The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The contemplation of the world of dreams, as we did yesterday, has drawn our attention to the fact that in the moment when we enter from the world that is spread out before our senses as the world of natural laws into another world, the natural laws actually cease. I would like to say that they cease gradually, they cease little by little. In dreams, one can still clearly see how they are still based, on the one hand, on what is natural and lawful, but how, on the other hand, moral and ethical connections play into the dream, how one thing is connected to another in such a way that something is expressed in the context, such as, let us say, the moral value of the dreamer or the like. The dream is just a gentle transition from the physical-sensual world into completely different worlds, into worlds that then have nothing at all to do with the merely natural-law contexts.

Now, however, through such ideas and feelings, as they can be aroused by directing one's soul towards such transitions as are given in dreams, a, I would say, human understanding of world connections must be brought about, which otherwise should simply stand before the human soul as unrevealed secrets. You will soon feel what I actually mean. What matters is not intellectual comprehension of these things. What matters is to gain a totally human understanding, to gain a human relationship to the things with which man is connected, connected in his whole life and through the fact that he belongs to humanity. And it is impossible to say or present something about certain things in life if you have not allowed your feelings to be touched by something like what was discussed yesterday about 'Iraum. The things that depend on this coloring that the feeling gets as a result. And so today, in response to what was said yesterday about dreams and the strange utterances of the experimental magician, I want to put forward something that is linked to phenomena of life that should actually be felt as much greater mysteries than is usually the case. In connection with yesterday's considerations, such people, who from a certain point of view, bear the collective name “somnambulists”, people who show all kinds of deviations in their lives, which, for my sake, even go so far as to get up from their beds at night, climb around on roofs without falling off, and so on, that is, those people who are somnambulistic.

And secondly, from a certain point of view, I would like to discuss an appearance today that we have already discussed several times from other points of view, an appearance like that of Jakob Böhme or, for that matter, Paracelsus. And thirdly, in connection with this, I would like to discuss the appearance of Swedenborg. It can be said that today's humanity has become indifferent to everything, because the kind of interest that I would call a feuilletonistic one has spread so tremendously. Basically, phenomena such as somnambulists, Jakob Böhme or Swedenborg should be eating at people's souls, for they are quite different human phenomena that are placed in human life than ordinary citizens are.

Let us now try to understand such phenomena. Take the ordinary somnambulists. You know that in a certain way what they represent is connected with the manifestations of the moon. We have just recently spoken about the significance of the moon in the universe, and therefore this belongs in this context. I have told you that those beings who once were on Earth and brought man the original wisdom, which gradually faded away but which we find when we go back in history, that these entities have withdrawn to the Moon, as it were, to a kind of world colony, and that they populate the Moon internally. It is really the case that only the last remnants of what is characteristic of these beings have remained on earth in a coarser form. People were quite different back then, when these present-day moon beings were still on earth as the great teachers or guides of earthly humanity.

What these entities have left behind on earth are physical phenomena, the facts of reproductive life. These facts of reproductive life in its present form were not present on earth at the time when these entities gave people the original wisdom. Just as when you have dissolved any substance in a liquid, the liquid can look quite pure and even, but when the substance turns out to be sediment, then the substance is coarse and the liquid is even finer than it used to be – that is roughly what I mean here. What lives on earth today as the reproductive life is coarse in relation to what it once was. And what these beings have taken with them into the sphere of the moon is infinitely refined, has become infinitely more spiritual. But both belong together, both have been differentiated from each other. And what the moon really exerts on the earth as a force, what still works on the earth today as lunar force, is, as I told you when I discussed the position of the moon in the cosmos, that the moon actually reflects everything that is in the cosmos, not just the light of the sun, but actually reflects everything. So that we have two things in the moon: the interior of the moon, which is not currently emerging to the outside, but has closed itself off and been given a different task in the world, and that which is reflected back.

Now, in relation to his physical body, man is subject to the most powerful earthly force, gravity, in the way he moves, and also, incidentally, in the way he sits. It is always gravity that he appeals to. If he did not succumb to gravity with his physical body, he would not have these different states of equilibrium when walking, sitting, standing, and so on.

But with his etheric body, man is not so exposed to the earth force, but to the moon force. He is exposed to this force radiated back from the universe, and it pulls him out. While the force of gravity on earth pulls him down, this lunar force pulls him out into the cosmos. And this lunar force is temporarily predominantly active in somnambulant personalities. For moments, the lunar force overcomes the earthly force, and these personalities behave as if they had only an etheric body with which they can freely follow the lunar force. They drag their physical body along with them, and, as I said, climb around in the most daring way possible, as only the etheric body can, as the physical body cannot at all, but it is dragged along in such moments. So it is essentially, I would say, a breaking in of special lunar effects that occur in these somnambulistic personalities.

But now we must ask further, because everything is part of the great cosmic context, which ultimately leads back to nothing but beings. For the phenomena outside of the beings are only apparent, only the beings in the universe are truly real. So the beings in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, are truly real, as are the human beings, the angels, the archangels and so on. These are the realities; individualized beings are the realities. The other is something that takes place between beings, the other is an appearance, it is not a reality. So when we speak of realities, we are dealing with beings.

Now, when such beings appear, individualized human beings, that is, sleepwalkers, how does the appearance of such sleepwalkers fit into the whole of the universe? How is it that there are sleepwalkers at all in the context of the universe?

Now you really must grasp what I am about to say not in a logical, intellectual context, but in an emotional one, for that is the right logic in this field. Try to penetrate your feeling with the idea that one must go, I would say, from the world of natural law, beyond the currents of the dream-like into quite different worlds where natural laws no longer apply but where other connections prevail. Try to really feel your way into it, then you will also feel that one can speak of it: what is it like for those people who, in some earth life, appear as somnambulists, with what is not of this earth life, let us say, in the pre-earthly existence or in the post-earthly existence?

Surely, we could point out all the shortcomings and dark sides of the somnambulist, and even include the mediumistic aspect, but you know all that already, or at least you can know it. They behave differently in life, they act differently, they are different. Now, if they are different in earthly life, then one would have to ask, if one were to reach the spiritual world with its feelings in this way, I would like to say, quite literally through dreams: Are they perhaps also different in the neighboring extraterrestrial life, in the pre-earthly existence? What are they like there?

You see, it is evident from such entities, which are somnambulists in earthly incarnation, that in their pre-earthly existence they were actually extremely hostile in the spiritual world towards all spiritual beings.

If we use the means that already exist and that I have often spoken to you about, to investigate a somnambulant to find out what it was like in the pre-earthly existence – since the French Course we have often spoken of this pre-earthly existence in its concrete details – if we now investigate: What were such somnambulants like before they descended to their earthly existence? As grotesque as it may seem, it must be said: they were quite out of place in their pre-earthly existence – but they were materialists in the spiritual world in their pre-earthly existence.

Of course, one is not so materialistic there as to develop theoretical views about materialism. One moves, after all, first in the world of sympathies and antipathies; not in the world of concepts and judgments, but in the world of sympathies and antipathies. These somnambulists lived in the spiritual world, but most of what they experienced in the spiritual world was unpleasant to them. Everywhere they encountered spiritual beings they felt a sense of hatred for them. And so, when they descended to earthly existence, they could not anchor their astral body in the right way within themselves. One must indeed consolidate the astral body when one descends into earthly life. This consolidation suffers from the fact that these beings have constantly taken up these forces of antipathy towards the spiritual. And then the karma, which I would call cosmically directed, arises, that these entities, in their earthly life, because they have a physical body, must be connected to this physical body in just the way that a not quite consolidated astral body must be connected to the physical body.

Now I have also shown you how one passes through the sphere of the moon when descending back to earth, how one absorbs the lunar forces. Such beings have too little independence in relation to the lunar forces. They are not sufficiently consolidated in themselves, so that a relationship with the lunar forces remains in them when they enter their physical body. The result of this is that such beings actually show less consideration for their physical body than the average person shows for his physical body. And it is this, that they remain subject to the lunar sphere, the means of education in the entire plan of the world, to cure these people of their hostile attitude towards the spiritual. So that one stands with the moon-sick before people who, in this earthly life, are to be educated to get rid of their hostility towards the spiritual by being moon-sick. Through this non-grasping of the physical body, they experience the spiritual on earth, while in the spiritual world itself they have not sufficiently experienced the spiritual.

The normal citizen, who is now firmly seated in his physical body, is much more firmly seated in it today than is desirable for the good of humanity; he is terribly stuck in it. But the somnambulists pay very little attention to this physical body. Therefore, under certain constellations, they may experience moments when they are more given to the forces of the moon than to the forces of the earth.

Let us now move on from these personalities to one who, I would say, stood there in a certain greatness in Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus. Of course, such personalities also appear in history in a less grandiose way, not now in the present time, but it is not so long ago that such personalities were around. I would say there have always been more or less little Jakob Böhmes. Until a few decades ago, you could still find such little Jakob Böhmes, these personalities who, when you look at them so outwardly in ordinary life, are distinguished by the fact that they look into nature in a different way than is the case with the average citizen.

Take a characteristic manifestation in the case of Jakob Böhme. What was in his whole human character was already manifested in his youth. Take the characteristic manifestation: he tends animals like others do, when suddenly he has the urge to leave the animals, the herd and the others who are there, and to go to a place up in the mountains. Driven by instinct, he looks at a particular place. There he finds a hole in the ground, the earth is open. He looks down and finds a treasure down there. It shines up at him. He is amazed by this apparition, but he goes away in prayer. It does not even occur to him to take any of it. He often went back to look again. The hole was no longer there, the treasure must have been covered, and so on. He should have thoroughly convinced himself that what he had seen did not exist in the physical world, but of course, given his whole spiritual makeup, he never came to believe that he had not seen something after all.

Thus, what later emerged as his special way of thinking was prepared in him: to see into the borderline processes of things, the essence of things, everywhere. Anyone who reads Jakob Böhme's writings with even a little understanding will notice that the man saw salt and sulfur differently than a normal chemist of the time, of course. He speaks out of completely different insights. He even speaks out of insights that are not quite so familiar to him, so that language everywhere meets what he sees, because language is really sometimes confused and chaotic, and you have to live in it if you want to understand what this Jakob Böhme actually saw.

Now, to help you visualize the whole phenomenon of Jakob Böhme, I remind you of what I told you about the Druids. They dimmed the physical sunlight with their cromlechs, looked into the shadows, and in the shadows they saw the spiritual that radiates from the sun. For other people, shadows are just shadows, they are not light, they are something negative. For the Druids, however, it was something very real. And the shadow was not only different in its direction, depending on whether it appeared in March or October, but also in its inner attitude, in its coloring, in its coloring, but also in particular in the spiritual that it contained. If you push back the physical rays of the sun, so to speak, then the spiritual that the sun radiates appears precisely in the shadow. But for Jakob Böhme, this was what followed from his entire human essence. I would say that when he gave himself an inward jolt in a certain direction – it's a rough way of speaking, but that's how it is – when he gave himself an inward jolt, he could extinguish the physical sunlight and actually see into the darkness.

And what happens when you look through something where you don't follow the light, so to speak, but where you have something like a boundary in front of you? Something like a mirror appears. But when you look, let's say, like this - I'm drawing the physical eye, but it's not so much the physical eye that matters - there is light everywhere. Well, then you just see the physical things. But when you can extinguish this physical sunlight through your own power, then looking into the darkness actually occurs in the back. You don't even need the shadow, looking into the darkness occurs. But when this looking into the darkness occurs, then it has the effect of a mirror. And because Jacob Böhme could see like this, he saw things as if they were reflected in the darkness, and they gave back to his soul's eye what they had inwardly spiritually. So he saw the most ordinary objects when he tuned into them, especially the characteristic objects he speaks of, salt, sulfur, mercury and so on, not as one sees them when looking at them under ordinary circumstances, but he saw their essence, that which underlies them spiritually, mirrored in the darkness.

This was the special way in which he saw: He saw what underlies things spiritually, mirrored in the darkness. He saw them in the glow of the sun's effects, but excluding the physical effects of light and heat. While the somnambulists bring their will into the lunar effects and are thus less subject to the gravity of the earth for moments, and are more exposed to the lunar effects, while the ordinary somnambulists follow the lunar effects with their organs of will, Böhme was able to follow the solar effects with his organ of knowledge, and was thus a solar man, so to speak, a solar addict in contrast to the lunar addicts. And in such people, as Jakob Böhme was in his particularly characteristic greatness, we again have human individualities that stand out from ordinary humanity through a special relationship to the spiritual: sun people.

Again, with these sun people, we must ask: What were they like in their pre-earthly existence? Yes, you see, the pre-earthly existence of such people is actually extremely interesting. I have often reminded you that in the early days of human development, people always looked back to their pre-earthly existence. Something occurred in their consciousness that allowed them to have a kind of memory of their pre-earthly existence. They knew: I descended from spiritual worlds into the earthly world.

Something like this, not like a personal looking back, but a looking back on the way one looked at the spiritual world before one's earthly existence, emerged atavistically in Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus. As a result, such people have more of a connection to the elemental spirits of nature than to what natural things outwardly represent on their surface. They see more the spiritual entities that are within nature. For example, what is called sulfur on earth is not seen in the pre-earthly existence, but, if I may express it this way, the elemental spirit that underlies sulfur is seen. This is seen in the pre-earthly existence.

The yellow sulfur or sulfur of a different color – this concept does not exist in the pre-earthly existence. For the pre-earthly existence, there is not even an idea of the “sulfur” that people on earth talk about. There is absolutely nothing of the physical sulfur, but there is an idea in the pre-earthly existence of the very different spiritual essence that underlies the sulfur. These are the qualities that people like Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus possess.

As a result, they have precisely the power to exclude physical sunlight and, in physical darkness – I cannot say to see the spiritual effects of the sun, just as one does not see light or color, and so not see the spiritual effects of the sun either – I would say that with the vision, one encounters this physical darkness, but in spiritual elevation, which then reflects the spiritual that is present in the nature beings and natural forces. |

And basically it is actually like this: if there were not occasionally people who provide such inspiration – the channels through which such inspiration enters humanity are usually not taken into account – people would not know much about nature at all, because these inspirations are also necessary for even the most abstract knowledge of nature. The others then put everything into intellectual terms. But this looking into the living nature of things comes from such sun people.

You see, it became more and more difficult to express such things in the world the closer we came to the 20th century. Most of you know the biography of Jakob Böhme. You know how he was persecuted. If he had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, or if someone like Jakob Böhme, with the particular way he spoke, had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, he would probably have been locked up in an asylum. He would have fared much worse than he did in his environment at the time, but it was difficult even then to appear. After all, Jakob Böhme had, in a sense, still been able to feel the benefit of that time, and this benefit consisted, for example, in the fact that he was not maltreated with what we already have to learn in schools today. School education, elementary school education, was not so advanced. Please do not think that I am speaking against elementary education, but it must be said that things must also be judged from a different point of view. Perhaps not many of you have lived in such places where some retired shoemaker was a teacher. In such places, children have not learned all that much wisdom in the time that people in the present day have been able to live through in their youth; they remained much more untouched. But what one is exposed to in today's normal school not only trains something, but also kills something. Jakob Böhme had the good fortune not to have been subjected to such a school education, and therefore what was in him as a sun-person could push its way to the surface.

Yes, it is already there in the person; but sometimes it has to come out in a completely different way. I could quote you some compositions from the last third of the 19th century in which I could show you how people, because they went through school education from the end of the 19th century, naturally could not speak like Jakob Böhme - but in some musical compositions it comes out anyway. There is also a keynote and a basic mood as in the writings of Jakob Böhme. It breaks through somewhere, especially in music, but not in what has particularly reached the heights. Don't think that I would have to talk to you about a Wagnerian composition, nor about “Hänsel and Gretel”, of course, when I tell you these things. I would have to mention completely different compositions. But there are such musical achievements where something like this breaks through. Now, as I said, it is precisely such impulses, which are then realized, that have a certain significance for earthly life.

Now we can consider the third type, which has emerged so characteristically in Swedenborg. Swedenborg looks quite peculiar when you look at the externals. Swedenborg had already ascended to the forties of his life on earth; he was a recognized great scholar of his time, encompassing the entire science of his time, as much as one could possibly encompass this science of his time. There are works of his that have been published. But there are an enormous number of manuscripts that were written entirely outside the science of the time, that were written so strongly outside the science of the time – they then remained manuscripts – that a Swedish society of the greatest Swedish scholars has now been formed to publish those works of Swedenborg's that he wrote in the sense of normal science until well into the 1740s.

But then something like this begins with Swedenborg, where people say: He has gone mad. He has just gone mad! — One publishes his works as those of one of the greatest men of his time and explains that not just anyone is good enough to publish them, but that today entire academies are needed to make Swedenborg accessible to the world up to the age of forty-four or something like that. The future is not taken into account! But it is important that Swedenborg lived to a certain age in the intellectual and scholarly environment of his time, which was already so intellectual and scholarly, and that a certain spiritual insight then dawned on him.

Such a spiritual view, as it specifically occurred in Swedenborg, has very special characteristics. It is like this: If you imagine a human being and what the human being has as a brain, then, in a certain way, for the normal person, the etheric body fills the brain. What I have indicated here in red would be the physical brain. The etheric body fills the physical brain and extends somewhat beyond it.

Now, in the normal way, in the right, I could also say bourgeois way, his etheric body was formed, his brain, his head constitution was formed so normally by Swedenborg until he was in his forties. Then a force overcame him that contracted this etheric body somewhat, not behind the skin, of course, but contracted somewhat, into itself, so that it became denser, thereby also becoming more independent of the brain, but still retaining all the cleverness. Because it is not true that he then became more foolish; he was just as clever as before.

When you walk around as a sleepwalker, your astral body is so strongly subject to the power of the moon. The organs of will then often adjust to the power of the moon. When you are like Jakob Böhme, your cognitive faculty is aligned with the powers of the sun, and it repels the physical effects of the sun. When one becomes like Swedenborg, when there is such a contraction of the etheric body, there is the power that causes it, the Saturn power, that power of Saturn – I described it to you cosmically a short time ago – in which there is actually something like a kind of inwardness of our entire planetary system, as one can also say, Saturn contains the powers of the memory of our planetary system. What had been passed on to Swedenborg was precisely this Saturn force, this inwardness of the entire planetary system. This is how he was able to see things in such visions as he just described them. He saw angels, archangels, processes between angels and archangels, as he just described them. But what was it actually? What did he enter through this contraction of the etheric body of his head? He did not succeed in seeing the real processes in the hierarchies. You have to imagine what he saw like this: if this is the Earth, then we are drawing the Earth's ether sphere. This now extends into the cosmic expanse, about which I told you yesterday that we would encounter the Orion Nebula and so on, that there is a lawfulness, not a natural lawfulness, but a lawfulness, as it is in a dream. Where space would end, we would only encounter the processes in the hierarchies. Swedenborg did not see into this with his ability to see, but all the processes that really take place outside the ether sphere are not merely reflected in the ether, but they call forth, I would say, real image processes in the ether. So that something is going on up there in the hierarchies that should be described quite differently, but which has an effect on the ether sphere of the earth, so that the ether forms act in the earth's ether. Figures are acting around us, these are not the real angels, these are the ether figures, the figures formed out of the ether, but which now also implement their deeds in such a way that they are understandable to man.

These – one cannot call them reflections, but perhaps real reflections – these real reflections of the higher hierarchies in the earth's ether were seen by Swedenborg. He did not see what angels were doing, but he saw what one can see when one is up there in the angelic deeds, not seeing them as such, but seeing what is going on down there in the earth's ether in the sphere of men. What the angels do up there cannot have a direct effect on people on earth; it is precisely these real reflections that then have an effect among people. The reflections in the ether have an effect among people, they walk among us. Swedenborg saw them, he became aware of them.

So if those people we call moonstruck cause us to look at their pre-earthly existence, if, when we look at people like Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus, we look at their present earthly existence, then we have every reason to look at the post-earthly existence of people like Swedenborg. Our earthly existence only makes sense when we look forward to the afterlife. For it is these people in particular who are still able, after death, to have an instructive effect on others who have passed through the gate of death, to tell them much of what must remain incomprehensible in the higher worlds if one has not already become acquainted with something of the higher worlds in the earthly world.

And one would like to say: It is so in the general spiritual plan of the world that human personalities of the kind of Swedenborg are introduced here on earth into the real shadows, real mirror images of the processes in the higher hierarchies, so that they are well prepared when they go up there, because they will need it precisely in the post-mortal existence. While the earth-lives of somnambulists, because of their condition, have something of the character of a reformatory in relation to the spiritual worlds, the lives of personalities such as Swedenborg have something preparatory for the achievements they have to accomplish after death. And so we can say that people are different in their individualities, and especially in those who are very different from the others, it can be shown how man can only be understood if we not only consider his relationship to the earthly environment, but if we know that he also has a relationship to the spiritual worlds in every moment of his life, even here in earthly existence has a relationship to the spiritual worlds. Everything that happens here in earthly existence, even in people in whom it manifests itself as strikingly as in Böhme and the others, has a connection to the pre-earthly existence, to the spirit that also lives in earthly existence, or to the post-earthly existence. Only in these special types, somnambulists, the Jakob Böhme type, the Swedenborg type, do we notice very strongly what is present to some extent in every human being: a being of earthly existence in relation to the pre-earthly existence or to the simultaneous earthly spiritual existence or to the post-earthly spiritual existence. In particular, those beings who, I might say, behave in the cosmos as I described to you at the time, that is, the moon beings, sun beings, Saturn beings, they need the forces that play in particular human beings to carry out their tasks.

And that is where a perspective can open up to us, which I will mention only at the end of these reflections. What this perspective opens up, I will talk about when I give the next lecture here. But a very specific perspective can open up for us. We really have to consider that the human interior, even the physical human interior, the ordinary physical human interior, which lies within the human skin, actually falls outside of what we usually call the cosmos.

We can, roughly speaking, say the following: if we have the earth here, then the mineral, plant, animal, physical-human effects and so on happen on it, and so what can be observed with the senses and combined with the mind happens on it. Then there are people on this earth on it. But there is also a world inside people, it is not the same world as outside. I could do it like this: I could draw many people schematically, always showing the inside of the people. What is going on inside the people could be the red, and the white around it could be the natural effects that can be seen with the senses and so on. Now you can make an abstraction. Do you think I will now erase everything that is there in the way of natural effects, I will only leave the red, I will erase everything so that only the inner being of people remains and everything else is gone. So imagine that I would first remove all the minerals from the earth, remove all the plants and remove all the animals, everything else that would be there in the way of natural effects – but if you remove the three natural kingdoms , everything is gone, and then there are the skins, so that you then have the physical skin gone, but not only the skins, but also all the physical matter that you have within you. I would take all that away, then something would remain of the whole globe: these are divine effects. We would still have the hierarchies in it, angels, archangels and so on. We would actually only then have taken away the earth and kept heaven.

And if you follow this sensation, then you come to adjust the human interior in the right way to the actual spiritual supersensible world and to imagine in a comprehensive way where that is that could be called heaven. It is actually in the person, in that which remains when all that is gone that I have described.

If you describe sleepwalkers, Jakob Böhme, Swedenborg as I have today, who are you actually talking about? Then you are not on earth, but in the cosmos. It is necessary in our time that we no longer talk about the human being as if he were a connection between the laws and effects of nature that are outside, as has been the case in the last few centuries. Instead, we must today become aware of what would be there if we were to remove everything – I do not want to repeat the horrible image again repeat the ghastly image — if one were to remove all that I have just said would be removed, and leave only the inner man, then one would not only come upon the spiritual world in a general, vague, abstract-pantheistic sense, but one would come upon the concrete spiritual world of supersensible entities. They have their dwellings in man. And humanity must gradually become aware of this again, that the human body is indeed the dwelling of the gods.

Only when this is taken up in our time consciousness is the right ingredient in this time consciousness, whereby culture, instead of going down, can go up. This is a truth that can be expressed from a variety of perspectives. Today I wanted to present it to you as a link to what I said yesterday about dreams and today about these so-called abnormal states of mind.

This lecture is also known as: Mysteries of the Pleroma: the Corruption of their Influence in Europe and Asia Today. It is lecture 7 of 12 from the lecture series: Cultural Phenomena—Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy.

In a time of great and momentous decisions like the present it is all the more necessary that in their study of contemporary events and happenings, men's minds should also be raised to the Spirit. The Spirit is no abstraction but a reality which transcends and works into the physical life of humanity. It is by no means enough to admit that the Spirit pervades all things physical, for this is to recognise one fragment only of the world in which man lives and moves as a thinking and acting being. For many centuries it was justifiable to hold such a view, but in our age this justification has ceased. In the lecture to-day, therefore, we will consider how certain happenings in the physical world are connected with impulses emanating from the spiritual world.

To begin with, we will study the character of certain spiritual impulses which have been at work in the course of evolution and have led on to the present state of affairs in the world. For long ages now, Western civilisation and its offshoots have paid attention to one fragment only of the whole story of the evolution of the world, and from a certain point of view this was quite right. In times when the Old Testament became the authoritative record, it was proper to regard the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah as the dawn of world-evolution.

But in still earlier times the intervention of Jehovah was regarded not as the incipient but as a much later episode in the evolutionary process. It was said that another, more purely spiritual phase of evolution had preceded the creation of the world by Jehovah as it is described in the Bible and as it is ordinarily understood. In other words, it was held that the intervention of Jehovah had been preceded by that of other Beings, that the creation of man had occurred after the passage of an earlier phase of the evolutionary process.

Those men in Greece who meditated upon the earliest stages of world-evolution spoke of a primordial Being for the understanding of whose nature a much more highly spiritual mode of knowledge is required than for an understanding of the events described in the Old Testament. These men spoke of the Being whom they held to be the actual Creator of the world—the Demiurgos.

The Demiurgos was a Being dwelling in spheres of lofty spirituality, in a world devoid of every element of that material existence with which in the Bible story the humanity created by Jehovah is naturally associated.

We must therefore think of the Demiurgos as a sublime Being, as the Creator of the world who sends forth other Beings from Himself. The Beings sent forth by the Demiurgos were ranked in successive stages, each stage being lower than the last. (Such expressions are, of course, quite inadequate, but no other words are available.) The life of these Beings, however, was held to be entirely free from the conditions of earthly birth and earthly death.

In Greece they were known as Aeons—of the first rank, the second rank and so on. The Aeons were Beings who had issued from the Demiurgos. Among these Aeons, Jahve or Jehovah was a Being of a relatively subordinate rank. And this brings us to a consideration of the teachings of the Gnostics, as they were called, in the early centuries of Christendom. It was said that Jehovah united with matter and that from this union man came into existence.

