believe that they can throw out the lower soul faculties from the activity of the senses, the intelligence and memory, or if they really throw them out – to a certain extent one can only do that – but then one becomes one's own lower self! It is only possible to a certain extent to expel the lower soul faculties from the higher ones. One can expel them, for example, by stepping onto the lectern and expounding to the foxes and other, later students all kinds of sciences. One can expel the lower, actually earthly soul faculties from the intellect. But one cannot expel them completely. If, after spending the day in philosophy, you do not enjoy your midday meal, then your intelligence is permeated by real desires and feelings, and you grumble about what your housewife has prepared, and in particular, your sense activity of taste, smell and so on. Thus, sometimes, the dry philistine exists in man, who has thrown out the lower soul faculties from his upper soul faculties, and the person who is quite capable of enthusiasm when something is over-peppered or over-salted or even burnt or otherwise not properly cooked in some way!

Our lower soul abilities must interact with our higher soul abilities. But there is actually a wave of development in humanity, precisely since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, since the middle of the 15th century, to make the activity of the senses, the intelligence, purer and ever purer, and later this will also come in relation to memory. This has not yet been affected. The aim is to liberate these faculties, indeed, the aim is that not only the characteristics I have just mentioned in the dry philistine - which only arises because this dry philistine is in fact more affected by what human nature in general does after all. But the physical part of the human being will dry up altogether, as I have already explained in an earlier observation, and will be less and less able to warm and illuminate the higher soul faculties. They will then actually become that dried-up part if they are not filled by what can come from spiritual revelation.

Indeed, we have to fertilize sensory activity, intelligence and memory in the following stages of the earth's development with what is revealed from the spiritual world, because the actual earthly gift that comes for these higher abilities as volition, desire and feeling gradually dries up. We do not merely want to disparage the stuffy philistine, as we have just done, but at the same time we want to admit that he is a pioneer of the drying up of our higher soul abilities in the future, that he already feels in his body what will affect all of humanity; only today he still rarely feels the necessity that this must be replaced by spiritual revelation. It must be replaced by spiritual revelation. Man, accustomed as he has been to experiencing the upward streaming (arrow up) of volition, desire and feeling in memory, intelligence and sense activity, must experience the revelations of the spiritual world through spiritual knowledge ( down arrow, top right), so that his sensory activity, his intelligence, his memory can be filled with that with which they are no longer filled, as our physical body withers more and more in the decadence of the earth.

Let us first of all realize that we are heading for a time when everything that man perceives through sense experience, through intelligence, through memory, must receive spiritual revelation within him so that human culture can progress. Let us now turn to the lower human faculties, which today are only present in embryonic form. These lower human faculties are those that primarily bring us into relationship with our environment. Even inwardly, they are related to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms that make up our environment. By feeling, we feel about the things in our environment; by desiring, we desire the things in our environment; by willing, we directly intervene in the active nature of our environment. We are completely immersed in our environment. And what, we ask, comes of what becomes of the feelings, desires and will of the people who live together on earth?

If you take a spiritual look at everything that is called the social world, you will see that it is entirely the result of the will, desires and feelings of the people living together. And what we experience as human beings through our feelings, what people desire from each other and from nature, and what is done out of will, that is actually the outer world. By desiring, we belong to the social order much more than we realize. We are made into desiring beings by our position in the social world, and our will intervenes everywhere in the social world in such a way that what happens in the social world happens through our will. Therefore, in what we call the social order of life, what people feel, desire and will lives an independent life. Today's Social Democratic Party says: what lives outside is the result of an economy, of economic forces, and how they develop. No, what lives outside is the objectification of the feelings, desires and will of people living together in society. That which first arises in man as feeling creates conditions that then determine the social life of man; likewise desire and even more so will. But everything in human nature is connected. The colors are drawn down there, which correspond to feeling, desire and will. The intelligent properties, the sensory activity, the actual intelligence, the memory work downwards and work out into the social world through our will (arrow down, going to the right).

