The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees, Last Monday we were able to present eurythmy as an educational and teaching tool, and I took the liberty of talking about eurythmy as a form of gymnastics that is inspired and spiritualized. Today, eurythmy as a free art will be presented to you here. To explain that which seeks to reveal itself as art is actually an inartistic undertaking. For everything that is truly artistic must work through that which it presents directly in perception. And on the other hand, people demand of the truly artistic that they can grasp its whole essence, without first having to seek the way in some roundabout way through a conceptual or other explanation.

If I nevertheless take the liberty of saying a few words in advance, it is because the eurythmy we are trying out here at the Goetheanum and elsewhere is an art that draws from hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and also makes use of an unfamiliar artistic formal language. And allow me to say a few words in advance about these artistic sources and this artistic formal language.

What reveals eurythmy as a free art are movements of the human being in his or her individual limbs, or also movements of groups of people in space. These movements are not mere mimicry or pantomime, nor are they merely gestural or even dance-like; rather, eurythmy is meant to be a truly visible language, and a visible language that is derived from the sensual-transcendental observations of the human organism itself, so that in eurythmy one can bring forth something from the human being that comes out of him just as organically - without being an instantaneous gesture or facial expression - as human language itself. And just as a sound, or a tone when singing, wells up in a lawful way out of the human soul, so too should that which emerges as eurythmy art come out of the human soul, out of the human organization.

As I said, it is important to carefully study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, which movement tendencies or tendencies to move begin in the human speech or singing organs when the person prepares to speak or sing. I say expressly: movement tendencies, because what I mean by this is not a real movement, but one can actually only observe what lies at its basis in the process of coming into being, so to speak in the status nascendi, because that which wants to form itself as movement in the organs of singing and speaking is stopped in its development by the singing or speaking person and converted into those movements that can then represent the tone or the sound, so that what arises in the individual organ systems, in the singing or speaking system in humans, must be transferred to the whole person. This is entirely in accordance with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe regards the individual leaf as a simplified plant, and in turn the whole plant as a complicated leaf. What Goethe applies here only to morphological considerations can be elevated to the artistic. One can transfer what is assessed in a single organ system in terms of movement possibilities to the whole human being, just as nature transfers the form of the individual leaf to the whole plant in a more complicated form. Then the whole human being becomes a speech or singing organ. And even groups of people become a speech or singing organ. And one should seek just as little a connection between the individual movement and the individual soul process as one may seek a connection between the individual sound or tone and that which takes place in the soul. But just as speech as a whole is formed according to law, so too the formation of eurythmic movements as a whole is absolutely lawful. This can be achieved by allowing the human being to reveal himself through this eurythmy, to present in his very own element precisely that artistic element that underlies singing or speaking. For in speech, through the human organization, the conceptual and that which does not merely come out of the head like the conceptual, but rather comes out of the whole human being: the volitional, flows together. But the more the merely conceptual lives in any content, the less artistic that content is. The thought kills the artistic. And only as much as can pass through language from the element of will that comes from the whole, from the fully human, so much can be found in language that is truly artistic and poetic.

Therefore, the poet, who is truly an artist, must wage a constant war against the prosaic element of language. This is particularly the case with civilized languages, where language is increasingly becoming an expression of cognitive thought on the one hand or, on the other, of thought that is suitable for social convention. As languages grow into civilization, they become an increasingly unusable and unusable element for the expression of that spiritual reality which the artistic poet must truly seek. Therefore, the poet must go beyond the prose content and, through rhythm, rhyme, harmony, meter, the musical or imaginative-thematic, lead language back, as it were, to that element in which the human being, through sound or phonetics, makes himself the revealer of the spiritual and can thereby truly elevate the sound or phonetic into the spiritual-artistic.

Now, because of the particular way it expresses itself through movement, eurythmy works from the human will element in an elementary and natural way. It is precisely through this that the truly artistic, both musical and poetic, can be brought out in people. And what the poet, I would say, is already striving for in an invisible eurythmy, can be seen in the human movements that occur in eurythmy. One can create an accompaniment to any piece of music in eurythmy, and then, in a sense, a visible song is performed. One can also sing in eurythmy, just as one can sing audibly. And one can also present poetry in eurythmy, in which case what appears on stage as eurythmy must be accompanied by the recitation or declamation of the poem. In an unartistic age, there will be little understanding for what is necessary for recitation and declamation to accompany the eurythmic art. And today is such an unartistic age.

Today we understand little of what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with a baton in his hand like a conductor with his actors. He did not look at the prose content, he looked at the artistic formation of the iamb. Or it is difficult to understand how Schiller, especially in his most significant poems, did not initially have the literal prose content in his mind, but rather a melodious theme into which he then incorporated the literal prose content, so to speak. In an unartistic age such as the present, when the importance of declaiming and reciting is seen in the fact that the prose content is emphasized and that what lies behind the prose content as rhythm, rhyme, harmony, musical and imaginative themes lie behind the prose content. In such an age, one will understand little about what forms recitation and declamation must take in order to be performed simultaneously with eurythmy.

But the unartistic person must understand how a secret eurhythmics is sought in real poetry and how this secret, invisible eurhythmics can reveal itself in the visible language in which it appears here. Before such performances I must always say that we ask the audience to be lenient because we know very well that this eurythmy is still in the early stages of development. But anyone who delves into its true essence can also know that it offers unlimited possibilities for development. For why? When Goethe says, “When nature begins to reveal her secret to him who beholds her, he feels the deepest longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” it may be added, justifying eurythmy: “When human essence itself in its formation and in its movement begins to reveal its secret, feels the deepest longing to reveal to the eye that which lies within this human form in terms of possibilities of movement, of eurythmy.

If, as Goethe says elsewhere, when man stands at the pinnacle of nature, he sees himself as a whole of nature, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together, in order to rise to the production of a work of art, then, with regard to eurythmy, one may say that this eurythmy does not use an external tool, but the human being itself, and in the human being all the secrets of the world are truly hidden. If we can draw them out of him, then the revelation of these secrets of humanity, of these microcosmic secrets, is a revelation of the macrocosmic secrets.

Eurythmy uses the human being as its tool, drawing from the human being's nature order, harmony, measure and meaning and presenting the human being as a work of art. By undertaking this, there must be unlimited possibilities for development within it, because if the human being is taken as a tool for artistic expression, this is in any case the most worthy artistic tool.

And so we may hope that artistic revelations will come out of eurythmy, which is still in its infancy today. These revelations may still be somewhat influenced by us, but will probably come first through others. These revelations can establish eurythmy as a fully-fledged younger art alongside its fully-fledged older sister arts.

Dear attendees! If you advance in the course of the development of today's science, you can make your way from this or that branch of knowledge to the other, to which you are led by certain external or internal necessities. But basically, all this comes from a deeper human essence. You have to say: this path is traversed with a certain inner indifference. Of course, there are exam nerves, and these can lead to inner psychological catastrophes. But these psychological catastrophes – especially those who have gone through them will be able to testify to this – are not really connected with the content of what one is approaching, let us say in mathematics, in medicine, in biology. A researcher can also experience inner joy when he has discovered something. But what is experienced inwardly by the soul is outwardly linked to the content of what has come before the soul in knowledge.

This is certainly a radical way of expressing a phenomenon that does not always occur so radically; but if we contrast it with the opposite that arises when studying, that is, at the same time as inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, the validity of what has been said will emerge.

When studying and inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, one really does experience inner fateful events. One experiences psychological catastrophes and peripeteia. On the one hand, these experiences are closely and intensely connected with the content of the person approached in knowledge. On the other hand, we experience something that takes hold of human nature in many ways, transforms it, brings it to other levels of soul development, and so on. This fact, which at first glance might appear to be an external one, is in fact intrinsically connected with the nature of anthroposophical spiritual science; it is connected with the fact that, while one rises objectively out of today's scientific spirit into a world picture in a justified way, one does not actually find the human being in this world picture. Of course, one can also construct him out of it; but the human being who can be constructed out of the present evolutionary doctrine, who can be constructed out of present-day biology or physiology, does not present himself in an image that evokes inner tremors and liberations in the soul; he presents himself in an image that leaves the soul cold.

But, dear attendees, is not the essence of the human soul in everyday life that we go through inner turmoil, pain, suffering, joy and satisfaction? Do we not go through catastrophes and peripeteia through our external lives? Can we therefore hope that we can grasp this human being, who is internally changeable and so close to us in his changeability, through a science that, on the one hand, provides us with an image of the human being that must actually leave us indifferent, yes, that must see its perfection in a certain relationship precisely in the fact that it leaves us indifferent? Anyone who sees this fact in the right light will initially be emotionally drawn to the essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man. This essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man — I have tried to describe it in part according to its method in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” I have tried to describe it by name in my book “Theosophy” and then in the ” Secret Science. I have tried to show how the striving for knowledge must ascend if it is to arrive at genuine anthroposophical knowledge of man, through three degrees of knowledge, through Imagination, through Inspiration, through Intuition understood in the deeper sense. And I believe I have made it clear in my description of what a person can experience in imaginative, inspired, intuitive life, that going through such a path of knowledge means that a series of inner experiences of destiny take place at the same time. , so that not only the content of knowledge approaches the human being in abstraction, but the image of the human being approaches direct human experience, that which sits within us as the experienced essence of our human dignity.

Imagination is the first step in penetrating the essence of the world as well as the essence of the human being. I have described how imagination can be cultivated through a kind of meditative life and a kind of concentration of the power of thought, in a completely healthy way that is the opposite of a pathological one. Now I would like to draw attention to what actually happens within a person when they strive for this imaginative level of knowledge. It is the case that through this meditative inner experience, through this methodically disciplined inner experience of concentrating thoughts and feelings, the soul forces are, as it were, gathered together, and they are permeated by consciousness more intensely than is otherwise the case. If we then observe what is actually growing when we meditate and concentrate in this way, we find that it is the same thing — only in its continuation — that has brought us to actual self-awareness in our ordinary experience, that has brought us to composure, to calm personality and which has brought us, if I may use the expression, to the actual egoity of the human being, to that in which the human being must find himself so that he can detach himself from the world in a level-headed way, so that he can come to self-awareness in the right way.

This is also the dangerous thing about this path, that first of all this egoity of the human being must be strengthened. That which has led people to egoity must be taken further. Therefore, what is striven for here can basically only be properly achieved if it is preceded by a corresponding preparation, the preparation that I have described truthfully in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a certain method for attaining true inner modesty, that inner modesty which may not always be openly displayed in outer life, owing to outer circumstances, but which must penetrate the life of the soul in depth. If this modesty is not thoroughly developed as an inner strength of the soul experience, then there is indeed the danger of human megalomania on the path to imagination, not pathological megalomania, but psychological, moral megalomania. Those who apply anthroposophical methods correctly cannot lapse into pathology because these methods run directly counter to what can lead people out of their natural state into pathological conditions. However, they may certainly face psychological dangers such as the megalomania referred to here. A certain inner stability, rooted in modesty and unpretentiousness, is necessary for the individual who aspires to that elevation and intensification of egoism which is necessary to achieve imaginative knowledge. In ordinary life and in ordinary cognition, our concepts are too pale, our highest ideas too abstract, to move from their own full saturation to the inner experience of that which actually pushes man towards egoity. That which otherwise lives in the power of forming concepts and shaping ideas must be elevated, must be intensified. Then, indeed, an experience occurs, and by the occurrence of this experience the one striving toward imagination can actually gauge the correctness of his striving. One has done exercises to increase one's egoism, one has done such exercises that one's pale concepts and ideas have been raised to the intensity one experiences when one has a sensory image before one's eyes or ears. One has thereby increased that power which, by its concentration, produces our composure, our sense of personality, our egoism. The experience one has is that from a certain point on, an increase in egoity no longer occurs, that from a certain point on, precisely because of the increase in egoity, in a sense because of the arrival of egoity at a point of culmination, this egoity actually dissolves. That is the significant thing, that our egoity, when it is increased, is increased correctly, does not increase into the excessive as egoity, but that it basically dissolves.

From this alone it can be seen that the experience we have as human beings in the outer physical world, and which, through its own nature, carries us to egoity, is necessary as a transition, that egoity in a healthy way the physical world and through sensory perceptions must be attained before one can turn to that increase that I mean here, which then leads to a dissolution, so to speak, of egoity, or rather, to an outflow of egoity.

Where does our egoity flow into first? In ordinary life, my dear audience, our egoity is actually banished into the moment. We can only say “I” to ourselves by feeling that we are a being experiencing the moment. That which we already experienced yesterday, which was intimately connected with our egoity yesterday, what we were immersed in yesterday, has become objective for us today in this moment. And to a certain extent, we see what we experienced yesterday, in contrast to our sense of self, as something external through memory, just as we see any external experience as external. One time, something objective rises from the depths of our own organization in memory; the other time, it approaches us by announcing itself to us through the external senses.

Of course, we distinguish the remembered experience from the external sensory experience; but at the same time there is something very similar between the two in the way they approach the ego, which can only be fully grasped in the moment. In the endeavor to advance to imagination, the I actually gradually flows out over our physical life on earth between birth and death, and we learn to be immersed in a past experience as we are immersed in the experience of the present moment. We learn to feel ourselves as I in the long-past experience as well as we otherwise do in the present moment. I draw your attention to the fact that you have certainly already experienced in a dream – which I certainly do not regard as some kind of valid source of knowledge, but only use here for clarification – that you have certainly already experienced in a dream that you felt like a person 20 years in the past , as a person 20 years younger, that you imagined your image from 20 years ago and behaved in the dream as if you were only 20 years old, that you did the same things as you did 20 years ago. I would like to remind you that in this dream image you actually objectify yourself in such a way that you feel yourself at the age you were at a distant point in time.

What appears in dreams in a semi-pathological way can be attained by the human being in full consciousness through imaginative knowledge, and can be developed in full consciousness. Then the human being experiences what he has ever experienced in this earthly life – he does not just experience it as an ordinary memory, which is contrasted with the experience of the present moment, he experiences it in such a way that his I, his egoity, fills the entire stream of his experience in this earthly life. He steps out of the moment and into the stream of his experience of time. The I does not flow out in a nebulous way; the I flows out into the stream of real experiences of this earthly life. But in this outpouring one grasps something different than in the ordinary consciousness of the moment, which, according to ordinary logic, must be filled with intellectual images in abstractions. In this outpouring of the life stream, one grasps images, images of the vitality of the life of the senses. That which otherwise stands before the soul as a memory of life becomes inwardly saturated and intense; one learns the nature of imaginative knowledge in oneself. At the same time, one penetrates into the essence of the human being by advancing in knowledge. But from this moment on, one knows that one has submerged with the ego not in a stream of abstract memories, but in a stream of real life forces, the same life forces that, from our birth, or let us say from our conception, are the forces that constitute our organism, that shape our organs, that work on us internally, in growth, in nourishment, in reproduction.