According to this Gnostic conception, therefore, Jehovah was a somewhat lower descendant of the more lofty Aeons who had proceeded from the Demiurgos, and as the outcome of Jehovah's union with matter, man was created.

“Pleroma” was the name given to a world which transcends, although it has its basis in the phenomena of the world of sense. This conception was thoroughly intelligible to the Ancients although it was utterly beyond the grasp of a later humanity. The Pleroma was a world at a higher level than the physical world but peopled none the less by individualised Beings. And at the lowest level, at the lowest stage of the Pleroma, the human being created by Jehovah comes into existence. At this same stage, another Being appears, a Being incorporate not in the individual man nor yet in a nation, but rather in humanity taken as one whole, a Being who remembers its descent from the Demiurgos and strives again to reach the spiritual world. The name of this Being was Achamoth and in Greece, Achamoth was a personification of the spiritual strivings of mankind. The urge which lives in men to reach the spiritual world again was therefore said to be due to Achamoth.

Another conception was then added to this world of ideas, namely, that in order to reward the strivings of Achamoth, the Demiurgos sent down an Aeon of a very high rank. This Aeon—so it was said—united with the man Jesus in order that the strivings of Achamoth might be fulfilled. The Gnostic teaching was that in the man Jesus there had dwelt a Being belonging to the ranks of the Aeons, a Being of a far more highly spiritual order than Jahve or Jehovah.

And so, among those in whom these ideas lived during the early Christian centuries—and the hearts of many men in those times were turned with the deepest fervour and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha—there grew up the conception of the great mystery connected with the man Jesus in whom a holy Aeon had come to dwell.

Study of this mystery took many different forms but no essential purpose would be served to-day by entering into a detailed consideration of the various ideas current in Greece, Asia Minor and its neighbouring districts, as to the manner in which this Aeon had been incorporate in the man Jesus. The kind of ideas which in those days men brought to their study of a mystery of this character have long since passed away from the sphere of human thinking. Man's thought to-day is concerned with all that surrounds and is connected with his life between birth and death and at best there dawns upon him the realisation that spiritual foundations underlie this physical world of sense. Direct, inner experience of the kinship of the human soul with the Pleroma which was once a matter of immediate experience and referred to as naturally as we refer to-day to man's connection with the spiritual world—which was moreover of far greater interest to human beings in those days than the physical world—this too has passed away. There is no longer any direct experience of kinship with the spiritual world. Such ideas lived in European civilisation no longer than the first three, or rather no longer than the first three and greater part of the fourth centuries of our era. By that time the minds of men were no longer capable of rising to the sphere known as the Pleroma, and the dawn of another age had broken. This was the age of thinkers like Augustine and Scotus Erigena who were among the first. It was the age of Scholasticism, of European Mysticism at its prime, an epoch when the language of the mind bore little resemblance to the language used in the early days of Christendom. Men's minds were now directed to the physical world of sense and on the basis of this material world they endeavoured to evolve their concepts and ideas of the super-sensible world.

Direct experience of kinship with the spiritual world, with the Pleroma, had died away. The time had come for man to pass into an entirely different phase of development. It is not a question here of the respective merits of two epochs of time, or of forming an opinion of the inherent value of the medieval mind. The point is to realise and understand that civilised humanity is faced with different tasks during the different epochs. In an earlier age, kinship with the world known as the Pleroma was a matter of immediate experience, and it was man's task and function to activate the spiritual forces of knowledge in the innermost recesses of the soul—the forces of spiritual aspiration. But as time went on, darkness crept over the world of the Pleroma. Faculties of an entirely different character began to function in the human mind and the development of rationalistic thought began. In the ages when there had been direct experience of kinship with the Pleroma, the faculty of individual thinking had not begun to function in the mind of man. Knowledge came to him through illumination, through inspiration and through an instinctive realisation of the super-sensible world. His thoughts were revealed to him. The springing-forth of individual thoughts and the building of logical connections in thinking denoted a later phase, the coming of which was already foreshadowed by Aristotle. This later phase of evolution cannot really be said to have begun in any real sense before the second half of the fourth century of our era. By the time of the Middle Ages the energies of the human mind were directed wholly to the development of thought per se and of everything that is associated with the activity of thinking.

In this connection, medieval culture and, above all, Scholasticism rendered inestimable service to the progress of civilisation. The faculty of thinking was turned to practical application in the shaping and association of ideas. A technique of thought of the very purest kind was worked out, although it too has been wholly lost.

The re-acquisition of the technique of Scholastic thought is a goal to which humanity ought for their own sake to aspire. But it goes against the grain in our days, when men prefer to receive knowledge passively, not by dint of their own inner activity. The urge to inner activity is lacking in our present age, whereas in Scholasticism it lived and worked with a tremendous power. And that is why even to-day it is possible for the thought of men who understand the essence of Scholasticism to be far more profound, far more consistent than the thought emanating from the world of science. Modern scientific thought is formal, short-winded, often inconsistent. Men should really learn a lesson from the technique of Scholastic thought, but the learning will not be of the kind that finds favour to-day. It must be an active learning, not a learning that consists merely in assimilating knowledge that has already been laid down as a model, or deduced from experiments.

The Middle Ages, then, were the period during which man was meant to unfold an inner faculty in his soul, namely the faculty of thought. The Gods drew a veil over the Pleroma—which was a direct revelation of their life and being—because, if this revelation had continued to influence the human mind, men would not have unfolded that strong, inner activity of thought which came to the fore during the Middle Ages and from which sprang the new mathematics and its kindred sciences, all of which are the legacy of Scholasticism.

Let us try now to summarise what has been said. Throughout many centuries the Pleroma was a revelation vouchsafed to man. Through an Act of Grace from on high, this world of light revealed itself in and through the light that filled the mind of man. A veil was then drawn over this world of light. Yonder in Asia, decadent remains of the world behind this veil were still preserved, but in Europe it was as though a precipitous wall arose from Earth to Heaven, a wall whose foundations stretched across the districts of the Ural Mountains and Volga, over the Black Sea and towards the Mediterranean. Try to picture to yourselves this great wall which grew up in Europe in consequence of the trend of evolution of which I have told you. It was an impenetrable wall, concealing from men all traces even of those decadent remains of earlier vision of the Pleroma which were still preserved over in Asia. In Europe, this vision was completely lost. It was replaced by a technique of thought from which a vista of the spiritual world was entirely absent. There you have a picture of the origin and subsequent development of medieval thought. Great though its achievements were, men's eyes were blinded to all that lay concealed behind the wall stretching from the Ural and Volga districts, over the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Medieval thought was incapable of piercing this wall and though men hankered after the East, the East was no reality.

This is not a symbolic but a true picture of Europe as it was in the Middle Ages. Under the influences of a Giordano Bruno, a Copernicus, a Galileo, men felt the call to set about understanding the Earth beneath their feet. And they then proceeded to work out a science of the Heavens modeled upon their conception of the Earth, in contrast to the older science of the Earth which had been a reflection of heavenly lore and of the mysteries of the Pleroma.

And so in the darkness there arose a new mode of knowledge and a new mental life, for the light was now shut off by the wall of which I have spoken.

The course of evolution is such that when the time is ripe for the development of certain definite faculties in one portion of the human race, other portions of humanity are separated off as it were behind a veil. And in the case of which we are speaking, a decadent culture grew up in the East behind the wall which had now been erected on the Earth, while Europe saw the beginnings of what was later to develop into Western culture in its most characteristic form. As a matter of fact the position to-day is fundamentally the same, except that men try now by means of historical documents and an external mode of knowledge devoid of all insight into the mysteries of the Pleroma, to inform themselves about the dark secrets of existence. The significance of these things in the present age becomes quite apparent when we look over to the East, behind the great wall, where decadence has corrupted an earlier insight into the world known as the Pleroma. What was once an instinctive but at the same time a highly spiritual form of knowledge has become corrupt; the life of the human soul in the spiritual worlds has descended to the material world which from the time of the Middle Ages onwards was the only world that remained accessible to the mind of man. Over yonder in the East we see a culture which in the true sense is not culture at all but an impulse to give an earthly, physical garb to purely spiritual experiences awakened by insight into the mysteries of the Pleroma.

Deeds of the Gods in the world of the Gods were conceived as the deeds of idols and the worship of idols superseded the worship of the Gods. Forces belonging in truth to the world of the Pleroma were dragged down to the material realm and gave rise to the practice of corrupt magical arts in the regions of Northern Asia. The magic arts practised by the Shamanic peoples of Northern Asia and their aftermath in Central Asia (Southern Asia too was affected to a certain extent but remained somewhat freer), are an example of the corrupt application of what had once been a direct vision of the Pleroma. What ought to have been achieved, and in earlier times was achieved by the inner activity of the soul was now assisted by earthly magic. The forces living in the Pleroma were dragged down to the material world in an Ahrimanic form and were applied not only on Earth but in the spiritual world bordering on the Earth, the influences of which pour down upon human beings. And so, Eastward of the Ural and Volga regions, in the astral world which borders on our physical world, there arose during the later Middle Ages, continuing through the centuries to our own day, an Ahrimanic form of magic practised by certain spiritual beings who in their etheric and astral development stand higher than man but in their development of soul and Spirit stand lower than man. Throughout the regions of Siberia and Central Asia, in the spiritual world immediately adjacent to the earthly world, terrible etheric-astral Beings are to be seen, Ahrimanic beings who practise an earthly, materialised form of magic. And these forces work upon human beings who are unskilled in such arts but who are infected by them and so come under the influence of this astral world.

In connection with these matters we must remember that ancient mythological lore was the outcome of a wonderfully spiritual conception of Nature. When men spoke in Greece of the Fauns and Satyrs and of the activities of the Fauns and Satyrs in earthly happenings, these beings were not the creations of fantasy as modern scholars would have us believe. The Greeks knew the reality of the Fauns and Satyrs who peopled the astral sphere adjacent to the earthly world. Approximately at the turn of the third and fourth centuries of our era these astral beings withdrew into regions lying Eastwards of the Ural, the Volga and the Caucasus. This territory became their home and there they entered upon their later phase of development.

Against this cosmic background the faculty of thought in its pure form began to evolve in the souls of the men of Europe. So long as they adhered rigidly to an inwardly pure, inwardly austere activity of thinking of which Scholasticism affords a splendid example their development was thoroughly in harmony with the aims of the spiritual world. They were preparing for something that must be achieved in our present age and in the immediate future. But this purity was not everywhere maintained. Eastwards of the great wall of which I have spoken, the urge had arisen to drag down the forces of the Pleroma to the earthly world and apply them in an earthly, Ahrimanic form of magic. And Westwards of this wall, the urge towards rationalistic thought and towards a purely intellectual grasp of the earthly world mingled with the element of lust in material existence. In other words, a Luciferic impulse gradually insinuated itself into the working of the faculty of pure reason now dawning in the human mind.

The result of this was the development of another astral world, immediately adjacent to the Earth, together with the efforts that were being made to unfold the faculties of pure reason and a pure, inwardly active form of thought. This astral world was ever-present among those who strove with the purity of purpose of men like Giordano Bruno, Galileo and others to promote the development of the faculty of earthly thought and to establish a standard and technique of thought. In and among all this activity we can divine the presence of beings belonging to an astral world—beings who attracted not only to themselves but to the religious life of men, forces proceeding from the element of lust in earthly existence, and whose aim was to bring the strivings for rationalistic thought into line with their own purposes. And so the efforts of the human mind to unfold the faculty of pure thought were gradually tinged with earthly, material considerations.

The technique of thought manifest in the latter part of the eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth century was influenced in a very high degree by the astral forces which by this time had insinuated themselves into the sphere of rationalistic thought. The material lusts of human beings which a pure and developed technique of thought ought to have been capable of clarifying and to some extent dispersing, gave birth to an element well-fitted to provide nourishment for certain astral beings who set out to direct the forces of this astute, keen thinking to the needs of material existence.

Such is the origin of systems of thought of which Marxism is an example. Instead of being sublimated to the realm of the Spirit, thought was applied merely to the purposes of physical existence and of the world of sense. In this way the realm of human thinking became easy of access to certain Luciferic beings indwelling the astral world. The thoughts of men were impregnated through and through with the thoughts of these astral beings by whom the Western world was obsessed just as the East was now obsessed by astral beings whose existence had been made possible by the decadent magic arts practised among the Shamanic peoples. Under the influence of these astral beings, the element of earthly craving and desire crept into the realm of an astute but at the same time material mode of thought. And from this astral world influences played into and took possession of men of the type of Lenin and his contemporaries.

We have therefore to think of two worlds: one lying Eastwards of the districts of the Ural Mountains, the Volga and the Caucasus, and the other Westwards of this region. These two worlds in themselves constitute one astral sphere. The beings of this astral region are striving in our present age to enter into a kind of cosmic union. Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts live the beings whose life-breath is provided by the thinking of the West, permeated as it is by a Luciferic influence. In the astral sphere Eastwards of the Ural and Volga districts dwell those beings whose life-element is provided by magic arts which are the debased, materialised form of what once was a power functioning in the world known as the Pleroma. These beings are striving to unite, with the result that there has come into existence an astral region in which human beings are involved, and which they must learn to understand. If they succeed in this, a task of first importance for the evolutionary progress of mankind will be accomplished. But if they persist in ignoring what is happening here, their inner life will be taken hold of by the fiery forces emanating from the Ahrimanic beings of Asia and the Lucifer beings of Europe as they strive to consummate their cosmic union. Human beings are in danger of becoming obsessed by these terrible forces emanating from the astral world. Eastwards and Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts, then, we must conceive of the existence of an astral region immediately adjacent to the Earth—a region which is the earthly dwelling-place of beings who are the Fauns and the Satyrs in a later metamorphosis.

If the whole reality is revealed to us as we look over towards the East of Europe to-day, we see not human beings alone but an astral sphere which since the Middle Ages has become the Paradise of beings once known as the Fauns and Satyrs. And if we understand the nature of these beings, we can also follow the processes of metamorphosis through which they have passed since then. These beings move about among men and carry on their activities in the astral world, using on the one hand the Ahrimanic forces of decadent, Eastern magic and on the other, the forces emanating from the Luciferic, rationalistic thinking of the West. And human beings on the Earth are influenced and affected by these forces.

In their present state, the goat-form which constitutes the lower part of the bodily structure of these beings has coarsened and become bear-like, but on the other hand their heads are radiant and possessed of a high order of intelligence. They are the mirrored personifications of Luciferic rationalism developed to its highest point of subtlety. The beings indwelling this astral Paradise are half bear-, half goat-like in form, with semi-human countenances exhibiting a subtle sensuousness but at the same a rare cleverness. Since the later Middle Ages and on through the centuries of the modern age this astral region has become a veritable Paradise of the Satyrs and Fauns in their present metamorphosis, and there they dwell.

And in the midst of all these mysterious happenings a laggard humanity goes its way, concerning itself merely with physical affairs. But all the time these forces—which are no less real than the phenomena of the world man perceives with his physical eyes and grasps with his physical brain—are playing into earthly existence.

The conditions now developing as between Asia and Europe cannot be fully intelligible until we understand them in their astral aspect, their spiritual aspect. The decadent forces emanating from Shamanic arts which have been preserved in the astral regions of Central and Northern Asia are striving to consummate a kind of cosmic union with the impulse which has received the name of Bolshevism, and Eastwards and Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts endeavours are being made to consummate a union between a certain form of magic and Bolshevism. It is a world of myth and is for this reason well-nigh incomprehensible to the modern mind. Luciferic elements in the form of Bolshevism are striving to unite with the decadent forces proceeding from Shamanic arts and coming over from the East. From West to East and from East to West forces are working and weaving in this astral Paradise. And the influences which pour down from this astral world into the earthly world emanate from the passionate efforts for union between the beings known in olden times as the Fauns and Satyrs who surge over from the East, and the spirits of the West who have developed in a high degree, everything that is connected with the head.

The spectacle presented to super-sensible sight may be described in the following way: The nearer we come to the Ural and Volga districts, the more do these cloud-like, spiritual forms seem to gather together into a mass of heads, while the other parts of the bodily structure become indistinct. Seething over from the East we see those other beings, known in days of yore as the Fauns and Satyrs. Their once goat-like form has coarsened to a bear-like form and the further West they come in their efforts to consummate their astral union with the Luciferic beings of the West, the more do their heads seem to disappear. These beings come into existence in the astral world and the Earth-sphere is their home just as it is the home of physical humanity. They are the tempters and seducers of humanity on Earth because they can take possession of men; they can obsess human beings without in any way needing to convince them by means of speech.

It is urgently necessary that these things should be realised to-day. Men must awaken those inner faculties of soul which once gave birth to the mythological lore of olden times. For it is only by rising to the sphere of Imaginative knowledge that we can stand with full consciousness in the onward-flowing stream of human evolution.

If we want to give its proper place among familiar things of life to what we come to know as stages on the road into the spiritual world, it is important first to have the right conception of the three states of our ordinary human consciousness. These three states – waking, dreaming, sleeping – we have described over and over again.

And we know how the human being is fully awake only in his thinking, in his conceptual faculty; how feeling, although its experience appears to differ from that of dreams, in the whole mood of its relation to a man is yet of the same nature. In ordinary consciousness feelings are experienced in just as vague a way as are dreams – not only that, but they seem to be connected in a similar manner.

The dream produces picture after picture without any regard for connections in the external world. It has its own connections. On the whole the same is true of the world of feeling. And anyone whose world of feeling in ordinary consciousness is of the same kind as his conceptual world, is terribly prosaic, dreadfully dried up and frigid. In the conceptual world when we are fully awake we must have an eye to what in the ordinary sense is logical; but we should never get anywhere in real life were we to feel in the way we think.

Then – as we have often said – there rises up from a man’s hidden depths, the will. It is possible to have some conception of it, but its essential being, how it works and weaves in the human organism, is something of which a man remains as ignorant, or as unconscious, as of his dream experience. It would be profoundly disturbing for him were he to experience what his will is actually doing.

In reality the will is a burning, consuming process. And for a man throughout his waking life always to be perceiving how in his willing he actually consumes his organism and, by food or sleep, has to replace what is thus consumed, would in ordinary consciousness certainly not conduce to his comfort.

Now, with regard to their pictures, we can to a certain extent compare a man's feeling world in his waking state, in his waking dreams, with the dream-world when he is either in deep sleep or halfway there. In this way we find that a man does not perceive these pictures as belonging to his ego but as part of the external world. While dreaming, he has so strong an impression of the action of the dream-picture being the world outside, that, at times, he can even perceive himself in the picture.

Today the following should be of particular interest to us. We go through ordinary life having one experience after another, and our dreams shake up all these experiences together, paying little heed to the connection between them which holds good for a man when awake. The dream becomes a poet developing the strangest tendencies.

A philosopher, describing his own experience, once said that he constantly dreamed he had written a book. He had not really written it but when dreaming thought he had, thought too that it was a better book than any of his others. But he dreamed the manuscript was lost. It was mislaid and he could not find it. In his dream he hurriedly searched everywhere, without success. A terribly uneasy feeling grew upon him that the manuscript of his best book might be irretrievably lost. In the midst of his discomfort he woke up. In the particular case of this philosopher this was a natural experience, for he had published a great many books. So great was their number that once when I went to see him, and his wife happened to be in the room, she told me he had written so many that the success of one was detrimental to the others.

In this philosopher’s house you always felt a remarkably practical atmosphere. On another occasion, when I called on him with a publisher, wanting to discuss an epistemological problem, this rather annoyed me. I had insisted on the publisher coming in with me – or, rather, he had insisted upon it himself – and the moment the philosopher saw him, he began: As an expert can you tell me how many copies of my book (I cannot remember which) are to be found in second-hand bookshops? – You see what a sense of the practical there was in this philosopher's house! I have no wish to be scornful; I am merely giving you a characteristic example. Others, too, may have had dreams in which their experiences appeared in fanciful guise.

Everybody knows that in dreams things do not take the same course as in our ordinary experience; the connections in them are different. On the other hand, it is easy to see how intimately related the dream is to the characteristics of the dreamer. It is a fact that many dreams are actual reflections of what is going on within our body, and we move about in our dreams as if in a perfectly familiar element.

Little by little we become aware that the dream has its own way of grouping experiences. By thinking clearly we gradually learn how we actually live in our dreams; we live there when on the point of leaving our physical and etheric bodies or at the moment of return. It is always on the transition from waking to sleeping, or from sleeping to waking, that the dream really takes place. I have frequently given you examples showing that even our dreams of greatest import take place when we are either waking up or on the point of falling asleep. Among these examples you may remember the dream of a student: how he dreamed that two students were standing at the door of a lecture-room, when one of them said something to the other which, according to the students' code in Germany, demanded satisfaction, and how it came to a duel. The whole dream was very vivid – the setting out for the scene of action after the due appointment of seconds, and so on, up to the very moment of firing. The dreamer hears the report which, as he now wakes up, changes into the noise of a failing chair that he himself has overturned. By this time he is fully awake, for the fall of the chair has cut short the dream. Thus the dream has taken place at the very moment of waking, containing within it its own time, not the time of its actual duration. According to their own inner time dreams often last so long that no one would ever sleep to that extent. Yet the dream maintains a close connection with what the sleeper is inwardly experiencing – the experience going right into his physical body.

The men of old knew quite well about such things, and a certain kind of dream was said by the old Jews to be God's punishment of a man "in his reins". Thus there was known to be a connection between the functioning of the kidneys and certain dreams. On the other hand, you have only to read a book like "The Seer of Prevorst" to find there how out of dreams people described what was wrong with their organs. Such men have a special gift for perceiving, symbolically in mighty pictures, any defective organs, so that beside it the cure can be seen. In those days this was made use of to encourage the sick person himself, out of the explanation of his dream, to prescribe his own remedy. On this point we should also study what was the authorised practice in the Temple-sleep.

When we consider the relation of the dream to our ordinary experience, the dream must be said to be a protest against the laws of nature, the laws according to which we live from the moment of waking till we go to sleep. The dream pays no heed to those laws – it makes them appear foolish. And what for the external, physical world is found to be natural law is no law for the dream, which is in itself a living protest against it. If we ask of nature on the one hand what the facts are, she will answer in accordance with natural law; but if we ask the same question of the dream, the answer will be different. Anyone who judges the course of a dream in accordance with natural law will say there is no truth in the dream – which is so, indeed, in the ordinary sense. But the dream approaches the supersensible, the spiritual, in a man, even though its pictures belong – to speak in the abstract – to his subconscious. We shall not judge correctly unless we realise that the dream has to do with a man's inner spiritual reality.

Now this is something people are slow to admit; they want to make an abstraction of the dream, to judge it only according to its fantastic character. They refuse to recognise it as something connected with the inner nature of man. And if the dream has this connection and it protests against nature’s laws, surely this is a sign that man's inner nature does the same itself.

I beg you to grasp the importance of this – that, when we come to the real man, what is within him protests against the laws of nature. Now what does this signify?

Today natural law is studied from nature around us, in the scientific way customary in the laboratory, and we find the same world-outlook extended to the investigation of man himself. He is treated as if natural law held good within him – as if it continued to do so inside his skin. But that is not by any means the case. The dream with its rejection of natural law is far nearer to what is within a man than the natural law itself. The inner human being does not act according to natural law. The dream, which in its composition is an image of what is within man, is evidence of this. Anyone who understands this is bound to call it nonsensical to believe that within the heart, within the liver, the same laws hold sway as those in nature outside. Logic belongs to external nature; to what is within man belongs the dream. And whoever calls the dream fantastic should also speak of man's inner nature in the same way. This can be actually perceived. For in the course it takes during earthly life, between birth and death, when sickness arises in one part, well-being in another, the inner nature of man is far more like a dream than like ordinary logic. Our present mode of thinking, however, has no such approach as this to what a man has within him, but is utterly given up as people are to their observations of nature outside or in the laboratory; and what they observe in this way they would like to find repeated in human beings.

It is of great importance in this respect to realise for example, how science today often treats what has a part in a man's physical make-up. Albumen is known to play a part in his life, fats, carbohydrates and salts – in essentials, naturally. That is well-known. Now what does science do? The scientist analyses the albumen, finding in it a certain percentage of oxygen, a certain percentage of nitrogen, a certain percentage of carbon and hydrogen; he analyses the fats, carbohydrates and so on. He then knows how much of all these the man contains. But from such an analysis scientists never learn what effect, for example, the potato has had upon European culture. There is hardly any mention of the influence that potatoes in the diet have had on the cultural life of Europe. For this analysis, by which you simply discover the various amounts of oxygen, nitrogen and so on, in one food or another never shows you how, for instance, rye is digested mainly by the lower bodily forces whereas the digestion of potatoes calls upon forces which are right up in the brain. This means that anyone who consumes an undue amount of potato has to use up his brain in the process of digestion, and thus partly deprives his thinking of brain-force.

Such matters as these show that neither our materialistically-minded science nor a more theological outlook arrives at the truth. When science gives an account of our food it is as if I were to describe a watch by saying: The silver is procured from a silver mine, in such and such a way; it is then loaded up and conveyed to various towns, and so on. – But when it gets to the watchmaker there is a full-stop; and what goes on in his workshop does not come into the picture. Perhaps the porcelain dial may be described, how porcelain is made, but again nothing is said of what goes on in the workshop. This is how food today is treated by science; it is just analysed. For what science tells us is actually worthless as regards the effect of the various nutriments on the human organism. In spite of any analysis there is a great difference between eating the fruits, say of rye or wheat, and eating tubers – as in the case of potatoes.

In the human organism there is quite a difference between the absorption of tubers and that of fruits or seeds. It can really be said of our present mode of thinking that it no longer goes to the heart of material existence. Materialism is therefore a world-conception with absolutely no knowledge of the working of matter, and we have to gain that knowledge by the light of spiritual science. Therefore those whose attitude is that of materialistic science say: Anthroposophy is spiritual to a fantastic degree. On the other hand, theosophists or theologians are content with abstract spirit that is never actively creative and does not show any real connection with material activity; and these call Anthroposophy materialistic because it extends its knowledge to what is material.

Thus we find ourselves caught up between two factions: those who treat everything ideally, in the abstract, and those who deal with everything materialistically. The former learn nothing about the spirit, the latter never know anything about the material. On these lines today, a way of thinking is developing which is quite unable to approach man himself.

Now recently in our spiritual evolution something most remarkable has appeared. At least the nocturnal side of spiritual life can no longer be denied – unless people want to be pig-headed. It is characteristic of the way people steeped in natural science react when they meet the darker side of spiritual life – or something else I am going to discuss – which they are unable to deny.