If, in fact, man increasingly dries up with regard to his physical organization in the direction of the future, then little would be able to flow from the bodily organization into the social order, and sensory experience, intelligence and the individual human memory thoughts would flow into the social world without first passing through feeling, desire and will. In other words: If it were to develop in accordance with the mere organization of the earth, so that our bodily organization dries up and only sensory activity, intelligence, memory remain for us, and these are not fertilized by the spirit either, then a dry intelligence, a merely external sensory perception and merely selfish memories of the individual human beings would want to dominate social life. This would give rise, in ever further development, to what is now beginning in Russia. In Russia, a social order is now beginning to take shape in Leninism and Trotskyism that stems solely from sensory experience, intelligence and the few memories of an egotistical nature of the individual human beings. One does not yet realize that this order in Eastern Europe strives to be a purely rationalistic order, an order that is to be formed only from the cognitive abilities of man on earth, as he has emerged from the Saturn, Sun and Moon man, that everything that can be taken from the spiritual world is to be consciously excluded.

The feeling that teaches one to what degree of rigidity human civilization is coming, so that man will only be a walking machine, that feeling that teaches one what would become of the world if dictators like Lenin and Trotsky were left to take care of it, that feeling must come from such an understanding of the nature of human nature as we have presented to our souls during these two days. From such a realization one sees that it is simply a necessity of human nature that the upper faculties of the soul should be enlightened and warmed by spiritual revelation, lest what intelligence and sense activity and memory would become if they did not fertilize themselves with the spiritual world should flow out into social life. Man must learn to feel what holds him together with all earthly existence, and he must learn to feel, out of spiritual knowledge, what is preparing in the East and what threatens to consume all of Asia in an ever faster and faster development. Man must learn to feel this as the great and terrible disease of present-day civilization, which must be cured. And it can only be cured if it can be diagnosed in the right way.

Practising spiritual science today means seeking out the healing process of the diseased civilization. This should be felt by a sufficiently large number of people, and it should be felt very deeply and thoroughly. Without spiritual science one will not feel this. And now all the leading events are taking place without any sense of what one is actually doing. The Versailles Treaty was nothing other than the instilling of a poison of civilization, a toxic substance that must make humanity even sicker than it was before. For everything that is created without knowledge of the future conditions of life on earth is a disease-causing substance for developing humanity.

We are accustomed to accepting such things as true, spoken from the heart, from the intuitive sense. Here they are not said from such a source. Here they are derived from the knowledge of the nature of human nature. And here it can be shown that the spiritual life of human beings, of which memory, intelligence and sensory activity are the bearers, cannot continue to exist without being fertilized from the spiritual world. This is not admitted today. But why is it not admitted? It is not admitted for a historical reason. Since the middle of the 15th century, more and more of those entities have emerged that are today perceived as the actual bearers of civilization, the modern states. But these modern states can only be in the future that which - I have explained this in another context here - relates to the life of the human being between birth and death. They must not interfere in anything that relates to the spiritual world between people. In the future, people must be able to let the spiritual world into their memory, their intelligence and their sensory activity as individuals. They can only do this as individuals, only as individuals. In the future, individuals must become mediators between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and physical worlds. And people today rightly feel this, although they have almost the wrong feelings in the way they feel it, but they still feel it as something improper when currents that should only flow into individual human beings flow into so-called public state affairs. When the Russian Czar and the Russian Czarina availed themselves of the inner experiences of a Rasputin for their governmental acts, people were right to fear it, because revelations from the spiritual world may only play into the spiritual life, they may not play into the life of the state. Only that which has become our healthy reason through spiritual revelations may play a part in it. Now, Rasputin did not go as far as healthy reason, even if he did go as far as revelation.

On the other hand, in social life outside of it, only that which is connected with the lower abilities of human beings, with the abilities that develop on earth, with desires, feelings, and will, can find expression. These develop in dealings from person to person; and they develop in dealings not with abstract humanity as a whole, but only with circles that are connected by interests, by their particularly constituted desires, by their particularly constituted feelings or by the will that they must develop.