We now become immersed in the stream of those forces that otherwise only have to do with the mediation of our nourishment, that make us grow, and that make our reproduction possible. And now, instead of living in an abstraction, we are living with full consciousness in a concrete reality, and we are learning what the etheric body is. We are learning that our physical body, in which we normally live in our ordinary lives, is based on a body that is an inner formation of forces and that can only be seen in such imaginative knowledge. One becomes familiar with that which has been repeatedly sought by hypothesis by physical and biological science in recent decades, and which is even denied by others today in its existence. One becomes familiar with the real ether world in contrast to the ponderable physical world and learns to recognize how that which underlies our physical human form is really such an ether human being. But in grasping oneself as such an etheric human being, the ego of the earthly human being dissolves in an even higher sense. One cannot grasp this etheric human being without simultaneously seeing in all its individual parts and aspects what the cosmos, what the world, is. At the same time, one is led out of oneself by grasping oneself as an etheric human being, because that which works within us as an organizing etheric human being throws its rays in currents out into the cosmos, bringing us a connection between these or those inner organs, between this or that limb of our physical organism and the cosmos.

What is experienced does not appear in the form of abstract concepts, but in the saturated form of imagery, of imagination. But in that we have, in a sense, surrendered our egoity in the process of knowing, as I have described it, we grasp at the same time that which is now etherically outside of us in the world. We penetrate through our own etheric body into the etheric of the great world, from which we are, after all, born as human beings.

But then a new task arises. The world we now experience is quite different [from the physical one]; it does not have certain things that we rightly consider to be the defining characteristics of our physical world. It initially presents itself to us in a pictorial way, while we recognize our physical world in its true objectivity when we strip away the pictoriality. But when we now ascend from the grasp of our own etheric body to the ethericity of the world, we notice that precisely those senses that otherwise convey the external world to us in the most beautiful way lag behind in their effectiveness. We owe what we have of the physical external world to the eye, the ear and so on. These senses, as it were, recede at first, and the very senses that are ignored in ordinary physical life come to the fore in human experience as we become so attuned to the etheric world: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life. These come to the fore. We are freed, as it were, from our own heaviness. We enter into an experience of the world's own equilibrium, into which we find our way. The movements observed through the eyes or those detected by instruments cease. But what can be inwardly experienced in the movement when the human being is in this movement is experienced in the imagination through the resting human being, in that the movement first increases. This is a living penetration into the etheric world. And here I would like to draw your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to the fact that it is really as I characterized it in my introductory words today, when I said that the path of anthroposophical knowledge means a series of inner soul experiences of destiny. For what occurs, so to speak, as a damping of the higher senses and as a spiritualization and strengthening at the same time of the senses usually regarded as low, is connected with such a fate. And, although I know what one is exposed to in such a description, I would like to mention what I want to say here with an example: I was once occupied with the internal mental processing of what a person actually experiences when they profess their soul to these or those worldviews, when they become a materialist, idealist, realist, spiritualist, positivist, skeptic, and so on. These things cannot be exhausted by what ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science produce about them, if one really strives to recognize them from within. Ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science are actually exhausted in the fact that the idealist rails against the realist, criticizes him, and that he refutes what the realist puts forward; the spiritualist becomes haughty, and nevertheless he is often a complete layman in that which can only be recognized in the material world, he indulges in the most disparaging criticisms of materialism, which nevertheless was a cosmic side effect of our modern, justly so praised scientificness. These things, why the human mind leans towards materialism on the one hand, and on the other, for example, towards spiritualism or idealism, these things lie deeper than one usually thinks.

When one seriously engages with these things, then one carries out an inner soul work that is connected with the thought process in a healthy, but also comprehensive sense. One experiences something at the same time as one thinks. If you think abstractly, you experience nothing. But if you experience what becomes an experience for the human being, whether you are a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, then you are led, as it were, into the direct existence of the human soul. In a completely different way, this human soul is grasped by a kind of thinking that I would call deeply introspective, than is the case with the ordinary sciences.

What one can experience in such thinking, which must be meditative and concentrated thinking, leads one further, releases certain powers of the imagination, and leads to the appearance of an inner image for individual concrete things, , but with the complete character of this thought-experience, an inner pictorial experience arises, which, however, is not a dreamt or fantasized pictorial experience, but which is connected with the cosmic, supersensible facts underlying external phenomena.

And so I lived at that time, after I had gone through this concentration, this meditation on what I have just described to you. I lived myself into the imaginative world in such a way that the whole person who emerged in the imagination suddenly became something that stood before the inner eye in a concrete world fact. It was formed out of what one had grasped as the essence of man, as an image of the cosmic, the zodiac, the zodiakus; but not as one has it in mind in its abstract form, but in such a way that the individual formations of the zodiac became truly essential, so that the spiritual essence of the zodiacal constellation emerged and revealed how it now came together with the individual elements of human nature: the world as an image, within a certain sphere as an image, the living out of inner thoughts, striving towards cosmic imagery.

The I not only flows out into this stream of one's own personal experiences for this earthly life, the I flows out into the cosmos. One learns to recognize what is really there in the undulating, surging ether of the cosmos. One does not enter into this undulating, surging life of the cosmos other than by increasing one's egoity to the point where it reaches its culmination, then dissolving oneself in the comprehension of the world and pouring out into the objective existence of the world.

What I am describing to you is basically the character of the etheric world. Experiencing yourself in this etheric world — you will now understand why I call it a destiny experience. Experiencing knowledge is at the same time a destiny experience. In this etheric world one can experience that which cannot be described in any other way than as I have described it in my “Occult Science”. It is the etheric experience of the world that has been presented in this “Occult Science”.

But at the same time, one's inner destiny takes such a turn that one feels the egotism into which one is placed in ordinary life between birth and death, I might say, continually expanding. The point then is that through the continuation of such exercises, as I have indicated in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” in its second part, that through the continuation of such exercises the I, which one has actually lost in a certain psychological sense, that this I is found again.

If you develop - everyone can develop this - you develop the power to carry your thoughts into the pictorial experience, and if you practice this carrying of your thought power into the etheric pictorial experience long enough - for the individual person it is so long, for the other person differently long - if you practice this long enough, one practices it so to speak until it has the necessary strength to fight against the persistent addiction to lose one's thoughts in images, one maintains the upper hand with one's composure, with the imbuing of one's etheric image experiences with the power of thought. Then the I-experience arises again. But it now appears in a completely transformed form, it now appears before the fully collected soul, before the soul that is as collected as one can only be in the solution of some mathematical problem. The experience of the I emerges from the world of ethereal images, but it emerges in such a way that we see it, so to speak, not as something that dwells in our physical corporeality, but as emerging from the cosmic etheric world, to the contemplation of which we have risen. One would like to say: While otherwise our ego, when it emerges, experiences and is viewed as if it came from the physical body, as if it came from a human center, we now experience it as if our ego radiates from the indeterminate periphery of the universe, as if it wants to converge in a center instead of diverging. And we notice: the world in which we are now placed with full inner reflection, with full inner power of knowledge, the world we actually only dream of in our ordinary life between birth and death when we apply a force that cannot initially be a force of knowledge, when we apply the power of feeling.

What we experience in our ordinary human life through feeling is not imbued with the power of thought to the same extent as our imaginative life. In reality, as I have often discussed, it is only imbued with the power of thought to the extent that our dreams are imbued with the power of thought. What we experience, so to speak, in the shadow of the world of personal feeling, we now experience in its true form: the I, as it descends from the periphery of the world, from the world of etheric substance, as it, instead of dissolving into the indefinite, pushes towards the center of its own being. And in this comprehension, which transforms the ordinary emotional experience into a real thought experience and thus into a real cognitive experience, in this experience we grasp what is called the astral body in anthroposophical knowledge of man. The astral body appears to us as given to us by the world when we look out from our center. We discover how, as it were, what is our astral body is exuded from the etheric force arrangements. It is as if we were suddenly not living in ourselves, but living in the air we breathe in — as if our body were standing there objectively and we were not in this body, but in the air we breathe in — and it is as if we felt that our external physicality was merely this body of air that penetrates into the human interior. It is as if we were looking into the human organs, as if we were approaching the human form in its externality.

Ascending from this breathing experience, Indian yoga philosophy aimed to achieve the experience that I have just described to you as the experience of the astral world. We in the West are not allowed to imitate this yoga experience in the East, due to the nature of our organization. But everything that we can experience in the immediate future, in which we actually experience ourselves outside our body in this way, presents itself in the same way as the world soul in the etheric body of the world. In fact, we never have a physical world body before us in a concrete realization, but in real realization we only reach an etheric world body in the way described, and in this etheric world body we experience the world soul in its configurations, one of which is our own soul, our own astral body, if I may put it this way.

In the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science” what one can see in the ether world, the surging and nature of this ether world in its concreteness, one can also describe the soul-like becoming and weaving of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be incumbent upon me, if it is to come to pass in this life, to show that what has been described in my “Occult Science” as the ether world can also be described as the astral world. It will be seen that then one must speak from quite a different spirit, that then something must be added to the descriptions of this “Occult Science”, which in its description, in its characterizations, must be quite different from the descriptions, the characterizations of this “Occult Science”. And I say to those who approach my writings in this way, that instead of having the will to penetrate into the matter, they quibble over words and look for contradictions. I predict that they will find will find between the book, which is created in this way through the description of the astral in relation to the etheric, that they will find an even greater portion of what they will state as contradictions in their way. These are the contradictions of life, and the one who wants to penetrate life objectively must familiarize himself with these contradictions in a living way, not in abstract logic.

But when what we come to know as our own astral, as our own soul, approaches us in this world, we actually feel like cosmic human beings, and we feel our own astral body, our own soul, only as a part of the cosmos. But we feel it as a member not of the etheric cosmos, but of the soul cosmos, and we now know: the cosmos has a soul. And by being able to present the astral body to our soul as something other than what appears to us only through our outer physical corporeality and through the etheric, a life that precedes our birth or our conception , a life accomplished in the spirit, in the soul world, is placed before this soul of ours, and a life that we enter as a spiritual-soul being when we pass through the gate of death. That which is called immortality, and also that which our civilization has lost and which should be called unbornness, becomes a fact, for one gets to know oneself from the whole world that outlasts the individual human life. One does not just grasp the part of the human being that is embodied in the body between birth and death, but one grasps the human essence that precedes birth and follows death; one grasps oneself as a link in the eternal spiritual world.

And still further can be continued that inner concentration, that inner meditation, whereby one must only see to it that the power one has attained to penetrate the world of images with thoughts is fully maintained with the power of reflection. One can penetrate even further in this penetration of the imagination with thought-content, and the penetration of inspiration with thought-content; one can always intensify that which is the level-headed thought-experience in imagination, in inspiration, and then one comes to the experience of the true form of the central human ego. Then one penetrates through the human astral body, which actually presents itself as developing from the periphery of the world towards our human center, and presents itself as a member of the entire astral cosmos. From there, one arrives at the true self, of which one has only a shadow in ordinary life, to which one says “I”; one arrives at that which one now objectively sees as one's self, in the same way that one otherwise objectively sees external things. For that which one undergoes on the path of knowledge has brought one out of one's own corporeality, and what now moves back into one's own corporeality is not the ego that one has in ordinary life, but a real ego.

This real self initially has nothing to do with much of what shapes us as a human organism from the cosmos, what works in us and lives from the world that we have gone through in the spiritual and soul realm before birth or before conception. This I presents itself as an objective reality, as that which, so to speak, represents the sum of all the I's we have lived through in our past earthly lives.

This is achieved at the level of the intuitive, the truly intuitive. There, that which can be described in anthroposophical knowledge of man as repeated earthly lives becomes wisdom. In fact, anthroposophical knowledge does not consist of formulating abstract insights based on existing facts, which are images of the facts, but rather consists of gradually and truly living one's way into the human essence. What one experiences of this human being, after one has first poured out one's I, one's egoity, into the stream of life between birth and death in the etheric realm, now stands as the subject opposite the I that has become objective on the path from our previous life to our present life. It is from such a path of knowledge that the one speaks who, from inner vision, not from theory, speaks about the existence of repeated human lives on earth. This view of repeated human lives on earth is not a theory, but something that arises as a realization at the same time as the view of the true self, which in our ordinary life we have before us in the same way as we have our soul life before us between falling asleep and waking up. Just as we are between falling asleep and waking up in a state that we do not see into, that is given to us only negatively as an empty part of our experience, so we must, as it were, leave out in our life stream what we have experienced while sleeping. When we look back and let our life appear before us, how for ordinary consciousness we actually only have those stretches of life that run from waking to falling asleep, how these are always interrupted by empty lengths of stream, stream members, so in ordinary life we look down into our ego, into our organization. We see, by experiencing the surging, weaving soul life, a kind of empty space that we oversleep as we oversleep our state of sleep, and to this empty space we say I, not to something really fulfilled. Anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, ladies and gentlemen, can indicate how it arrives at its content, can describe step by step how it advances inwardly to grasp that which it must present to the world as a teaching. And because true anthroposophical knowledge of man carries the thought everywhere - for you have seen that I had to place the main emphasis on this in the description of this anthroposophical method of knowing man, that in imagination, in inspiration, the thought experience has been carried into it with all its sharpness, that this thought experience also appears in the intuitive experience in the end; you have seen that I had to place the special emphasis on this must attach to this, and because the thought experience is everywhere within, because that which man has in the abstract thought experience, which he uses for ordinary science, is everywhere within in all that the spiritual researcher directs his soul and his spirit, his I, therefore everything that the spiritual researcher presents to the world can be relived and also verified by the mere thought experience. The human being must only have the opportunity to follow the spiritual researcher to the thought experience. He must not lose the thought experience immediately when he leaves the sphere of sensory experience. He must have the strength to develop the inner capacity for growth and reproduction that can still have the self-generating thought when the thought stimulated by the external sensory experience ceases to bear its actual character. This intense inner experience can be appropriated at first; then one will find: the spiritual researcher describes things that he has essentially experienced by carrying the thought into imagination, inspiration and intuition.

The thoughts that he incorporates into it can be followed and tested. For the thoughts that he forms in imaginative, inspired and intuitive life can be tested for accuracy by their very nature and essence when you hold them up to yourself. One must only not cling to the human prejudice, which in recent times has become all too strong, that a thought can only be verified if one can have an external sensual fact as proof. One must recognize that the thought itself, the same thought that is used in external science, has an inner life, that it can shape its inner organization. If one experiences only this inner self-fashioning of the power of thought, if one experiences it in a way that Hegel in his time could not yet experience — hence he only unravelled abstract thoughts in his philosophy — if one experiences this living movement of the thought, which I first tried to present in its form in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, then one can really examine every single thought that the spiritual researcher expresses. Those who do not undertake this examination will generally do so because they feel compelled to do so out of an inadequate will: 'I do not follow what you are thinking there, because what I know so far gives me no reason to do so.