A noteworthy example of this is a book by Ludwig Staudenmaier – the (translated) title of which is "Magic as an Experimental Science". One might almost say: The nightingale as a machine. – Anyway this book is characteristic of our time.

How, then, does this man go to work? In his case the peculiar feature is that his very way of life led him to experience magic in himself. And the day came when he felt impelled to start certain experiments on himself – which might be said to reveal the darkness of his destiny. He was unable to deny after these experiences of his that there is such a thing as automatic writing. You know that I never recommend anything of the kind, always describing it as dangerous. But when it comes to what these people have actually done, then we are faced by something exceedingly strange, and need all our critical faculty to distinguish the true from the false. Now this committing to writing of things never previously entering the writer's head, this automatic writing, became for Staudenmaier a problem on which to experiment. Accordingly he set himself down with a pencil, when, lo and behold, things burst forth to which he had never even given a thought, and what he wrote was indeed most peculiar! Just imagine how surprising it must be to a scientific thinker when, on taking up a pencil, he turns himself into an automatist, believing all the while that it cannot be done. But the pencil suddenly takes command, guiding his hand to write quite astonishing things. That is what happened to Staudenmaier.

Now his greatest surprise was when the pencil began to show temper, as dreams do; it wrote what was very far from his thoughts. Thus remarks appeared such as "You're a silly fool!" – and it can be gathered from this how completely the pencil was now in control.

These indeed are things this gentleman would never have thought! After repeated remarks of this kind, and the pencil had written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked who was really the writer. The answer came: "Spirits are writing." In his view this again was not the truth, since for a scientific writer spirits do not exist. Whatever was he to say? Certainly not that it was spirits who were lying; so he said that his subconscious was always telling lies. For how terrible for a man if his subconscious suddenly convinces him that he is a silly fool, and moreover records it in writing, so that – as the expression goes – it is there in black and white.

However he continues to behave as though spirits were speaking and asks why they do not tell the truth. To which comes the reply: Oh – that is just our way; we are spirits who have to lie, for it's part of our very nature.

This was a most apt description. Here begins a sphere where things are certainly very questionable, for, you see, when it appears that truth has its home above while below it is always being contradicted, this naturally creates an awkward situation. But if anyone is entirely at the mercy of a scientific world-conception, in a case such as this he can but conclude that the liar is in him. Staudenmaier, therefore infers that it is not objective spiritual beings speaking but his own subconscious – and in such general terms anything can be summed up.

Now it is quite typical of such spirits that they did not make use of Staudenmaier's hand to write down any new way of proving some mathematical problem, or a solution in the realm of natural science; characteristically they always said something of a different sort.

There was indeed every reason for Staudenmaier to be upset, and a medical friend of his advised him to go out shooting. Advice of that kind is popular with the medical profession; for example, doctors are very fond of recommending marriage. In Staudenmaier’s case, however, the advice was to go shooting, to shake off this foolishness by diverting himself.

But just imagine! In spite of setting out to shoot magpies in the way he described, here too everything was delusion, for all kinds of demon-like forms peeped from the trees instead of magpies. Sitting on the branches were creatures, half-cat, half-elephant, making long noses at him and putting out their tongues. And when he looked down he did not see hares, for example, on the ground but all manner of fantastic figures up to every sort of trick.

Thus it was not only that the pencil was scribbling nonsense, but now things became still more fantastic; so that instead of magpies appearing it was demons, with all their ghoulishness – in fact, more delusion.

Actually all he saw was as it is in a dream and, if his will had remained intact, he might have shot instead of a magpie some kind of horror, half-cat, half-elephant. By the time this came to the ground it would certainly have changed into something else – perhaps half-frog, half nightingale, with a devil's tail. It would certainly have changed in falling.

In any case we may say that our experimentalist gained access to a world resembling that of dreams; a world which also protested against anything to do with the laws of nature.

For what would have been the natural course of events? On lowering his gun after shooting a magpie, Staudenmaier would have found a magpie on the ground. It was not this, however, that happened, but what I have just described; which was another protest against natural law on the part of the darker side of the spiritual world into which the man was plunged. Had he kept consistently to his idea of the subconscious, he should at least have admitted: If all this is in my own subconscious then this subconscious is evidently protesting against the laws of nature. For what was this subconscious actually telling him? As I have described, it conjured up all kinds of demons; and these told him quite different things about himself from what he had ever thought. Thus, he could but conclude: If the world were organised entirely in accordance with natural law, what now constitutes my inner being could not exist – as a man I should not be able to exist. For when what is within me speaks, this has nothing to do with natural law. Within a man, therefore, an entirely different world holds sway from the one where there are laws of nature – a world that in its very conditions reject these laws.

That is the one interesting point about this maker of experiments in magic, about the magician who with his experiments impressed so many people. It shows how – even though in a different way – a man can in fact come to the perception of a world which, in its connections, is like the world of dreams we so frequently meet in life.

This leads us, through a right conception of ordinary human existence to recognise that, bordering on this ordinary world that is interwoven by natural law, there is another world where these laws are no longer valid.

If these matters are looked at rightly, we can only infer that, adjoining the world ruled by the laws of nature of which we make a study, there is another world independent of these laws and ruled by quite different ones of its own. By sinking into the world of dreams in a realistic way we come to a world where natural laws are no longer effective. That the human being, with his ordinary consciousness, perceives this world as fantastic, is due to his inability to understand the conditions he meets there. He himself introduces the fantasy. But what weaves and lives in it belongs to an altogether different world-sphere, and it is this sphere into which a man sinks in his dreams.

This leads us on directly to another thing. If we talk to somebody wedded to the usual world-conception of today, he will say: I study what law it is that governs the fall of a stone, and discover the law of gravitation. Then I go further out into the universe and apply the same law to the stars. – And this is what thinks: Here on earth I discover the laws of nature; there outside is the cosmos (drawing is made). The laws I have discovered for the earth I imagine still to be valid for the nebula of Orion, or anything else.

Now everyone knows that, for example, the force of gravity diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker; and he knows that light too decreases. I have already told you that the truth of our natural laws also diminishes. What down on earth is true as regards them is no longer true in the cosmos; it is true only for a certain distance. Beyond that distance, out in the cosmos, the same law begins to hold sway which we meet with in our dreams. Hence we should be clear that, looking out at Orion with its nebula and in order to understand it, we must not think in accordance with the experimental method of physics, but begin to dream – for Orion shows its conformity with dream-law.

It can be said that various details of such things have actually been known in the past, and in later times an inkling of them has still been preserved, especially by those thinkers capable of genuine concentration.

Such a thinker was Johannes Müller, the natural scientist who lived not, it is true, in the second, but in the first part of the 19th century. He it was who taught Haeckel. He could at any time really concentrate, and lived absolutely in what he undertook. By being able to live thus entirely in what he was doing, a man may sometimes discover a great deal, though – as I will show you – in certain respects this may have its disadvantages. For instance, Johannes Müller, on being asked a question during a course of lectures he was holding in summer, replied: I only know about that during the winter-course – not in the summer. – During the summer-course he was so completely engrossed in the subject of the lectures he was actually giving, that he openly admitted it would only be when winter came that he could turn his thoughts to a different matter.

Another very interesting thing was admitted by Johannes Müller – that he could spend a long time dissecting bodies to discover something he wanted to know without success; but that afterwards he often dreamed about these experiments, when he would see far more deeply into the matter, and it became quite clear. This was in the first half of the 19th century, and in those days anyone, even a famous scientist, could own up to such eccentricities.

In his dreams, therefore, a man is in a quite different world with quite different laws. And weighing the matter rightly, it must be presumed that, if we want to follow in the steps of Johannes Müller, we must not think of Orion and its nebula in the way customary in observatories and other astronomical centres – we have to dream. Then we learn more than by thinking things over. This reminds us of the shepherds of old, who, sleeping in the fields at night, had dreams about the stars, thus getting to know more about them than the people who lived later. That is really so.

In short, whether we enter man’s inner nature and approach the world of dreams, or go out into the wide cosmos, we meet – as was said in olden days – beyond the circle of the Zodiac a world of dreams.

Then we reach the point of understanding what was meant when the Greeks – who still had knowledge of such things – used the term "chaos". I have seen every possible explanation of chaos but not one anywhere near the truth. For what had a Greek in mind when he spoke about chaos? He was thinking of the law concerning which dreams give us some notion, or which we must suppose to hold good in the outermost regions of the cosmos. This law that differs from natural law was ascribed by a Greek to chaos. He said indeed that chaos begins where natural law is no longer to be found, where another kind of law holds good. A Greek considered the world to have been brought forth out of chaos, out of a condition, that is, not yet in accordance with natural law, but as it is in dreams or, as is it still today, in the far reaches of the cosmos – in the Dog star near the constellation of Orion and so on. There we come to a world which still makes itself known to man in the fantastic but living land of dream-imagery.

If here we have the physical world of nature (a drawing was made), when we sink into the land of dreams we come, as it were, to a second stream. Then beyond the dream world there is a third stream without any immediate relation to natural law. The world of dreams protests against this law; but in the case of this third world it would be nonsensical to say it was guided by them at all. It absolutely opposes these laws – even boldly – for it has more to do with human beings, whereas the dream still appears as living pictures, this third world comes to expression chiefly in the moral world-conception through the voice of conscience.

If next to one another we had, on the one side, the world of nature, on the other the world of morality, there would be no bridge to connect the two. The bridge, however, is formed by the world of dreams, or by that world experienced by our friend who made experiments in the realm of magic, where things were said to him having nothing to do with natural law.

Between the world in which nature weaves her laws and the world from which the voice of conscience streams to us, there lies for ordinary consciousness the dream-world. Since this is the waking world, while this is the dream-world, and this is the world of sleep, we are led to conceive that during sleep the gods actually speak to man – not of what has to do with nature but of what is moral; and when man wakes, this remains within him as the divine voice, as conscience.

In this way the three worlds are merged together, two things becoming clear: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against natural conditions; or the other hand, the extent to which the dream-world is a bridge to a world the reality of which is hidden from ordinary consciousness – that is, the world out of which moral perceptions arise.

If we make our way into this world we find the further spiritual world that is no longer comprehensible in accordance with the laws of nature, a world with spiritual laws. In dreams the two are mingled – spiritual law with natural law, natural law with spiritual law – because the world of dreams is a stream connecting the two.

Thus we have thrown light from yet another aspect on how the human being is an essential member of these three worlds.

From the most varied points of view—the point of view in Occult Science is only one of these—I have indicated how in a certain very early condition of our planet, Sun, Moon, Earth (indeed the other planets too, only this will not concern us today) were one whole, and how we must speak first of a departure of the Sun from the one whole, Sun-Moon-Earth; and then at a much later epoch, of a departure of the Moon.

All these matters have, of course, their external aspect, derived from sense-conceptions. But they have also an inner aspect, which is this: that Beings are bound up with such an existence, with Sun-existence, with Moon-existence—Beings who also on their part liberated themselves from the one whole with the separation of the Sun and entered into an entirely different kind of existence in the Cosmos. So that as regards the further evolution of the Earth we cannot merely speak of a detached Sun, exerting its physical and etheric influences on the Earth, but, when it is a question of taking the spiritual element of the cosmos into account, we must speak of a Sun population, of Sun Beings, who although they were once united with the Earth now lead an existence outside the Earth-evolution—an existence that extends far beyond this Earth-existence, and is much more sublime.

It is exactly the same in the case of what may be called the Moon population. And when we were describing the spiritual side of such cosmic processes, it was necessary to point to the fact that within the Earth-evolution itself there once existed a primordial wisdom. But this primordial wisdom did not, of course, consist of concepts which, as it were, floated around in the air; it proceeded from Beings who do not assume a physical body in the human sense, but who, as the result of the instinctive clairvoyant forces possessed by man at that time, did nevertheless live in man; it proceeded from the Beings who continued their existence on the Moon, after the Moon as an external cosmic body had separated from the Earth. We must therefore say that within the Moon-being, not in the light that the Moon radiates back as reflected sunlight, and not in all the rest of what the Moon radiates back from the Cosmos, but in the inner being of this Moon-existence there live Beings who were once the founders of the primordial wisdom among Earth men. These are the Beings who passed over into the figures of myths and sagas in picture form, who did not assume forms perceptible to the ordinary consciousness; they are primordial Beings who were once the founders of the primordial wisdom among Earth men. These are the Beings who passed over into the figures of myths and sagas in picture form, who did not assume forms perceptible to the ordinary consciousness; they are primordial Beings to whom we look back with wonder and awe, even if we only discover them externally as the real foundations of the myths, sagas—primordial Beings to whom the intellectual forces of present humanity can attain only by great exertion through the development once again of Imagination, Inspiration, and so on. But there did remain, at all event within humanity itself, something that was a kind of unconscious memory. And then in the different evolutionary epochs of human civilization, by which I mean, of course, the more ancient epochs of civilization, these unconscious memories appeared in man's life of feeling and in his whole constitution of soul, so that when we survey civilization we can speak of a Sun civilization and a Moon civilization. These are, as it were, consciousness-memories of something that in earlier times worked in a far-reaching sense as Nature-forces in man; and what man perceived of them is only an appendage, reminiscent of growth forces, forces of inner organization.

On the basis of such conceptions we are able to penetrate in some degree into the Druid culture. With the means accessible today to external science man will ask in vain as to what was the real soul-constitution of these Druid priests. (I might just as well call them Druid sages, for both are expressions entirely suited to that age, although of course they did not exist then.) What was it that lived in the impulses by means of which these Druid priests guided their people?

What is often narrated in history, and indeed often sounds terrible, always signifies something that was active in the epochs of decadence and degeneration. What I am going to describe here invariably refers to what preceded this epoch of degeneration, and was active when the civilization was in its prime. For these cromlechs, these Sun circles, in what they truly represent, draw attention to what existed in the epoch when the Druid Mysteries were in their prime. And with the means given us by anthroposophical Spiritual Science, we can in a certain way even today penetrate into the whole manner and mode of working of these Druid priests. It may be said that they were everything to their people, or rather their tribe. They were the authorities for the religious requirements, so far as one can speak of religious requirements at that time. They were the authorities for the social impulses, and also, for instance, for the healing methods of that time. They united in one all that later on was distributed over many branches of human civilization.

We obtain a right perspective of this Druid culture—and it is quite correct to use this expression—only when we realize that its essence is to be found in an epoch preceding that which echoes to us from those mythological conceptions of the North that are connected with the name of Wotan or Odin. What is associated with the name of Wotan really lies later in time than this epoch when the Druid culture was in its prime. In the orbit of wisdom that points to the divine name of Wotan or Odin we must recognize something that comes over from the East, proceeding in the first place from Mysteries in the proximity of the Black Sea. The spiritual content of these Mysteries flowed from the East towards the West, in the certain “colonizing” Mysteries, emanating from the Black Sea and proceeding westwards, were founded in the most varying ways.

All this, however, streamed into a culture that must be called sublime in a deeper sense, into a primordial wisdom, Druid wisdom. This Druid wisdom was really an unconscious echo, a kind of unconscious memory of the Sun and Moon elements existing in the Earth before the Sun and Moon were separated from it. Initiation in the Druid Mysteries was essentially a Sun-Initiation, bound up with what was then able to become Moon wisdom through the Sun-Initiation. What was the purpose of these cromlechs, these Druid circles? They were there essentially for the purpose of a spiritual observation of the relation of the Earth to the Sun. When we look at the single dolmens we find that they are really instruments whereby the outer physical effects of the Sun were shut off in order that the Initiate who was gifted with seership could observe the effects of the Sun in the dark space. The inner qualities of the Sun element, how these permeate the Earth, and how they are again radiated back from the Earth into cosmic space—this was what the Druid priest was able to observe in the single cromlechs. The physical nature of the light of the Sun was warded off, a dark space was created by means of the stones, which were fitted into the soil with a roof stone above them and in this dark space it was possible by the power of seeing through the stones to observe the spiritual nature and being of the Sun's light.

Thus the Druid priest standing before his altar was concerned with the inner qualities of the Sun element so far as he needed the wisdom that then streamed into him—streamed in, however, in such a way that the wisdom had still the character of a Nature-force—for the purpose of directing and guiding his people.

But we must always bear in mind that we are here speaking of an epoch when men could not look at the calendar to see when it was right to sow, when this or that grain of seed ought to be entrusted to the soil. In those ages men did not look at a book in order to get information about the time of the year. The only booking in existence was the Cosmos itself. And the letters that formed themselves into words arose from the observations as to how the Sun worked on one or other contrivance that had been erected. Today, when you want to know something, you read. The Druid priest looked at the action of the Sun in his cromlech, and there he read the mysteries of the Cosmos. He read there when corn, rye and so forth were to be sown. These are only instances. The impulses for all that was done were read from the Cosmos. The greater impulses, which were needed, one may say, to complete the yearly calendar, were obtained from observation within the shadow of the Druid circle. So that in this age, when there was nothing that was derived from the human intellect, the Cosmos alone was there. And instead of the printing-press man had the cromlech in order to unravel from out of the Cosmos the mysteries it contained.

Reading the cosmic book in this way, men were therefore concerned with the element of the Sun. And in contradistinction to the Sun element, they perceived the Moon element. The forces which were then concentrated in the Moon were once united with the Earth. These forces, however, did not wholly withdraw; they left something behind in the Earth. If there had been Sun-forces alone, rampant, growing cells only would have arisen, life elements, always with the character of small or large cells. The diversity, the formation, does not emanate from the Sun-forces, but from the Moon-forces working together with the Sun-forces.

When he exposed himself to all that his circles, his cromlechs could reveal to him, the Druid priest did not receive the mere abstract impression which we today receive, quite rightly, when in our way—that is to say in an intellectual way—we enter into the things of the spirit. For the forces of the Sun spoke to him directly. In the shadow of the Sun the spiritual Sun-nature worked into him directly, and it worked far more intensely than a sense-impression does on us today, for it was related to far deeper forces. As the priest stood before his place of ritual, observing this Sun-nature, his breathing changed even as he observed. It became unloving, it was blunted, it went in waves so that the one breath merged into the other. He, with all that he was as a human being through his breath, lived in what was given as a resulting influence of the Sun. And the outcome was no abstract knowledge, but something that worked in him like the circulation of the blood, pulsating inwardly through him, kindling his human being even into the physical. Yet this working into the physical was spiritual at the same time, and the inner stimulations he experienced—these were really his knowledge.

We must conceive this knowledge in a far more living way, as far more intense—we must conceive it as living experience. Moreover, the Druid priest received it at certain times only. With a lesser intensity of life it could be kindled in him every day at noon; but if the great secrets were to be revealed, the priest had to expose himself to these influences at the time which we now call the season of St. John. Then there arose what I may call the great wave of his knowledge as against the lesser daily waves. And while, through the Sun-influences which he thus caught up on Earth in a peculiar and artificial way, he experienced what he felt as his Initiation—his Sun-Initiation—he became able also to understand the forces which had remained behind as Moon-forces in the Earth when the Moon had left it. Such was the Nature-lore he gained under the influence of Sun-Initiation. What was revealed on the surface of things was unimportant to him, but what welled forth from below as the Moon-forces in the Earth, this was important. Through the principle of Initiation, whose relics, as we have seen, are preserved in these strange monuments today, he placed himself in a condition to gain knowledge. And the knowledge he gained was of all that works in Nature, especially when in the sky at night-time the stars stood over the Earth, and the Moon traveled across the heavens.

The Sun-Initiation gave the Druid priest the spiritual impulse, and as a result he had his science of Nature. Our science of Nature is an earthly science. His was a Moon-science. The underlying Moon-forces, as they ray forth in the plants from the depths of the Earth, as they work in wind and weather and so forth—these he felt. He felt them, not in the abstract way, as we today—having an earthly science—feel the forces of Nature. He felt them in all their livingness.

And what was thus livingly revealed to him, this he felt as the elemental beings living in the plants, in the stones, in all things. These elemental beings, having their dwelling place in trees and plants and so forth, were enclosed in certain bounds. But they were not those narrow bounds that are set to man today. They were far wider. His science of Nature being a Moon-science, the Druid priest perceived how the elemental beings can grow and expand into gigantic size.

From this resulted his knowledge of the Jötuns, the giant-beings. When he looked into the root-nature of a plant beneath the soil, where the Moon-forces were living, there he found the elemental being in its true bounds. But the beings were ever striving to go forth and grow outward gigantically. When the kind of elemental beings who lived beneficially in the root-nature, expanded into giants, they became the giants of the frost, whose outward physical symbol is in the frost, who live in all that sweeps over the Earth as the destructive hoar frost and other destructive forces of the frost-nature. These were the loosened root-forces of the plants which lived within the frost, as it swept with its giant forces over the Earth, working destructively; whereas in the root-nature the same forces worked bounteously and beneficially. And what worked in the growth of the leaves, this too could grow to giant size. Then it lived as a giant elemental being in the misty storms that swept over the Earth, with all that they contained in certain seasons—with the pollen of the plants, and so forth.

And what lives gently, modestly, as it were, in the flower-forces of the plants, when this grows to giant size, it becomes the all-destroying fire.

Thus in the weather-processes the Druid priests beheld the forces of being expanded into giants—the same forces that lived within their right limits in the kingdoms of Nature. The chosen places where we find these old heathen centers of ritual show that what they received on the one hand through the Sun-circles and the cromlechs, was developed into the Earth-knowledge which was thus made possible. They developed it so as to be able properly to observe the mysterious working and weaving of wind and weather as they sweep over the Earth—the working together of the water and the airy nature, the hoar-frost oozing forth from the earth, the melting dew. It was through the Sun-Initiation and the knowledge of the Moon-beings that there arose this most ancient conception which we find at the very foundations of European culture.

Thus the Druid priest read and deciphered the cosmic secrets which his institutions of the Sun-Initiation enabled him to gain from the Cosmos. Thus, stimulated by the Sun-Initiation, he gained his knowledge from his science of Moon-nature. But with all this the whole social and religious life stood in close connection. Whatever the priest could say to the people arose on the spiritual foundations of this element in which the people lived. We see it best of all in what the Druid priests possessed as a science of healing. They saw on the one hand the elemental beings contained within their bounds in the various growths and products of the mineral and especially of the plant kingdom. Then they observed what happened to the plants when these were exposed to frost, exposed to the influences which the giants of the storm and wind carry through the airy spaces, or again, exposed to the seething of the fire-giants. They studied what the giants of frost and hoar-frosts, the giants of the storm, the fire-giants, if loosed and set free, would do to the plants. At length they came to the point of taking the plants themselves, and imitating within certain limits all that was indicated in outer Nature as the influence of the giants. They subjected the plants to a certain process, to the freezing cold process, the process of burning, the process of binding and solution.

The Druid priests said to themselves: “Looking out into this world of Nature we behold the destructive working of the giants, of frost and storm and fire. But we can take from these giants, from the Jötuns, what they spread so awkwardly and clumsily over the world; we can wrest it from them; we can harness once more within narrow limits these loosened forces of the Moon.”

This they did. They studied what takes place in the thawing earth, in storm and wind, in the fierce, seething heat of the Sun. All this they applied to the Sun-nature which lived in the plants and which they themselves received in their Initiation. And in so doing they created their remedies, their healing herbs and the like, all of which were based upon the fact that the giants were reconciled with the Gods. In those times each single remedy bore witness to the reconciliation of the foes of the Gods with the Gods themselves.

What man received immediately under the influences of Sun and Moon, just as it was offered by Nature herself, this would be a food-stuff. A medicine, on the other hand, would be something that man himself created, in that he continued Nature beyond herself, harnessing the giant-force to place it in the service of the Sun.

We must imagine the Druid civilization spread out over a great portion of Northern and Central Europe about 3,000 or 3,500 years ago. Men had nothing at all similar to writing. They had only this cosmic writing. Then into all this there spread from the East, to begin with from a Mystery in the region of the Black Sea, what is now contained as an insoluble riddle for the ordinary consciousness in the Norse Mythology, associated with the name of Wotan.

For what is Wotan? The Mystery from which this Wotan culture proceeded was a Mercury Mystery, a Mystery that added to the impulses of Sun and Moon the impulse of Mercury. One might say that that old civilization was there in a sun-and Moon-radiant innocence and simplicity, untouched by what could be told to mankind through the Jupiter impulses. Only away in the East these Jupiter impulses were already present. From thence they now spread, colonizing, towards the West. Wotan-Mercury carried his influence westward.

Here at the same time we have thrown light upon the fact that Wotan is described as the bringer of the Runes, the Runic art of writing. He was the bringer of what man drew forth from himself in the first primitive way of intellectuality as an art of deciphering the universe. This is the very first entry of intellectualism, the Wotan impulse. Thus one might say that the Mercury, the Wotan-nature, was now added to the Sun-and Moon-natures.

Wherever this Wotan impulse worked itself out fully, everything that was present from earlier experiences was influenced by it. It all received a certain impulse from this Wotan element. For there was one thing, a special secret of the Druid culture. We know that at all places things arise that do not belong there. Weeds grow on the tilled land. We might say that the Druid culture recognized as the good plants of civilization only the Sun and Moon qualities, and if, hastening forward as it were to a later time, the intellectual element already then arose, they treated it as a weed. Among the many remedies the Druids had, there was one against the Mercury quality of deep thought and introspection. Strange as it may seem to us today, they had a remedy against this habit of sinking into one's inner being, or as we should say, of pondering on one's own salvation. The Druids wanted man to live with Nature and not to sink into himself, and they regarded as sick and ill anyone who even attempted to express anything in signs or the like, unless it were merely to imitate the things of Nature in a primitive form of art. Anyone who made signs was diseased and must be healed. Indeed he was then considered as black human being, he was not white. Yes, my dear friends, if we with all our present knowledge were transposed into the Druid culture, we should all be sent to a hospital and cured.

And now from the East the Wotan civilization brought this very illness. The Wotan civilization indeed was felt as an illness. But it also brought, with a power grown truly great and gigantic, what had formerly appeared as an abnormality, an unhealthy introspection. Into the midst of what had formerly been taken only from the cosmic writing, it brought the Rune. So that man now transferred his intellectual element into the signs he made. It brought in all that was felt as a Mercury culture. Thus it was no wonder that what proceeded from the Wotan culture, distilled from the best forces that were in it, viz., the Baldur-Being, the Sun-Being, was felt and thought of as one united not with life, but with death. Baldur had to go to Hel, into the dark forces of Death, the dwelling-place of Death.