This, however, justifies the necessity for a threefold structure of public affairs. In the future, the state, which must not allow direct spiritual life to enter into its affairs at all, will not be allowed to extend to spiritual life. Spiritual life will have to have its own independent administration because it cannot progress if it does not receive spiritual revelations. A healthy State must renounce spiritual revelations. If it interferes in spiritual matters, it is only to make things as difficult as possible. The spiritual life must be separated and made independent. But the economic life cannot be connected with the life of the state either, because this economic life must be closely rooted in the communities of interests of the individual people bound together in circles of interest, in the feeling, desire and will as it develops in the associations, in the narrower communities.

In short, just as the physicist understands the complex phenomena of physical nature from the simple experiences he makes, so today one must understand from human nature with its higher abilities: memory, intelligence and sensory perceptions, its lower abilities: will, desire and feeling - that which has to happen in the development of humanity. And anyone who today, with social willpower drawn from a strong but empty self-confidence and with the tone that is called the chest tone of conviction in many people today, presents himself and develops social ideas is like someone who stands in front of a telegraph installation, has no idea about electricity and magnetism, these simple facts, and now, out of his lack of knowledge, explains a telegraph installation. The people who talk about sociology today usually talk from a spirit like that — no matter how learned it may sound to many people — like someone who has never heard of the nature of electricity and looks at a Morse code system in a telegraph station and says: “There are just tiny little riders in there, you can't see them, they ride to the other station, you just can't see any of that.” And he explains it all very neatly. This is how Marxism explains social facts, this is how our university sociologists explain social facts. Reality only emerges when one recognizes human nature. But human nature can only be recognized from within the whole cosmic order. Because memory is connected with the extraterrestrial, intelligence is connected with the extraterrestrial, sensory activity is connected with the extraterrestrial. Feeling is something that will only become what it is supposed to be after the earth no longer exists; desire and will in an even more distant future. Just as one must know the simple fact of the thermodynamics of the organism in order to be a physicist, the simple fact of acoustics, so too, in order to have a say today, and as many people as possible must have a say with regard to social facts, one must delve into the simple, elementary connections between the human being and the world, because that which is socially grounded is carried by the human being into the social order. But here, in his own being, man brings in the whole universe. That is why it is also bad for those chatterboxes who, from all sorts of old traditions, talk about man being a microcosm, a small world compared to the macrocosm, and who stick to these abstractions. Only he who knows that there were once ancestors of man as moon people who had fantastic imaginations has a real right to speak of macrocosm and microcosm. The moon has passed away, the earth has come into being. Human memory has arisen out of that which is no longer there, but which once was there. This has no earthly origin. Only the human ego and its expression, the present physical human body with its form, have an earthly origin. One must grasp this in concrete terms, otherwise one has no right to call it anything but a microcosm.

My dear friends, the decadent civilization can only be saved if it is finally realized that man must be spoken of as a cosmic being from the institutions in which philosophy is taught today as a mere sum of expressed abstractions. What has become of humanity through abstraction, through mere abstraction, appears only in symptoms in such philosophies as those of the American William James, the Englishman Spencer, the Frenchman Bergson or the German, Königsberg Kant. These abstractions conceal from humanity what it is. But the living knowledge of the spiritual, which is to be striven for through spiritual science, can bring man to self-knowledge.

More on this tomorrow.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried to explain how necessary it is for the future development of humanity that people come to a real self-knowledge, that is, to a knowledge of humanity. But how it is impossible to come to a knowledge of humanity without finding the connection of the human being with the extra-terrestrial worlds. Of all that the human being carries with him in his essential being through his journey through life, the physical organization is only the smallest part. But only this physical organization, as it is found in the human being today, is fundamentally an earthly product. That which otherwise belongs to the human being's essential being is not an earthly product in the sense that I have discussed it from a certain point of view in these two lectures.

But the present physical human organization already indicates that man as such is a being that points beyond the immediate present. Although the physical organization certainly points to the earthly, in the earthly, man's physical organization points us beyond the immediate world-historical moment into the past and into the future. Among the abilities of man, we have had to emphasize cognitive abilities: sensory activity, intelligence, memory, and we have had to emphasize feeling, desire and will: abilities that are more of a nature of desire.