Anyone who takes this view is simply not open to discussion about anthroposophy, and in particular about anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. It is not necessary to ascend to imagination, inspiration, and intuition oneself; it is only necessary to bring the thought life, which one already develops in ordinary science, vividly into the whole inner soul life, and from this living grasp of the thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher brings out of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But, ladies and gentlemen, one must be determined to break away from dead thinking, which only arranges concepts in a linear fashion, just as the external sense world unfolds. This dead thinking proceeds in such a way that I form this concept from one piece of the external sense world, then I stick it to the concept that I gain from the other piece of the sense world, and so on. Only those who adhere to this method of gluing for a system of concepts will say that, from the point of view of ordinary thinking, they cannot verify what is given in anthroposophy. But anyone who grasps that the human being really carries within himself, within himself experiences thinking as a living organism — it is only overshadowed, it is only overshadowed by an illusion —, anyone who grasps this thinking that is alive in life, can verify from this thinking everything that the spiritual researcher presents about man and the world.

Thus you see from the whole meaning of what I have taken the liberty of presenting to you that when the spiritual researcher attempts to penetrate to knowledge of man, at the same time as he strives for this knowledge of man, knowledge of the world results. Knowledge of the true human being leads us beyond ourselves into the objective world. Real knowledge of the true objective world gives us, within its content, the human being, the truly outwardly and inwardly living human being, who can feel at home in the world, which he discovers in this way. And so it may be said: Just as it can already be sensed that world and human being must belong together in the most intimate way, as I have already emphasized in my Philosophy of Freedom, so spiritual science presents knowledge to the world that world knowledge must be attained through knowledge of the human being, because world existence can be experienced can be experienced in the innermost human being, that human nature can be recognized from knowledge of the world, because the human being with his innermost nature comes from the objective, true world; that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being [and knowledge of the human being through knowledge of the world].

In this, however, a contradiction or even a paradox can be found, for one might ask: Where should we begin? Should we start with knowledge of the world in order to gain knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the world , as the pantheist or some other philosophically or materialistically minded person would undertake, or should we, as the mystic often does, soar from knowledge of man to knowledge of the world?

But this is dead, this is not alive thought. Knowledge of man and knowledge of the world do not belong together like two dead limbs of an organism, so that one can start with one and move on to the other, but knowledge of man and knowledge of the world belong together like the living limbs of a being itself. And just as little as one can say that the head lives through the limbs or the limbs live through the head, so little can one say that one can start with knowledge of the world in order to arrive at the human being, or start with knowledge of the human being in order to arrive at knowledge of the world. Rather, one must say that both must arise in living unity, and both must mutually illuminate each other in living unity. And in this sense, in the sense of a living realization, a world knowledge gained from spiritual research through true knowledge of man, a true knowledge of man through true world knowledge, must arise for the great questions of our time.

I would like to say a few words about the building idea, with the supporting, direct view of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one must first speak about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a sensory view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach is meant to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol when looking at this building, as is popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from artistic perception and has also been created from these artistic perceptions in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must work only through what it is itself. Explaining has become popular, and people then want explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such explaining of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in the presence of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about the details that arose in my mind when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new stylistic form, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University, where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to the invention of any new architectural style or type of building. What is true about this idea is that the style that is to stylize the characteristics of a people must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was peculiar to previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometrically static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said, and rightly said from a certain point of view, by someone who has become inwardly attuned to previous architectural styles, against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of construction that this building here is an as yet imperfect first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of construction to the organic. It is certain that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of construction, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of construction will play the first, leading role. This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometrical-static-symmetrical forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of the lobe of your ear: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot well imagine that an organic form such as the lobe of the ear is suited to grow on the big toe. This organ is completely bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be completely unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what goes beyond the static, which the organism develops. But one senses that the building idea has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to look at every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic – everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically – but transferred into organically made structures. It is not an imitation of an organic structure. You will not understand it if you look for a model in nature. But you will understand it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the building, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically. From this point of view, I also ask you to look at something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below. The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he climbs the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in everything he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my own intuitive perception. You may believe it or not, but this form came to me entirely from my own artistic intuition. As I said, you may believe it or not, but it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the shape of the three semicircular crescents in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they directly express what gives a person stability. This expression, that stability is to be given to the human being in this structure, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract reflection. One can remain entirely in the artistic.

If you look at the wall-like structures while handling them, you will find that natural forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that these forms, which are radiator covers, are first worked out of the concrete material of the building, and then further up out of the material of the wood, and that they are thereby metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. Only after having shaped them out of the material does one realize that they must be so. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them, depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this does not result from calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. This is the room where you can leave your coat. The staircase, which leads up here on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms.

Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We are now entering a kind of foyer. You will notice the very different impression created by the wooden cladding compared to the concrete cladding on the lower floor.

I would like to note here: When you have to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, you have to approach it differently than when you have to work with soft materials, such as wood. The material of wood requires you to focus all your senses on the fact that you have to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you only succeed in coaxing out of the material that which gives the forms when you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with deepening. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised surfaces to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each capital, is treated individually. A capital in this organic structure can only be such that one feels: in what follows each other, a kind of repetition cannot be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, which is the product of an organic idea, you have only a single axis of symmetry, running from west to east. You will find a symmetrical arrangement only in relation to this, just as you can find only a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness but out of the inner organization of forces of the entity in question.

At this point, I would like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. The walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed and opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven from elementary foundations into the physical in these windows, which you see here and which you will see under construction. If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense that they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. There was a need to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that, using a single-colored windowpane, you can, as it were, scratch out designs using a kind of etching method, a glass etching method. And so monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then worked on in such a way that the motifs one wanted could be scratched out with the diamond pencil. So for this purpose, a glass etching technique was conceived, and the windows emerged from that.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with symbolic design alone. You can see it already on this larger windowpane: nothing is designed on these windowpanes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. People often approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. There is something about the human physical countenance that is maya, that is thoroughly false, that is something else in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is a being that is envisaged, only it does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a mere physical-sensual view is not reality. What is behind it spiritually? The spiritual fact that what is whispered into the ear, left and right, are world secrets. So that one can truly say: the bull speaks into the left ear, the lion into the right ear. If one wants to express this as a motif in a picture or in words, then one can only attach to the word that which is already in the picture itself. However, one must be clear about the fact that one can only understand such a picture if one lives in the world view from which it has emerged. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will also not be able to behave sympathetically towards the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a lot when he lives into a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. An example of the artist's experience is this: When Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which is now so dilapidated that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it was taking too long. He could not finish the Judas because this Judas was to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and was still not finished. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He was not an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, should finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the painting would now be quickly completed. - There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

Dear attendees, you have entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for the musical instruments. If you look around after entering, you will see that the architectural idea is initially characterized by the floor plan depicting two not quite completed circles, whose segments interlock. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain in more detail what the building idea is. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing off the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development.

The two columns at the back of the organ area have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs: forms that, to a certain extent, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below was then metamorphosed into the following forms of architraves, capitals and pedestals. This progressive metamorphosis came about through artistic perception, in that, when I was developing the model, I tried to recreate what occurs in nature. What takes place in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the further up it goes, into the indented, intricately designed leaf, even transformed into petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - albeit not in a naturalistic way. One must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but out of much deeper soul forces than those of reflection, one will achieve such transformations of the second out of the first, of the third out of the second, and so on.

It can be misunderstood that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a kind of Mercury staff appears. One could now believe that the caduceus was placed in these two positions by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and below it - the intellect has a symmetrizing effect - the column motif with the caduceus. The person who works as we have done here finds something else. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, only by sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff, this Mercury staff emerged as a petal emerges from the sepal. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when man intervenes in the evolution of his soul-life. When this is individualized and worked into the column, it follows later what is worked on this architrave surface earlier. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave.

A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design. At the same time, a cosmic secret emerges in it, as one feels evolution all around. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling for it. One only thinks it out with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm in this regard, and the idea has arisen that is completely justified in the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one starts from the assumption that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then later become more and more differentiated. Spencer in particular has worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is indeed a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a middle and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

Thus it is necessary that man connects with the power of nature, that he feels the power of nature, that he makes the power of nature his own power and creates out of this feeling. So it has been attempted to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. You can see, for example, that the organ is surrounded by sculpted motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the entire organic design as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in the same way.

You see here the lectern on which I stand. With it, the first consideration was to create something in this place that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the idea that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of the spoken word must continue in such a way that, like the nose on a face, its form reveals what the whole person is. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can turn a nose study into the “architectural style”, the physiognomy of the whole person. No one can ever have a nose other than the one they have, and there could never be a lectern here other than the one that is here. However, if one asserts this, it is meant in one's own view; one can only act in one's own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here. You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it is an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by mysteriously sensing the shape of the human head in it, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane a person who is aiming – on the left – to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you will see all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has fired. This is a reality, but one from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner exaltation may be offended if they experience such things as they are meant here, simply as a human being shooting. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says, that can also be said. She glossed over such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also repeat her not quite correct German. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the same idea was also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that behind the effort to create a window experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear as the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw the horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects resulting from light and dark, from the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in itself, that it is only a matter of seeing how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, it arises from the colored something other than a can and a bass violin. The color is creative, and how it puts together, but it is a necessity of the mere colored out, you have to experience. Then you do not make a can next to a bass violin, because that is again outside the colored.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot here next to the blue spot and the black spot, this is initially a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants with the human mind here, so one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child emerged. The entire head emerged from the colors with all its figuration. Only in the human soul does a spiritual-real object form by itself.

For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted that a philistine, a person attached to the sensual world, will naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: If you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something inside the eye, like two eyes looking at each other. What takes place inwardly can certainly be developed further in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness towards you, and what is experienced inwardly, can be shaped in such a way that, when projected outwards, an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when, by narrowing the pupil, it sees itself in the darkness. One need not merely read the secrets of the mind, one can see them - suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts have been made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars to paint with an open head, is, if you do it that way now, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated, and as if he were not a human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power were composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right material to cover the building. We were then still able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will certainly feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern while the building was being constructed was the acoustics. During the construction, the building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside so that work could be carried out upstairs. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, they were a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I could expect the acoustic question to be solved for the lecturer by occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been achieved, but to a certain degree of perfection, to carry out the acoustics. You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the building, are connected with the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material, to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people here in the middle talk to each other, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world being that one may only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

Dear attendees,A very serious philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, spoke from his deepest insight the sentence: What kind of philosophy you choose depends on what kind of person you are. - For a philosophy that wants to talk about moral and ethical, moral-social aspects from its own field, such a sentence is, if you look more closely, downright devastating. For if, in its highest realizations, which are supposed to be the philosophical ones, one only reflects what one already is as a moral and social human being, then philosophy, world view, cannot possibly provide impulses for morality and the social. And anyone who takes such a sentence seriously will have to ask themselves the important question: How can knowledge, how can a body of knowledge have any kind of impelling effect on the moral, on the social life? For in our time, scientific thinking, which permeates all the life forces of human beings, would indeed like to have a certain authoritative effect on the moral and social life. This question seems to me to have a very special significance for our time, and to an even greater extent for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become one if it could not find any impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present time. Again and again, however, one is referred to the special nature of today's scientific spirit when such a question is raised.

This scientific spirit, it would like to develop in a way that actually contradicts Fichte's dictum. Today's scientific spirit, which has developed the way of thinking and the methods that are particularly suitable for the external, independent nature of man, would like to deliver results that cannot be said to be the way man is. And in fact, it will make a lot of sense if someone says today: a chemist who forms a world view, a physicist who forms a world view, will be pushed by the objectivity of his view to develop something that is valid for all people, so to speak, that cannot be said to be similar to what the human being is as a whole. In a sense, objective science must flourish independently of the moral or other state of the soul.

One can say: this science has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would want to believe that it is already sophistically oriented spiritual science, it still has this meaning to an increased extent. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become that if it could not find some impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present day. But again and again, when such a question is raised, attention is drawn to the special nature of today's scientific spirit.

This scientific spirit, it would like to develop in a way that actually contradicts Fichte's dictum. Today's scientific spirit, which has developed the way of thinking and the methods that are particularly suitable for the external, independent nature of man, would like to deliver results that cannot be said to be the way man is. And in fact, it will make a lot of sense if someone says today: a chemist who forms a world view, a physicist who forms a world view, will be pushed by the objectivity of his view to develop something that is valid for all people, so to speak, that cannot be said to be similar to what the human being is as a whole. In a sense, objective science must flourish independently of the moral or other state of the soul.

One can say: this science has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would want to believe that it is already sophistically oriented spiritual science, it still has this meaning to an increased extent. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become that if it could not find some impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present day. But again and again, when such a question is raised, attention is drawn to the special nature of today's scientific spirit.

This scientific spirit, it would like to develop in a way that actually contradicts Fichte's dictum. Today's scientific spirit, which has developed the way of thinking and the methods that are particularly suitable for the external, independent nature of man, would like to deliver results that cannot be said to be the way man is. And in fact, it will make a lot of sense if someone says today: a chemist who forms a world view, a physicist who forms a world view, will be pushed by the objectivity of his view to develop something that is valid for all people, so to speak, that cannot be said to be similar to what the human being is as a whole. In a sense, objective science must flourish independently of the moral or other state of the soul.

One can say that this scientific nature has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would believe that they already talk this way, that they say: you don't make social life with moral principles. That was considered almost the most outstanding axiom in the socialist-thinking circles of modern times, that all the social life drawn from moral or socially conceived maxims is an illusion. And the socialists' social attitude actually fed on this axiom. It was said that what really matters is not how some class, how some individual person thinks about what should actually happen socially, but that it matters that one turns to those people in whose egoism, in whose entirely natural, elementary egoism it lies to shape the world as it must be shaped – and that is the proletarian demand. I would like to say that, precisely because of the modern spirit of science, every moral principle, every social view not based on egoism, has been eliminated. And as long as we do not realize what this means for the whole course of the world in modern times, and as long as we do not want to see how our social needs arise from the feelings and thoughts of human beings, we will not be able to approach what our time particularly needs in this respect.

The scientific spirit of modern times is therefore powerless against moral and social impulses, as is simply shown by the historical course of events. What emanates from this spirit, however, flows through a certain social necessity into the minds of the broadest classes of people. And it is out of this attitude that even those who know nothing about science, who have not arrived at science, judge the social affairs of this world. What does that mean in this case? The social affairs are viewed in such a way that everything that must appear in a healthy way as a social and moral evaluation of some fact for humanity is also, as in the shaping of science, eliminated. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take this fact into account in particular. It wants to become a power that is able to unleash such moral impulses in the individual human being that these moral impulses can prevail in a socially beneficial way. But then the anthroposophical school of thought must lead, I would say, in the way people who develop it look at world phenomena, to bring the moral and the social into it so that one sees it.

In the lecture you gave earlier, you humorously showed how people are talked into all sorts of things in our social and economic life, and how these people then add these things to their household goods. Such things must be seen in their symptomatic aspect, and they are seen in their symptomatic aspect only when one can draw the connecting lines from them to the great events of world history. For if it were not for the fact that people let these things be talked into them by the peddlers, then there would not be that either – for things are connected in social life – which at the end was told to us about the horrific militarization of economic life.