Moreover, to begin with, men pondered most, as we can see from the traditions of the Edda, not on the question of how this Baldur, son of the Wotan forces, should be freed from Hel—for this is really a later conception—but on the question of how he should be healed. And at length they said: We have many means of healing, but Baldur, the intelligence proceeding from the Runes of Wotan—for this there are no remedies, and it can only lead to death.

Thus we see once more what I have pointed out to you from so many points of view in the study of human evolution. In olden times the instinctive knowledge of mankind knew nothing of the significance of death, for men remembered the pre-earthly life and knew that death is only a transformation. They did not feel death as any deeper incision than this. Above all there was no such thing as the tragedy of death. This only entered in when the Mystery of Golgotha approached, which became indeed a redemption from the fear of death. In the Baldur legend you see the most visible description of how, with the entry of intellectualism, there comes that mood of soul which reckons with deaths, and you see what thus entered into human evolution.

Thus what had been seen in the death of Baldur, who could not rise again, was only healed once more in the way of soul and spirit, when the Christ-figure who could rise from death was placed over against him.

It is wonderful how in the North, through the influence of the Mercury-forces on the Sun-and Moon-forces, the perception of the Christ-impulse was prepared. In Baldur, the God who falls into death and cannot rise again, we see the forerunner, in the North, of Christ, who also falls a victim to death, but who can rise, because He comes directly from the Sun. Baldur, on the other hand, the Sun-force coming from Wotan, is the Sun-force reflected back by Mercury, radiating forth from the signs which man makes out of his intellect.

Thus we see how evidently all these things evolve in the Northern regions, where man still appears to us living and reading in the Cosmos, seeking for his religious, social and medical conceptions from the Cosmos, until at a later stage he passes over to dwell with the Earth-forces. From his sacrificial stone the Druid priest gazes at the configuration of the shadow of the Sun, and reads what appears in the shadow, representing the spiritual aspects of the Sun. Then we approach the time when the Sun-Being, the Sun-nature that had been caught up, as it were, in the cromlechs is drawn in abstract lines, called rays. We approach the time when the relationship of what lives in root and leaf and blossom with what lives in frost and wind and fire is recognized at most in a chemical sense. Giants and elemental beings alike are transformed into “forces of Nature.” And yet in our forces of Nature no more is contained than the giants of ancient time. We are only unaware of the fact and feel immensely superior. It is a straight line of development from the giants to the forces of Nature. These are the latter-day children of them. Man who lives today in a highly derived, i.e., an unoriginal, civilization, cannot but be deeply moved when he looks at these scant relics of the Druid age. It is as though he were to behold the hoary ancestors of what is living in this present time.

To go more into detail, we too today speak of medicine and remedies in a strangely abstract way, very intellectually, describing abstractly their mode of preparation. All this we must imagine transformed into something altogether living if we would look back on the way the Druid priest regarded his remedies. For he felt the Sun-forces which he knew so well and which in plants and other products of Nature he treated with the forces of the giants. All this was altogether living for him. From the giants he wrested the forces of preparation to transform the plants into medicaments. He knew that in so doing he did something for the whole Cosmos. Then he gazed on man himself. Through his peculiar knowledge of man, the most intimate parts of the natural man, e.g. in the dream-recognized the symptoms coming forth, as it were, from the imaginations that arose, the vague, unconscious flickering-upward of the deeper human nature into consciousness under the influence of these remedies in which the giant-forces were subdued and held in check, he recognized how these things worked in the human being into whom they were instilled. Thus he had on the one hand his Loki in the wild influences of the outer fire, and on the other hand what he had taken away from Loki in order to transform this or that plant by a combustion process into a medicament. From the way this worked within the human being, he then beheld the Loki-force in man. For here it was disarmed. And the Druid said: That which out there in the world of the giants is working with threatening danger and destruction works healingly when brought in the right manner into the inner man. Poisonous forces as it were on a large scale become healing forces when brought to the right place.

Thus the Druid in his way perceived the varied forces and workings of Nature. Thus he was within the spiritual whereby he sent forth the religious, social, medicinal and other impulses into his community. Thus in that time the ancient primeval wisdom which the Moon Beings, so long as they were here, had cultivated on the Earth, and which was now no longer here directly, since they themselves had gone with the Moon—this primeval wisdom was preserved through Beings that were found and known by a kind of Sun-Initiation in the way I have described to you today.

Today I want to clarify certain deep world-mysteries, the knowledge of which has been lost in modern civilization. To realize some of what has been lost, think of the modern conception of the planetary system, that it originated in some kind of rotating, primeval nebula, from which the various planetary bodies coalesced. From this picture we can easily speculate that there are no fundamental differences between these heavenly bodies. This in fact is the prevailing attitude towards them. If the whole planetary system is viewed as a rotating nebula, out of which the heavenly bodies gradually separated, what essential difference is there between, for example, the Moon and Saturn? It is of course true that important research in the last century into earthly substances, particularly into minerals, has led to knowledge about the material composition of the heavenly bodies, and even a certain kind of physics and chemistry for them. This has made it possible for ordinary text-books to give specific details about Venus, Saturn, the Moon, and so on. But all this amounts to no more than making an image of, let us say, the physical organism of man, leaving out of account altogether the fact that he is a being of soul and spirit. With the help of Initiation-science we must again learn to realize that our planetary system, too, is permeated with soul and spirit. And today I want to speak of the various planetary individualities and of their individual characteristics.

Let’s begin with the planet nearest the Earth, the planet with whose history is bound up with the Earth's history, though only in a certain sense, and which once played an entirely different part in earthly life from the part it plays today. You know from my book Outline of Occult Science that there was once a cosmic age, relatively speaking not in a very remote past, when the Moon was still united with the Earth. The Moon then separated from the Earth and now circles around it.

When we speak of the Moon as a physical body in the heavens, its physical nature is only the most external revelation of the spirit behind it. To those who have knowledge of both its outer and its inner nature, the Moon in our universe presents itself initially as a gathering of spiritual beings living in great seclusion. Outwardly, the Moon acts as a mirror of the universe, and its reflection of the light of the Sun is evident to the most superficial observation. We can say that what comes from the Moon is sunlight, shining upon the Moon and then reflected. First and foremost, then, the Moon is a mirror of sunlight. Now, as you all know, we see what is outside or in front of a mirror but we do not see what is behind it.

The Moon not only mirrors sunlight, but also reflects everything that radiates upon it, although sunlight is by far the strongest. All the heavenly bodies in the universe send their rays toward the Moon, and the Moon, as a mirror of the universe, then radiates it all back in every direction. It can be said, therefore, that the universe is before us in a twofold aspect. It reveals itself directly on Earth, but also in what is radiated back by the Moon. The Sun's rays work with tremendous power in themselves, but also in their reflection from the Moon. Every other radiation in cosmic space is also reflected by the Moon. There is the manifest universe, and there is also its reflection from the Moon.

Anyone capable of observing the mirror-pictures thrown back in all directions by the Moon would have the whole universe before him in reflection. Only that which is within the Moon, that and that alone remains, if I may so express it, the Moon's secret. It remains hidden, just as what is behind a mirror remains hidden. What is behind the outer surface of the Moon, in the innermost sphere of the Moon, is significant above all in its spiritual aspect.

The high spiritual beings peopling this innermost sphere of the Moon are high beings who shut themselves off in strict seclusion from the rest of the universe. They live in their Moon “fortress”. A person can develop certain heart qualities in relation to sunlight to such an extent that he does not see the reflection from the Moon, and only for such a person does the Moon become as it were inwardly transparent, and only then can the person penetrate into th universe’s Moon-fortress. He then makes the significant discovery, that through the utterances, the teachings of those high beings who have withdrawn into seclusion in this Moon-fortress, certain secrets can be revealed that were once in the possession of the most advanced spirits on Earth, secrets which have long since been lost.

The farther we go back in the evolution of the Earth, the less do we find the abstract truths that pride present-day humanity. More and more we find pictures, truths expressed in pictures. We can wrestle our way through to glimpse some of these deeply significant truths by studying what is still preserved, as a last echo of oriental wisdom, in the Vedas and the Vedanta. We can press on to the primal revelations hidden behind the myths and sagas, and we can realize with wonder and awe that a glorious wisdom was once possessed by men who received it without intellectual effort, as grace from the spiritual world. And finally, we can come to all that was once taught to primeval humanity on Earth by the high beings who have now withdrawn into the universe’s Moon-fortress, after leaving the Earth together with the Moon. A certain memory has been preserved of what these high beings once revealed to the peoples of a remote past, to human beings whose nature was quite different from human nature as it is today. If we succeed in fathoming this mystery, which I will call it the universe’s Moon-mystery, we realize that these high beings now entrenched in the Moon-fortress were once the great teachers of earthly humanity, but that all consciousness of the realities of spirit and soul hidden in this fortress has been lost. What is still transmitted to the Earth from the heavens represents only what the outer surface, the walls, as it were, of the Moon-fortress, what the outer surface radiates back from the rest of the universe.

This Moon-mystery was one of the deepest secrets in the ancient Mysteries, for it is primal wisdom that the Moon enshrines within itself. What the Moon is able to reflect from the whole universe forms the sum-total of the forces which sustain the animal world of the Earth now, especially the forces that are connected with the sexual nature of animals. These forces also sustain the animal element in man and are connected with his sexual nature in its physical aspect, so we see that the lower nature of man is a product of what radiates from the Moon, while the highest wisdom once possessed by the Earth lies concealed within the Moon-fortress.

In this way one gradually comes to a knowledge of the “individuality” of the Moon, to an understanding of what the Moon is in reality. All other knowledge of the Moon is only like information we could glean about a human being from a pasteboard image of him displayed in some exhibition. Such an image would tell us nothing whatever about the man's individuality. Equally it is not possible for a science that refuses any approach towards initiation to know anything about the individuality of the Moon.

We turn now to Saturn. In earlier times Saturn was regarded as the outermost planet of our system, Uranus and Neptune having been added much later. We will leave them out of consideration now and think of Saturn as a kind of antithesis to the Moon. The nature of Saturn is to receive many diverse impulses from the universe but not allow them to stream back, at all events not to the Earth. Saturn too, of course, is irradiated by the Sun, but what Saturn reflects of the solar rays has no significance for earthly life. Saturn is an entirely self-engrossed heavenly body in our planetary system, raying his own being into the universe. When we contemplate Saturn, he tells us always what he is. Whereas the Moon, contemplated in its external aspect, tells us about everything else in the universe, Saturn tells us nothing at all about the impulses he receives from the universe. He speaks only of himself, tells us only what he himself is. And just what he is, that reveals itself gradually as a kind of memory of the planetary system.

Saturn presents himself to us as the world body who has steadfastly participated in whatever has come to pass in our planetary system and has faithfully preserved it in memory, in his cosmic memory. He is silent about the cosmic-present. He receives the things of the cosmic-present into himself and works upon them in his life of spirit and soul. True, the hosts of high beings dwelling in Saturn lend their attention to the outer universe, but mutely and silently they receive the happenings in the universe into their realm of soul, and they speak only of past cosmic events. That is why Saturn is like a kaleidoscopic memory of our planetary system. He holds faithfully and silently what has already come to pass in the planetary system. He holds its secrets within himself.

In trying to fathom the mysteries of the universe we normally turn to the Moon, although normally in vain, for we must win the confidence of the Moon beings if we are to learn anything from them about cosmic mysteries, but this is not necessary with Saturn. With Saturn, all that is necessary is to be open to receive the spiritual. And then, to the eyes of spirit and soul, Saturn becomes a living historian of the planetary system. Nor does he withhold the stories he can tell of what has come to pass in the planetary system. In this respect Saturn is the exact opposite of the Moon. Saturn speaks unceasingly of the planetary system’s past with such inner warmth and zest that intimate acquaintance with what he says can be dangerous, for the devotion with which he tells of past happenings in the universe arouses in us an overwhelming love for the cosmic-past. Saturn is the constant tempter of those who listen to his secrets. He tempts them to give little heed to today’s earthly affairs and to immerse themselves in what the Earth once was. Above all, Saturn speaks graphically about what the Earth was before it became Earth, and for this reason he is the planet who makes the past unendingly dear to us. Those who have a particular inclination towards Saturn in earthly existence are people who like to be gazing always into the past, who are opposed to progress, who ever-and-again want to bring back the past. These indications give some idea of the individuality, the individual character of Saturn.

Jupiter is a planet with a different character. Jupiter is the thinker in our planetary system, and thinking is the activity cultivated by all the high beings in his world-domain. Creative thoughts received from the universe radiate to us from Jupiter. Jupiter contains, in the form of thoughts, all the educational-craft of the different beings of the universe. Whereas Saturn tells of the past, Jupiter gives a living portrayal of what is congruent, what is present now in the universe. It is necessary, however, for a person to earnestly, intimately take in what he presents to the eyes of the spirit. If a person does not unfurl his own thinking, then he comes for example, how can I say it, not as a clairvoyant, then he comes upon the secret mysteries of Jupiter, which he finds reveal themselves only in thoughtforms, and only when the person himself thinks, only then he comes upon the secret mysteries of Jupiter, who is the thinker of the universe.

When a person attempts to fathom any of the significant enigmatic questions concerning the possibilities of his own being, and then comes up against human physical and etheric obstacles, and especially when he comes up against human astral obstacles, and he is on the wrong tack, then the beings of Jupiter step in and help him. The beings of Jupiter are really the helpers of human nature for the unfolding of human wisdom. And whomever has properly tried to work out in clear thinking an enigmatic question of the possibilities of his own being, and cannot come to a groundbreaking insight, if the person patiently keeps it in mind and continues to work on it, he finds that the Jupiter beings actually help him during the night. And many who have come to a better understanding of a day-riddle at night, as if out of a dream, many would have to admit, if they were really to look at the truth, that the Jupiter-powers bring spirited animated impetus into human thinking, if I may so depict it. As therefore Saturn is the guardian of memory of the universe, Jupiter is the thinker of the universe. To Jupiter the human being owes all that he really knows of the universe’s present spiritual state. To Saturn the human being owes all that he has of the universe’s soul-spiritual past. It was due to intuition that it was normal in ancient Greece, where people lived intimately with the presence of spirit, it was normal then to hold Jupiter in high honor.

A stimulus to the whole development of the human being is given also through the part played by Jupiter in the cycle of the year. You all know that as far as his apparent movement is concerned, Saturn moves slowly, very slowly, round his orbit, taking some 30 years. Jupiter moves faster, taking about 12 years. Because of this quicker movement Jupiter is able to bring satisfaction to man's need for wisdom more quickly. And when in a certain sense a person’s destiny is expressed in the World-All, when at that very time there exists a special relationship between Jupiter and Saturn, then there may come into a person’s destiny a wonderful illuminated glimpse, in which, with thinking, much will be revealed in the present concerning the past. And if we look in humanity’s world-history, into the epoch of the Renaissance, where a resurgence of old impulses entered in, especially in the last phases of the Renaissance, this renewal of old impulses is associated with a specific planetary configuration between Jupiter and Saturn.

But, as already said, Jupiter is in a certain respect impenetrable and his revelations remain in the unconscious if a man does not bring to them clear and active light-filled thinking of his own. And that is why in ancient times, when active thinking was still at a very early stage of development, the progress of humanity was in truth always dependent upon the relation between Jupiter and Saturn. When Jupiter and Saturn together formed a certain planetary configuration, many things were revealed to our ancestors in those days. Modern man is more dependent on things removed from their development, which means, Saturn-memory and Jupiter-wisdom are disconnected in a modern person’s soul-spiritual development.

We now come to Mars. It is difficult to find appropriate expressions for these things, but Mars may be called the great “Talker” in the planetary system. Unlike Jupiter, who translates his wisdom in thought-forms, Mars always smothers the souls beholden to him with chatter about virtually everything accessible to him in the universe, which for him is not everything. Mars is the most talkative chatterbox planet in our system, and he is particularly active when sleeping human beings talk during dreaming. Mars has a great longing to be talking always, and whenever some quality in human nature enables him to make a man loquacious, he stimulates this tendency.

Mars does little thinking. He has few thinkers, but many talkers, in his sphere. His spirits are always on the watch for what arises here or there in the universe and then they talk about it with great zest and fervor. In humanity’s evolutionary course, Mars is the planetary individuality who in manifold ways instigates human beings to make statements about world-mysteries. Mars has his good and his less-good sides; he has his genius and his daemon. His genius works in such a way that men receive from the universe the impulses for speech. The influence of his daemon results in speech being misused in many and various ways. In a certain sense Mars may be called the Agitator in our universe. He is always out to cajole whereas Jupiter wants only to convince.

The planet Venus is again different. In a certain way, I could say, Venus repels, wards off the whole universe. She is demure, prudish, aloof concerning the universe; she does not wish to know anything about the universe. She regards any submission to the universe, I might say, any external universal exposure and submission, as if it would cause her maiden purity, her virginity, to be lost. She is deeply shocked when any impression from the external universe attempts to approach her. She has no desire for the universe and rejects every dancing- partner – it is very difficult to express these things, because the circumstances and conditions have to be described in terms of earthly language –. On the other hand, Venus is highly responsive to everything that comes from the Earth. The Earth is, so to speak, her lover. Whereas the Moon reflects the whole surrounding universe, Venus reflects nothing at all of the universe, and wants to know nothing of it, but she lovingly reflects whatever comes from the Earth. If we are able to glimpse the mysteries of Venus with the eyes of soul, the whole Earth with all of her soulful secrets is there before us once again.

The truth is that human beings on Earth can do nothing in the secrecy of their souls without it being reflected back again by Venus. Venus gazes deeply into the hearts of human beings, for that is what interests her, that is what she will allow to approach her, so that the most intimate experiences of earthly life are reflected again from Venus, in a mysterious and wonderful way. In the reflection she transforms everything, just as a dream transforms the happenings of physical existence. Venus transforms the occurrences of earthly life into dream-pictures. In reality, therefore, the whole sphere of Venus is a world of dreaming. The secrets of human beings in their earthly existence are transformed by Venus into dream-pictures of infinite diversity. She has a very great deal to do with poets, although they are not aware of it.

I said before that Venus wards off the rest of the universe. She does not, however, repel everything in the same way. In her heart, Venus repels what approaches her from the universe but not what comes from the Earth. As I said before, she declines every would-be suitor, but for all that she listens attentively to the utterances of Mars. She transforms and illuminates her dreamlike experiences of earthly things with what is communicated to her from the universe through Mars.

All these things have their physical side as well. Impulses go out from these sources into what is done and into what comes into existence in the world. Venus receives into herself everything that comes from the Earth and she listens always to Mars, without wanting him to know it. And from this process, although the Sun is there in between to regulate it, spring the forces which underlie the organs connected with the formation of human speech.

If a person wants to become familiar with the impulses in the cosmos connected with the formation of human speech, then the person must turn his gaze to this noteworthy living and weaving that plays out between Venus and Mars. And when destiny happens to play out just so in how Venus stands in relationship to Mars, that there may be a tremendous significance for the development of the speech of a folk-soul group, the speech of the folk will be inwardly deepened when Venus for instance stands in quadrature, 90 degrees from Mars. On the other hand, a language tends to become superficial, poor in qualities of soul, when Venus and Mars are in conjunction, and this in turn has an influence upon the people or nation concerned. In this manner impulses are portrayed as they form in the World-All and have their effect on the folk they pertain to.

We come next to Mercury. In contrast to the other planets, Mercury is not interested in things of a physical, material nature as such, but in whatever is capable of combining, of coordinating. Mercury is the domain of the masters of combining concepts and ideas in thinking, whereas Jupiter is the habitation of the masters of wisdom-filled thinking. When a human being comes down from pre-earthly life into a contemplation of the possibilities of his existence on earth, the Moon impulse provides the forces for his physical existence, Venus provides the forces for his basic qualities of heart and temperament, but Mercury provides the impetus for his capacity of reasoning about things, of making sense of them, especially for his intellect. The high master-crafters of coordinative inner knowing have their habitation in Mercury.

There is a remarkable connection between these planets and the life and being of a human being. The Moon, which enshrines beings living in strict seclusion, and reflects only what is first radiated to it from the universe, builds and fashions the outer form, the body of man. It is therefore by the Moon that the forces of heredity are incorporated in bodily constitution. Within the Moon sit those high spiritual beings, who in complete seclusion cosmically muse upon what is fostered and transmitted in the stream of heredity flowing from generation to generation by way of the physical.

It is because the Moon beings remain so firmly entrenched in their fortress that modern scientists know nothing essential about heredity. From a deeper insight, and in terms of cosmic language, at the present time when heredity is discussed in one or another forum of science, these forums may be said to be “Moon-forsaken” and “Mars-bewitched”. For science speaks under the influence of the daemonic Mars-forces and has not even begun to approach the real mysteries of heredity.

Venus and Mercury, on the other hand, bring into the human being the karmic element that is connected more with the life of soul and spirit and comes to expression in his qualities of heart and in his temperament. And then Mars, and especially Jupiter and Saturn, when a man has a right relationship with them, act as liberating factors. They wrest man away from what is determined by destiny and make him into a free being. Biblical words in a somewhat changed form might be used as follows. Saturn, the faithful custodian of cosmic memory, says, “Let us make man free in the realm of his own memory”. This influence of Saturn is forced into unconsciousness as a human being’s memory becomes his own possession, as he thereby acquires the sure foundation of his personal freedom. The inner will-impulse contained in acts of free thinking, however, is due to grace bestowed by Jupiter. It would be in Jupiter's power to rule over and control all the thoughts of men. He is the one in whom we find the thoughts of the whole universe if we are capable of gaining access to them. But Jupiter too has withdrawn, leaving men to think as free beings.

The element of freedom in speech is due to the fact that Mars too has been gracious. Because Mars was obliged as it were to acquiesce in the resolution made by the other outer planets and could not exercise any greater coercion, man is free, in a certain respect, in the realm of speech too, not entirely, but in a certain respect free. From another point of view therefore, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn may also be called the liberating planets, for they give man freedom. On the other hand, Venus, Mercury and the Moon may be called the destiny-determining planets.

In the midst of all these deeds and impulses of the planetary individualities stands the Sun, creating harmony between the liberating and the destiny-determining planets. The Sun is the individuality in whom the elements of destiny-necessity and human freedom interweave in a most wonderful way. And no-one can understand what is contained in the flaming brilliance of the Sun unless he is able to behold this interweaving life of destiny and freedom in the light which spreads out into the universe and concentrates again in solar warmth.

Nor can we grasp anything essential about the nature of the Sun as long as we take in only what the physicists know of it. We can grasp the nature of the Sun only when we know something of its nature of soul and spirit. In that realm, it is the power which imbues warmth in the element of necessity in destiny, which transmutes destiny into freedom in its flame, and if freedom is misused, which condenses it once more into its own active substance. The Sun is, as it were, is the flame in which freedom becomes a luminous reality in the World-All, and at the same time the Sun is the substance, as condensed ashes, in which misused freedom is molded into destiny, until destiny itself can become luminous and pass over into the flame of freedom.

Yesterday I gave you a description of the starry sky nearest to us. If you think back to this description, you will have to say to yourselves above all: if we draw such a picture of the starry heavens from spiritual knowledge, it looks quite different from what is otherwise said in this field today. Yesterday, precisely in order to make this emerge clearly, I spoke in the way I have just done. I had to speak in a way that must seem absurd, perhaps even ridiculous, to anyone who acquires knowledge about these subjects today through contemporary education. And yet, the fact of the matter is that a kind of healing of our sick spiritual life can only take place if this total change of perspective — especially of such things as we discussed yesterday — can take place.

And one would like to say: Wherever thinking takes place today, but thinking takes place in such a way that it runs into the old, conventional ideas, one sees on the one hand how thinking everywhere points to this new kind of spiritual knowledge. But one also sees how people are not able to keep up with such spiritual insight, and how they therefore actually remain at a loss everywhere and - which is perhaps the worst thing in the present moment of history - are not aware of their helplessness, indeed do not want to be aware of it.

Let us imagine how what I described yesterday from a completely different point of view is described today. Yesterday I spoke about the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and so on, and I presented the individualities, the spiritual individualities that can be associated with these words. I showed you, as it were, our planetary system as a gathering of spiritual beings that work out of different impulses, but in such a way that these impulses also have something to do with earthly events. We saw living beings appearing in the universe with a certain character. We could speak of living beings in Saturn, the Moon and so on. But the whole way of speaking differs from what is said about such things today. There is the assumption – I repeat it again – of a primeval nebula that existed once, which was in a rotating, circling motion and from which the individual planets split off, which today one looks at with complete indifference as more or less luminous physical bodies that rush along in space.

This view that the heavenly bodies are such indifferent bodies, to which nothing else can be applied than physics, especially mathematics, to calculate their orbits, to possibly explore whether the substances found on Earth are also present there, this indifferent view of the heavenly bodies, is something that has actually only become common among mankind in the last three to four centuries. And it has become customary in a very definite way. Today things are just not understood. Because man has lost the possibility of looking into the spiritual, or, as it was only the case in the later Middle Ages, at least to have a presentiment of it, it has also become possible to completely lose the spiritual. Then the physical concepts that arose on earth, the mathematical and computational concepts, were regarded as something certain, and now that was revealed out there in the celestial space was also calculated. A certain assumption was made here – I must already present these theoretical considerations today – we have learned how to calculate something on earth, how to do physical science on earth, and have now extended this calculation on earth, this physical science, to the whole of the heavens and believed that the calculation results that apply on earth also apply to the heavens.

On earth, we speak of time, of matter, of motion; for physicists, one could say, of mass, also of speed and so on: all concepts that have been gained on earth. Since the time of Newton, these have also been extended to the heavens. And the whole conception that one has of what is going on in the world is nothing more than a mathematical result obtained on earth and then projected into the heavens. The whole of Kant-Laplace's theory is indeed an absurdity the moment one realizes that it is valid only on the assumption that the same laws of calculation apply out there in space as on earth, that the concepts of space, time and so on are just as applicable out there as on earth.

But now there is a strange fact, a fact that is causing people a lot of headaches today. We live in a very strange time, which is announced by manifold symptoms. In all popular gatherings held by monists and other bundlers, people are presented with the fact that the stars shine out there through the known processes. The whole beautiful doctrine of spiral nebulae and so on, as presented to the outer eye, is presented to a believing audience by popularizing speakers and writers. And today's man has his education from these popular speakers and popular writers. But this education is actually, basically, only the result of what physicists and other so-called learned people thought and devised decades ago. In such popular gatherings, everything that was considered important by experts decades ago is reheated. But today the experts are being shaken up by something completely different. That which is shaking them up is, for example, the so-called theory of relativity.

This theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, is what concerns the thinking physicists today. Now, the details of this theory of relativity can be discussed, as I have already done here and there; but today we are not concerned with its inner validity, but with the fact that it exists and that physicists are talking about it. Of course there are physicists who are opposed to it, but there are many physicists who simply talk about the theory of relativity. But what does that mean?

Yes, it means that this theory of relativity destroys all the concepts on which our view of the movements and nature of celestial bodies in space is based. For decades, what is written in astronomy books today, what is still presented to a lay audience in popular lectures and books, has been valid; it has been valid. But physicists are working to dismantle and destroy the most popular concepts – time, movement, space – and declaring: none of it is as we thought it was. — You see, at least for physicists today it is already something of a matter of conscience to say, for example: I point my telescope at a distant star. But I have calculated that it takes so much time for the light from that star to reach the Earth. So when I look through my telescope, the light that enters my telescope has taken so many light-years. The light that enters the telescope must therefore have started out up there so many light-years ago. The star is no longer there, it is no longer there at all. I get the beam of light into my telescope, but what is in the extension of the telescope is not the star at all. And if I look at a star next to it, from which the light now takes much fewer light-years, it still arrives at the same time. I turn my telescope: the star comes to a point of light that was perhaps there so-and-so many years ago. Now I turn my telescope again: a star falls into my telescope that is not there at all, but was there a completely different number of years ago. And so I form views of my starry sky! Everything is there from the time when it was there, but actually it is not there at all. Actually nothing is there: everything is thrown over and under.

This is exactly how it is with space. We perceive a distant sound somewhere. When we approach it, it appears to us at a different 'pitch' than when we move away from it. Space becomes decisive for the way we perceive things. And of course that makes people scratch their heads. Time, which plays a role in all calculations, has suddenly become something quite uncertain, something merely relative. And of all that is so popularly drawn out into space, the modern physicist – and he is aware of this – can only say: There is something that was once there, is still there, will once be there. Well, there is something there. And that something that is there causes its light emissions to coincide with the crosshairs of my telescope at a certain point in time. — That is the only wisdom that remains, the coincidence of two events. So, what once happened somewhere, sometime, coincides with what is happening today in the crosshairs of my telescope. Only of such coincidences can one speak – says today's physicist – it is all relative; the concepts from which the world building has been theoretically constructed are actually of a merely relative, not at all absolute value. That is why physicists today are talking about a radical revolution in all the concepts of physics. And if you went straight from a popular lecture for laypeople to a lecture by a relativity theorist today, you would find that the popularizer is handing down to people something that is built on the ideas that the experts say: “It's all melted like snow in the sun!”

You see, we cannot just say that a physical world view has been built up out of certain concepts over the past three to four hundred years; rather, we have to say that today there are already enough people who have dissolved these concepts out of these concepts, who have destroyed them. After all, this world view, which is considered certain, no longer exists for a large number of thinkers. So the matter is not quite so simple that what is said from a completely new point of view may be ridiculed. Because what is said from the other point of view melts away in the present like snow in the sun. It is actually no longer there for those who understand something of the matter, or at least want to understand something. So that one actually stands before the fact that people say: What is described here from the point of view of spiritual science is absurd because it does not agree with what we consider to be right. But if they now take the relativity point of view, then these people must say: That is absurd, what we have considered to be right! That is how things stand today. But actually the majority of humanity is asleep, watching as if asleep as these things unfold and letting them happen. But it is important to realize that the worldview that has celebrated such great triumphs as such is actually in ruins today.

The facts of the spiritual world will only become clear to a wider public when people at least begin to loosen the pointy cap they sleep under. So, one does not just have the option of thinking that what speaks out of such a tone as I did yesterday is absurd in the face of today's science, because this science is, for example, quite negative in its theory of relativity; it actually says everywhere what is, and humanity will have to steer towards an understanding of that which is.

These things should be explained by such representations, as I tried to give them yesterday with regard to individual stars in our planetary system. But what do we see there? We see that, to a certain extent, it is precisely following the course of world development. What would an old-fashioned physicist, not a newcomer to physics (because most newcomers are relativists), what would an old-fashioned physicist say if he heard something as outrageous as what I said yesterday? If he did not immediately say that it is all crazy and twisted, and that is perhaps what he would say at first, he would still claim: That contradicts the firm foundations of science. But what are the firm foundations of science? They are the concepts of space, time and so on that have been gained on earth. Now the relativity theorists are destroying these concepts for the universe, declaring them invalid.

Anthroposophy, however, takes a practical approach: it disregards earthly concepts when talking about the moon and Saturn and Jupiter and so on. It no longer speaks in earthly terms, but attempts – however difficult it may be – to characterize Venus and Mars in a way that is no longer possible with earthly concepts. And so, in order to penetrate into the cosmos, we must be willing to lose our earthly concepts. I wanted to show you how the cosmos fits into contemporary spiritual life and how things stand in contemporary spiritual life. There is only a relationship with earthly concepts when one reaches out into the cosmos. Just imagine, when we go to the moon, as I characterized it yesterday, to those entities that are anchored in the moon as in a world fortress and actually live behind the surface of the moon - where they, if may I put it, their world business, when we come to these entities, which can only be approached with a clairvoyantly sharpened gaze, we find that these entities work in secret. Because what is inside the moon does not go out into the world, and everything that comes from the moon is reflected out of the world. Just as the moon does not absorb sunlight but reflects it, so it also reflects everything else that happens in the universe. Everything that happens in the universe is reflected back by the moon as if by a mirror. Processes take place within it that remain hidden.

But I have told you: the spiritual beings who are entrenched in this lunar fortress, as in the universe, and who conduct their world business in there, were once on earth before the moon split off from the earth. They were the first great teachers of human souls on earth. And the great ancient wisdom that is spoken of is basically the heritage of these lunar beings, who now live in secret within the moon. They have withdrawn themselves.

When one speaks in this way about the universe, moral concepts enter into the ideas that one develops. One forgets the physical concepts of the earth; moral concepts enter into the description. We ask ourselves: Why have these lunar entities withdrawn, why do they work in secret? Yes, when they were still on earth, they did indeed suggest an enormous wisdom to people. If they had remained on earth, they would have continued to suggest this wisdom to people, but people would never have been able to enter the age of freedom.

These entities had, so to speak, made the wonderful decision to withdraw from Earth, to retreat to a secluded place in the universe, far from human existence, in order to carry out their world business there, so that people would no longer be influenced by them, so that people could all absorb the impulses of the universe and become free beings. These entities have chosen a new dwelling place in the universe to gradually make freedom possible for people.

Yes, that speaks differently than is spoken of by the physicist, who, if he heard that the moon had split off from the earth, would simply calculate the speed at which it happened, the forces by which it happened, and would only ever have the earthly forces and the earthly speeds in mind. They are completely disregarded when we speak of the moon as I did yesterday. But if we leave aside the physical, what remains are such resolutions, such great cosmic-moral impulses. The important thing is that we move from physical verbiage, which applies to the physical conditions of the earth, to a discourse in moral ideas about the universe.

The important thing is that one does not merely put forward theories that are to be believed, but that there is a moral world order. This has completely confused the human soul in the last three to four centuries, that one has said: One can know some things about the earth, and, based on what is known on earth, calculate the universe and construct theories such as the Kant-Laplace theory, but with regard to the moral and divine order of the world, one must believe. This has greatly confused people, because the insight has been completely lost that one must speak in earthly terms about the earth, but that one must begin to speak cosmically the moment one rises up to the universe. There, physical speech gradually gives way to moral speech. What is otherwise at most imagined is practically carried out.

If you find a description of the sun by a physicist today, it is some kind of gas ball steaming out there, and its eruptions are described like terrestrial eruptions. Everything is projected onto this cosmic body in the same way as what happens on earth, and with the same calculations that we have acquired here, we then calculate how a ray of light passes the sun or the like. But the calculations we use here on Earth no longer apply when we go out into space. And just as the strength of light decreases with distance in a square, the laws no longer apply in outer space. We are only related to the universe in our morality. By rising above the physical as human to the moral, we here on earth become similar to what works in outer space as realized morality.

Thus we must say: in the ultimate sense, Anthroposophy is a science. It actually implements what arises as a demand. It no longer speaks in earthly concepts, except for the moral ones, which, however, are already supermundane on earth. It speaks in such moral concepts when it soars to the universe. This must be taken into account. And from this point of view, the concepts that we need to understand on earth must be gained, which cannot be understood just now.

You see, the beings that are anchored in the moon, I said, only work as if in a fortress. There they do their world business. For everything that the moon gives to the world, that the earth gives, is reflected and mirrored. But this is a state that has only just occurred in the course of evolution in the cosmic becoming. It used to be different. And into the, I would like to say, soft, slimy form that the earth itself and all beings once had, these beings worked when they still walked on earth. And it is in connection with these effects that the spinal cord column develops in both humans and animals. So that the spinal cord column in humans and in animals is an inheritance from very ancient times, when the moon beings were still connected with earthly existence. This can no longer arise today. The spinal column is an inheritance; it can no longer arise today.

But with regard to the four-footed animals, these entities made the spine so strong that it remains horizontal. In the case of humans, they made it so that it could become vertical, and the human being could then become free through the vertical spine for the universe and its influences at the moment when these lunar beings retreated to the lunar fortress.

And so we will gradually come to explaining the earthly from the universe, and to judging spiritual forces and impulses in the right way in earthly existence as well. It is the case that human minds have been invaded by ideas that have only emerged in the last three or four hundred years. And all of them under the influence of the view that the only thing one can apply to the whole universe to explain it is what one has gained from physical events and from the physical things of the earth. One has made the whole universe into a physical image of the earth. Now, however, people have realized: Something coincides with my crosshairs, but that was there once! The whole story does not apply in this way. And if one takes into account stars that are far enough away, today's physicist can say: What I record as a map is not there at all. I draw two stars next to each other: one of them was there, say, a thousand years ago, the other was there six hundred years ago. No, the stars were never there, side by side, as I see them in my crosshairs, coinciding as the rays of light.

So it all melts away, it is not really like that at all. With these concepts, you do not get what is out there. You calculate, calculate, calculate. It is just as if the spider weaves its web and then imagines that this web weaves through the whole world.

The reason for this is that these laws, according to which one calculates, no longer apply out there, but at most one can use the morality that is within us to get concepts of what is out there. Out there in the starry sky, things happen morally, sometimes also immorally, ahrimanically, luciferically, and so on. But when I take morality as a generic term, things happen morally, not physically. But this is something that must be rediscovered, because the other has become so firmly entrenched in people's minds over the last two or three centuries that even doubts such as those of the relativity theorists — for their negations have a great deal to be said for them — cannot dislodge it from people's minds. It is also understandable, because if even this last chimera, the time-space calculation that they perform, if even this still disappears from their minds for the starry sky, then there is nothing left in these minds, and people do like to retain something in them. For something else will only be able to be in it if one rises to the possibility of looking at the starry sky as we did yesterday.

Now we must realize that all this points to the fact that it is necessary for people of the present time to form clear ideas about what has actually happened in the last three to four centuries, and what has found its preliminary expression in the greatest of all wars that have ever taken place on earth, and in the chaotic conditions that will become even more chaotic in the near future. What is required of humanity is to really come to terms with these issues. And in this respect it is interesting to take a look beyond the Earth with its present level of intellectual development.

Within the civilization in which the Westerner with his American followers live, everything that has been developed in the last three to four centuries under the influence of a phenomenally magnificent technology and a magnificent world traffic - which is only now breaking down - is considered so solid that, of course, anyone who does not adopt the same concepts is a fool. Now it is true that the Orient is in a state of decadence, but one must also say: What one has to express again today from the sources of our own anthroposophical research, as I did yesterday, was, albeit in a completely different way, once in ancient times, still oriental wisdom.

We cannot accept this oriental wisdom in its old form today, as I have often discussed. We have to regain it from the Western mind, from the Western soul. But it was once, I would like to say, the custom to speak about the stars in the way that I began to speak about them yesterday, based on the old clairvoyance, on this dream-like old clairvoyance. Only that has been completely lost to humanity, and European humanity today considers all of this to be absurd, which was once considered the highest human wisdom.

Now, as I said, although this was once a great and original wisdom in the Orient too, today people there are in a state of decadence. But in a certain sense, at least externally and traditionally, something of such a way of looking at the universe has been preserved in the Orient, I would even say a soulful way of looking at the universe. And the technical culture of Europe impresses the Orientals very little. These souls, who today in the Orient lovingly engage with the ancient wisdom, fundamentally disdain what has developed in Europe as a mechanical culture and civilization. They study what concerns the human soul from their ancient scriptures. In this way, some inwardly experience an, albeit decadent, enlightenment, so that something of the soul's view of the world still lives in the Orient. And it is not unnecessary to also look at the way in which these people, who still have some kind of reflection of an ancient culture, look at the European-American intellectual scene. Even if it is only for the sake of comparison, it is still interesting.

A remarkable book has been published by a certain Rãmanãthan, an Indian from Ceylon, entitled “The Culture of the Soul among the Western Nations” [the title was written on the board]. This Rãmanãthan speaks in a remarkable way. He obviously belongs to those people over there in the Orient who, within Indian civilization, have said to themselves: These Europeans also have very strange scriptures, for example the New Testament. Now these people, to whom Rãmanãthan also belongs, have studied the New Testament - but of course in the way that the soul of these people can study the New Testament - and have absorbed this New Testament, the work of Christ Jesus, through the New Testament according to the state of their soul. And there are already people over there – as this book by Rãmanãthan shows – who now speak of the Christ Jesus and the New Testament from the remnants of an ancient culture. They have formed very specific ideas about the Christ Jesus.

And now this man writes a lot about these ideas of Christ Jesus, and of course he addresses the book - he wrote it in English - to the Europeans. He addresses the book, which is written by the Indian spirit about Jesus in the Gospels, to the Europeans, and he says something very strange to the Europeans. He says to them: it is quite extraordinary that they know nothing at all about the Christ Jesus. There are great things in the Gospels about Christ Jesus, but the Europeans and Americans know nothing about it, really know nothing about it! And he gives the Europeans and the Americans a strange piece of advice. He says to them: “Why don't you have teachers of the New Testament come from India, they will be able to tell you how it actually is with Christ Jesus.

So these people in Asia, who are dealing with European progress today and who then read the New Testament, tell these Europeans: If you want to learn something about the Christ Jesus, then you must have teachers come to you from us, because all the teachers who speak to you understand nothing about it, it is all misunderstood! —And he explains this in detail. He says: In Europe, at a certain time, a certain understanding of words took the place of an understanding of spiritual essence. The Europeans cling to a certain understanding of words with regard to all things. They do not carry a spiritual understanding in their heads, but the words they learn from their individual populations rise up into their heads, and then they think in words.

It is a remarkable way in which these Indians, despite their decadence, still come to this insight, because so far the story is quite striking. Even in physics and mathematics, thought is done in words today, not in things. In this respect, people today are quite strange. If someone wants to be very clever, then he quickly quotes: “For just where concepts are missing, a word comes at the right time.” But today it happens mostly out of the urge that the person in question has run out of all concepts: then the Goethean saying quickly comes to mind. But then he does not notice that. He does not realize that he is quite bitter in this vice at the moment when he criticizes it.

So this Indian says to the Europeans: You have only a word-understanding of all things, and you have extended this word-understanding over the New Testament, and thereby you have killed the Christ for four centuries. He no longer lives among you, he has been dead for four centuries. Get teachers from India so that he can be awakened again.

He says: For three to four centuries, the Europeans have known nothing at all about Christ. They cannot know anything because they do not have the concepts and ideas through which one can know something about Christ. — The Indian says to the Europeans: You need a renaissance of Christ Jesus. You have to rediscover the Christ, or someone else has to discover him for you, so that you have him again! - So says the Indian, after he has come to read the Gospel. He realizes that strange things have happened in Europe in the last three to four centuries. And then he says: If the Europeans themselves want to find out which Christ lives in the New Testament, they would have to go back a long way. Because this lack of understanding of Christ has been slowly prepared, and actually the Europeans would have to go back to Gnosticism if they still wanted to learn something from their own scriptures about the Christ.

A strange phenomenon! There is an Indian, who is only representative of many, who reads the New Testament and says to the Europeans: There is nothing that helps you more than going back to the Gnostics.

But the Europeans only have the Gnostics in the counter-writings. The Europeans know nothing of the Gnostics. It is a strange fact: the writings of the Gnostics have all been destroyed, only the polemics of the Christian church fathers against the Gnostics have survived, with the exception of the 'Pistis Sophia' and a few others, but these cannot be understood as they are, any more than the Gospels themselves can be understood. '

But now, if you are not a Gnostic but rediscover the Christ through modern spiritual science, the theologians come along and say: There the Gnosis is being warmed up again - the Gnosis, which they do not know, however, because they cannot know it from any external things. But 'warming up Gnosticism' is what it is, and that must not be done, because it distorts Christianity. This is also a divergence between East and West. Those who study the New Testament in the East find that one must go back to the first centuries. When theologians of the present day are confronted with something that appears as the description of Christ in today's anthroposophy, and which, to them, sounds like an unknown gnosis, they say: He wants to revive gnosis, that must not be allowed, it distorts Christianity.

Yes, the judgment of the Indian is quite remarkable. This Rãmanãthan actually says: What the Europeans now call their Christianity is falsified. The Europeans say: The Rãmanãthan falsifies our Christianity. But the Rãmanãthan comes quite close to the right view, albeit with his decadent view. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong. It is only important to call these things by their right name. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong, because if one did not falsify the wrong, one would not arrive at the right.

But that is the way things are today. Just think of the abyss you are looking into when you take this example from Rammanathan. For example, someone might say: Read the Gospels impartially. — It is difficult for a European today to read them impartially, after having been presented with the mistreated translations for centuries and having been educated in certain ideas. It is difficult to read them impartially. But if someone reads them impartially, even from his point of view, then he discovers a spiritual Christ in the Gospels. For that is what Ramanathan discovered in the Gospels, even if he cannot yet see it in the anthroposophical sense. But Europeans should still take note of this advice from the Ceylonese Indian: Let preachers of the Christ come to you from India, for you have none.

In these matters, one must have the courage today to look into the development that has taken place over the last three to four centuries, and only through this courage is it possible to truly emerge from the immense chaos into which humanity has gradually plunged. This tendency towards ambiguity clouds all concepts and ultimately also causes social chaos. For that which takes place between people does take place after all out of their souls, and there is already a connection between the highest truths and the destruction of external economic conditions. And so one must again be willing to lose one's earthly concepts if one wants to penetrate into the cosmos.

In yesterday's lecture I wanted to give you an example of how the cosmos fits into present-day spiritual life and how things stand in present-day spiritual life. A relationship with earthly concepts only exists when one comes out into the cosmos.

During his earthly existence, the human being alternates in the states of consciousness, which we have already considered from many points of view during these days, between the states of complete waking, sleeping and dreaming. And I have just tried to explain the full significance of dreaming during the short lecture cycle at the delegates' meeting. Today, let us first ask ourselves the question: Is it part of the essential nature of man as an earthly being to live in these three states of consciousness?

We must be clear about the fact that within earthly existence, only man lives in these three states of consciousness. The animal lives in a fundamentally different cycle. The animal does not have the deep dreamless sleep that man has for the longest time between falling asleep and waking up. On the other hand, the animal does not have the complete wakefulness that man has between waking up and falling asleep. The animal waking state is actually somewhat similar to human dreaming. Only the conscious experiences of higher animals are more definite, more saturated, I might say, than the fleeting human dreams. But on the other hand, the animal is never unconscious to the same high degree as man is in deep sleep.

The animal therefore does not differ to the same extent from its surroundings as does man. The animal does not have an external world and an internal world in the way that man has them. If we translate into human language, the animal actually reckons, what lives as a dull consciousness in the higher animals, with its entire inner being to the outside world.

When an animal sees a plant, it does not initially have the feeling that there is a plant outside and that it is a closed being inside, but rather a strong inner experience of the plant, an immediate sympathy or antipathy. In a sense, the animal feels within itself what the plant expresses. That in our present age people are so little able to observe what does not reveal itself in a very crude way, this circumstance alone it is, which prevents them from simply seeing from the behavior, from the behavior of the animal, that it is as I have said.

Only man has this sharp, clear distinction between his inner world and the outer world. Why does man acknowledge an outer world? How does man come to speak of an inner world and an outer world at all? He comes to it through the fact that he is always outside his physical and etheric bodies with his I and with his astral body in the state of sleep, that he, so to speak, leaves his physical and etheric bodies to themselves in sleep and is with those things that are the outer world. During our state of sleep, we share the fate of external things. Just as tables and benches, trees and clouds are outside our physical and etheric bodies when we are awake, and we therefore call them the external world, so our own astral body and our own ego belong to the external world during sleep. And when we belong to the external world with our ego and our astral body during sleep, something happens.

To understand what is happening, let us first consider what actually happens when we face the world in a normal waking state. The objects around us are external to us. And gradually, human scientific thinking has come to recognize only that which can be measured, weighed and counted as certain for these physical things of the outside world. The content of our physical science is, after all, determined by weight, by measure, by number.

We calculate with the calculation operations that once applied to earthly things, we weigh the things, we measure them. And what we determine by weight, measure and number, that is actually given by the physical. We would not describe a body as physical if we could not somehow prove its reality with the scales. But that which, for example, colors are, that which sounds are, that which even sensations of warmth and cold are, that which is the actual sensory perceptions, that weaves so over the heavy, measurable, countable things. When we want to define any physical thing, what constitutes its actual physical essence is precisely what can be weighed and counted, and what the physicist actually only wants to deal with. Regarding color, sound and so on, he says: Yes, something is happening out there that also has to do with weighing or counting. — He himself says of the color phenomena: There are vibrations out there that make an impression on people, and people describe this impression as color when the eye determines it, as sound when the ear determines it, and so on. - Actually, one could say: the physicist today does not know what to do with all these things - sound, color, warmth and cold. He regards them simply as properties of what can be determined with the scales, with the measuring stick or by calculation. In a sense, colors adhere to the physical, sound breaks away from the physical, and warmth or cold undulate out of the physical. We say: that which has a weight, that asked for the blush, or it:st red.

When a person is in the state between falling asleep and waking up, it is different with the I and with the astral body. In this state, things are not there at all in terms of measure, number and weight. According to earthly measure, number and weight, things are not there. When we are asleep, we do not have things around us that can be weighed, strange as it may seem, nor do we have things around us that can be counted or measured directly. You could not apply a yardstick as I and as an astral body in a state of sleep. But what is there, if I may express it in this way, are the free-floating, free-weaving sensations. Only that in his present state of development, man does not have the ability to perceive the free-floating blush, the waves of the free-weaving sound, and so on.

If you want to draw a schematic picture of the matter, you could do it like this. [Here he begins to draw on the board] You could say: Here on earth we have tangible solid things, and the red, the yellow, that is, what the senses perceive in the physical world, adheres to these tangible solid things, so to speak. When we are asleep, yellow is a free-floating being, red is a free-floating being, not attached to such conditions of heaviness, but freely weaving and floating. It is the same with sound: it is not the bell that sounds, but the sound that weaves.

And it is true that when we walk around in our physical world and see something, we pick it up; only then it is a thing, otherwise it could also be an optical illusion. Weight must be added. That is why one is so inclined to regard something that appears in the physical without it being perceived as heavy, such as the colors of the rainbow, as an optical illusion. If you open a physics book today, you will find that it explains that what you see is an optical illusion. What is actually real is the raindrop. And so you draw lines into it that actually mean nothing at all for what is there, but which you imagine through space; you then call them rays. But the rays are not there at all. Then one says: the eye projects that outwards. This projection is something that is used in physics today in a very strange way. So I take up the idea: we see a red object. To convince ourselves that it is not an optical illusion, we pick it up and it is heavy: this is how we verify its reality.

The one who now becomes aware in the I and in the astral body outside the physical and etheric body also finally comes to the conclusion that something like this is already there in this free-floating and free-weaving colored, sounding; but it is different. In a freely floating colored shape, there is a tendency to move out into the vastness of the world; it has an opposite gravity. These things on earth want to go down to the center of the earth [drawing, downward arrows], while those [upward arrows] want to go out freely into space.

And there is also something similar to a measure. You see it when you have, let's say, a small reddish cloud [plate 4], and this small reddish cloud is surrounded by a mighty yellow structure. Then you measure, but not with the scale, but qualitatively you measure with the red, with the stronger shining the weaker shining yellow. And just as the measuring rod tells you: that is five meters, so here the red tells you: if I were to spread out, I would enter the yellow five times. I have to expand, I have to become more powerful, then I will also become yellow. — So the measurements are made here.

It is even more difficult to explain counting here, because in earthly counting we usually only count peas or apples that lie next to each other indifferently. And we always have the feeling that when we make two out of one, the one is actually quite indifferent to the fact that there is another two next to it. In human life it is already different; there it is sometimes the case that one is dependent on the two. But that also goes into the spiritual. But in actual physical mathematics, the units are always indifferent to what is associated with them. That is not the case here.

If there is a one of a certain kind somewhere, it requires any, say, three or five others, depending on the case [drawing, red dots and rings]. This always has an inner relationship to the others, there the number is a reality. And when consciousness begins to perceive what it is like to be out there with the ego and the astral body, then one also comes to determine something like measure, number and weight, but in an opposite way.

And then, when seeing and hearing out there are no longer a mere swimming and groping of red and yellow and sounds, but when one begins to perceive things in such an orderly way in there too, then the perception of the spiritual entities that actualize and realize themselves in these free-floating sensory perceptions begins. Then we enter into the positive spiritual world, into the life and activity of spiritual beings. Just as we enter into the life and activity of earthly things here on earth by determining them with the scales, with the measuring rod, with our calculations, so we enter into the comprehension of spiritual entities by acquiring the merely qualitative, opposite heaviness, that is, by wanting to expand with ease in space, measuring color by color and so on. These spiritual essences now also permeate everything that is outside in the realms of nature.

With the waking consciousness, the human being sees only the outer side of minerals, plants, and animals. But in what lives as spiritual in all these beings of the nature kingdoms, there the human being is when he sleeps. And when he then goes back into himself when he wakes up, then his I and his astral body retain, so to speak, the inclination, the affinity to external things and cause the person to recognize an external world. If the human being had an organization that was not designed for sleep, he would not recognize an external world. Of course it is not a matter of someone suffering from insomnia. For I am not saying that a person does not sleep, but that a person does not have an organization that is designed for sleeping. It is a matter of being attuned to something. That is why a person who suffers from insomnia becomes ill, because it is not suited to his nature. But that is just how things are: precisely because man dwells in sleep with what is in the outer world, with what he then calls his outer world when awake, he also comes to an outer world, to a view of the outer world.

This relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly recreate an external event within us, when we can correctly experience an external event within us. But for this we need the mechanism of sleep. We would have no concept of truth at all if we did not have the mechanism of sleep. So that we can say: we owe truth to the state of sleep. In order to devote ourselves to the truth of things, we must also spend a certain amount of time with them in our existence. Things only tell us about themselves when we are with them in our souls during sleep.

The dream state is different. As I explained to you in the short series during the delegates' meeting, the dream is related to memory, to the inner life of the soul, to that which lives primarily in memory. When the dream is a free-floating world of sound and color, we are still half outside of our body. When we completely submerge, the same forces that we unfold in the dream, weaving and living, become forces of memory. In this way we no longer differ from the outer world. Our inner life coincides with the outer world, we live so intensely in the outer world with our sympathies and antipathies that we do not perceive things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we did not have the ability to dream and the continuation of this dream power within us, we would have no beauty. The fact that we have any predispositions for beauty at all is based on our ability to dream. For the prosaic existence, we have to say: we owe it to the power of dreaming that we have memory; for the artistic existence of man, we owe beauty to the power of dreaming. So: 'the state of dreaming is connected with beauty'. The way we perceive beauty and create beauty is very similar to the weaving force of dreaming.

We behave similarly when experiencing beauty and when creating beauty – only with the application of our physical body – as we behave outside of our physical body, or half-connected to our physical body, when dreaming. There is only a small gap between dreaming and living in beauty. And only because in today's materialistic time people are so coarse that they do not notice this gap, there is so little awareness of the full significance of beauty. In order to experience this free floating and weaving, one must necessarily devote oneself to it in dreams. Whereas when one surrenders to freedom, to the inner exercise of will, and thus lives after the jolt, one no longer has the sensation that it is the same as dreaming, because it is just the same, only with the application of the powers of the physical body.

People today will think long and hard about what was meant in older times when one said “chaos” [the word “chaos” is written on the blackboard]. There are many different definitions of chaos. In reality, chaos can only be characterized by saying: When a person enters a state of consciousness in which the experience of heaviness, of earthly measure, just ceases, and things begin to feel half light, but do not yet want to reach out into the world , but still maintain themselves horizontally, in balance, when the fixed boundaries dissolve, when the floating indeterminacy of the world is still seen with the physical body, but already with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then one sees chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos to man.

In Greece, people still had the feeling that you can't really make the physical world beautiful. The physical world is just a necessity of nature, it is what it is. You can only make that beautiful which is chaotic. If you transform chaos into cosmos, then beauty arises. That is why chaos and cosmos are interchangeable terms. You cannot create the cosmos – which actually means the beautiful world – from earthly things, but only from chaos, by shaping chaos. And what you do with earthly things is merely an imitation in the substance of the shaped chaos.

This is the case with all artistic endeavors. In Greece, where mystery cults still had a certain influence, people still had a very vivid idea of this relationship between chaos and the cosmos.

But if you travel around in all these worlds - in the world in which man is unconscious when he is in a state of sleep, in the world in which man is half-conscious when he is in a state of dreaming - if you travel around everywhere: you will not find goodness. These beings that are in there have been predestined with wisdom from the very beginning of their lives. In them, you find ruling, weaving wisdom; in them, you find beauty. But there is no point in our, as terrestrial human beings, trying to get to know these entities and speak of goodness in them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a difference between the inner and outer world, so that the good of the spiritual world can or cannot follow.

Just as the sleeping state is truth, the dreaming state is beauty, so the waking state is goodness, assigned to the good [it is written on the board]. |

Sleeping state: truth
Dreaming state: beauty
Waking state: goodness

But that does not contradict what I have said in recent days, that when one leaves the earthly and comes out into the cosmos, one is led to drop even earthly concepts in order to speak of the moral order of the world. For the moral order of the world is just as predetermined, just as necessarily predetermined in the spiritual as causality is here on earth. It is just that there it is spiritual: the predetermination, the being-determined-in-oneself. So there is no contradiction.

But we must be clear about human nature: if we want to have the idea of truth, then we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, then we must turn to the state of dreaming; if we want to have the idea of kindness, then we must turn to the state of waking.

Thus, when a person is awake, he is not destined for his physical and etheric organism according to truth, but rather destined for goodness. So we must come to the idea of goodness all the more.

Now I ask you: What does contemporary science strive for when it wants to explain the human being? It does not want to ascend by explaining to the awake person the path from truth through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything according to an external causal necessity, which only corresponds to the idea of truth. One does not come to that which lives and weaves in man in an awakened state, but only to that which the sleeping person is at most. Therefore, if you read anthropological works today and do so with an awakened eye, awake to the soul peculiarities and forces of the world, then you get the following impression. You say to yourself: That is all very nice, what we are told by today's science about man. But what is this human being like, of whom science tells us? He is constantly lying in bed. He cannot walk. He cannot move. Movement, for example, is not explained at all. He is constantly lying in bed.

The human being that science explains can only be explained as a person lying in bed. There is no other way. Science only explains the sleeping human being. If you want to get him moving, you have to do it mechanically. That is why it is also a scientific mechanism. You have to introduce a machine into this sleeping human being that will get this lump up and moving when it is time to get up and put it back into bed in the evening.

This science, however, tells us nothing about the human being who walks around in the world, who lives and breathes, who is awake. For what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of kindness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain from external things. This is something that is given very little consideration. When a modern physiologist or anatomist describes the human being, one has the feeling that one would like to say: Wake up, wake up, you are asleep, you are asleep! — People get used to this state of sleep under the influence of this world view. And what I have always had to characterize: that people actually oversleep everything, that is because they are obsessed with science. Today, because the popular magazines report on everything everywhere, even the uneducated are obsessed with science. There have never been so many obsessed people as there are today, obsessed with science. It is quite peculiar how one has to speak when describing the real conditions of the present day. One has to use completely different tones than those that are currently in use.

And so it is when a human being is placed in an environment by the materialists. When materialism was at its height, people wrote books such as one that sounded in a certain chapter, which states: Man is actually nothing in himself. He is the result of the oxygen in the air, he is the result of the degree of cold or heat under which he is. He is actually - so ends this materialistic description - a result of every draft of air.

If you go along with such a description and imagine the person to be what the materialistic scientist describes, then it is in fact a highly neurasthenic person. The materialists have never described any other people. If they did not realize that they were actually describing people asleep, when they wanted to move on but had fallen out of step, they never described people as anything other than highly neurasthenic individuals who, due to their neurasthenia, are bound to die the very next day and who cannot live at all. For this epoch of science has never grasped the living human being.

There lie the great tasks which must lead men out of the conditions of the present back to such conditions under which the further life of world history is possible. What is needed is an advance in spirituality. The other pole must be found to what has been attained. What exactly has been attained in the course of the 19th century, which was glorious for the materialistic world view? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way – it can be said quite sincerely and honestly – it has been possible to determine the external world in terms of measurement, number and weight as an earthly world. In this respect, the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century have achieved something magnificent and tremendous. But the sensations, the colors, the sounds, they are all fluttering around in the indefinite. Physicists have completely stopped talking about colors and sounds; they talk about air vibrations and ether vibrations, which are neither colors nor sounds. Air vibrations are not sounds, but at most the medium through which sounds propagate. And there is no grasp of what the sensory qualities are. We must first come to that again. Actually, today we see only what can be determined by means of scales, measures, calculations. The rest has eluded us.

And if the theory of relativity also introduces the magnificent disorder described to you yesterday into what can be measured, weighed, counted, then everything becomes fragmented, everything diverges. But after all, this theory of relativity itself fails at certain limits. Not with regard to concepts – one does not escape the theory of relativity with earthly concepts; I have already discussed this elsewhere – but with reality one always escapes the concepts of relativity. For that which can be measured, counted, weighed enters into quite definite relationships with regard to measure, number and weight in the outer, sensory reality.

Once upon a time in Stuttgart, a physicist or a group of physicists took umbrage at the way the theory of relativity was treated by anthroposophists. Then, in a discussion, he demonstrated a simple experiment that it is actually immaterial whether I hold the matchbox and stroke the match: it will burn; or whether I hold the match and stroke the matchbox: it will also burn. It is relative.

Certainly, here it is still relative. And in relation to everything that is related to a Newtonian space, or to an Euclidean space, it is all relative. But as soon as that reality comes into consideration, which appears as heaviness, as weight, then it is no longer as easy as Einstein imagined, because then real conditions arise. Here one must really speak in paradoxes again. Relativity can be asserted if one confuses the whole of reality with mathematics and geometry and mechanics. But if one enters into the true reality, then that no longer works. After all, it is not just relative whether one eats the roast veal or whether the roast veal eats one! You can travel back and forth with the matchbox, but you have to eat the roast veal, you can't let the roast veal eat you. There are things that set limits to these relativity concepts. These things are such that if they are now told outwardly, one will say: There is not the slightest understanding for this serious theory. But the logic is already as I say it: it is no different, I cannot do it differently.

So it is a matter of seeing how, by taking into account weight – that is, what actually makes physical bodies – how, in reality, I might say, colors, sounds and so on cannot be accommodated anywhere. But with this tendency, something extraordinarily important is lost. Namely, the artistic element is lost. As we become more and more and more and more physical, the artistic element leaves us. No one today will find any trace of art in what the physics books describe. There is nothing left of art, everything must come out. It is indeed dreadful to study a physics book today if you still have any sense of beauty. Because everything that beauty is woven from, color and sound, is outlawed, and only recognized when it adheres to the heavy things, precisely because of that, art is no longer important to people. Today it is no longer important to anyone. And the more physical people become, the less artistic they become! Just think about it: we have a great physics. There is truly no need to rebuke opponents who say, in the field of anthroposophy, that we have great physics. But physics thrives on the denial of the artistic. It thrives on the denial of the artistic in each individual, because it has arrived at a way of treating the world in which the artist no longer cares about the physicist.

I don't think, for example, that the musician today attaches much importance to studying the physical theories of acoustics. It's too boring for him, he doesn't care. The painter also doesn't like to study the terrible color theory that is contained in physics. He usually turns, if he cares about colors at all, to Goethe's color theory. But that is wrong, according to physicists. Physicists turn a blind eye and say: Well, it's not so important whether the painter has a correct or a false theory of colors. It just so happens that under today's physical world view, art must perish. Now we have to ask ourselves the question: Why was there art in older times?

If we go back to very ancient times, to the times when people still had an original clairvoyance, it was the case that people did not notice so much of measure, number and weight in earthly things. They did not care so much about measure, number and weight, they were more devoted to the colors, the sounds of earthly things.

Just think that chemistry has only been calculating with weight since Lavoisier; that is a little more than a hundred years! Weight was only applied to a world view at the end of the 18th century. The consciousness that everything must be determined according to earthly measure, number and weight was simply not present in the older humanity. One was devoted to the color carpet of the world, the weaving and undulation of sound; one was devoted not to the vibrations of the air, but to the undulations and weaving of sound. One lived in it, even by living in the physical world.

But what possibilities did one have by living in this sensual perception free of heaviness? It gave one the possibility, for example, when one approached a person, not to see the person at all as one sees him today, but one looked at the person as a result of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the cosmos. He was more of a microcosm than what stands within his skin on this small patch of earth, where man stands. Man was thought of more as an image of the world. The colors flowed together from all sides, giving man his colors. The harmony of the world was there, resonating through man, giving man his form.

And humanity today can hardly understand the way in which the ancient mystery teachers spoke to their students. Because if someone today wants to explain the human heart, they take an embryo and see how the blood vessels expand, and how a tube initially forms and then the heart gradually takes shape. No, the ancient mystery teachers didn't talk to their students like that! That wouldn't have seemed much more important to them than knitting a sock, because after all, the process looks very similar. On the contrary, they emphasized something else as being tremendously important. They said: The human heart is a result of the gold that lives everywhere in the light and that streams in from the universe and actually forms the human heart. They had the ideas: The light weaves through the universe, and the light carries the gold [see drawing]. The gold is everywhere in the light, the gold weaves and lives in the light. And when a person is in their earthly life, then their heart – you know, after seven years it changes – is not built from the cucumbers and lettuce and roast veal that a person has eaten in the meantime, but these old teachers knew: it is built from the gold of the light. And the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the heart to build itself up out of the light-woven gold of the whole universe.

Yes, people spoke differently, and one must become aware of this contrast, for one must learn again to speak in this way, only on a different level of consciousness. For example, what once existed in the field of painting, which then disappeared, where one still painted from the universe because one did not yet have the gravity, that has left its last trace - let us say, for example, with Cimabue and especially with the icon painting of the Russians. The icon is still painted from the external world, from the macrocosm; in a sense, it is a section of the macrocosm. But then one arrived at a dead end. One could not go further because this view simply no longer exists for humanity. If one had wanted to paint the icon with an inner part, not just out of tradition and prayer, then one should have known how to treat gold. The treatment of gold in the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. To bring out what is human in the background of gold, that was ancient painting.

There is an enormous gulf between Cimabue and Giotto. For Giotto had already begun to do what Raphael would later take to a particularly high level. Cimabue still had tradition, but Giotto was already becoming a naturalist. He realized that tradition was no longer coming to life in the soul. Now you have to take the physical human being; now you no longer have the universe. You can no longer paint out of gold, you have to paint out of the flesh.

This has finally come to the point that, after all, painting has passed over to what it had in many ways in the 19th century. The icons, they have no heaviness at all, the icons have “shone in” from the world; they have no heaviness. You just can't paint them anymore today, but if you painted them in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to paint things in such a way that they had weight. From this it became that everything that is painted also has weight in the picture, and one then paints it from the outside; so that the colors relate to what is painted, as the physicist explains that the color arises on the surface through some special wave vibration. Art, in the end, also reckoned with weight. Giotto began it in an aesthetic-artistic way, and Raphael then brought it to the highest level.

So that one can say: The universe has departed from man, and the heavy man became that which one could only see. And because the feelings of the old days were still there, the flesh became as little heavy as possible, but it became heavy. And so the Madonna was created as the opposite of the icon: the icon, which has no weight, the Madonna, which has weight, even if she is beautiful. Beauty has been preserved. But icons cannot be painted at all, because man does not experience them. And it is an untruth when people today believe that they experience icons. That is why the icon culture was immersed in a certain sentimental untruth. This is a dead end in art, it becomes schematic, it becomes traditional.

Raphael's painting, painting that is actually based on what Giotto did with Cimabue, this painting can only remain art as long as the old splendor of beauty still shines on it. To a certain extent, it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still felt something of the gold weaving in the light and at least gave their pictures the radiance with which the gold weaving in the light made them shine from the outside.

But that came to an end. And that is how naturalism came about. And so today, in terms of art, humanity is caught between two stools on the ground, between the icon and the Madonna, and is dependent on discovering what pure weaving color and pure weaving sound is, with their opposite weight, opposite to measurability, to weighable countability. We must learn to paint from color. Even if we approach this today tentatively and poorly, it is our task to paint from color, to experience color itself, detached from the heaviness of experiencing color itself. In these things, one must be able to proceed consciously, also artistically consciously.

And if you look at what has been achieved in the simple attempts at our programs, you will see that, even if it is only a beginning, a start has been made to free colors from heaviness, to experience color as an element in itself, to make colors speak. If we succeed, then, in contrast to the unartistic physical world view that allows all art to evaporate, an art is created from the free elements of color and sound that is free from heaviness.

Yes, we are also sitting between two chairs, between the icon and the Madonna, but we have to get up. Physical science will not help us here. I have told you: one must always remain lying down if one applies only physical science to the human being. But now we must get up! For that we really need spiritual science. This contains the element of life that carries us from heaviness to the weightless color, to the reality of color, from the very bondage in musical naturalism to the free musical art and so on.

In all areas, we see how it is about a rousing, about an awakening of humanity. That is it, that we should take up this impulse to awaken, to look out, to see what is and what is not, and everywhere the challenges lie to move forward. That is why I really had to conclude with just such reflections, as I have brought to you, both at the delegates' meeting and now in these days, before this summer break, which is due to the English trip. These things are already getting to the nerve of our time. And it is necessary that one lets the other shine into our movement, as I have tried to hint at.

I have described how the modern philosopher has come to admit: What does this intellectualism lead to? Building a giant machine that you place in the center of the earth to blast the earth out into all the spaces of the universe! He admitted that this is the case. The others do not admit it to themselves!

And so I have tried in the most diverse places – for example, when I showed you yesterday how the concepts that were still there thirty or forty years ago are now being dissolved by the theory of relativity, simply melting away like snow in the sun – I have tried to show you how everywhere you look there are calls to really strive towards anthroposophy. For, as the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann says: If the world is as we have to imagine it – that is, as he imagines it in the 19th century – then we must actually, because we cannot endure it in it, blow it up into space, and it is only a matter of our being so far that we can carry it out. We must long for the time when we can blast the world into all the expanses of the universe. Before that happens, relativists will have ensured that people no longer have any concepts! Space, time, movement dissolve, then one can already fall into such despair that under certain conditions one already sees the greatest satisfaction in this blasting out into the whole universe. But you just have to familiarize yourself with what lies as certain impulses in our time.

That is what has caused the last lectures to be held in the way they have been: where external culture shines into our ranks. They were also an invitation to open our eyes. And I tried to shape these lectures in such a way that they show what it means: the Anthroposophical Society should make every effort to get out of sectarianism, to get beyond sectarianism.

My dear friends, I am sorry to have to say goodbye to you for a few weeks with these words, but I would like you to use this time to reflect on how to get out of this sectarianism! Otherwise, the situation will arise that the Anthroposophical Society will get more and more into sectarianism. And there are strong tendencies not to throw off the sectarianism, but to sail right into the sectarian nature.

How it is possible to avoid sectarianism is something that must occupy our feelings. And I wanted to touch on this point very briefly because it is extremely necessary to do so. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that, in these last lectures, I have tried to speak in such a way that, so to speak, we look out into the world everywhere, that there is no spinning into a sect, but a life in the world with open eyes, with a practical mind, an inner connection with the world. This is entirely compatible with the utmost immersion in the spiritual. That is why I told you that today a person must even know that there may be an Indian today, Rãmanãthan, who looks at European culture and says to the Europeans: Let yourselves be taught about the Jesus of India, because you understand nothing about Jesus Christ. We only understood the matter when we started reading the New Testament.

If we allow ourselves to become ensnared in such sectarianism, as there were strong tendencies towards during the delegates' meeting, then we will not achieve the great task of anthroposophy in the present, and this must be achieved, because 'it is a human task.

Having said this, I would like to take leave of you for a few weeks and we will announce the next events in due course. In the next few weeks, lectures and eurythmy performances will take place at various locations in England.

So we want to prepare ourselves for a summer break in such a way that during this summer break we let our hearts be particularly alert to the right feeling of how we should feel so that the development of humanity can continue in the right way.

Automated Translation

My dear friends, this evening I would like to tell you something about the journey, and then give another talk tomorrow — since the next week has to be spent in Stuttgart and I will be dealing with some things that are perhaps more closely related in content to the things that I will also have to deal with today, as part of the description of the journey.

The journey began with Ilkley, in the north of England, where an educational course was to be held, a course dealing with Waldorf school methodology and didactics in relation to contemporary civilization. Ilkley is a town in the north of England with a population of about 8,000. At present there is a tendency in England to hold so-called summer schools at such places during the summer months, and this course was initially also in the form of such a summer school.

The course was to be accompanied by what we have developed in the anthroposophical movement in the way of eurythmy, and it was also to be accompanied by what six of our Waldorf school teachers could offer based on what has just been said in the individual lectures.

Ilkley is a place that is probably considered a kind of summer resort, but it is located in the immediate vicinity of those cities that really put you so deeply into what industrial-commercial culture is in our time. Leeds and other places are very close by, for example Bradford, and Manchester is not far away either. These are cities that truly reflect the life that has arisen from the present. One really has a feeling there that says very clearly how much the present needs a spiritual impact; a spiritual impact that is not limited to giving individual people something for their immediate individual-personal soul needs. It is certainly as justified as possible to see the anthroposophical movement in this light, but I am now speaking of the impressions that are really imposed on one by today's outside world.

You see, my dear friends, it is indeed the case that one would consider it an extraordinary, I would even say cultural paradox, if someone were to recommend adding indigestible mineral products - let's say any minerals, stones and so on - to human food, in other words, to regard it as something possible to add sand or the like to human food. One is compelled, on the basis of one's ideas about the human organism, to regard this as impossible. But anyone who is able to look more deeply into the structure and interrelationships of the world — and this may be said out of genuine anthroposophical feeling and perception — will have a special sense of a collection of houses and factories in such a style, which, so to speak, gives nothing to the aesthetic needs of human beings — as for example, in Leeds, where incredible-looking black houses are lined up in an abstract manner, where everything actually looks as if it were a condensation of the blackest coal dust, which has formed into houses in which people now live. If we consider this in connection with the development of culture and civilization of all mankind, and really do so with the same attitude as I have just applied to the sand in the stomach, we feel that we must say: It is just as impossible for human civilization for such a thing to become established in the long run in the whole course of human development and for human civilization to somehow progress inwardly.

Now it is really not the case that one could ever be a reactionary on anthroposophical ground. Of course, one must not speak of these things in a negative sense. These things have simply arisen out of the life of the whole evolution of the earth. But they are only possible within the development of humanity if they are imbued, permeated with a real spiritual life, if the spiritual life actually penetrates into these things and is gradually able to elevate them to a kind of aesthetics, so that people do not completely stray from the inner human through these things being placed in the unfolding of culture.

And I would like to say: it is precisely from such an experience that the most absolute necessity of a penetration of spiritual impulses into contemporary civilization arises. These things cannot be grasped merely in the sense of general ideas that one forms, but they must be grasped in connection with what is in the world. But one must have a heart for what is in the world!

Ilkley itself is a place that, on the one hand, has the atmosphere of its proximity to these other, purely industrial cities, but on the other hand, there are traces everywhere in the surrounding remains of the dolmens, the old Druid altars, that are reminiscent of an ancient spirituality that has no direct successor there. It is, I would say touching, to perceive when on the one hand one has the impression that I have just described, and when on the other hand, in this region, which I would say is thoroughly permeated by the effluents of those impressions, one climbs a hill and then finds the remains of the old sacrificial altars with the corresponding signs in the extraordinarily characteristic places where they are always found - there is something extraordinarily touching about it. There is such a hill near Ilkley, with such a stone at the top. And on this stone, essentially – it is a little more complicated – but essentially what is known as a swastika, which was imprinted on the stones that were placed at certain sites at that time and what was imprinted on something very specific: it points to how at these sites the Druid priest was imbued with the same thoughts that, let's say, two to three millennia ago, were culturally creative in these areas. For when one enters such a place, stands before such a rock with the engraved signs, then one can still see from the whole situation today that one is standing in the same place where the Druid priest once stood and where he felt so strongly about the engraving of this sign that he expressed his consciousness, which he had from his dignity, in this sign.

For what does one read in this sign when standing before such a stone? One reads the words that were in the heart of the Druid priest: Lo, the eye of sensuality beholds the mountains, beholds the places of men; the eye of the spirit, the lotus flower, the turning lotus flower – for its sign is the swastika – beholds the hearts of men, beholds the interior of the soul. And it is through this seeing that I want to be connected with those who are entrusted to me as a community. Just as one would otherwise read a text from a book, one reads this, so to speak, by standing in front of such a stone.

This is roughly the setting in which the Ilkley Conference was held. It consisted of my always giving the lectures in the morning, which this time, above all, tried to extract the Waldorf school pedagogy and didactics from the whole historical development of the art of education. This time I started from the way in which the art of education in Greek culture grew out of general Greek life, from which one can see that actually no special methods or special practices should be invented for school, but that school should impart what is contained in general culture.

It is certainly not right, for example, to invent special practices in Froebelian kindergartens – and I am not criticizing Froebel at all! – for doing this or that with the children, practices that are not connected to and have not grown out of general cultural life. Rather, it is right for the person practising the art of education to be directly involved in general cultural life, to have a heart and mind for it, and then to incorporate into the educational methods from direct life that into which the person to be educated is to grow later.

And so I wanted to show how pedagogy and didactics must grow out of our life, but now permeated by the spirit. This gave us the opportunity to shed light on the Waldorf school method from a different point of view. What I just mentioned was only the starting point; the subject at hand was an examination of Waldorf school pedagogy, which you are familiar with.

After that, there was a eurythmy performance by the children of the Kings Langley School and eurythmy performances by those eurythmy artists who had come with us at the Ilkleyer Theatre there. It would probably have been better if the latter had taken place first, so that it could have been seen in the order itself how what is cultivated as eurythmy in the school also grows out of eurythmy as an art that is part of cultural life. Well, these things will settle down in the future, so that in terms of external arrangements, too, a picture will be given of what is actually intended.

The third aspect, so to speak, was the achievements of those who had been involved as teachers at the Waldorf School. And here it must truly be said that the greatest possible interest was shown in the matter. I must say, for example, that the way in which Dr. von Baravalle presented his ideas was extraordinarily moving for anyone who cares about the development of the Waldorf School. When one saw how Dr. von Baravalle simply explained his geometrical views in the way they apply to children, using the method that you should know well from his book on physical and mathematical methods, and how then, from an artistic-mathematical development of surface transformation and surface metamorphosis, one might say, suddenly with an inner drama, the Pythagorean theorem emerged. When they saw how, after the audience had been led step by step and did not really know where it was all going, a number of surfaces were shifted until, at the end, the Pythagorean theorem was visualized on the blackboard by shifting the surfaces. There was an inner amazement among the audience, which consisted of teachers, an inner dramatic unfolding of thoughts and feelings, and I would like to say such an honest, sincere enthusiasm for what is coming into the school as a method that it was really moving – just as what our teachers presented in general aroused the most extraordinary interest. We had brought examples of our students' work, which consists of sculptural pieces, making toys, paintings, and so on. The greatest interest was aroused when it was described how the children work on these projects and how they fit into the school's overall curriculum.

The way in which music lessons are taught, as interpreted by Miss Lämmert, attracted the greatest attention, as did the discussions by Dr. Schwebsch. The insistent, loving way of Dr. von Heydebrand, then the forceful way of our Dr. Karl Schubert; all these are things that really showed that it is possible to bring the essence of the Waldorf school system to the soul of a teaching staff in a vivid way. Miss Röhrle then gave a eurythmy lesson for different people, which was also a good addition, so that the whole thing was quite well summarized from an educational point of view. I can say that because I had no part in putting the program together. All of this was put together by our English friends in such a way that it really was a very nice summary of the educational subject.