Now, when we ask ourselves: What must man have in his physical organization in order to develop cognitive abilities? — we must turn our attention to the human head organization and everything connected with it. It is only in the way I explained it yesterday and the day before — but in that way — that the main organization is necessary to develop cognitive abilities for the ego, for earthly human consciousness. It is wrong to believe that the eye is the absolute creator of the visual sensation; but it is right to know that the eye is the mediator of the visual sensation for the consciousness of the I. And the same applies to the other senses, especially the higher ones.

In this way, and with many variations, the human bodily organization points to the earthly; but at the same time it points beyond the present moment, so that we can say: The human being, as we see him before us in his head organization, points to the previous earth life. Just as our intelligence points to the distant, very distant past solar life, so our present physical head organization, with the earthly nature of the cognitive abilities, that is, for the organization of the cognitive abilities towards the I-consciousness, points back to our earlier earth course. I have already pointed out what the human head actually is. You can say the following schematically: The human being consists of the head and the rest of the organization. — Let us say (see drawing), this is the present course of life (center), this is the previous course of life (left), this is the following course of life (right). So we can say: the head of our present life originated through the metamorphosis of our remaining bodily organization in the previous life, and we have lost our head from the previous life. — Of course, I do not mean the physical organization — that is obvious — but the forces, the formative forces that the physical organization really has. What we now carry in us, as the rest of the human organization, the trunk with limbs, in addition to the main organization, the carrier of the cognitive abilities for the I, will become the main organization of our future life on earth.

You already carry within you the powers that will be concentrated in the head in your later life on earth. What you accomplish today with your arms, what you accomplish with your legs, will become part of the inner organization of the head in your next life on earth. And the powers that emanate from your head in your next life on earth will become your karma, your destiny for that life. But that which will be your fate in your next life on earth will pass indirectly through the rest of your organization, through which you will enter into human life today, into your future life as a head.

If today, let us say, you behave lovingly towards another person through an earthly walk, then that is something that your extra-head organism has carried out. That will be a head power that your destiny brings about in your next earthly life. So then, our head with its abilities always points to the earlier course of earthly life, namely to the organization of the limbs. Man is subject to this great metamorphosis. His head is a metamorphosed organism from a previous incarnation, and his present trunk and especially limb organization underlies the organization of the head in the next life on earth.

This is something that must, in a sense, have practical significance in the coexistence of people. For when a person knows that he is integrated into the development of humanity, only then does he feel that he is truly standing in this earthly life, and he will understand many things that are otherwise incomprehensible. We now live, as I have often explained, in the fifth post-Atlantic period. It began in the middle of the 15th century, that is, in the middle of the 15th century, new conditions of existence were given for European civilization with its American extension, insofar as it arose later. But the consequences of these new conditions of existence have not yet occurred. The people of the civilized countries often live in habits, even in thought-habits, which correspond more to the earlier, the fourth post-Atlantic period. We have educated our intelligentsia not in the things that belong to the present, but we have had them learn Latin and Greek and so on. A Greek would have had different views in this regard. He would have looked askance at the time when Greek culture was at its zenith if his son had been taught Egyptian or Persian or something similar instead of Greek. But the time when this was still permissible, when we could still cling to the remnants of the Greco-Latin period, is past. For people born after the mid-15th century are all rebirths, in essence, of those physical human beings who lived in the Greco-Latin period. What did they bring with them, these people? The heads of the bodies they had in the Greco-Latin period. So if someone was born, let us say in the 16th or 17th century, he came into the world with a head, that is, with cognitive abilities, insofar as the head is the mediator of cognitive abilities for the sense of self, which arose from his body from the Greek-Latin period. Therefore, he still came into the world with tendencies that originated in this Greek-Latin period. But this is now partly exhausted or is in the process of being exhausted. Very soon not many people will be born with minds from that time, but more and more people will be born who had their previous embodiment in the fifth post-Atlantic period, not all of them, but many, especially those who set the tone, or at least those who, towards the end of the fourth post-Atlantic period, lived with their bodies doing completely different things than those in the prime of the fourth post-Atlantic period.