What is truly effective in the here and now is what matters. And I would like to paint a picture for you, prompted, so to speak, by the humorous account I have just given, of how such peddling has an antisocial, dare I say it, anti-moral effect.

Once, when I was at a fair, a trader was selling huge amounts of soap. Now, ladies and gentlemen, an observation that really leads to social thinking must inspire the human mind to arrive at a point in life where soaps are offered that can be used for washing. But that was completely out of the question with the soaps offered by this trader. Those who tried it afterwards soon gave up the attempt to wash themselves with it permanently. But the trader did great business, and I will tell you how he did it. He had large bales of such soap next to him. He stood on a podium; he took a number of soaps from the first bundle. Now he was, in the best sense, what you might call a representative person. In the most wonderful phrases, he presented the excellence of his soap to his audience, and he called forth the opinion that this must be a particularly valuable soap, which one can pay well for, through everything he did there. And then he sold about ten soaps, piece by piece, for a very high price, the individual piece. This price was paid by those who happened to have the money in their pockets, and they were very happy to have received such good soaps; for they recognized the quality of the soap by the high price. Now they were standing there. The man had achieved as a representative personality what he wanted to achieve, and he was no longer interested in being this representative personality. Therefore, he said later: Oh, the way I've been selling the soaps up to now, they're much too expensive! These soaps are only worth half the price. I will sell them at half price from now on. And now he had the kind of customers again who would buy from him, and he was able to suggest to them that he was such a good man that he would sell the soap cheaper than the first buyers, who were still standing there, had received it. They didn't complain, but instead — excuse the harsh expression — opened their mouths wide. But then, when he still had a considerable number of bars of soap from the first bundle, he said: “But I'm a good man, I won't sell this last bar of soap at all, I'll throw it away.” And so he threw all the soap among the audience and they could pick it up for free.

I am telling you this fact not only because it is grotesque in itself, but because I also learned something else that is highly interesting. All this had happened and the salesman went to his second bundle, and he did it again in the same way, and in all three stages, and he again got rid of his bars of soap in all three stages!

This seems to me to be extraordinarily symptomatic, ladies and gentlemen, because when I look at the big businesses that are being done in the world, and when I look at the consuming public and how it relates to them, then I actually see all three stages continually there, and one can see from the perception of these three stages how internally impossible our economic structure actually is. But precisely under the modern spirit of science, this truly healthy, truly practical thinking has been lost. For practical thinking, which does not remain within the routine, but becomes a true purpose in life, must above all see reality in things, see what lies within them, not what is only outwardly before the eyes, and in which one can beguile people with all kinds of suggestions.

It is very often slanderously said of anthroposophical spiritual science that it seeks to exert some kind of suggestive power. In the example I have told you, which certainly did not originate with an anthroposophist, there was a great deal of suggestive power that is very common today, a suggestive power that its audience knows very well.

In contrast to this, anthroposophical spiritual science wants to provide something that is capable, through its inner vitality, of effectively seeing through social and moral connections, of finding something in the human being that find something that may be as Fichte's sentence expresses it: that it is of the same nature as the human being itself, but at the same time can be effective within the moral and social world. But if we really want to understand the spiritual life, then, ladies and gentlemen, we have to make some effort, and so, just to illustrate my train of thought today, allow me to go into something that can illustrate it a little from a completely objective point of view, without regard to personalities, from a certain quarter.

You see, when I spoke about it in Stuttgart, people from all sorts of different quarters believed that I consider Count Hermann Keyserling's comments about me to be a lie, and people from various quarters believed that I was personally annoyed and speaking about such a matter for some personal reason. But that was not the case at all, because I can give you the most honest assurance: I couldn't care less about what Count Hermann Keyserling thinks of me; I don't care about a personal attack. But there is something else I do care about: I care about looking at the phenomena that occur in our lives in terms of their ethical and moral value. And here I must say the following: I consider it one of the greatest achievements of modern science that – even if not always in practice, at least in the theories expressed – this modern science tends towards the proposition that one should not simply express what one subjectively believes to be true, but that one must absolutely recognize the obligation to first truly fathom the truth of what one expresses.

It is usually not recognized that there is something extraordinarily progressive in the assertion of this sentence, because anyone who is a historian or a scientist cannot and must not content themselves with the excuse that they have heard this or that here or there, but they are obliged to recognize the basis of truth for what they say. And this principle must be incorporated into our moral life, because if the moral life is to be the basis of the social, then morality must be permeated by objective truth and not merely by subjectively believed truth, because it is not this subjectively believed truth that has an effect on social life, but only objectively experienced truth. It must be said that we are now living in an age in which the split between knowledge and belief has led to a situation in which, whenever someone asserts something that they have believed and that subsequently turns out to be objectively untrue, they excuse themselves by saying that a person is entitled to assert what they believe to be the truth to the best of their knowledge and belief. My dear audience, this principle allows the possibility of every possible objective untruth entering into public life, and only by combating this principle can morality be brought into our social life, and into our business and economic life. Therefore, because I always want to make use of the spirit of truth that is necessary for anthroposophy on the one hand and for all of modern life on the other, I had to assert this spirit of truth in the face of what has occurred on the characterized side. I was interested in this as a cultural phenomenon, not as a personal matter, and as a cultural phenomenon it actually leads to that deeper concept of truth that we so urgently need today.

You see, it is easy to say that Count Hermann Keyserling is not an opponent of anthroposophy. Count Hermann Keyserling himself wanted to prove to me that he was not an opponent of anthroposophy, and that is why he wrote me a long letter a long time ago. But this long letter was written in a handwriting that I could not read; the lines that went across were always crossed by others, the letters were written in a highly sloppy and careless manner, and I really could not finish reading this letter. The person who is able to judge the world and people not according to arbitrary principles but according to essential inner symptoms could say to himself – this writing is of course not the reason I want to give for the underlying facts, but it is a symptom –: this writing, and the way such a letter is brought about, does not provide the human basis for what is attributed to Count Hermann Keyserling from certain quarters. And if you then approach his works, you find something, you find what I now express as my conviction: if Count Hermann Keyserling were to say that he was a very devious opponent and enemy of anthroposoph , dear ladies and gentlemen, I would believe him and I would find it entirely justified, because the person who writes Count Keyserling's books cannot be a follower of and cannot be an objective judge of anthroposophy. But if he says that he is not an opponent, then he is telling an objective untruth. When Count Hermann Keyserling says that he is not an opponent of anthroposophy, to me that says much more about his dishonesty than if he had honestly said that he must be an opponent. I do understand that there must be opponents; but the fact that there are people, numerous people, who today even become fashionable, who simply say the opposite of what is now their inner truth as an outer truth, that goes against the principle of anthroposophy, which looks everywhere for inner truth and not for outer truth, which is then no truth but only an apparent truth.

I wanted to emphasize this, dear attendees, for the reason that one should not always misjudge what the innermost impulse of anthroposophical sentiment is, and so that one may know that this anthroposophical sentiment touches the nerve of the present world, and it makes the claim not only to say what has already been said in the same sense, but to say it in a way demanded by the spirit of the time; but that demands that we even learn to think anew about lie and truth.

This, however, is the only thing that can guide us when we approach such an important problem as anthroposophy as a moral and social creative force. For there we must look at the fact that anthroposophy not only embraces this modern scientific spirit, this modern scientific spirit, but that it also develops that which is already present as a germ in this modern science, developing this germ more and more, while this germ is not developed by this modern science. Therefore, my dear audience, in its beginning, Anthroposophy is quite like modern science, but by inwardly grasping the essence of this modern science, it leads in its further course to where not only the facts of external nature are understood, but where the facts of the inner life of man are also understood, for example, the instincts or the will.

And we will only come to grasp the true core of anthroposophy, on the one hand, and to understand the moral and social impulses of anthroposophy, on the other, if we realize how the [scientific] spirit, which otherwise only grasps external natural facts, can can reach in, transforming and metamorphosing itself, into what the human being is in his instincts, for example, in his will impulses; for this is connected with the actual character of our present epoch, which began in the 15th century and in which we still find ourselves today. In the 15th century, the first seeds of the modern scientific spirit were sown, and this modern scientific spirit had to develop in a one-sided way. I cannot go into this in more detail now; I have explained it many times in other places. It had to develop the inner soul constitution in such a way that it was capable of pursuing the connection between external natural phenomena in a lawful way. In order that this one-sided power of the human soul-life might develop vigorously in spite of its one-sidedness, the other powers of human life and human organization had to be left behind for a while.

What first developed in a one-sided way was that which guided human beings to let a conscious soul-life take the place of an old instinctive soul-life. No matter how much one may declaim about the fact that man has lost his naivety as a result of consciousness having taken the place of the old instinctive, such declaiming has no more value than if one complains that one used to be twenty years old and looked a certain way, and now one is older. These things cannot be criticized, but must simply be recognized in their necessity. From the 15th century onwards, humanity had to pass over into consciousness, and it did so first in the realm of imaginative life. But even this imaginative life was formerly placed in the instinctive life. Those who are truly familiar with the totality of civilization and cultural life that preceded the 15th century, including Greek civilization, know how all the powers of the human soul worked instinctively in those days, and how even what was called scientific worked, in certain respects, much more instinctively, out of the instinct-based human soul condition, than it does today. And in this human soul-condition, borne by instinct, in which a world necessity beyond human beings was at work, a kind of threefold structure of this social life has always emerged, approximately, until the 15th century, as human beings have worked in social life. The instincts have worked, I might say, with natural certainty – if I may use this not quite proper expression. People have integrated themselves into the social organism through their instincts, and through what they have done in the process, what they have achieved – whether in these or those life situations that arose from people acting on instinct – a certain structure of the social organism has emerged in the spiritual sphere, in the legal-constitutional sphere and in the economic sphere.

This threefold social order, which today must be spoken of consciously, was basically present, even if this is not apparent to some people today who do not understand the threefold social order at all. , by feeling that he was part of the social life, he received what he needed to satisfy his imaginative, [his soul's] and his will needs, he received it from a spiritual member of the social organism, from a state-legal and from an economic one. They were in a relationship that was understood by humanity at that time through their instincts and that they could satisfy through their predispositions. Of course, today we no longer know what to do with this old structure.

But now came the newer time. It was the time when people developed their imaginative life one-sidedly. It was the first half of the 15th century, the 16th, 17th century, and partly still the 18th century. Beneath the imaginative life that had become conscious, there still glimmered what was left of the inheritance of the old instincts. And I would like to say that something instinctive was still at work in the moral and social spheres, while man passed over this world and looked at that which was now already emerging from his fully conscious life of ideas. But since then, since the 18th century, these instincts have completely died out, and what remains are only abstract traditions. We do not live today with an elementally generated morality and justice of the social world; we live because the instincts that used to establish social orders are no longer active. And as much as the Marxists believe that they live in Marxism, they live in the most ancient traditions, which can be seen from the fact that they always want to explain the conditions of social life from the prehistory of wild and barbaric peoples.

This is what has developed up to our most recent times. But this, ladies and gentlemen, has also led to the fact that man now only wants to approach social and moral life with his imagination, which has been developed one-sidedly, and that out of the old tradition, moral institutions and social institutions have arisen alongside it, for which only traditions remain, with which human life in its reality is no longer connected. And while instinct, the instinct-based state of mind, has, out of a sense of world necessity, placed the spiritual alongside the legal and the economic, the not yet fully developed life of ideas, the one-sidedly developed life of ideas, lacks the possibility of seeing through this structure of the social organism. What the human being can think and what he has in the way of traditions are mixed up in a chaotic way. He does not have the impetus to see the correct characteristics of spiritual, legal-state, and economic life, and in recent times he has mixed them up into chaos in all areas of state life.

This chaos is the latest phase in the development of the social organism. Man, placed in the social order, wants to receive from the spiritual life, out of his human nature, what this alone can give him in his freedom; he wants to receive from the legal-state life what this alone can give him when all mature people can have a say, and from the economic life what this alone can give when it is formed out of expertise and specialist knowledge in associations. Everything that a human being, in accordance with his nature, can only receive from a properly structured social organism, he should receive today from a chaos, from a chaotic formation of this social organism.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the fundamental cause of the crisis we are facing today; for everything you can describe in the field of education, in the field of the free intellectual life, insofar as it has still retained its freedom, everything you can describe in the fields of business life, the other economic sectors, all these are special crises in the face of the great crisis, [which consists in] the fact that man today, without the broad masses actually knowing it, is placed in a social chaos that actually rejects his innermost being. And this rejection manifests itself in the revolutionary, social-revolutionary forces of the present. And as long as one does not realize that the basis for our present world crisis lies in this modern powerlessness of man to see through the structure of the social organism, one will also be unable to have any understanding for the reforming forces of this world crisis.

Within the threefold structure of the social organism, however, there is one area that works differently from the others: the economic area. Economic life, which produces goods according to human needs, is subject to a certain necessity. These needs arise. This economic life still gives itself its social impulses in the same way as it used to give them according to old traditions. Man must pay attention to this. He has no freedom here, no arbitrariness. With regard to the legal and state life, and especially with regard to the spiritual life, he can divert attention from that which is really essential to him, and for the reasons I have given, modern humanity has diverted its attention from the structure of the social organism. This has become evident: that this turning away has initially only led to the neglect of progress in intellectual and legal life, but that economic life, as was to be expected from such neglect, could not but develop in a one-sided way. And so today we have a public thinking that basically pays no attention to intellectual and legal life, but continues to work in old forms, in old traditions, and which, through the natural economic necessities to see everything it thinks at congresses and other gatherings, in war and peace resolutions, solely in the light of this economic life.

And the means by which man could truly intervene in social life in the past were his instincts and his will. Anthroposophy shows us how man, through the activity of his will and his instincts, continually draws from a subconscious realm, just as he draws strength from sleep, which is also a subconscious state. Anthroposophical knowledge must absolutely place what the human being experiences in relation to the actual essence of his will in parallel with what he calls sleep. It is a sleep that we continually carry around in us as we let our will impulses work from the unconscious, just as the refreshing forces that approach our life work from what we gain in our sleep. But in relation to social life, this unconscious was only possible in a certain period of time; it has no longer been possible since the middle of the 15th century.

And here natural science is subjecting itself to a great, a powerful illusion: it wants to explain everything scientifically, it wants to include the human being in this scientific explanation, and from the principles it has formed about natural facts, it now wants to explain instinct and will. She constructs views about instinct and will that are actually only continued views about external natural existence. But anthroposophical spiritual insight shows us that instinct and will are rooted in their deeper essence in the spiritual and not in the natural, which we can only reach with natural science. Instinct and will are rooted in the spirit; they only integrate themselves in the human being. They reveal themselves in the human being in a natural shell. It is only this natural shell that science approaches; it does not approach the actual essence of instinct and will at all. But by taking the path from external natural science to a spiritual science, anthroposophy is able to see through not only the shell, the cover of instinct and will, but the true essence of instinct and will. And in so doing, it not only brings up into abstract thinking that which works as instinct and will, but the essence of instinct and will comes alive in the life of imagination. Anthroposophy begins as the most modern science as knowledge; in the further pursuit of its path, it leads to life, it leads the human being to submerge into those depths where instinct and will are rooted spiritually in the spirit. She may say, because she is a living being, with Fichte: What view one forms depends on what kind of person one is – because she is able, through her liveliness, to be allowed to work in the sense of this saying and yet be able to bear fruit for the moral, for the social life.