During the whole conference, a committee was formed which set itself the task of founding an independent school in England based on the model of the Waldorf School. The prospects are actually very good for such a school to be established as a day school, alongside the Kings Langley School, which had already agreed last year, after my Oxford lectures, to adopt the Waldorf school methodology. As I said, it was the children of the Kings Langley School who had presented what they had learned in eurythmy at the theater in Ilkley. The interest and the way in which these things have been received, and also how sympathetically the eurythmy performances have been received, is something that can already be very satisfying. This was the first half of August, until August 18. Then we hiked over to Penmaenmawr.

Penmaenmawr is a place in North Wales, on the western English coast, where the island of Anglesey is located, and this Penmaenmawr is a place that could not have been better chosen for this anthroposophical undertaking this year. For this Penmaenmawr is filled with the directly tangible astral atmosphere, into which the young man shaped himself, who had emerged from the Druid service, traces of which can be found everywhere. It is right on the seashore, as I said, where the island of Anglesey is located; a bridge, which, by the way, is ingeniously built, leads over to it. On one side, hills and mountains rise everywhere near Penmaenmawr, and on these mountains you can find the remains of the old so-called sacrificial altars, cromlechs and so on scattered all over the place; there are traces of this ancient Druidic service everywhere.

These individual scattered cult devices, if I may call them that, are apparently arranged in the simplest way. If you look at them from the side, they are stones arranged in a square or rectangle, with a stone lying on top. If you look at them from above, these stones would stand like this [see drawing], and then a stone lies on top, enclosing the whole thing like a small chamber.

Of course, such things were also grave monuments. But I would like to say that in older times the function of a grave monument is always connected with the function of a much more extensive cult. And so I do not want to hold back here from expressing what such a cult site can teach us.

You see, these stones enclose a kind of chamber; a capstone lies on top of it. This chamber is dark in a certain way. So when the sun's rays fall on it, the outer physical light remains. But sunlight is filled with spiritual currents everywhere. This spiritual current continues into this dark space. And the Druid priest, as a result of his initiation, had the ability to see through the Druid stones and see the downward flow - not of physical sunlight, because that was blocked - but of what lives spiritually and soulfully in physical sunlight. And that inspired him with what then flowed into his wisdom about the spiritual cosmos, about the universe. They were therefore not only burial places, they were places of knowledge.

But even more. If at certain times of the day this was the case, what I have just described, then one can say: at other times of the day the opposite was the case, that currents went back from the earth [upwards], which could then be observed when the sun was not shining on them, and in which lived that which were the moral qualities of the community of the priest, so that the priest could see at certain times what the moral qualities of his community children were in the surrounding area. So the descending spiritual substance as well as the ascending spiritual substance showed him that which allowed him to stand in a truly spiritual way in his entire sphere of influence.

These things are, of course, not recorded in what today's science tells us about these places of worship. But it is indeed what can be seen here directly, because the power of the impulses – the impulses from the work of the Druid priests in the time when it was their good time – was so strong that even today these things are absolutely alive in the astral atmosphere there.

I was then able to visit another type of place of worship with Dr. Wachsmuth: from Penmaenmawr, you have to walk about an hour and a half up a mountain. At the top, there is something like a hollow. From this hollow, you have an unobstructed, wonderful view of the surrounding mountains and also of the hollow boundary of your own mountain. Up there in this hollow, one found what can be described as the actual sun cult site of the ancient Druids. It is arranged in such a way that the corresponding stones are arranged with their cover leaves; the traces are present everywhere.

Think of it this way: these places of worship have no inner space. Up here, in close proximity to each other, you have two such Druidic circles. When the sun makes its daily path, the shadows of these stones fall in a variety of ways, and you can now distinguish, let's say, when the sun passes through the constellation of Aries, the Aries shadow, then the Taurus shadow, the Gemini shadow and so on. Even today, when deciphering these things, one still gets a good impression of how the Druid priest was able to read the secrets of the universe from the various, qualitatively different sun shadows that this Druid circle revealed, from that which lives on in the sun shadow when the physical sunlight is held back, so that in fact it contains a world clock that speaks of the secrets of the world. But these were definitely signs that emerged from the shadows that were cast, signs that spoke of the secrets of the world and the cosmos.

The second circle was then a kind of control to check what the first circle had revealed. If you had gone up in an airplane and gone so far away that this distance in between might have disappeared, you would have had, looking down, the ground plan of what the ground plan of our Goetheanum was, directly from these two druid circles.

All this is located where the island of Anglesey is also close by, where much of what has been preserved in the accounts of King Arthur took place. The center of King Arthur was a little further south, but some of the events that took place there were also part of King Arthur's work. All this gives the astral atmosphere of Penmaenmawr something that makes this place in particular a special one, one of which one can say: when speaking about spiritual things, one is compelled to speak in imaginations. It is the case with imaginations that when they are formed in the course of the representations, these imaginations in the astral atmosphere within today's civilization very soon disappear. When one tries to depict the spiritual, one is constantly fighting against the disappearance of the imaginations. One has to create these imaginations, but they quickly fade away, so that one is constantly faced with the necessity of creating these imaginations in order to have them in front of oneself. The astral atmosphere that results from these things is such that it is a little more difficult to form the imaginations there in Penmaenmawr, but that this difficulty in turn leads to a great relief of the spiritual life on the other hand, that now these imaginations, after they are formed, simply look like they have been written into the astral atmosphere, so that they are inside. Every time one forms imaginations that express the spiritual world, one has the feeling that they remain in the astral atmosphere there. And it is precisely this circumstance that so vividly reminds us of how these Druid priests chose their special places, where they could, I would say, effectively engrave in the astral atmosphere what was incumbent upon them to shape in imaginations from the secrets of the world. Coming from Ilkley, which is very close to industrialism and shows only very slight traces of the ancient Druidic period, one feels a kind of real transcendence, almost like crossing a threshold, and now entering into something that is simply spiritual in the immediate present. Everything here is spiritual. You could say that this part of Wales is a very special place on Earth. Today, this Wales is the custodian of an incredibly strong spiritual life, which admittedly consists of memories, but real memories that stand there. So that it may actually be said: the opportunity to talk about Anthroposophy at this place – not in reference to the branches of Anthroposophy, but about Anthroposophy itself, about the inner core of Anthroposophy – I count that as one of the most significant stages in the development of our Anthroposophical life.

The credit for having made this institution, for having placed something like this in the development of anthroposophical life, goes to Mr. Dunlop, who is extraordinarily insightful and energetic in this direction. He explained the plan to me when I was in England last year and then stuck to it and has now brought it to fruition. From the outset, it was planned to bring something purely anthroposophical in connection with eurythmy to this place this August.

Mr. Dunlop then had a third impulse, but it was impossible to carry out, and it may be said that what has become possible has only become possible through the truly spiritually insightful way of choosing this place. I think it is of some importance to bear in mind that there are such outstanding places on the earth's surface where, in such a vivid memory, there is an immediate awareness of what was once a living sun cult in preparation for the later adoption of Christianity in Northern and Western Europe.

The lectures were in the morning; the afternoon was partly devoted to allowing the participants to see this astral atmosphere and its connection to the memories of decaying sacrificial sites, dolmens and so on, on the spot; the evening was filled with discussions on anthroposophical topics or with eurythmy performances. There were five of them in. Penmaenmawr, which were received with great sincerity on the one hand and with the greatest interest on the other. The audience consisted partly of anthroposophists, but also of a non-anthroposophical audience. It was certainly the case that — which is, of course, understandable for a mountainous area bordering the sea — from one hour to the next there was always a nice change from half-downpours to bright sunshine and so on. For example, one evening — the external furnishings were almost the same as in this carpentry workshop — we really did go from a downpour to a eurythmy performance; at the beginning, people were still sitting in the hall with their umbrellas, but they did not let themselves be deterred in their enthusiasm. So it was definitely something, as I said in Penmaenmawr itself, that can truly be recorded as a very significant chapter in the history of our anthroposophical movement.

One event was dedicated to discussing educational questions in Penmaenmawr as well. And on this occasion, I would also like to mention the following, which you have already been able to read in the brief presentation I gave of it in the “Goetheanum”. When I came to England, to Ilkley, I found a book called 'Education Through Imagination', which I was able to skim through at first and which immediately captivated me; a book that one of our friends in particular describes as one of the most important books in England. Its author is Miss MacMillan. The same person was then chairman on the first evening and the following evenings in Ilkley. Miss MacMillan gave the opening speech. It was uplifting to see the beautiful enthusiasm and the inner honest fire for the art of education in this woman. And at the same time, it was extraordinarily satisfying for us that this woman in particular is fully committed to what can be achieved in a truly serious art of education through the Waldorf school methodology.

During the following days, I read more of the book and summarized my impressions in the article in the last issue of the Goetheanum. Then, last Monday, Frau Doctor and I were also able to visit the place of work of this excellent woman in Deptford, near London and Greenwich. There we found the Miss MacMillan Care and Education Institute. She takes children from the lowest and poorest social classes into this care and education institute; she also aims to take children at an older age. Today she has 300 children at the school; she started with six children many years ago, today there are 300. These children are taken in at the age of two, coming from circles where they are very dirty, impoverished, sick, malnourished or very poorly nourished – if I may say so, rickety, typhoid, afflicted with worse. Today you can see a kind of school barracks in the immediate vicinity, like those of the Waldorf School – the barracks, not our current opulently built house, the provisional barracks – but there they are very beautiful, nicely furnished. The things are in a garden, but you only have to take a few steps from any of the Iore and then you can compare the population from which these children come, living on the streets in the most terrible squalor and filth, with what is being done with these children.

First of all, the bathing facilities are exemplary. That is the main thing. The children arrive at 8 o'clock, are released in the evening, and thus return to their home every evening. The care begins in the morning with a bath. Then a kind of teaching begins, all done with tremendous devotion, with a touching, poignant sense of sacrifice, all arranged in a touching, practical way. Miss MacMillan is also of the opinion that the education of the Waldorf School must penetrate everything, so one must say: one can see that from this point of view with complete satisfaction – while today one might want to do some things differently in terms of methodology; but that is not considered at all in the face of this sense of sacrifice. Things are always in a state of becoming. It is truly significant how well-mannered these children become, which is particularly evident during mealtimes, when they are led to the table and serve themselves, or when the food is passed by one of the children. What practical sense can achieve is shown, for example, by the fact that this, I would like to say extraordinarily homely, “feeding” of the children, during which one would like to eat along, costs 2 shillings 4 pence for the child during the week. Everything is extremely well organized. It was wonderful, for example, to see how the older children, who have been at the center for years, were called together and then presented us with a long scene from Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream,” the Midsummer Night's Dream, with real feeling and even a certain mastery of dramatic technique. There was something touchingly magnificent about the way these children performed it, expressively and impressively, with real inner control of the drama.

And this performance of Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream” was almost in the same place where Shakespeare himself once performed his plays for the court with his troupe. Because near Greenwich was the court of Queen Elizabeth. There, in the rooms where today's classrooms are located and other rooms, as I will explain in a moment, even the royal household of Queen Elizabeth lived, and Shakespeare, coming from London, had to perform his plays for the courtiers there. The children performed these Shakespeare plays for us at the same location.

And in the same area, connected to this educational mental hospital, is a children's clinic, again for the poorest of the poor. Every year, 6,000 children go through this clinic, not 6,000 at the same time, but every year. The head of this clinic is now also Miss MacMillan. So that in a very impoverished and polluted area, in a terrible area, a personality is working with full energy and actually great in the conception of what she is doing.

It was therefore a very deep satisfaction for me when Miss MacMillan expressed the intention, if at all possible, to visit our Waldorf School in Stuttgart with some of her colleagues at Christmas. This teaching staff is extraordinarily devoted. You can imagine that caring for such children, with the characteristics I have just described, is not exactly easy. It therefore filled me with great satisfaction that this particular person was the chairman for the Ilkley lectures, and then in Penmaenmawr – where she came again in the few days that she could bring herself to do so – she introduced a discussion on education in which Dr. von Baravalle and Dr. von Heydebrand spoke. So it was precisely what took place at Penmaenmawr and what was connected with it that was really quite satisfying.

The last part, so to speak, was the third part, which was the days in London. Dr. Wegman had come over for what was to be my first task in London. We were to present the method and essence of our anthroposophic medical efforts to a number of English doctors. Forty doctors were invited, and most of them appeared at Dr. Larkin's house. I was able to speak in two lectures, first about the special nature of our remedies in their connection with the symptoms and with the nature of the human being. And then in the second lecture I was able to give a physiological-pathological basis for the functions of the human being; then something about the mode of action of individual remedies, again in connection with this basis, the effects of the antimony remedy, the effects of mistletoe and so on – and I believe we can truly say that perhaps a fairly good understanding of the matter has been brought to bear, even in a wider circle, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Wegman was consulted quite frequently. So this aspect of anthroposophical work has also come into its own.

The finale was a performance at the Royal Academy of Art, which was an extraordinary success. The room is not particularly large, but not only was it sold out, people also had to be turned away. The eurythmy was received with extraordinary enthusiasm. One could say of eurythmy that wherever it goes, it makes its way. If only it were not for the enormous obstacles that exist in the present time! On the one hand, when one sees all that is going on, for example, the tendency of the Ilkley enterprises to now have a kind of Waldorf School emerge in England, then one looks again with a great concern, which cannot leave one today, at what one, I would like to say, encounters as an indefinite, painful response when one asks oneself: What will become of the Waldorf school in the terribly endangered Germany, from which, for example, the school efforts have emerged? I say this not so much because of the pecuniary side of the matter, but because of the extremely endangered circumstances within Germany. There are some things that make you say: If things continue as they are now, it is hard to imagine where the efforts of the Waldorf School in particular will lead.

After all, if things continue as they are now, as they have arisen from what is currently happening, there will hardly be any possibility of bringing such things through the current turmoil without danger. Then one has a heavy heart when one sees how these things are happening after all, and how in fact today all things in the world happen out of shortsightedness and without any inkling that spiritual currents must play a part in the development of culture, and how in fact in the widest circles people have lost all direct interest, all hearty engagement with things. Basically, we are all asleep when it comes to things that go so terribly to the root of human and earthly becoming. Humanity is asleep. At most, one complains about the matter when it is of immediate concern. But things do not happen without the development of great ideas! And there is such a dullness in the world towards the impulses that are to strike: Either one does not want to hear about it, or one feels uncomfortable in the world when something like the endangered situation in Central Europe is pointed out. One feels uncomfortable, one does not like to talk about it, or one colors it in a certain way and speaks of insubstantial things, of guilt and the like. In this way one gets rid of these things. The way humanity relates to general world events today is something that can be terribly painful for the soul. This general cultural sleep, which is becoming more and more widespread, is basically something quite terribly lamentable. There is actually no awareness of how the earth today, in its civilization, forms a unity, even in the face of such elementary events – I do not want to talk about them here, but they have happened – such as the poignant Japanese tragedy brought about by nature. Yes, when one compares how people looked at these things relatively recently and how they look at them today, there is something that really does bring home to one again and again the necessity of pointing out how urgently humanity needs to wake up.

Of course, this is always in front of you, especially when you see what could become of it if people would take an interest, if people would come to take things as they are, if they would not take them in terms of national divisions, in terms of state divisions, but in a general human sense! When one sees on the one hand what could become of it, and when on the other hand one sees how it is almost impossible because of general lethargy, then this actually characterizes, I would say, our present age most of all. That is the way things are. One cannot speak of the one without the other also arising in the context.

I wanted to give you a kind of travelogue today, my dear friends. I will speak about questions of intellectual life, which are, of course, more distantly related and which are actually also anthroposophical in content, tomorrow, after this.

My lecture will take place tomorrow at 8 a.m.; on Tuesday at 8 a.m. there will be a eurythmy performance here.

To-day I would like first to remind you how events which take place behind the veil of appearance, outside the physical, sense-perceptible world, can be described in pictorial terms. One has to speak in this way of these events, but the pictures correspond throughout with reality.

With regard to sense-perceptible events, we are living in a time of hard tests for humanity, and these tests will become harder still. Many old forms of civilisation, to which people still mistakenly cling, will sink into the abyss, and there will be an insistent demand that man must find his way to something new. In speaking of the course that the external life of humanity will take in the early future, we cannot—as I have often said—arouse any kind of optimistic hopes. But a valid judgment as to the significance of external events cannot be formed unless we consider also the determining, directing cosmic events which occur behind the veil of the senses.

When a man looks out attentively with his physical eyes and his other senses at his surroundings, he perceives the physical environment of the earth, and the various kingdoms of nature within it. This is the milieu in which comes to pass all that manifests as wind and weather in the course of the year. When we direct our senses towards the external world, we have all this before us: these are the external facts. But behind the atmosphere, the sun-illumined atmosphere, there lies another world, perceptible by spiritual organs, as we may call them. Compared with the sense-world, this other world is a higher world, a world wherein a kind of light, a kind of spiritual light or astral light, spiritual existence and spiritual deeds shine out and run their course. And they are in truth no less significant for the whole development of the world and of man than the historical events in the external environment of the earth and on its surface.

If anyone to-day is able to penetrate into these astral realms, wandering through them as one may wander among woods and mountains and find signposts at cross roads, he may find “signposts” there in the astral light, inscribed in spiritual script. But these signposts have a quite special characteristic: they are not comprehensible without further explanation, even for someone who can “read” in the astral light. In the spiritual world and in its communications, things are not made as convenient as possible: anything one encounters there presents itself as a riddle to be solved. Only through inner investigation, through experiencing inwardly the riddle and much else, can one discover what the inscription on a spiritual signpost signifies.

And so at this time—indeed for some decades now, but particularly at this time of hard trials for mankind—one can read in the astral light, as one goes about spiritually in these realms, a remarkable saying. It sounds like a prosaic comparison, but in this case, because of its inner significance, the prosaic does not remain prosaic. Just as we find notices to help us find our way—and we find signposts even in poetical landscapes—so we encounter an important spiritual signpost in the astral light. Time and time again, exactly repeated, we find there to-day the following saying, inscribed in highly significant spiritual script:

O Man,
You mould it to your service,
You reveal it according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

Injunctions of this kind, pointing to facts significant for man, are inscribed, as I have said, in the astral light, presenting themselves first as a kind of riddle to be solved, so that men may bring their soul-forces into activity.

Now, during our days here, we will contribute something to the solving of this saying—really a simple saying, but important for mankind to-day.

Let us recall how in many of our studies here the course of the year has been brought before our souls. A man first observes it quite externally: when spring comes he sees nature sprouting and budding; he sees how the plants grow and come to flower, how life everywhere springs up out of the soil. All this is enhanced as summer draws on; in summer it rises to its highest level. And then, when autumn comes, it withers and fades away; and when winter comes it dies into the lap of the earth.

This cycle of the year—which in earlier times, when a more instinctive consciousness prevailed, was celebrated with festivals—has another side, also mentioned here. During winter the earth is united with the elemental spirits. They withdraw into the interior of the earth and live there among the plant-roots that are preparing for new growth, and among the other nature-beings who spend the winter there. Then, when spring comes, the earth breathes out, as it were, its elemental being. The elemental spirits rise up as though from a tomb and ascend into the atmosphere. During winter they accepted the inner order of the earth, but now, as spring advances and especially when summer comes on, they receive more and more into their being and activity the order which is imposed upon them by the stars and the movements of the stars. When high summer has come, then out there in the periphery of the earth there is a surging of life among the elemental beings who had spent the winter in quiet and silence under the earth's mantle of snow. In the swirling and whirling of their dance they are governed by the reciprocal laws of planetary movement, by the pattern of the fixed stars, and so on. When autumn comes, they turn towards the earth. As they approach the earth, they become subject more and more to the laws of earth, so that in winter they may be breathed in again by the earth, once more to rest there in quietude.

Anyone who can thus experience the cycle of the year feels that his whole human life is wonderfully enriched. To-day—and it has been so for some time past—a man normally experiences, and then but dimly, half-consciously, only the physical-etheric processes of the body which occur within his skin. He experiences his breathing, the circulation of his blood. Everything that takes its course outside, in wind and weather, during the year; all that lives in the sprouting of the seed-forces, the fruiting of the earth-forces—all this is no less significant and decisive for the whole life of man, even though he is not conscious of it, than the breathing and blood-circulation which go on inside his skin.

When the sun rises over any region of the earth, we share in the effects of its warmth and light. But when a man accepts Anthroposophy in the right sense, not reading it like a sensational novel but so that what it imparts becomes the content of his mind, then he gradually educates his heart and soul to experience all that goes on outside in the course of the year. Just as in the course of a day we experience early freshness, readiness for work in the morning, then the onset of hunger and of evening weariness, and just as we can trace the inner life and activity of the forces and substances within our skin, so, by taking to heart anthroposophical ideas—entirely different from the usual descriptions of sense-perceptible events—we can prepare our souls to become receptive to the activities that go on outside in the course of the year. We can deepen more and more this sympathetic participation in the cycle of the year, and we can enrich it so that we do not live sourly—one might say—within our skin, letting the outer world pass us by. On the contrary, we can enrich our experience so that we feel ourselves living in the blossoming of every flower, in the breaking open of the buds, in that wonderful secret of the morning, the glistening of dew-drops in the rays of the sun. In these ways we can get beyond that dull, conventional way of reacting to the outer world merely by putting on our overcoat in winter and lighter clothes in summer and taking an umbrella when it rains. When we go out from ourselves and experience the interweaving activities, the flow and ebb, of nature—only then do we really understand the cycle of the year.

Then, when spring passes over the earth and summer is drawing near, a man will be in the midst of it with his heart and soul; he will discern how the sprouting and budding life of nature unfolds, how the elemental spirits fly and whirl in a pattern laid down for them by planetary movements. And then, in the time of high summer, he will go out of himself to share in the life of the cosmos. Certainly this damps down his own inner life, but at the same time his summer experience leads him out—in a cosmic waking-sleep, one might say—to enter into the doings of the planets.

To-day, generally speaking, people feel they can enter into the life of nature only in the season of growth—of germination and budding, flowering and fruiting. Even if they cannot fully experience all this, they have more sympathy and perception for it than they have for the autumn season of fading and dying away. But in truth we earn the right to enter into the season of spring growth only if we can enter also into the time when summer wanes and autumn draws on; the season of sinking down and dying that comes with winter. And if during high summer we rise inwardly, in a cosmic waking-sleep, with the elemental beings to the region where planetary activity in the outer world can be inwardly experienced, then we ought equally to sink ourselves down under the frost and snow-mantle of winter, so that we enter into the secrets of the womb of the earth during mid-winter; and we ought to participate in the fading and dying-off of nature when autumn begins.

If, however, we are to participate in this waning of nature, just as we do in nature's growing time, we can do so only if in a certain sense we are able to experience the dying away of nature in our own inner being. For if a man becomes more sensitive to the secret workings of nature, and thus participates actively in nature's germinating and fruiting, it follows that he will livingly experience also the effects of autumn in the outer world. But it would be comfortless for man if he could experience this only in the form it takes in nature; if he were to come only to a nature-consciousness concerning the secrets of autumn and winter, as he readily does concerning the secrets of spring and summer. When the events of autumn and winter draw on, when Michaelmas comes, he certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying; but he must not, as he does in summer, give himself over to a nature-consciousness. On the contrary, he must then devote himself to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, he must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness.

And then the form of Michael stands before us again. If, under the impulse of Anthroposophy, a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakes in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inward spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a forcible Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.

For a man who out of present-day spiritual knowledge wrestles his way through to an experience of this picture, it expresses something very powerful. For when, after St. John's tide, July, August and September draw on, he will come to realise how he has been living through a waking-sleep of inner planetary experience in company with the earth's elemental beings, and he will become aware of what this really signifies.

It signifies an inner process of combustion, but we must not picture it as being like external combustion. All the processes which take a definite form in the outer world go on also within the human organism, but in a different guise. And so it is a fact that these inner processes reflect the changing course of the year.

The inner process which occurs during high summer is a permeation of the organism by that which is represented crudely in the material world as sulphur. When a man lives with the summer sun and its effects, he experiences a sulphurising process in his physical-etheric being. The sulphur that he carries within him as a useful substance has a special importance for him in high summer, quite different from its importance at other seasons. It becomes a kind of combustion process. It is natural for man that the sulphur within him should thus rise at midsummer to a specially enhanced condition. Material substances in different beings have secrets not dreamt of by materialistic science.

Everything physical-etheric in man is thus glowed through at midsummer with inward sulphur-fire, to use Jacob Boehm's expression. It is a gentle, intimate process, not perceptible by ordinary consciousness, but—as is generally true of other such processes—it has a tremendous, decisive significance for events in the cosmos.

This sulphurising process in human bodies at midsummer, although it is so mild and gentle and imperceptible to man himself, has very great importance for the evolution of the cosmos. A great deal happens out there in the cosmos when in summer human beings shine inwardly with the sulphur-process. It is not only the physically visible glow-worms (Johannis Käferchen) which shine out around St. John's Day. Seen from other planets, the inner being of man then begins to shine, becoming visible as a being of light to the etheric eyes of other planetary beings. That is the sulphurising process. At the height of summer human beings begin to shine out into cosmic space as brightly for other planetary beings as glow-worms shine with their own light in the meadows at St. John's time.

From the standpoint of the cosmos this is a majestically beautiful sight, for it is in glorious astral light that human beings shine out into the cosmos during high summer, but at the same time it gives occasion for the Ahrimanic power to draw near to man. For this power is very closely related to the sulphurising process in the human organism. We can see how, on the one hand, man shines out into the cosmos in the St. John's light, and on the other how the dragon-like serpent-form of Ahriman winds its way among the human beings shining in the astral light and tries to ensnare and embrace them, to draw them down into the realm of half-conscious sleep and dreams. Then, caught in this web of illusion, they would become world-dreamers, and in this condition they would be a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. All this has significance for the cosmos also.

And when in high summer, from a particular constellation, meteors fall in great showers of cosmic iron, then this cosmic iron, which carries an enormously powerful healing force, is the weapon which the gods bring to bear against Ahriman, as dragon-like he tries to coil round the shining forms of men. The force which falls on the earth in the meteoric iron is indeed a cosmic force whereby the higher gods endeavour to gain a victory over the Ahrimanic powers, when autumn comes on. And this majestic display in cosmic space, when the August meteor showers stream down into the human shining in the astral light, has its counterpart—so gentle and apparently so small—in a change that occurs in the human blood. This human blood, which is in truth not such a material thing as present-day science imagines, but is permeated throughout by impulses from soul and spirit, is rayed through by the force which is carried as iron into the blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear and hate. The processes which are set going in every blood-corpuscle when the force of iron shoots into it are the same, on a minute human scale, as those which take place when meteors fall in a shining stream through the air. This permeation of human blood by the anxiety-dispelling force of iron is a meteoric activity. The effect of the raying in of the iron is to drive fear and anxiety out of the blood.