This must be taken into account if we want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity: you have your head from your previous incarnation and you have your body so that you can prepare a later head for the following incarnation. And the time must come when the lack of awareness of this connection with previous and subsequent incarnations is just as much a sign of stupidity in people as it would be stupidity if one did not know how old one was, if one believed that he was only born last week, although he is already an adult, or if he believed or was made to believe, when he is a ten-year-old boy, that he would always remain a ten-year-old boy, that he would not even become an old man. Today man only lives selfishly in his one life on earth. At the most, he believes that there are a number of earth lives, but it becomes faith, it does not become practical wisdom of life, as this feeling of being in between the incarnations must be; as it must become practical wisdom of life when one has reached the age of forty, that one knows that the forty-year period is the continuation of childhood and youth and is the beginning of growing old and becoming an old man. What human consciousness encompasses must expand. It will not expand in a living way if it is not fertilized by insights from spiritual science. Otherwise it remains a mere abstract belief, otherwise people will continue to say: Yes, I know, I have already been on earth countless times, and I will come back to earth countless times again. But this belief does not matter; only the living feeling of being part of the development of humanity, the feeling: With your head you are actually quite an old fellow, because that is only the fully grown body of a previous incarnation, with the rest of your physical organization you are a baby, because that will only grow into a mature head in the next incarnation – this feeling of the human being as a real duality placed in time is something that must become a part of living consciousness. And just as today one tries to determine, by means of all kinds of skull measurements and similar interesting stuff, how the individual human beings, human nations, human races differ on earth, so in the future, according to soul-spiritual knowledge, which, however, cannot be gained without such foundations as we have developed in these days, one will have to recognize the people who inhabit the earth in their differentiation. We will have to ask about the spiritual and psychological peculiarities of humanity scattered across the earth. And salvation cannot come until our university sciences in particular are completely imbued with the kind of attitude and approach that we have come to know in these days. Our universities will ride humanity into decline if they are not fertilized in all their parts by that cosmic knowledge that can only be gained today through spiritual science. Likewise, in the future, people's religious feelings must be based on what man can know about the spiritual and soul. Otherwise we will not get ahead. For if we direct our attention to the spiritual and soul life, we shall become accustomed to characterizing human groups throughout the world according to their own soul and spiritual qualities, and not merely according to their physical characteristics, as is often done in present-day anthropology. Anthroposophy must take the place of mere anthropology. But the matter has a very serious, practical side. Certain things that are happening in the present, that underlie the serious events of this present, cannot be understood at all if one does not have the opportunity to focus one's attention on the spiritual qualities of the members of humanity. And here I would like to draw attention to something that seems to me to be extraordinarily important. During these terrible war events, well-meaning people have often emphasized one thing for Europe, and actually Ernest Renan, the French writer who described the “Life of Jesus” and the apostles, emphasized this one thing for Europe as early as 1870; during this war period it has been repeated many times. Renan said that for the salvation of Europe it is absolutely necessary that a peaceful coexistence should occur between the French nation, the English state and the German people. In particular, this has often been emphasized during the war by many well-meaning and unbiased people who have not been beguiled by what was officially commanded as opinion or what was spread as opinion by people interested in this or that cause. Now one can say: the development of Europe in recent decades has been so contrary to what reasonable people must regard as a basic condition for the progress of civilization in Europe. Without this peaceful cooperation, these unbiased people said, Europe cannot continue. But this peaceful cooperation never really came about in recent years; at most, a semblance of such peaceful cooperation emerged.