What kind of mind one has, dear attendees, depends to a certain extent on the nature of the rest of the human organism. But if we focus only on what lives in the mind, we fail to grasp the rest of the organism; then the rest of the organism seems like an unknown. Thus, for the modern scientific mind, that which works in the will below the level of the life of ideas still appears as an unknown. If, then, this modern science works in the way that the human being is constituted, it does not see through, and therefore does not experience, what is in the human being's will nature, because it does not penetrate into this will nature of the human being. By rising from knowledge to full life, anthroposophy flows with all human consciousness into the stream of instinct and will, making them conscious, and one thereby acquires the possibility of working not only on one's thinking but on one's whole human being. But then, when we have a science that works on the whole human being, then, while we think, that which may influence this thinking arises in the other person. Then knowledge and life work as an organic whole, where one determines the other simultaneously, not one after the other. Then, in this organic interaction, philosophy, including moral philosophy, may be what the human being can make of them by virtue of his or her nature.

These, esteemed attendees, are the things we must look at if we want to recognize anthroposophy as a moral and social impulse. This is what anthroposophy believes it has to say to our time in this regard, to which it feels obliged to say it. And it must be convinced that the possibility of replacing the oppressive forces with constructive ones will not arise until people decide, when discussing economic issues, to look at what is beneficial for the spiritual and for the legal life, until they have a true heart for what alone can become lawful and what can only arise from the harmony of all of all mature human beings in their independent legal lives, before they do not have a deep feeling that genuine spiritual life can only flourish when it is left to its own devices, that the three can only work together as they once worked together out of instinct, when consciousness out of man finds its way to the secrets of the world, to which it once found its way when it still worked only instinctively.

This time will be the time when people no longer marvel at the world like Woodrow Wilson — at least he was, even if he is no longer — justify the state administration of school education by saying that only the state is capable of creating the conditions of freedom in which the free individual can live. Well, my dear audience, such a freedom is only to be allowed to prevail if it is conditioned, that is, made necessary by state institutions.

And further, in his great book “The State”, published in 1889, Woodrow Wilson says: the state must not give up control of the schools, because what the state needs for its power, for its authoritative effectiveness, it can best achieve by owning the teaching.

Now, my dear audience, anyone who feels what freedom of spiritual life should and must be must rebel against a maxim that says: the state must instill in children what it needs for its preservation – because by saying this, it is saying that the state must establish in schools that which is not freedom of spiritual life, which is the deepest lack of freedom in spiritual life.

As long as scientists do not have an eye, an eye of the soul, to look up to what is thought about the spiritual, about the legal, there can be no improvement in our present moral life, which underlies the social, and in this social life itself, because we not only need a critique of the old moral instincts, a critique of the old social concepts, we need the creation of new moral impulses and new social impulses. But these can only come about through a science, through a knowledge that, by spiritualizing human knowledge itself, is also capable of penetrating into the spiritual world.

Dear attendees! In the introductory words to the last but one performance here, I took the liberty of saying a few words about the educational and artistic aspects of eurythmy. If I now also take the liberty of saying a few words before today's performance, it is for a special reason. Today, we will not only have eurythmized lyrical and similar material in the performance, but also dramatic scenes, and indeed dramatic scenes from my Mystery Dramas. We are dealing here with the use of eurythmy in the dramatic presentation of the dramatic. Now the peculiar thing about eurythmy is that it moves away from the treatment of speech and sound as practised by the poet and the composer and back to that visible language that expresses through the movements of people or groups of people what would otherwise be expressed through music or speech.

But now, in order for the poetry, the tonal, to be real art, one must go back from the mere content of what is heard to the deeper treatment of the tone, the sound, the word, the word connections and so on. One must go back to what rhythm, beat, what rhyme treatment is, what the musical or imaginative theme is and so on. Why is it necessary to go back from the literal content or the musical content, which is basically just an invisible eurythmy, to this eurythmy? Because all art, ladies and gentlemen, must carry what can be experienced into the realm of the supersensible, of the spiritual. And it is precisely through this that one is able, for example, to carry the linguistic up into the spiritual, that one carries this formal - the rhythmic and so on - into speech treatment.

Since eurythmy is particularly concerned with bringing this imperceptible, or rather, only indirectly perceptible, into direct sensory perception, it is particularly suitable for depicting dramatic scenes in which the actions that otherwise take place on earth in the sensual-physical realm move up into the supersensible-spiritual realm; when something is to be presented on stage that connects the human being in the innermost being of his soul with the world soul and the world spirit, in fact with the supersensible.

We have had this experience, at first in particular in the performance of individual scenes from Goethe's Faust – where Goethe is compelled by his entire Faustian plot to carry the individual actions up into a supersensible realm – in order to reveal that which cannot be represented by ordinary gestures in the sensual-physical realm. The prologue in heaven, the Ariel scene at the beginning of the second part, the scenes in the classical or romantic Walpurgis Night, much of what is found in the second part in particular, is treated by Goethe in language in such a way that one sees that the poet as an artist feels that in this case must depart from the more or less naturalistic of stage presentation in the gesture — and proceed to something that also stylistically elevates that which the human being presents on the stage through himself, into a stylized realm, and thereby brings the supersensible to revelation on the stage. Such scenes, in which the supersensible plays, do not tolerate the ordinary gestures that have to be used in the reproduction of such actions that play in the physical-sensual realm. And in particular, it may be said that this can be illustrated by my mystery dramas, which in so many cases have to carry the developmental impulses that play in these mysteries into the supersensible realm. And here one can say that they can easily be carried upwards. For, you see, my dear audience, these mysteries are slandered if one believes that something is conceived abstractly in them and then brought into a poetic-artistic form. I may say, without committing any immodesty, that these mysteries, as they appear before our eyes in their pictorial sequence today, were originally seen in pictures in the mind; everything in these mysteries, in space and temporality, everything in these mysteries has been conceived in pictures, and I always feel annoyed when people appear who interpret these mysteries symbolically in some way, because I had nothing symbolic in mind. I also had the supersensible scenes in imaginations, in pictures, so precisely, so down to the hearing, the inner hearing of the sound of the words, as they stand there. They were conceived literally and are only copied from what was seen.

Therefore, the scenes that play into the supersensible realm must have a certain eurythmic quality right from the conception, and I would say that this is particularly brought to life in the art of eurythmy in an elementary way. We may believe that precisely where drama must rise into the supersensible, that is where eurythmy will be able to render great service to drama.

I do hope, however, that ordinary naturalistic theatre, where gestures are used to imitate natural gestures, will one day be able to be treated in some way using eurythmy, if not in terms of the gestural-mimic expression of the individual action, but at least in terms of the stylization of the ductus that runs through the entire drama. It is possible that a eurythmic style can be found for more naturalistic dramas. So far I have not succeeded, but I cherish the hope that, as with lyric, epic and so on, the dramatic will also be able to make use of eurythmy on a larger scale, where it does not rise into the supersensible either.

But precisely through that which can be achieved in the dramatic field today with the help of eurythmy, perhaps in a way that is convincing for the spectator, one may perhaps also say, from a different point of view than before, that eurythmy can become something – even if is still in its infancy today, and if basically we can only make attempts at it today, that eurythmy will be able to become something that can one day stand as a fully-fledged art alongside the other fully-fledged arts in all its individual branches.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

Dear ladies and gentlemen! With your permission, I will expand on and supplement what I have already said during the tour of the Goetheanum, and present a summary of our building here today.

For many years, our anthroposophical movement worked by holding its meetings in ordinary halls, as can be found today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the commission to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or goal, builds a house for itself today — and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of goals — then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual process today. If Anthroposophy had been a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But Anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way. Furthermore, Anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the ideas of Anthroposophy arise from the whole of human experience, from the deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has arisen from a primeval source, just as it was the case with the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teaching, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given on the other side for direct artistic insight. It is not a translation or transposition of anthroposophical ideas into art that is at issue here, but rather a different branch that can develop as art from the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come.

What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from the plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. This means nothing other than that if anthroposophy creates a physical shell in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older worldviews have given their physical shells the corresponding style. Take the Greek style of architecture, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic, Greek views of the gods. The Greeks felt that in creating their temples they were building a dwelling for the gods. And this corresponds to what earlier cultural views saw in the further development of the human soul that had passed through death; there is a certain qualitative relationship between the Greek god and the human soul that has passed through death, as it was felt in earlier cultural currents. And something similar to how in ancient times dwellings were built for human souls that had passed through death, while still believed to be on earth, was later shaped by the Greeks in their temple. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul that belongs to a different hierarchy, a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and burdening and other things for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, as a chthonic deity, as an earth , this house was formed out of the earth, so that the temple was built as a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limb-being, as such a connection of forces. A Greek temple is only to be considered complete when one views it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those who have a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can only feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and so on.

Let us skip ahead in art history and look at the Gothic building. When you experience the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, not complete. The Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside it, whose souls resonate in harmony in their work. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue. A Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

The Greek worldview, or the worldview that took shape in the Gothic period, are dead worlds for today's humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that stem from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed one-sidedly in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of an architectural style of its own for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the fact that, to a certain extent, a higher being in man, but which is man himself, speaks to the person who lives in ordinary life, which takes place between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide is spatially expanded, what inwardly belongs to the life that we lead between birth and death. And when a person enters this building in the sense of such an anthroposophical world view, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structures.

Dear attendees! When I had the pleasure of welcoming you here as visitors to our summer course last Sunday, I was able to say from the bottom of my heart that here in this Goetheanum we are trying, in science, in art and in everything that can be religiously inspired by science and art in the depths of the human being, to follow the clearly audible call of the spirit of the time itself, which, as we believe, allows itself to be heard, as it is understood here, because it wants people to use their strength to lead themselves out of decline and towards a new dawn. The work of this Goetheanum and the work of all its co-workers is to be devoted to the fulfillment of this call of the times. In the short time during the summer course that we have been so fortunate as to see you here, it was naturally impossible to give more than a few hints about the intentions of this Goetheanum and the actual goal that our co-workers have in mind for this work. But what is to be worked out here should be a living whole. And so it cannot be otherwise than that, as in the life of an individual human being, every single step one takes, be it as a child, as an adult or as an old person, contains the meaning of one's whole life in some way, that in the same way, in a living spiritual body, a living spiritual activity, the individual step, which can only be presented in the short span of a week, nevertheless shows in a certain sense the meaning of the whole. And we would be happy here if you could take something from this one step about the meaning of our work, about the meaning of our will. I have often taken the liberty of expressing something of the meaning of this work, of this will, by pointing out how the content of knowledge expressed here in the word is the one branch that grows out of one root, but how another branch, that of artistic creation, grows out of this root, so that here neither art nor science is introduced into the other, but that both have the same root and both want to work out their products here with equal rights and in a fully creative way. And when that which can be expressed in ideas for the sake of knowledge, that which can be expressed in forms for the sake of contemplation, is worked out in this way, then that which is revealed from both sides, from the two most important and essential sides of human nature, that it seizes the religious roots of human existence, that it works into the human being, into those deeper dispositions of the heart where the human being is connected to the unity of the world, to the divine in the world. So that, even if not everything is to be reformed here and cannot be reformed, religious life is cultivated as it can be cultivated when the other revelations of the divine, the artistic and the scientific, are cultivated in the right way. This sense was expressed by Goethe, from whom this Goetheanum bears the name, in the beautiful word: He who possesses science and art also has religion. He who does not possess both, let him have religion.

And because such a gathering touches on the most essential part of what a human being carries within, in his entire humanity, we would like to work in such a way that those who come as visitors also come closer to each other humanly, humanly closer to what wants to work and be effective here out of the sense of Goetheanism. And anyone who understands the meaning of Goetheanism would like to hope that what is striven for and felt here will lead people to leave here with the thought that they have seen something in this Goetheanum, have experienced something that gives one the feeling of a kinship of the forces that live in all human beings, of a kinship of those forces in human nature that can bring people together in brotherhood from all over the world. One would also like to hope that those who visit this Goetheanum would have the feeling that it is being striven for here with our modest means – whether we can actually achieve this, that will depend on the judgment of our contemporaries – the aim here is that those who experience the work and the whole being of this Goetheanum here, because they experience human kinship, can feel this house like a human soul home. If only you could take with you the feeling that you were in a home for human souls! In a home, everything that we feel, sense and experience points to the communal processes and origins. The sense of belonging, the sense of brotherhood of all humanity, is what we would like to instill in everything that is done here. And I would also like to say today, as we part, that your visit may have contributed something to this great goal of human brotherhood, to whose collaboration everyone who enters this Goetheanum, at least in the spirit in which it was intended, must feel called. And so may the days you have spent here have brought you closer to us as human beings as well. Nowadays, we hear calls for human brotherhood and human alliances everywhere and from all sides. But what do we want to achieve by raising this call? We want to unite people who have inflicted unspeakable pain on each other in a terrible catastrophe to form fraternal alliances. Is such a union necessary if we approach the human being in the right way, by approaching the spirit from which the human being has grown, in which the human being is rooted? True, genuine human brotherhood does not need to be established, does not need to be glued together, if people want to seek the human brotherhood that has existed since the human being has existed, that human brotherhood that is found when one penetrates to the human spirit, in which human beings nevertheless actually are, since the human being has existed on earth. To seek true human brotherhood means to seek the source of the human being in the spirit, in the spiritual world; such genuine seeking is what is striven for here at the Goetheanum. In this respect, the work and striving of the Goetheanum is connected with the demands of the present-day spirit. It was out of this spirit that I was able to call out the words of greeting to you on Sunday when you came here. It was with a grateful heart, because this gratitude always wells up in those who are serious and honest about the tasks of this Goetheanum, and it wells up when people come together who want to pay attention to what is wanted here. After these days have passed, this gratitude towards you is rooted all the more in my mind. It is out of this thankfulness that I say goodbye to you today, but this farewell can be summarized in the words that come from the whole living spirit that strives for the future: “See you soon!”

Gentlemen, the question that has been asked is:

Is the iris in the eye the mirror of the soul in a healthy and diseased state?

I think the second question can be added, they are probably meant together:

What causes albinism or leukopathy in black people?

If we want to answer this question, we must first take a closer look at the workings of the human eye. The question relates to the fact that certain people can tell whether a person's entire body is healthy or sick by looking at the color of the iris, the colored ring-shaped body in the eye that surrounds the black of the so-called pupil. Not only, as you know, is a person's iris colored blue or black or brown or gray or even greenish brown, but the iris also has lines drawn in one way or another, which are created by fine vessels. So that, just as the general facial expression of one person is different from that of another, the finer structure of this iris or rainbow skin is quite different in different people, and much more different from each other than the actual physiognomy of people is different from each other.

Now we have to go into the structure of the eye a little if we want to talk about such a thing. This is connected with the other question you have asked. Namely, that especially in Negroes, but also otherwise, in non-black people, an abnormal, not quite ordinary skin coloration occurs, which is connected with the special coloration of the iris. This is connected in a certain way. Now this skin color is particularly noticeable in naturally black people, because they are just black, and then they have all kinds of white spots, and are then mottled like a tiger. They are very rarely completely pale and completely white; this occurs very rarely among Negroes, extremely rarely. But such so-called albinos also occur in other races that are not completely black. But this albinism also occurs in white people, in the so-called cockroaches – that's what they're called – they have a very pale skin color, almost milk-white skin color. Then they usually have a light reddish iris, and the pupil, which is otherwise black in humans, is then dark red. I once saw a female cockroach like this who even exhibited herself in all kinds of sideshows and let herself be seen. She had milky-white skin, a red iris or rainbow-shaped pupil, dark red pupils instead of black eye stars, and would then say in an extremely weak voice: “I am all white, have red eyes and see very weakly.” That was true, she saw very weakly.

If we want to get into this matter, we must, above all, study the structure of the eye itself. Over time, I have told you many things about the eye. Therefore, today you will perhaps understand what I have to say. You see, the eye is located inside the very firm bony body of the head. The bone structure of the head bulges inside, and in this bone cavity, which is open towards the brain at the back (see drawing), the eye sits inside. The eye is now first limited from the outside by a hard skin, which is opaque here. The so-called eyeball is limited by the cornea. This skin becomes transparent towards the front, here, where it bulges out a little. Otherwise, one could not approach the light with the inside of the eye if this outer cornea were not transparent. It is called the cornea because it is horny. Inwards from this is a skin, which consists of fine veins. The blood network of the body extends into the eye and also sends very small, fine veins into the eye. So here we have the hard cornea, which becomes transparent towards the front, and then the so-called choroid, which is adjacent to it. The third skin inside is formed from nerves; this is the so-called retina. So I still have to draw a third membrane, the retina. And the retina goes backwards into the brain, as does the choroid, of course. And this is called the optic nerve because it is a nerve substance, it goes to the eye. You know that people say: you feel through the nerves. — So with the optic nerve you see.

Now, the strange thing is that everyone has to admit that, as people say, you can see with the optic nerve everywhere here, except precisely where it enters; there it is blind, you see nothing there! So if someone looks just enough to somehow see out there, or if the nerves around it are diseased and only the spot where the optic nerve enters is healthy, then you still see nothing where the optic nerve enters. Now people say: with the optic nerve you see, it is there for that, that you see. Have you now heard the following? Just imagine: there is a group of workers, let us say thirty workers. Twenty-five of them have to work very hard; they are standing everywhere. And there is a group of five – they won't do it, but I'll assume they do it – these five are allowed to laze around while the others work hard. So we can say: there are the 25 hard-working laborers, and there are five who laze around all the time, sitting on padded chairs and lazing around. If someone were to tell you that the work is being done just as well by the five idlers – or perhaps he can't say that because he doesn't see it, but the work is accomplished by idling – you won't believe it, will you? That is nonsense. But now science teaches us that the optic nerve sees. But precisely at the point where it is most, it sees nothing! It is just as if you were to say: the work is done by what the five loafers are doing. You see, one knows such things—that is precisely the strange thing—one knows such things, but one nevertheless continues to assert quite ordinary nonsense. Isn't it, from the fact that here is the so-called blind spot—that's what it's called—and that you see nothing at all at the point where the optic nerve attaches the most, it is quite clear from this that the optic nerve cannot be what you see with.

The thing is this: there is something in the human body that is very similar to this thing in the optic nerve; namely, your two arms and hands. Imagine picking up a chair. You strain your arms all the way down to your hands. But what connects them stays up there, doesn't it. It's the same with the optic nerve. They are aiming at something that is affected by light, and in the middle it is as it is between the two arm approaches here. But it is not the optic nerve that is affected - because if it were the optic nerve, it would have to see the most of all - but what is affected is something of the very invisible that I have described to you. That is precisely the I, the ego organization. It is not the physical body, not the etheric body, it is not even the astral body; it is the I. And so I have to draw something else in there besides what is already there: there is the invisible I that is spreading out. Only it is not as if there were two such arms, but rather as if the arms were closing and becoming a sphere. We already begin to make a sphere with our hands when we touch something. So there is the supersensible I; it is reaching out there. And what is the nerve for? Yes, gentlemen, the nerve is for this purpose - because it is the work of the invisible human being - that something is secreted. Substance is secreted everywhere, and it remains there everywhere. With the supersensible self, one sees. But the nerve is there to secrete something.

Think of the nonsense that science says, just as if one were to examine the large intestine and what is inside it, and then immediately say, from what is now being excreted from the large intestine, that this is how humans nourish themselves! Just as what is excreted is inside the large intestine, so the nerve substance is excreted here. And this (the blind spot) is then the place where it is excreted the most. What is not needed in the eye is excreted into the brain, then goes further and is excreted at all. You see, this is something that you can easily understand, but about which the most fantastic stories are told to you today. It's just that people don't realize what it means when it is said that the nerve substance is seen or felt or something is perceived. That would be just as if one were nourishing oneself with the contents of the rectum. So you see that this business of the blind spot has no significance for vision, because the optic nerve does not see around it either, only here, where the blind spot is, is where the most secretion occurs. And just as nutrition ends in the rectum, where it is only for excretion, so here too vision ends, because that is where most is excreted, and because it makes no sense for vision to be in the middle.

Imagine you have a stick lying there and want to pick it up with your head! You can't. You have to pick it up with your arm, with your hand, with what is attached at the side. You can't see with your nerve either. You have to see with what is attached.

Now, gentlemen, everything that is there (pointing to the drawing) ends here in a kind of muscle. This muscle carries the lens. This is a completely transparent body. Why transparent? So that you can get to the light. And behind this body here is a thick liquid. In front of it is an even thicker liquid, and in this thicker liquid at the front floats the iris or rainbow skin, which is located here near the veins. It really floats in the liquid and leaves a hole open for the light. This hole appears black when you look into it, because you look through the entire eye to the background, which is black.

This iris is fairly transparent at the front, but at the back it is black. This black skin at the back is quite thin in some people. Because if it is thin, when you look through the transparent part into the black, certain people have blue eyes. And in those with thicker skin here, where you look at the thick back skin at the iris, they have black eyes or dark eyes. We will talk about brown eyes in a moment.

Now, gentlemen, we need to educate ourselves about what it is that causes the skin here, which actually determines the blue or brown or black, to be thicker or thinner in some people. I have already told you: what is called the I, the noblest, supersensible part of the human being, goes into the eye. The I goes into it. The I is more or less strong in different people. Now suppose a person has a very strong ego. You see, such a person is capable of completely dissolving the iron that is in the blood and that he also gets into the eye through this choroid. So someone with a very strong ego completely dissolves the iron, and the result of this is that little iron enters this skin, which is at the very outermost edge of the body, because it is completely dissolved. So little iron enters, and the result of this is that this skin becomes thin. Because it becomes thin, you get blue eyes. Now imagine that a person has a weak ego; then he does not dissolve the iron as much, and the result of this will be that a lot of undissolved iron gets into this skin. The skin becomes thicker because of this undissolved iron and the person gets dark, black eyes. So it depends on the ego whether the person has black or blue eyes.

Now, gentlemen, there is also another substance in the blood: sulfur. And even if the ego can process the iron, it is sometimes still unable to process the sulfur. If the ego lets the sulfur into the skin without processing it, then a yellowish-brown color develops in the iris, and that is how brown eyes come about. And if a lot of sulfur gets into the eyes, then a reddish iris develops. Because of the sulfur shimmering behind it, even the pupil does not turn black. You do not see the black, but the emitted, sprayed sulfur itself makes the pupil dark red. This is the case with cockroaches and humans who otherwise cannot supply their skin with the right color. So you can say: there are people who can inject sulfur into their eyes. The ego can inject it, and this is how the iris gets its special color.

But what goes into the eye in the way of sulfur or iron goes into the whole body, because it comes from the blood. There are only small blood vessels here in the eye. So if someone injects sulfur into the eye, he injects sulfur into his entire skin everywhere. And the consequence of injecting sulfur into his entire skin everywhere is that he does not have his natural skin color at the points where the sulfur has been injected; because the natural skin color comes from the processing of iron. So when a person processes their iron only slightly, but instead spews sulfur, then they get such mottled spots in their skin, and at the same time you can see it in the color of their eyes.

So you see: when you look at this invisible human being that is in every human being, you can understand the human being right down to the material level, right down to the substance. Anthroposophy is not so stupid that it does not understand the material. Materialism does not understand the material. Read somewhere about albinism, what can you read? The one of you who asked me the question will probably have read somewhere: the cause of albinism is unknown! — Materialism always comes to this strange conclusion: the cause is unknown! — because it does not trouble itself at all with those cases where the causes can be found. Of course it is easy to say: There is a red pupil. Yes, but one must know what is actually working inside and what history injects, because the red coloration and the pale coloration of the body comes from sulfur.

Now you can understand what real science is. Imagine you come to a place on earth where something has been worked on; someone looks at it and says: The work is already there, the cause is unknown. He does not care what happened before; that is why he states: the cause is unknown. He does not care that, for example, thirty people have been working there for many days. That is how science does it when it says: the cause of the red coloration of the pupil and the pale coloration of the skin is unknown. — But the cause lies precisely in the I that works in the matter, in the substance.

But from this you can also see that the iris really does contain a true reflection of how the whole body works with iron and sulfur. But take such an albino, such a cockroach; that is actually a kind of disease. There is too much sulfuric work in the body, but the body gets used to it, and it is organized. But now it can happen that this enters the eyes to a much lesser extent. You see, apart from the cockroaches I told you about, apart from the lady who exhibited herself in the show, I have seen many cockroaches. You can always tell that there is something very special about such cockroaches. You can say: There is a cockroach, an albino like this, and it has this peculiar reddish coloration of the iris, pale red, has the dark red coloration of the pupil, has the pale body. If you examine it further, you get from the nature of its body the view that in its case the connection between heart and kidney is particularly weak. He is not only weak in the eyes, he is weak in the connection between heart and kidneys. The kidneys of such a person are supplied with blood with great difficulty, so they work very hard. If he were to deposit the sulfur that he carries throughout his body in his kidneys, he would die as a child. Therefore, he releases the sulfur through the surface of the body – the skin turns white, the eyes turn red – so that the kidneys can work gently. Such albinos have kidneys that work very gently, for example. This can also occur in other people. But if, in people who are not cockroaches (most of them are not cockroaches), some kind of defect occurs in the kidneys, then doesn't it have to show up in the iris as well? What the sulfur and iron do together there is also expressed here. From the nature of the human iris, one can therefore conclude whether there is any damage in the human body. Therefore, if there is a spot here or there in the fine appearance of the iris, which is not actually normal, one can see: there is damage in the body. But, gentlemen, you have to bear this in mind: the human body is a unified whole, and what you see in the iris you would also see, if you were clever enough, if you cut out a small piece of skin and took it out – something would also appear in the skin that would not be normal – or even if you cut the nail of your big toe. There is also a very fine structure that could show if the liver, kidneys or lungs were not working properly, although it is a little different again. So if someone were particularly clever and, instead of examining the iris, were to examine the cut fingernails, for example – it would be much more difficult because it is not as pronounced – they would also be able to recognize the healthy or diseased condition there. It is only noticeable in the eye because the eye is an especially delicate structure, and the delicate is easy to grasp. It is most pronounced in the eye. But you can see that things are most pronounced on the surface of the body. For example, I have rarely seen someone put something on their shoulders when they want to feel a particularly fine material or something like that. If it were the case that it would be more advantageous, we would do something about it, so that when we have to feel something fine, we could free ourselves up there on the shoulder and feel it. But that doesn't help us. We feel it with the fingertips. And at the fingertips we are particularly sensitive to feeling things. There you have the same thing again. If the nervous system were what actually makes up feeling, then we should feel the most where we are close to the brain. But we don't feel the most close to the brain; instead, we feel the most where we are furthest from the brain, in the outermost fingertips, because the I sits most on the surface of the body. What a person is in their inner self can best be recognized on the outermost surface. Therefore, because the eyes are closest to the surface, they can also recognize the most, because the eyes are delicate and far away from the brain.

You may say: The eyes are in the skull and close to the brain. But there are quite a few bones in the way, and where the eye is connected to the brain, where there is no bone, nothing can be seen. So at the fingertips, it is due to the vastness of space that they are particularly sensitive; in the case of the eyes, it is because they are most protected from the brain.

There is something else that is strange. When any lower animal develops its brain, it develops the brain in such a way that the brain leaves the cavity free for the eye, and the eye does not grow out of the brain in that way, but rather it starts from the side and grows into it (it is drawn). The eye grows from the outside, not from the brain; the eye grows into the brain. So it is formed from the outside.

From all this you can see that what is formed on the surface, whether in the skin or in the eye, is connected with the way in which a person is actually most in touch with the outside world. In a person who is always in bed, who cannot use his will for his body, one cannot say that he is developing his ego strongly. In a person who is very mobile, one can say that he expresses his ego strongly. And that which otherwise brings us into contact with the outside world, that is precisely in smelling, seeing and so on, these are the senses. And the eye is just the most delicate sense that brings us into contact with the outside world. So you can say: because the I is particularly strong in these fine veins – there are terribly fine veins in this iris – you can see a lot from this, how the whole I works inwards, whether a person is healthy or sick.

That is the original truth and knowledge that can be gained about this matter. But the fact that I have just described to you is also one of the most difficult, because one must be very thoroughly informed about what such a small irregularity in the iris means if one wants to draw conclusions about a healthy or sick person. I will give you an example. You see, it may be, for example, that in some irises there are dots, dark dots, here or there. These dark dots naturally mean that the person has something that is not there otherwise, if these dark dots are not in the iris. But suppose the person in whom these dark dots appear were a terribly stupid fellow. Then he will have some kind of illness that these dark spots indicate. But in the case of the person with these dark spots, it may also be that in his youth he was overstrained with some kind of learning, had to learn beyond his physical strength. Then, as a result of having used certain organs too much in his youth, he may have developed a certain weaker activity in the eyes, and then these small iron deposits, these very fine iron deposits, can occur as a result of overexertion in childhood. So they can occur as a result of an illness in later life, but they can also occur as a result of overexertion in childhood. Most people think: if I see black spots in the iris, then there must be this or that in the body. But it depends on knowing not only the present life of the person concerned, but especially if you want to recognize something like this in terms of the causes of the disease, you have to go through the whole life of the person with him; you have to let him remember what he has already done here or there in childhood. Thus, what one sees in the iris can point to many things. And to draw conclusions from something like this to something in particular is one of the most complicated forms of knowledge.