Now, if we look at European conditions from the outside – but also with a mind to examine the spiritual and soul – we can see the essential differences between these three parts of humanity. We must not forget that since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period and then during the course of that part of the fifth epoch that has just expired, Europe has developed and the French nation has increasingly become a unified nation whose members felt themselves to be a unified nation. One could say that the entire spiritual life of the French nation was directed towards feeling itself to be a unified nation, towards bearing in consciousness something of the feeling: I am a Frenchman. One can study how, in the course of the centuries, what is summarized in the four words: I am a Frenchman, has gradually come about. If one is attentive to such a thing as the development of: I am a Frenchman! we must look at the parallel phenomenon within the German development. For example, the expression “I am a German” did not develop in the same way within the now defunct German Empire, nor could it always be expressed with: “I am a German”! — To say “I am a German” with full intensity “I am a German!” meant imprisonment and incarceration. It was the worst political crime. People have forgotten. The worst political crime was to feel German. Because in this Germany, the territorial principality had engulfed everything, and it was forbidden, forbidden internally as a way of thinking, to perceive the territory inhabited by Germans as a single entity. It was only in 1848 that the idea arose among some people that those who belong to the German people could somehow be regarded as a unity. But even then it was still considered something heretical, it was seen as heretical. And then it happened that actually only the people who were historically linked to the development of the German people felt it as something very intimate, that they regarded it as their intimacy. Read about how people like Herman Grimm, who really thought about and talked about such things, looked back on their own youth, which still fell in the years before the 1950s, and how they describe how they had no way of expressing the judgment of feeling, the judgment of the mind: I am a German. There is a huge difference here. But look at this huge difference inwardly. Consider the fact that, although it was a political and police crime to call yourself a German as late as the first half of the 19th century, the unified spiritual culture of Germany had long been established by then. Goetheanism, with all that belonged to it, was there; one did not read Goethe, but he had worked; one did not understand Goethe, but he had said great things for all Germans. But these “all Germans” were never allowed to admit to the outer life that they somehow belonged together. At least it could not be a thought that could lay claim to reality, that is, something lived in the German people, as in the depths of consciousness, which of course had no external political reality. In its historical development, everything that the French felt inwardly, that which constituted their unity, became an external state reality. In Germany, everything that existed in the form of external institutions was in contradiction to the inner spirituality of the German people. This is a very significant distinction that exists between Central Europe and Western Europe. If you take that and describe these things in detail, you would get the history of the 19th century. And if these details were to live in the minds of the people of Europe, who are dependent on living and feeling together, then the feelings of horror that led to today's decline would very soon come to an end. But it will not be possible to develop such feelings in an international way without considering the human being in his entirety and knowing how to look at him in terms of his knowledge and his ability to desire; for it is only by directing human consciousness to these mysteries of the human existence that one becomes aware of the need to engage in such reflections. For these reflections, which we have now undertaken, only then teach the right thing, the thing that matters. Why has the French people become such a compact mass, in which everyone feels French, as it was forbidden for the Germans to do until the German Reich of Bismarckian coloration came into being? What is the reason for this? It is because in France the old Latin-Roman nature has been preserved, the nature which I described to you here weeks ago as being that which is primarily the juridical-national nature. From Egypt, through Romanism, the national-juridical nature entered into Latin. The French nation has taken it over. No other nation on earth understands better than the French people, from their own feelings, what the legal system is and what the state is. But if one really wants to find the right way to penetrate through that, one might say, oppressive thing that the German development still has in the 19th century, this contradicting of the external state development, which made it necessary to be imprisoned if one felt German and not Prussian, not Württemberg, not Bavarian or Austrian, if one looks closely at what , and if one studies it in detail, one really does not study it in the way that the unscrupulous school tradition today inculcates in people, which has become German intellectual life from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. One studies how Goetheanism flows into the great spirits, who are no longer even mentioned, while the spiritual antipodes are celebrated as great celebrated as great men, one studies how Goetheanism flows into people like Troxler, like Schubert and so on, then one finds out that it was precisely the lack of talent for the state, the drowsiness for the state, the danger of being imprisoned if one wanted to be a citizen of German coloration that now predestined the German people to develop a good understanding for the spiritual, for the life of the mind. It has only been repulsed for the time being by the industrial and commercial development that has taken place since the 1870s. This has thoroughly dispelled the German spirit in Germany, and, as an invasion from abroad, has taken away all that was left of German spirituality. Goetheanism has been forgotten. The fact that a mind like Leibniz's lived among the Germans, for example, is something that high school students should know better than what Cicero wrote, but they hardly know that Leibniz lived.