That is why it is so outrageous that all kinds of little books are being written today; the things that are written there are usually very short and are called: On Eye Diagnosis. There you get a fifty-page instruction on how to examine the iris. Like this, right? There is the iris classification, there is the pupil, drawn quite schematically, then the disease is indicated; spleen disease is then indicated; lung disease, syphilis and so on. Now the eye diagnostician in question, who is familiar with what is recorded in this way, when he looks at the iris with a moderate magnifying glass, need only refer to his little book; and when he notices what is written where lung disease is written, he states: lung disease! And that is how numerous eye diagnosticians do it today after a study of an hour. They then leave the rest to the little book they have; they just make the diagnosis. Yes, gentlemen, but that is outrageous. Because what is most difficult is to be learned in the easiest way. This does not lead to the acquisition of something valuable, but on the contrary, it damages the whole medical system. And one must distinguish whether someone seriously wants to achieve something in the medical field, or whether someone just wants to make money.

Of course, people are upset about science today; and rightly so, because, according to the example of the optic nerve that I told you about, science actually does not pay attention to what a person really is, but most appreciates the filth of a person, the filth in the eye, for example, which is the optic nerve. Of course, people don't know that, but they feel it and become disgusted by science. This outrage can be understood. But what the eye diagnostician usually does is not better than science, but usually much worse. Science, unsuspecting because of materialism, considers dirt to be the noblest components of the human being. Of course, the dirt is also very necessary, because if it were to remain in the body, it would kill the body very soon; so it is necessary. But science thinks that dirt is the most valuable thing about a person! But that means it is on the path of good and does not just want to make money. It is just blinded. It just has a very large blind spot in its knowledge; but with all that, one must acknowledge the good will. But with these little eye diagnostic devices, one can no longer speak of good will, only of the desire to make money. That is why you always have to ask yourself about all these things: a good truth can underlie any endeavor, but it is precisely the best truths, gentlemen, that are most often misused by the world. You see, it is truly wonderful that in this little iris the healthy and the sick person are both completely reflected. But on the other hand, because the healthy and the sick person are both completely reflected, the iris is also most difficult to recognize in its entirety, and it must be said that anyone who practices eye diagnosis without recognizing the whole person, without really knowing something about the whole person, is practicing nonsense.

And what does it mean to recognize the whole person? You see, we have learned that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and the I. So not only do we need to know something about the physical person, but, especially if we are doing eye diagnosis, we also need to know something about the spiritual person. The usual anatomy, which only deals with the corpse, can, under certain circumstances, suffice with what it offers; it can actually offer relatively good things. Even if it does not know that the eye nerve is the dirt of the eye, at least it finds the eye nerve. But the eye diagnostician usually has no idea how the nerve runs, but has his little book of fifty pages and the classification of the iris and diagnoses away, without examining the person. Now, of course, he needs some other little book, again of fifty pages. There is the rubric “lung disease” and the remedy for it. But lung disease is something that can come from many causes. Knowing that the lungs are affected is not enough. The lungs can be affected by digestion. You have to know where it comes from. Many people suffer from lung disease. For many, the lung disease has a wide variety of causes. This is precisely where you have to be extremely careful, because where the most beautiful things are present, there is the most nonsense. How much have I told you in these lessons about the fact that man does not depend only on the earth, but on the whole starry sky. But that is precisely what requires the most complicated insight. You must not do any nonsense with it. After all, the various astrologers in the world today are doing a great deal of fraud and nonsense. It is similar with eye diagnostics as with astrology. There is also something very noble and magnificent underlying astrology; but for those who practice astrology today, there is nothing very noble underlying it. For them, speculation about the wallets of their fellow human beings is usually the underlying basis.

And so you can understand the connection, gentlemen: on the one hand, there are the phenomena that change the entire surface of the human being externally. The person gets pale spots where the skin is otherwise darker; his eyes change color, he is an albino. A certain activity is driven to the surface, diverted from the internal organs. But if the person is not a cockroach, not an albino, then the same things, the outer appearance of the eye, are present in the iris; but the finer structure, the finer arrangement then points to the inside. An albino is not a completely sick person just because he is an albino, but he is only afflicted with a predisposition to disease because he has it from an early age and his physical makeup becomes accustomed to it later.

You see, it is not at all good to call the albino a leukopath. This already indicates, because leukocytes, for example, are certain bodies in the blood, that the blood of such people is different. We do not know the cause. But if the blood becomes paler on the surface, then the general pallor does not occur, but the skin becomes paler on the surface. That is the difference between the disease of anemia, where the blood simply becomes paler on the inside, and leukopathy or albinism, where the blood is pushed more to the surface. So it is the case that in the case of people with anemia, an activity in the interior is not in order. The ego is more active on the surface, the astral body more in the interior. Therefore, all the bodies with which one sees and hears are more pushed to the surface. You need them for the ego. You need your liver in the inner being. And if you felt everything as strongly as your liver does, then you would constantly observe only your inner being and say: Aha, now I have just received a little cabbage soup in my stomach, the stomach walls are beginning to absorb it. It is like a radiance, very interesting. Now it goes through the pylorus into the small intestine; now it goes into the villi that are on the intestinal walls. You would observe all this, and all this, that would be very interesting; but you would not have time to observe the outside world! It is very interesting and there is plenty to observe and in some things much more beautiful than the outside world, but the human being is just quite distracted by it. So in general, what is inside does not come to consciousness; what lies on the surface comes to consciousness. So if someone does not process the iron properly in his inner being, where the astral person is more active, he will become an anemic person. If he does not process the iron properly on the outside, but dissolves it as I have described to you, then he will become an albino - which is very rare - or he will get leukopathy.

So you see, the question I was asked is related to this: albinism comes from an irregular processing of sulfur or iron by the ego. Anemia comes from an irregular processing of iron by your astral body and has more of an effect on the inside of the blood. Thus, if one only understands the human being correctly in what is going on inside him, one can also see which supersensible part of the human being is actually involved. He who properly understands the physical human being also understands the superphysical, the supersensible human being. But with materialism it is just the opposite: he does not understand the supersensible human being at all, and therefore he does not understand the physical human being either.

I will let you know whether I will be back next Wednesday. Perhaps someone will have another question by the next lesson, so that a similar discussion can take place as a result of this question.

Good morning, gentlemen! Have you thought about what you would like today?

Mr. Burle: If one might ask the doctor about human clothing, about the clothing that people wear. In some countries people have just one rag and throw it around them; others are buttoned up. One has dazzling colors, the other has simple colors. Then again, we could ask about the national costumes, what the peoples or the people in question wear. Then also what the waving flags are and - this is perhaps also connected with that - what ecstasy they exert?

Dr. Steiner: Much thought has been given to the question of human clothing because, as you can imagine, there are few external documents and little historical evidence about these things.

You see the clothing of the simpler peoples and tribes, and you also see the clothing of the people in the city to which you yourself belong. And finally, one sees what one puts on oneself, but actually pays the least attention to what one puts on oneself. In this matter, one simply goes along with what has become the custom. Yes, after all, one must do it to a certain extent simply for the reason that otherwise one is considered at least half a fool, if not a complete fool.

Now, the first question is that which is perhaps the most difficult for an external science to answer, because, as I said, external written records are only available in very few cases, about the reasons why people originally clothed themselves. If we really take into account everything that can be seen in this direction, we have to say to ourselves: Certainly, much of what is in clothing has already emerged from the human need for protection, from the need to protect oneself as a human being against the influences of the environment. You must remember that animals have their own protection. To a large extent, animals have protection against external influences that cannot penetrate their hair, skin and so on into the more delicate, softer parts of the organism.

Now you may ask yourself: Why doesn't man have this protection by nature? — I don't want to emphasize this question, which always asks why, because in nature it is actually not entirely justified to ask why. Nature simply puts the beings in place, and one must simply examine how they are placed. The why is never entirely justified. But we shall understand each other if I nevertheless say: How is it that man, unclothed by nature, must go through the world like this?

We must then ask ourselves the other question, whether this covering that the animal has from nature is not clearly connected with the less highly developed spiritual organization that the animal has? And it is. You see, gentlemen, it is really the case that sometimes those parts of a living being, that is, of an animal and also of a human being, that are most important, do not appear to be the most important in external life. We can cite some very small organs in the human organism. If these are not as they should be, then the whole human organism breaks down. For example, here in the thyroid glands on both sides, there are very small organs – I have mentioned them to you before in a different context – that are hardly the size of a pinhead. One might think that these are not so important. But if it should happen that a person needs an operation on the thyroid gland, and the surgeon is inept and removes these tiny, pinhead-sized organs as well, then the whole organism becomes ill. The person becomes dull and gradually perishes from exhaustion. So small, tiny, pinhead-sized organs are of the greatest possible importance for the whole human being! They have them because these organs secrete a very fine substance that must flow into the blood. And the blood is useless if these organs are not there and their secretions do not flow into the blood. So you can see that even organs that we do not pay much attention to have the greatest possible significance for the being in which these organs are found.

Take, for example, those animals in the animal kingdom that have hairy skin. Well, you can imagine that the hairy skin is good for keeping the animals from freezing in winter and so on. Certainly, that is one of its uses. But if these hairs are to arise in the skin, the animal must be accessible to a particularly strong effect of the sun. The hairs arise only when the animal is accessible to a strong effect of the sun.

You might say: Yes, but hair does not develop everywhere only where the sun's rays have access! - And yet it is so. It even goes so far that the human germ, in the first periods, while it is carried in the mother's womb, is hairy. You may say: It is not exposed to the sun. It loses these hairs later. And every human being who is born was actually quite hairy during the first weeks of the mother's pregnancy. He loses this hair. Why is that? It is because the mother absorbs the power of the sun, which works internally. The hair is very closely related to the effect of the sun.

Take the lion, for example. The lion, whose male has this mighty mane, is an animal that is extraordinarily exposed to the effects of the sun. As a result, the lion also has well-developed chest organs, which become particularly strong under the influence of the sun, a short intestine and powerfully developed lungs. This distinguishes him from our ruminants, which have more developed organs of the abdomen, intestines, stomach and so on. The way an animal is hairy, feathered and so on is therefore mainly related to the effect of the sun.

But again, when the effect of the sun on a being is very great, then it is the case that this being lets the sun think within itself, lets the sun will within itself: it does not become independent. Man has his independence from the fact that he does not have this outer protection, but that he is more or less exposed to the influences of the earthly environment. It is even interesting to note how the animal is less dependent on the earth than man. The animal is largely formed from outside the earth. I have, of course, provided you with evidence for these things everywhere. But man is emancipating himself from these external natural influences. And that comes from the fact that he has, so to speak, an unprotected skin on all sides and therefore has to seek his own protection.

You can see from our ordinary clothing that it is actually composed of two parts. One part is revealed to us when we put on a winter coat in winter and protect ourselves from the cold. That is the part of clothing through which we seek protection. But that is not the only one. You can see, for example, especially with women, that they don't just seek protection through clothing, but they arrange it so that it should be beautiful; sometimes it is indeed horrible, but it should be beautiful. It depends on taste or bad taste, but in any case it should be beautiful, it should adorn. These are the two functions of clothing: to provide protection against the outside world and to adorn.

One part of this task for clothing originated more in the north, where protection was needed. Therefore, there the clothing has more the character of protection. In terms of protection, people do not go to extraordinary lengths. But in warmer areas, in areas where entire nations actually walk quite naked, decoration forms the little that you see, or, when they put on more, the main part of the clothing.

But you will now know that it was precisely from the warmer regions that higher civilization came, that more of the spiritual life came from the warmer regions. Therefore, when we look at clothing, we can always see that, in a sense, the type of clothing designed to protect the human being from external influences has remained incomplete. On the other hand, clothing that is intended to adorn has undergone all possible development. Of course, what a person's taste is comes into play here, doesn't it? The whole spiritual direction of people comes into play. So let us assume more primitive peoples, simpler, more original ones. Such peoples have a strong sense of color. We in our regions, who are so far advanced in terms of reason – or at least we believe we are – do not have the sense of color that the more original peoples have.

But these more primitive peoples have a completely different sense. They have the sense that there are spiritual-supernatural parts to the human being. In the so-called civilized areas, people no longer believe that there are people who are not as clever as civilized people want to be, but who have a sense that the human being has a supernatural side. And they perceive this supernatural side as colored. This is the case with primitive peoples: they perceive the supersensible part that they carry within them – what I have called the astral body – as colored, and they want to make visible that which is invisible to us. So they adorn themselves in red or blue, or the like, depending on how they see themselves in the astral realm. This comes from the view that these people have of the spiritual world.

The Greeks, for example, saw how the etheric head of the human being is much larger than the physical head, how it protrudes, and so they endowed Pallas Athena, this goddess, with a kind of helmet. But you can see for yourself if you take this Pallas Athena and examine the helmet she is wearing, the helmet has something like eyes at the top. You can see that everywhere; just look at Pallas Athena, even in a bad statue, there are eyes at the top of the helmet. This proves to you that it was meant to be part of the body. That is something else you can see; they put it on Athena.

And the type of clothing that people made in those areas where they had a sense of the supersensible human being was adapted to how they imagined this astral body of the human being.

Now, in our regions — as you gentlemen know — only the ritual clothing in the truest sense is still made in colors. If you look at what the ritual clothing is, you will see that it is modeled entirely on how the astral body is imagined. So the colors and also the shape and form of the clothing are basically derived from the supersensible. And only when one understands this, does one understand how clothing is designed as an adornment. This is also very important. If you look at pictures painted by the old masters, you will see: Mary, for example, always has a very specific dress and a very specific wrap, because this is intended to suggest how she is in her astral body, in her heart, in her mind. This is to be indicated by the clothing. Compare pictures where Mary is with Magdalene at the same time, and you will always find that the old painters looked at Mary and Magdalene differently, just as differently as they are portrayed, because it is said to be based on their astral body and the clothing is made in the way the astral body is now supposed to be in terms of color.

We civilized people have simply moved into materialism, so we no longer have any sense of this transcendental side of man. We think with the mind of the earth and think that the mind of the earth is master of everything. Yes, gentlemen, that is why we no longer have any sense of dressing in such a way that what we wear looks halfway human! We put our legs, if we are men, into tubes. That is probably the most unadorned of all the clothes that have appeared in the world, the trouser tube! But we do a lot more; if we want to be particularly noble, we also put a so-called angstrom tube on our heads. Just imagine what an ancient Greek would make of a face if he could stand up and meet a person who has his two legs in tubes inside and also has a tall Angström tube up there, and what's more, it's black! The Greek would not think that this is a human, but that he would have an incredible ghost in front of him! You just have to imagine that. And it even comes to such things that, in a completely abstract way, people still cut off such rags from the coat, which is already ugly enough; then they call it a tailcoat. Yes, that is something that shows much more than anything how thoughtless humanity has actually become. Just because one is accustomed to it and because, as I said, one is regarded as a half-fool or a complete fool if one does not go along with things, one goes along with them. But one must be aware that the whole way men dress today is actually somewhat reminiscent of an insane asylum, especially when it is supposed to be quite normal. This just goes to show that little by little one has become completely divorced from any reality,

Women, of whom many men believed that they are less civilized than men, have remained somewhat closer to the original way of dressing. Today, however, there is also a tendency to make women's clothing more like men's, but it has not yet been fully successful.