These are things that come into consideration and that are deeper than anything that is cited today for the differentiation of the European center from the European West. And when one speaks of the need for peace between the European center and the European West, one must be clear about the fact that the whole historical development shows that such a peace can only come about when the Germans themselves feel: they are not predisposed for the external legal state life, they are predisposed to cultivate spiritual life. But it must be made possible for them; today it is made impossible for them, today they also no longer have any responsibility for it. One must know that the actual state people is the French people, because they understand best how the individual human being feels as a citizen. Thus we have spread the spiritual life and the legal and state life over the main civilization of Europe. These things are at the same time, I might say, distributed among the peoples as gifts. And economic life, the actual field of the more recent development of humanity, has been given to the English-American people. All that belongs to the understanding of economic life has therefore found its best expression in England and America. The French understand nothing of economics; they are better as bankers. The Germans have never understood economics; they have no talent for it. And when they have tried to manage the economy in recent decades, always talking about an upswing and a “place in the sun” or something similar, it meant that they were talking about something that was completely beyond their abilities and which they were failing to grasp. Because even all that emerged as economic parliamentarism in the second half of the 19th century originated in England. Those who were good parliamentarians in the economic sense are England's disciples as far away as Hungary. If you look at the people who have best mastered the art of parliamentarism in parliaments, such as in the Austrian parliament for a while, but especially in the Hungarian parliament for a long time, and if you look at where these people have learned, then you will see: In England they have learned economic parliamentarism. — And if you ask: Where did German Social Democracy come from? — then you will find: Marx and Engels had to go to England in order to distill from English economic conditions that which was then theoretically incorporated into German intellectual life and worked through to its logical conclusion. And where are the very first roots of Leninism and Trotskyism? They are to be found in English economic ideas; except that the English will take care not to think through these economic ideas of theirs to their ultimate consequences.

Thus these three fields, which I have often said must be compatible with each other, stand in a threefold relationship: German, spiritual; French, state-legal; and English, economic. How can we find a way to achieve international cooperation? By pouring the threefold structure over all these fields. For then what one person is talented for can be passed on to the other, otherwise there is no way. This is the historical impulse. This is actually how history should be studied, especially in the 19th century.

You cannot study history if you are only taught what is taught in today's schools. This history is only there to be forgotten, because you cannot use it in life. History teaching only makes sense if you can use it in your life. But you will only develop such history teaching if you understand the whole nature of the human being. And so it is with the other branches of our higher education today. The way in which these are cultivated at universities today leads to destruction. Only the fertilization of spiritual science can lead up to a new beginning. What is to happen today has in fact already been prepared by historical circumstances. But do not think that these historical circumstances can be properly understood by anyone who does not first know enough about anthroposophy to become familiar, for example, with something like the three 'beautiful' figures (see drawing on p. 229) in their mutual relationship, or with what we developed here yesterday and the day before. For only by soaring to such thoughts can one then consider the other in its deeper essence. Otherwise one has no interest in this other, otherwise one is satisfied with what school science gives one. And if one is satisfied with what school science gives one, then one is compelled to spend one's free time on the things that today's people spend their free time on.

Such things should truly be known far and wide today, so that there would be a sufficiently large number of people who would have an understanding for these things. Because today it really can't be about anything else but finding a sufficiently large number of people who, to begin with, have an understanding for such things. Until there is a sufficient number of people who have an understanding for such things, nothing can be done with them. One cannot go directly to institutions, one cannot immediately cultivate new institutions, but it is a matter of finding as many people as possible in whose cognitive abilities these things are present, then one will be able to form institutions with these people. But then even the opposing powers will never be able to resist.

Today, one discovers something remarkable when one looks at what people think about European life, about the way in which this European life should unfold from person to person. I must always share with you the details of what is happening. Today I would like to give you just a small sample of what we have had to deal with as important matters. Mr. Ferriere, who I told you about, who spread the defamation that I was the advisor of the former German Emperor, was even called the “Rasputin” of the German Emperor and the like, has been exposed by Dr. Boos has been shown up in an “open letter”, and in a parenthesis in this letter from Dr. Boos, I also stated what I once explained here about my relationship - or rather, lack of relationship - to the German Kaiser. Now the man had to admit that he had lied. But he confesses in a very peculiar way, and this way is characteristic. I will try to reproduce the French sentences in German as clearly as possible. I am actually quite happy to reproduce them in German, because it is only through this that they acquire a certain character that I would like to give them. So, after Dr. Boos's letter, it says here:

“We [the editorial staff] have communicated the above letter from Dr. Roman Boos to our correspondent” — that is, Mr. Ferrière —, “who answers us as follows: 'The above document is typical of the psychologist. Here it shows what Latin irony becomes under Germanic eyes. Truly, these people' — he means those who have Germanic eyes — 'take everything seriously. But my readers, they, they have not been put off! My article contains jokes — de la plaisanterie — but no malice — méchancetés. And if I was badly informed — I declare this as my fault, in the conviction that my interlocutor will not hold it against me. — Elegantly, it is assumed that 'he will not hold it against me'! — 'By interlocutor, I mean the sociologist, of whom I spoke as a sociologist [Dr. Steiner], and not the signatory of the above letter, whose name I did not mention in my article [Dr. Boos]. In fact, au fait, what can you do about this affair?"

So a man is capable of apologizing with such uselessness after not just lying, but slandering in the worst possible way. But one exposes oneself to the danger of being taken 'klobig' again if one takes things so 'seriously', if one maintains that slander is not a 'plaisanterie' but a 'méchanceté'.

Then it continues, and now comes something particularly beautiful:

"At the time I wrote my article, I knew Mr. Rudolf Steiner only from his printed works. Since that time, I have come to know him through people who know him well. My opinion has changed completely, and I had prepared an article in which I express my respect for the moral significance of his personal work. I admit that the letter from M. R. Boos has somewhat cooled my ardor.

Cute, isn't it? Very cute! He would have written the most beautiful article of praise if he hadn't been given such a telling-off! But I cannot bring myself to agree that this is a characteristic of the Latin race (compare “Germanic” above), because it would be somewhat insulting if lying and slander were considered something elegant and praiseworthy in the Latin race, something that is only “plaisanterie”. It cannot be a peculiarity of the Latin race... Now the gentleman continues:

"I could answer this letter a lot of things, but what would be the use of that? - à quoi bon? - One of the Latin qualities is to be brief. I was wrong to leave the terrain of verifiable facts. I withdraw my erroneous assertions and I conclude that the rumors that are circulating, even if they come from several different sources and from people who are well informed, may be false. I take note of this.

So, firstly, the man is so naive that he believes he has to believe all the rumors that are going around, because he is only now taking note of them. But secondly – yes, one again exposes oneself to the danger of being “clunky” in one's thinking or, as Ferriere says, “Germanic”: if one tries to think such “elegant” thoughts through, it is impossible, because, one is obviously not allowed to do so, otherwise one belongs to those people of whom it is said here: “Vraiment, ces gens-là prennent tout au sérieux.” But you just can't help but wonder: so the man is taking action to ensure that people don't believe all the rumors that are going around; but if people are like him, then they are precisely the ones who spread the rumors the most into the most diverse milieus. Only, you can't look for the thought behind the words in the case of such people.

They see from such a document that it is truly not a matter of teaching such people reason. One has only to make the other public aware of what kind of disgraceful people are walking around in the world and writing articles and slandering. Because it is not at all a matter of refuting these people, but merely of rendering them harmless, because the fact that these people exist is the harm.

If nothing is done on the part of spiritual wisdom, we shall go more and more rapidly towards the time when such a mentality will spread more and more. For in the end the materialists of all colours and all environments will say more and more of those who take things spiritually: Oh, those people, yes truly, they take everything so seriously! — It will soon be serious to even speak of the spirit. It is serious, yes; but one should not be serious! As long as such an attitude spreads - and it is spreading - there will be no ground for improvement in Europe. These are the people who have made Europe what it is. But we must work to ensure that a sufficiently large number of people develop an understanding for the need for change. Today, this should really be obvious, at least to those who have in some way come into contact with humanities.

Next Friday I will speak in particular about the development of imperialism in the world, that is, I will give an episodic lecture, a historical consideration of the development of imperialism from the earliest times, from Egyptian imperialism up to today's imperialisms. I would like to give a brief overview of the historical development of imperialism.