What does decorating actually mean? To shape oneself outwardly in such a way that one thereby gives expression to what man is spiritually! In this respect, in order to understand how everything related to clothing comes about in more primitive peoples, one must realize that in primitive peoples people do not consider themselves to be as independent as people today consider themselves to be independent. Today, every person considers himself, and with a certain right, to be an independent personality. Well, he says to himself: I have my own mind, through which I think out everything I can do. - If he is particularly conceited, he considers himself a reformer, and so today we have almost as many reformers as people in the world. So today, people consider themselves to be something absolutely independent. Now, that was not the case at all with earlier people and tribes. These tribes considered themselves a unit in their group and regarded a spiritual being as their group soul; they regarded themselves as belonging together like the members of a body and regarded the group soul as that which held them together. In this group-like way, they imagined themselves to have a very specific form. Then they expressed this in their clothing. So, for example, if they thought of the group soul in Greece as having a kind of helmet-like extension on its head, they would put on a helmet. And the helmet was not created out of a need for protection, but because they believed that it would make them more similar to the group soul.

Likewise, some group souls have been thought of as eagles, vultures, other animals, owls, and so on. They then arranged their clothing accordingly, so that it was adorned in some way with feathers and the like, in order to become similar to the group soul. And so clothing has mostly arisen out of spiritual needs.

In the case of primitive peoples and tribes, something emerges through clothing about how they have imagined their group soul. And if you find an original tribe and ask: How did they dress, especially how did they adorn themselves? Did they adorn themselves with feathers or with fur? then you can say: If you find a tribe that adorns itself mainly with feathers, then you know that the common group soul, which was in a sense their protective spirit, was imagined to be bird-like. If you find that a people adorns itself mainly with animal skins, then you can be sure that the group soul, which was in a sense their protective spirit, was imagined by them as either a lion-like or a tiger-like creature. So you can also see something in this for the design of the original clothing, if you ask yourself: How did these people imagine their group soul? And Mr. Burle was quite right when he said: One loves flowing clothing, the other tight-fitting. — Flowing clothing developed from the fact that they wanted to make themselves some kind of bird's dress, wanted to make dresses with wings; they liked it when the thing was wing-like. And it even had a great influence on people's skill when they acquired such flowing clothes. And when they turned, they also made pleasing movements with their arms. This made them skillful and so on. One can say: Adorning is the will to express the spiritual in temporal garments. And mere protection, which of course is not to be criticized, is the expression of the philistine in man. The more one wants to arrange clothing merely to protect oneself, the more one is a philistine. The more one wants to adorn oneself, the less one is a philistine and actually wants to express in clothing the spiritual that lies in human dignity.

It is natural that later in civilization these things have shifted completely. For example, one must be clear about the following. Imagine that such earlier peoples come to the conclusion that the sun has a special influence on the human heart, on the human breast in general, and they say to themselves: I am only a hearty person if the sun has the right influence. Not externally on the skin, where I would become quite hairy, but internally processed, the sun's rays act on the heart. The heart is rightly associated with the effect of the sun. What do people do who still know something about this connection with the sun? Yes, you see, they tie a kind of medallion around their necks, a medal that represents the sun. And so they have something hanging down around their necks that represents the sun (see drawing). These peoples go around with it, saying, as it were: I acknowledge that the sun has an influence on my heart.

Later, of course, this was forgotten. The civilized people have forgotten that originally it was a sign that the sun had an influence on the heart. But what once made sense has become habit, really become habit. And out of habit, people then adopt something like that, no longer have any concept of why it was originally created. These habits develop first; later, the states or governments take possession of such habits, they occupy them. Most of the so-called progress of states and governments consists in taking possession of what has become a habit. Someone finds — it can only ever be one person — let us say a cure. That comes from his mind. The government sets about claiming this remedy for itself and says: Only if I allow it, may it be sold here and there. — So in the end it comes from the government.

The same thing happened with the sun medallion. People originally made it out of their own knowledge, and later they made and wore it out of old habit; and then the governments said: No, you are not allowed to do that voluntarily, but we must first give permission for you to make and wear it. - And so the medals were created! And so the governments decorated their relatives with the medals. Of course, the order no longer has the slightest meaning. But those who scold the medals should also know that they originally had their good sense and that they emerged from something that made sense.

You see, that's what happened to many original garments. The ancient Romans and Greeks still knew that when they go around showing their naked bodies, it is not the whole human being, but there is a supersensible body. They imitated this supersensible body in their toga, and so they formed the toga. In this way, the Romans wanted to recreate the supersensible body. The toga is nothing other than the astral body. And in the artful folds of the toga, the powers of the astral body came to light. And in more recent times, because they no longer knew anything about the real spiritual human being, they knew of nothing better to do than to take the old garments and, in order to make them new, to cut off some piece here, there, or everywhere cut, first making the one that went down close to the ground shorter, and then making it so that it could be slipped on, and gradually transforming it into the modern man's skirt. The modern man's skirt is nothing more than the redesigned toga, only it is no longer recognizable.

Take the belt, for example. Yes, the belt came about because man knows: I am divided in the middle, unlike any animal. No animal has a diaphragm like the one humans have. For no animal does this division in the middle have such significance as it does for humans. Just compare the two. Today, people forget this in the most incredible ways. For example, the length of a human being is often compared with the length of an animal in order to find out something, such as how much food an animal needs and how much a human being needs. But just think about it: there is an animal, and there is a human being. Now someone measures the length of the animal and measures the length of the human being. Yes, gentlemen, can you compare the two things? That is nonsense. What you measure in the animal is only that in humans; so you can only compare it with the animal world if you measure the length of the human being from the crown of the head to here, the loin measurement. Or if you want to compare the human being with the animal, you can compare it with what the two hind limbs are in the animal. It is really the case that thoughtlessness sometimes goes terribly far.

Now, when primitive peoples realized the significance of the fact that man has a division in the middle, they indicated this with the belt. So that a human characteristic has also been indicated by the belt.

And you see, when a person is properly recognized, it is known, for example, that a special power even for thinking lies in the knee bend. And that is why the knee-bend - which we can no longer particularly adorn today because we have our trouser tubes over it - was adorned. From this something like the English Order of the Garter arose, in the way I have described. All these things have developed out of a real observation, not out of such terribly abstract, theoretical thinking as we have today.

And, you see, modern clothing has lost all its colors too. Yes, why has it lost its colors? Because the sense of the supersensible is expressed best through color. And the more a person enjoys color, the more inclined they are to somehow grasp the supersensible. But our time loves gray on gray, preferably undyed colors. The reason for this can be hinted at by the saying: 'All cats are gray at night' — because modern man no longer sees into the light at all, I mean into the spiritual light. Everything has become gray for him. He expresses this best in his clothing. He no longer knows which color to adorn himself with, so he adorns himself with no color at all. It has been completely forgotten that everything to do with clothing is connected with what was still known in ancient times, what was known by supersensible man. Now the general civilization has become grey. But for certain purposes in life the original colorfulness has remained, without anyone knowing where it actually came from.

The uniforms worn by our military in the modern state originated at a time when people had to rely more and more on defense. And all the individual parts of military clothing can be examined to see if they are somehow related to means of defense or attack; and basically, it can be said that all military clothing is actually outdated today and cannot be understood anymore. You see, the modern private's tunic is understood because it developed from the Roman toga. The military tunic is only understood if it is explained not from the Roman toga, from this drapery, which has been distorted into caricature, but if it is explained from the knighthood of the Middle Ages, where the whole was a kind of armor. There the armor was redesigned.

The flag was also mentioned (in the question). You see, the flag has the following background: originally, the so-called heraldic animal was on the flag – it didn't have to be an animal – but what was the heraldic animal? It was precisely the group soul, this soul that held the people together. And when they were together in groups, they wanted to have this soul before them in the picture. That is why they made the flag out of it. The flag is proof that the common thoughts that people have are summarized in this flag.

So it is particularly important to be clear about this: ancient painters were actually much more real in their painting than today's painters. Today, one usually paints so-called easel pictures, that is, one paints pictures that are then put into frames and hung somewhere, because one has been accustomed to it. Basically, there is no sense in this. For why should one hang a picture on a wall? One must ask. In ancient times it was like this: there were altars; there one painted the picture on the altars that one should remember when standing before the altar. There were churches where one walked around. One painted on the wall that which should come to mind in succession when one walked around. There it had a meaning, a relationship to what was going on inside in people.

And, let's say, in old knight castles --- well, what was knighthood based on? Chivalry was based on the fact that the people who belonged to it always looked up to their so-called ancestors. The ancestors were much more important than one was. If you had a large number of ancestors, you were worth more. Well, that's where the ancestor pictures were hung. So that made sense again.

But when that meaning was lost, that was when landscape painting first came about. And landscape painting – having a landscape on the wall, yes, you can have a thing for that. I don't want to be horrible about this and criticize all landscape painting, but after all, a painted landscape can never be the same as going out into the countryside! And so, basically, landscape painting only came about at a time when people no longer had a real sense of nature.

If you look at pictures from a few centuries ago – yes, even at those by Raphael or Leonardo – you will see that what is painted are the people, and the landscape, only hinted at, is actually done childishly, because people agreed that the landscape should be viewed outside in nature. But in the human being, one can express different things; the human being is not just nature, one can express different things there! And so Raphael was able to express a lot in Mary. You may know the picture that hangs in Dresden: Mary with the child Jesus on her left arm, clouds above; then below are two figures: Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, this picture that is called the “Sistine Madonna”. Yes, gentlemen, Raphael did not paint this picture to be hung on a wall, but he painted Mary with the baby Jesus so that a banner could be made to carry in processions. Now there are these processions where you go out into the field to the altar. They always had a banner that was carried in front. They stopped at the altar, where the people then knelt. Then someone later added those who knelt, St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. They don't even belong in the picture, and they are terrible in comparison to what Raphael himself painted at the time. But people don't notice that. Many admire the rather repulsive figure of Barbara in this picture just as much as they admire what Mary and the Christ Child themselves are!

All these are things that show you: one has also strayed from what still had meaning in painting. Why was this picture painted by Raphael for a church banner? The reason was so that people should have this common thought when they were in their procession, which corresponded to the purpose for which flags were made in the first place.

Well, then the desire arises to still associate a certain meaning with that which has been preserved from the old days, when things really had a meaning. Today you can go to areas, for example to Finland, where you will again encounter people in traditional clothing. Those who particularly want to be national wear the old clothing that was forgotten and is being rediscovered.

But all these people no longer live in the time when ancient instincts were present, when clothing was associated with meaning. Today, we would have to find clothing from what is in the spiritual life today, just as these ancient peoples found clothing from their meaning, from what they considered to be right in the world and humanity. But today, people no longer have this ability because they know nothing of the real, that is, of the spiritual human being. And so it has come about that today we have garments that are actually quite meaningless and that are based only on the fact that one drives meaninglessness to excess.

Originally, people wore belts. The belt emphasized that there was something special here in the human body. The belt was there to express this. Later, people saw the belt and saw that the human body was divided up; now they themselves made this division with the belt. Instead of the belt expressing something, in women's clothing it often led to women's clothing being made in such a way that it expresses nothing, but here only the liver and stomach and all sorts of things are squeezed together. You can say that a large part of what has emerged in the materialistic age has actually emerged out of senselessness, out of real senselessness. Even things that we today must consider nonsense had a certain significance for primitive peoples. Take, for example, the peculiarity of wild peoples not to clothe themselves by putting on garments, but to clothe themselves in a different way. No, the garment is actually that which adorns, which adds something to what the person is. The significance of clothing is actually suggestion, revelation. Thus, the invisible is to be revealed through clothing. So, you don't need fabric to dress, the wild tribes thought – they still think so today, and others think so too – but you can also dress by making all kinds of drawings on the body itself. They adorn themselves with so-called tattoos. People make all kinds of marks on their bodies.

Yes, gentlemen, these signs that people make on their bodies originally had a very great significance. Suppose, for example, a person carves a heart on his body. Now, if he walks around during the day, it has no great significance in the waking state. But when he sleeps, then what he has carved into his skin makes a very meaningful impression on his sleeping soul, and then it becomes a thought in his sleeping soul, which he naturally forgets again in the morning when he comes to consciousness. But this tattooing originally arose from the intention of having an effect on the person even in their sleep. Later on, however, it lost its significance even among savage tribes, at least to the extent that people only do it out of habit, continue it out of habit, but it has just lost its significance.

Now, you have to take all these things into consideration. Then you will see that clothing arose partly out of the need for protection, but for the most part, the greater part, it arose out of the need to adorn oneself. And adorning oneself is connected with making the supersensible visible on the outside. And then, precisely with regard to clothing, people came to know nothing else but that the human being wears it. And so the national costumes came into being. Of course, a tribe that is more obliged to protect itself will have close-fitting clothes, thick clothes, the whole body more or less laden with clothes, or at least those parts that are more exposed to the cold. A person in a milder climate will develop the adornment much more, will have thinner clothes, flowing clothes and so on. So it will depend somewhat on the whole environment, on the climate, how man protects himself in part, adorns himself in part. Then people forget this. When the migrations of nations then come about, it can happen that a nation from the area where the clothing was suitable for the area moves into another area where it is no longer understood why the clothing should be suitable for these nations; but they have just kept it out of habit. And in this way it is often very difficult today to find out from the immediate surroundings why these people have precisely this clothing. You can see then, can't you, people just stop thinking. They are like the polar bear that gets its white coat because it stands out a little against the northern snow and it then means protection for him against all kinds of persecution and so on – yes, if he were to wear it in a warm climate, it just wouldn't be protective, would it!

So it is in general: Man retains what he is used to without being fully aware of the reason for it. That is why it is not so easy today to answer the question of why one or the other tribe dresses in a certain way, just by looking at how people dress. As I said, you have to go back to earlier times.

For example, you will find that the Magyar costume of the Hungarians is quite special. The Hungarians wear somewhat high boots with tight tubes, tight-fitting leggings that are tucked into the tubes, and a tight-fitting skirt. It is all modernized, has lost its original meaning, but it points to what the Hungarian language also points to; namely, it mostly has hunting expressions in what is original! It is very strange: if you come to Pest and go, for example, across a street, you will find something like an inscription like: Kave Häz. That is nothing more than coffee house! Of course, this is not Hungarian or Magyar, but a bit changed from German. Kave Häz is what they say; so you do not realize that it is actually a German word. But if you ignore the numerous words that come from Latin or German in the Magyar, then you come to the conclusion that these are mostly hunter expressions, and you come to the conclusion that the Magyars are originally a hunting people. And if you look at their clothing, it is the one that was originally the most comfortable for hunters. But then it was modernized and changed. You can still understand that at least. But when you look at today's clothing, you can't understand much anymore.

Well, Mr. Burle, did some of what I said

Mr. Burle: Pretty much!

Well, then we will continue the lectures next Saturday. Perhaps one or the other of you will think of something else you would like to ask.