And so, as the gods with their meteors wage war on the spirit who would like to radiate fear over all the earth through his coiling serpent-form, and while they cause iron to stream radiantly into this fear-tainted atmosphere, which reaches its peak when autumn approaches or when summer wanes—so the same process occurs inwardly in man, when his blood is permeated with iron. We can understand these things only if we understand their inner spiritual significance on the one hand, and if on the other we recognise how the sulphur-process and the iron-process in man are connected with corresponding events in the cosmos.

A man who looks out into space and sees a shooting-star should say to himself, with reverence for the gods: “That occurrence in the great expanse of space has its minute counterpart continuously in myself. There are the shooting-stars, while in every one of my blood-corpuscles iron is taking form: my life is full of shooting-stars, miniature shooting-stars.” And this inner fall of shooting-stars, pointing to the life of the blood, is especially important when autumn approaches, when the sulphur-process is at its peak. For when men are shining like glow-worms in the way I have described, then the counter-force is present also, for millions of tiny meteors are scintillating inwardly in their blood.

This is the connection between the inner man and the universe. And then we can see how, especially when autumn is approaching, there is a great raying-out of sulphur from the nerve-system towards the brain. The whole man can then be seen as a sulphur-illuminated phantom, so to speak.

But raying into this bluish-yellow sulphur atmosphere come the meteor swarms from the blood. That is the other phantom. While the sulphur-phantom rises in clouds from the lower part of man towards his head, the iron-forming process rays out from his head and pours itself like a stream of meteors into the life of the blood.

Such is man, when Michaelmas draws near. And he must learn to make conscious use of the meteoric-force in his blood. He must learn to keep the Michael Festival by making it a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness.

Just as at Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Redeemer, and at Easter the death and resurrection of the Redeemer, and as at St. John's Tide we celebrate the outpouring of human souls into cosmic space, so at Michaelmas—if the Michael Festival is to be rightly understood—we must celebrate that which lives spiritually in the sulphurising and meteorising process in man, and should stand before human consciousness in its whole soul-spiritual significance especially at Michaelmas. Then a man can say to himself: “You will become lord of this process, which otherwise takes its natural course outside your consciousness, if—just as you bow thankfully before the birth of the Redeemer at Christmas and experience Easter with deep inner response—you learn to experience how at this autumn festival of Michael there should grow in you everything that goes against love of ease, against anxiety, and makes for the unfolding of inner initiative and free, strong, courageous will.” The Festival of strong will—that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. If that is done, if nature-knowledge is true, spiritual human self-consciousness, then the Michael Festival will shine out in its true colours.

But before mankind can think of celebrating the Michael Festival, there will have to be a renewal in human souls. It is the renewal of the whole soul-disposition of men that should be celebrated at the Michael Festival—not as an outward or conventional ceremony, but as a festival which renews the whole inner man.

Then, out of all I have described, the majestic image of Michael and the Dragon will arise once more. But this picture of Michael and the Dragon paints itself out of the cosmos. The Dragon paints himself for us, forming his body out of bluish-yellow sulphur streams. We see the Dragon shaping himself in shimmering clouds of radiance out of the sulphur-vapours; and over the Dragon rises the figure of Michael, Michael with his sword.

But we shall picture this rightly only if we see the space where Michael displays his power and his lordship over the dragon as filled not with indifferent clouds but with showers of meteoric iron. These showers take form from the power that streams out from Michael's heart; they are welded together into the sword of Michael, who overcomes the Dragon with his sword of meteoric iron.

If we understand what is going on in the universe and in man, then the cosmos itself will paint from out of its own forces. Then one does not lay on this or that colour according to human ideas, but one paints, in harmony with divine powers, the world which expresses their being, the whole being of Michael and the Dragon, as it can hover before one. A renewal of the old pictures comes about if one can paint out of direct contemplation of the cosmos. Then the pictures will show what is really there, and not what fanciful individuals may somehow portray in pictures of Michael and the Dragon.

Then men will come to understand these things, and to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will stand there to act as a powerful summons, a powerful spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how this impulse points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—of our epoch is being played out.

During the last three or four centuries we have developed a magnificent natural science and a far-reaching technology, based on the most widely-distributed material to be found on earth. We have learnt to make out of iron nearly all the most essential and important things produced by mankind in a materialistic age. In our locomotives, our factories, on all sides we see how we have built up this whole material civilisation on iron, or on steel, which is only iron transformed. And all the uses to which iron is put are a symbolic indication of how we have built our whole life and outlook out of matter and want to go on doing so. But that is a downward-leading path. Man can rescue himself from its impending dangers only if he starts to spiritualise life in this very domain, if he penetrates through his environment to the spiritual; if he turns from the iron which is used for making engines and looks up again to the meteoric iron which showers down from the cosmos to the earth and is the outer material from which the power of Michael is forged. Men must come to see the great significance of the following words: “Here on earth, in this epoch of materialism, you have made use of iron, in accordance with the insight gained from your observation of matter. Now, just as you must transform your vision of matter through the development of natural science into Spiritual Science, so must you rise from your former idea of iron to a perception of meteoric iron, the iron of Michael's sword. Then healing will come from what you can make of it.” This is the content of the aphorism:

O Man,
You mould it (iron) to your service,
You reveal it (iron) according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

That is, the lofty power of Michael, with the sword he has welded together in cosmic space out of meteoric iron. Healing will come when our material civilisation proves capable of spiritualising the power of iron into the power of Michael-iron, which gives man self-consciousness in place of mere nature-consciousness.

You have seen that precisely the most important demand of our time, the Michael-demand, is implicit in this aphorism, this script that reveals itself in the astral light.

Yesterday there stood before us the picture of Michael battling with the Dragon, as shown to us through an inner understanding of the course of the year. And art can really be nothing else than a reflection of what human beings feel in relation to the universe. Of course this is possible at various levels and from various standpoints; but on the whole we can speak of a work of art only when it expresses human feeling in such a way that through it the soul is opened to the secrets of the universe.

To-day, in the same spirit that led us to the culminating picture of Michael and the Dragon, we will carry further our study of the seasons of the year.

We know from yesterday's lecture that when autumn draws on, a kind of in-breathing by the Earth, a spiritual in-breathing, occurs, and the elemental beings are drawn back into the bosom of the Earth. Those who went out in the height of summer and turned back at Michaelmas are drawn further and further in, until in the depths of winter they are united most intimately with the Earth.

Now we must realise that in winter the Earth is above all self-contained, enclosed in itself. It has drawn back everything of a spiritual nature which it had allowed to stream out from itself during the summer. Hence in the depths of winter the Earth is more earthly, more truly itself, than at any other time. And while for our further studies we must keep firmly in view this winter character of the Earth, we must of course not forget that when winter prevails over half the Earth, the other half is experiencing summer. This is a fact we must keep in the background of our minds. But just now we are concerned with the coming of winter to one part of the Earth. It is then that the Earth unfolds its own nature in the deepest sense; the nature that makes it truly Earth.

Let us now look at this Earth of ours. It has a solid core, hidden below its visible outer surface, which in turn is largely covered by water, the hydrosphere. The continents are only floating, as it were, in this great watery expanse. And we can picture the hydrosphere as extending up into the atmosphere, for the atmosphere is always permeated by a watery element. Certainly this is much thinner than the water of the sea and the river, but there is no definite boundary in the atmosphere where the watery element comes to an end. Hence if we are to show schematically what the Earth is like in this respect we shall have, first, a solid core in the centre. Around it we have the watery regions (blue). I must of course indicate the jutting up of the continents: they will have to be exaggerated, for they should really be no more prominent than the irregularities on the skin of an orange. Then I must put in the hydrosphere, this watery part of the atmosphere all round the Earth. Let us look at this picture (blue) and ask ourselves what it really represents? It is not something made up out of itself: it is water shaped by the whole cosmos. The reason why this body of air and water is spherical is because the cosmos extends round it as a sphere on all sides. And this means that strong forces play in on the Earth as a whole.

The effect is that if we were to look at the Earth from some other planet, it would appear to us as a great water-drop in the cosmos. There would be all sorts of prominences on it—the continents, which would be rather differently coloured—but as a whole it would appear to us as a great water-drop in the midst of the universe.

Let us now consider this from a cosmic standpoint. What is this great water-drop? It is something which takes its shape from its whole cosmic environment.

If one approaches the matter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, bringing Imagination and Inspiration to bear on it, one comes to know what this water-drop really is. It is nothing other than a gigantic drop of quicksilver; but the quicksilver is present in an extraordinarily rarefied condition.

The possibility of these high attenuations has been shown by the work of Frau Dr. Kolisko. At our Biological Institute in Stuttgart the attempt has been made to put this on an exact footing. It has been possible to make dilutions of substances up to one part in a trillion, and in fact to establish precisely the effects which such high dilutions of particular substances can have. Hitherto, in homoeopathy, this has been merely a matter of belief; now it has been raised to the level of exact science. The graphs which have been drawn leave no doubt to-day that the effects of the smallest particles follow a rhythmical course. I will not go into details; the work has been published and these findings can now be verified. Here I wish to point out only that even in the earthly realm the effects of enormous dilutions must be reckoned with.

Here we are concerned with something of which we can say, when we use it on a small scale—this is water. We can draw water from a river or a well and use it as water. Yes, it is water, but there is no water that consists solely of hydrogen and oxygen. It would be absurd for anyone to suppose that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen only. In the case of mineral waters and such-like, it is of course obvious that something else is present. But there is no water composed solely of hydrogen and oxygen: that is only a first approximation. All water, wherever it appears, is permeated with something else. Essentially, the whole water-mass of the Earth is quicksilver for the universe. Only the small quantities we use are water for us. For the universe, this water is not water, but quicksilver.

Hence we can say, first of all, that in so far as we are considering the hydrosphere in relation to water, we have to do with a drop of quicksilver in the cosmos. Embedded as it were in this drop of quicksilver, naturally, are metallic substances—in brief, all the earthly substances. They represent the solid mass of the Earth, and they tend to assume their own special forms. Thus in the structure as a whole we observe [the general spherical form of quick]silver. Ordinary metallic quicksilver, one might say, is only the symbol produced by nature for the general activity of quicksilver, leading quite definitely to a spherical form. Embedded in the whole sphere are the metallic crystals, with the manifold variety of their own distinctive forms. Hence we have before us this formation of warmth, water, air: its tendency, as I have said, is to assume a spherical form, with individual crystal forms within it.

Even if we single out the air (dark red) which surrounds the Earth as its atmosphere, we can never speak simply of air, for the air always has a tendency to contain warmth in some degree: the air is permeated with warmth (violet). Thus we must add this fourth element, warmth, which enters into the air.

Now this warmth, which comes into the air from above, carries pre-eminently within it the sulphur-process, imparted to it from the cosmos. And to the sulphur-process is added the mercurial process, as I have described it in connection with the hydrosphere. Thus we have air-warmth—the sulphur-process; water-air—the mercurial process.

If now we turn towards the inner part of the Earth, we come to the acid-formation process, and especially to the salt-process, for the salts derive from the acids; and this is what the Earth really wants to be. Hence, when we look up into the cosmos, we are really looking at the sulphur-process. When we consider the tendency of the Earth to form itself into a cosmic water-drop, we are really looking at the mercurial process. And if we turn our gaze to the solid earth underfoot, which in spring gives rise to all that we see as growing, sprouting life, we are looking at the salt-process.

This salt-process is all-important for springtime life and growth. For the roots of plants, in forming themselves out of the seeds, depend for their whole growth on their relation to the salt-formations in the soil. It is these salt-formations—in the widest sense of the term—which give substance to the roots and enable them to act as the earthly foundation of plant-life.

Thus in turning back to the Earth we encounter the salt-process. This is what the Earth makes of itself in the depths of winter, whereas in summer there is much more intermingling. For in summer the air is shot through with sulphurising processes, which indeed occur also in lightning and thunder; they penetrate far down, so that the whole course of the season is sulphurised. Then we come at Michaelmas to the time when the sulphur-process is driven back by meteoric iron, as I told you yesterday. During summer, too, the salt-process mingles with the atmosphere, for the growing plants carry the salts up through their leaves and blossoms right up into the seeds. Naturally, we find the salts widely distributed in the plant; they etherealise themselves in the etheric oils and so on; they approach the sulphurising process. The salts are carried up through the plants; they stream out and become part of the being of the atmosphere.

In high summer, accordingly, we have a mingling of the mercurial element, always present in the Earth, with the sulphurising and salt-forming elements. If at this season we stand here on Earth, our head actually projects into a mixture of sulphur, mercury and salt; while the arrival of deep winter means that each of these three principles reverts to its own inner condition. The salts withdraw into the inwardness of the Earth, and the tendency for the hydrosphere to assume a spherical shape reasserts itself—imaged in winter by the snow-mantle that covers parts of the Earth. The sulphur process withdraws, so that there is no particular occasion to observe it. In place of it, something else comes to the fore during the deep winter season.

The plants have developed from spring until autumn, finally concentrating themselves in their seeds. What is this seeding process? When plants run to seed, they are doing what we are constantly doing in a dull human way when we use plants for food. We cook them. Now the development of a plant to blossom and then to seed-production is nature's cookery; it approaches the sulphur-process. The plants grow up into the sulphur-process. They are most strongly sulphurised, so to speak, when summer is at its height. When autumn draws on, this combustion process comes to an end.

In the organic realm, of course, everything is different from the processes we observe in their coarse inorganic form; but the outcome of every combustion process is ash. And in addition to the salt-formation, which comes from quite another quarter and is needed within the Earth, we must add all that falls down on to the Earth from the blossoming and seeding of plants as a result of the cooking or combustion process. This falling down of ash—just as ash falls down in our stoves—plays a great role which is usually overlooked. For in the course of seed-formation—which is fundamentally a combustion process—the seed-nature is continually showering down on the Earth, so that from October onwards the Earth is quite impregnated with this form of ash.

If therefore we observe the Earth in the depths of winter, we have first the internal tendency to salt-formation; besides this we have the mercurial shaping-process in its most strongly marked form; and while in high summer we have to pay attention to the sulphurising process in the cosmos outside the Earth, we now have in winter the ash-forming process.

So, you see, the tendency which reaches its culmination at Christmas is prepared in advance from Michaelmas onwards. The Earth is gradually more and more consolidated, so that in deep winter it becomes really a cosmic body, expressing itself in mercurial formation, salt-formation, ash-formation. What does this signify for the cosmos?

Now, if we can suppose that a flea, let us say, were to become an anatomist and were to study a bone, it would have before it an exceptionally small piece of bone, because the flea itself is so small and it would be examining the bone from a flea's perspective. The flea would then discover that in the bone we have to do with phosphoric lime in an amorphous condition, with carbonic acid, lime and so forth. But our flea anatomist would never come to the point of realising that the fragment of bone is a small part only of a complete skeleton. Certainly, the flea jumps, but in studying the tiny piece of bone he would never get beyond it. Similarly, it would not help a human geologist or mineralogist to be able to jump about like a gigantic earth-flea. In studying the mountain ranges of the Earth, which in their totality represent a skeleton, he would still be working on a miniature scale. The flea would never come to describing the skeleton as a whole; he would hack out a tiny piece with his little hammer. Suppose this were a tiny piece of collar-bone; nothing in the constituents of the little piece, carbonate of lime, phosphate of lime and so on, would reveal to the flea that it belonged to a collar-bone, still less that it was part of a complete skeleton. The flea would have hacked off a tiny piece and would then describe it from his own flea-standpoint, just as a man describes the Earth when somewhere—let us say in the Dornach hills—he has hacked out a bit of Jura limestone. Then he describes this bit, and works up his findings into mineralogy, geology, and so on. It is still the same flea-standpoint, though certainly somewhat enlarged.

This, of course, is no way to arrive at the truth. We need to recognise that the Earth is a single whole, most firmly consolidated during winter through its salt-formation, its mercurial formation and its ash-formation. Let us then ask what the whole nature of the Earth signifies when we look at it not from the flea's point of view, but in relation to the cosmos.

We will first consider salt-formation, taking this in the widest sense to connote a physical deposit, exemplified in the way ordinary cooking-salt dissolved in a glass of water will separate out as a deposit on the bottom of the glass. (I will not now go into the chemical side of this, though the result would be the same if I did). Now a salt-deposit of this kind has the characteristic of being porous, as it were, to the spiritual. Where there is a salt-deposit, the spiritual has a clear field of entry. In mid-winter, accordingly, when the Earth consolidates itself on the basis of salt-formation, the effect is, first of all, that the elemental beings who are united with the Earth have, one might say, an agreeable abode within it. But other spiritual elements, too, are drawn in from the cosmos and are able to dwell in the salt-crust which lies immediately below the Earth's surface. Here, in this salt-crust, the Moon-forces are particularly active—I mean the remains of those Moon-forces which were left behind, as I have often mentioned, when the Moon separated from the Earth.

These Moon-forces are active in the Earth chiefly because of the salt present in it. So in winter—beneath the snow cover which strives in one direction, one might say, towards the quicksilver form and in the other passes down into the salt deposits—we have the solid earth-substance, the salt, permeated with spirituality. In winter the Earth does indeed become spiritual in itself, through the consolidating influence, especially, of its salt-content.

Now water—that is, cosmic quicksilver—has the inner tendency to shape itself spherically. We can see this inner tendency everywhere. And because of this the Earth in mid-winter is enabled not only to become rigid through its salt-content and to permeate the salt with spirit, but also to vivify the spiritualised substance and to lead it over into the realm of life. In winter the whole surface of the Earth is reinvigorated. The quicksilver principle, working into the spiritualised salt, activates everywhere this tendency towards new life. Below the Earth's surface, in winter, there is a tremendous reinforcement of the Earth's capacity to produce life.

This life, however, would become a Moon-life, for it is chiefly the Moon-forces that are active in it. But because ash falls down from the seeds of plants, so that everything I have just described is impregnated with ash, something is present which keeps the whole process in the domain of the Earth.

The plants have striven upwards into the sulphur-process, and out of this process the ash has fallen down. This is what draws the plant back to Earth, after it has striven up into the etheric-spiritual. So in the depths of winter we have on the Earth's surface not only the tendency to absorb the spirit and to reinvigorate itself, but the tendency also to transform the Moon-like into the earthly. Through the remains of the fallen ash the Moon is compelled to promote Earthly life, not Moon life.

Now let us turn from the Earth's surface and look at the air-formation that surrounds the Earth. For the air, it is of the utmost importance always, but especially in midwinter, that the Sun radiates warmth and light through it—though the light is less relevant to our immediate considerations.

You see, science treats things always in isolation from one another, as in reality they never are. Air, we are told, consists of oxygen and nitrogen and other elements. But in fact this is not so: the air is not made up merely of oxygen and nitrogen, for it is always rayed through by the Sun. That is the reality: air is always permeated in the daytime by the activity of the Sun. And what does this activity signify? It signifies that the air up above is always seeking to tear itself away from the Earth. If salt-formation, mercurial formation and ash-formation were alone active, then nothing but the earthly would be there. But up above, because the activities striving upwards from the Earth are taken up into the activity of Sun and air, Earth-activity is transmuted into cosmic activity. The power to work on its own accord in the living-spiritual is taken away from the Earth. The Sun makes its power felt in everything that grows and sprouts upwards from the Earth. And so, in a certain region above the Earth, a quite special tendency is apparent to spiritual vision. On the Earth itself everything seeks to become spherical (dark red); in this upper region the sphere is continually impelled to flatten out into a plane (reddish). Naturally it will tend to resume its spherical shape, but up there the spherical is always inclined to flatten itself out. The upper influences would really like to break up the Earth, to disintegrate it, so that everything might become a flat surface, spread out there in the cosmos.

If this were to come about, the Earth's activities would disappear completely, and up above we should have a kind of air in which the stars would be active. This is very plainly expressed in man himself. What part do we as human beings have in the sun-filled air above? We breathe it in, and because of this the activity of the Sun extends right into us, downwards certainly in a sense, but chiefly upwards. Through our head we are continually drawn away from the influences of the Earth, and on this account our head is enabled to participate in the whole cosmos. Our head would really always like to go out into the region where the plane prevails. If our head belonged only to the Earth, especially in winter-time, our whole experience of thinking would be different. We should then have the feeling that all our thoughts wished to take a rounded shape. In fact they do not; they have a certain lightness, adaptability, fluidity, and this we owe to the characteristic incursion of the activity of the Sun.

Here we have the second tendency; here the Sun-like strikes into the Earthly. But this is at its weakest in winter. If we were to go still further out, something else would come into the picture. Then we should have to do no longer with the activity of the Sun, but only with the activity of the stars, for the stars in turn have a great influence on our head. Inasmuch as the Sun gives us back to the cosmos, so to speak, the stars have their own deeply penetrating influence on our head, and so on the whole formation of the human organism.

But now I must tell you that what I have just been describing no longer holds good to-day, for in a certain way man has emancipated himself, in his growth and his whole evolution, from the Earth's activities. If were to go back to the old Lemurian time, or especially to the Polarian time that preceded it, we should find the whole thing quite different. We should observe that everything that occurred on the Earth had a great influence on the human organism. You will indeed have gathered this from the account of the evolution of the Earth given in my Occult Science. In those early times we should find man placed in the very midst of the activities I have been telling you about. To-morrow I will describe how man has emancipated himself from all this; to-day I will speak as though we were still fully involved in it. And here we come to something that to present-day understanding will seem highly paradoxical.

We can ask the question: What does a mother become when she is beginning to develop a new human being? Originally—after all that has first to happen in order that a new human being may come into existence on Earth—it is the salt-forming Moon-forces which chiefly influence the female organism at that time. So we can say that while a woman is otherwise and in general a human being, the salt-forming Moon-forces then have the strongest influence on her. We can put this in spiritual-scientific terms by saying: The woman becomes Moon, just as the Earth—especially just below its surface—becomes Moon when Christmas approaches.

So it is not the Earth only which becomes mostly Moon when deep winter prevails; this tendency of the Earth to become Moon occurs again, in like manner, when a woman prepares herself to receive a new human being. And precisely because of this, the Sun-influence on her becomes different, just as it is different in mid-winter, compared with high summer. And the formation in the woman of the new human being stands wholly under the influence of the Sun. Because the woman takes up the Moon-activities, the salt-activities, so strongly into herself, she becomes able to take up the Sun-activities on their own account. In ordinary life the Sun-activities are taken up by the human organism through the heart and from there spread out over the whole organism. But directly a woman prepares herself to bring forth a new human being, the Sun-activities are concentrated on the forming of this new life. Thus we can say schematically: The woman becomes Moon so that she can take up the Sun-activities into herself; and the new human being, existing first as an embryo, is in this sense wholly Sun-activity. The embryo is enabled to come into being through this concentration of Sun-activities.

The old instinctive clairvoyance knew this in its own way. At one time in old Europe a remarkable idea prevailed. It was thought that before a new-born child had taken any earthly nourishment, it was a quite different being from what it became after imbibing its first drop of milk. That was the old Germanic belief. For these people had an instinctive feeling that the new-born infant was a Sun-being, and that through the first earthly nourishment it received it became a creature of Earth. Hence the new-born infant did not at first belong to the Earth at all. Again, according to occult laws which I might touch on at some other time, old Germanic custom gave the father—at whose feet the child was always laid directly it was born—the right either to let it grow up or to destroy it; for it was not yet a creature of Earth. If it had taken one single drop of milk, he no longer had the right to destroy it. It would then have to remain an Earth-creature, because it had been ordained by nature, by the world, by the cosmos, to be one. In such old customs there lives something of immensely profound significance.

Here indeed is the basis of the saying: The child is of the Sun. So it is possible now to look on the woman who has borne the child as a being who is in the deepest sense related to all earthly processes. For the Earth prepares itself in mid-winter through the salt-tendency—that is, the Moon tendency—so that it may be best able to receive the Sun-element. The Earth then reaches out beyond the Sun-element to the heavens, to which also the human head belongs.

Hence we can say something like this. In order to bring the essence of Christmas rightly before our souls, let us transpose ourselves into the being of man. In the Christmas spirit is expressed the coming to birth of the Jesus-child, who is ordained to receive the Christ into himself. Let us look closely at this. If we look at the figure of Mary, we are bound to see that her head reflects something heavenly in its whole appearance, its whole expression. We must then indicate that Mary is preparing to take into herself the Sun, the child, the Sun as it rays through the encircling air. And then we can see in the form of Mary the Moon-Earthly element.

Now imagine how this could be portrayed. First we have the Moon-Earth element, spread out below the Earth's surface. Then, going out into the great spaces, we find a raying forth from man into the cosmos, and this could be shown as a heavenly Earth-star radiance, sent out by the Earth into the cosmos. The head of Mary is like a radiant star, which means that her whole countenance and bearing must give expression to this star-radiant quality.

If then we turn to the breast, we come to the breathing process; to the Sun-element, the child, forming itself out of the clouds in the atmosphere, shot through by the rays of the Sun.

Further down we come to the Moon-like, salt-forming forces, given outward expression by bringing the limbs into dynamic relation with the Earth and letting them arise out of the salt and the Moon-elements in the Earth. Here we have the Earth in so far as it is inwardly transfigured by the Moon.

All this would really have to be shown through a kind of rainbow colouring. For if we were to look from the cosmos towards the Earth, through the shining of the stars, it would be as though the Earth were wishing to shine inwardly, beneath its surface, in rainbow colours. On the Earth we have something related to the Earth-forces, to gravity and to the formation of the limbs, which can be expressed only through the garment which follows the Earth-forces in its folds. So we should have the garment down below, in relation to the Earth-forces. Then we should have to portray, a little higher up, that which gives expression to the Earth-Moon element. We could even picture the Moon, if we wished to symbolise; but the Moon-element is clearly expressed in the configuration of the Earth.

Higher up still, we must bring in that which comes forth from the Moon-element. We see how the clouds are permeated with many human heads, pressing downwards; one of them is condensed into the Sun resting on Mary's arm: the Jesus-child. And all this must be completed, in an upward direction, through the star-radiance expressed in the countenance of Mary.

If we understand the depths of winter, how it shows us the connection of the cosmos with man, with man who takes up the birth-forces in the Earth, the only possible way of presenting the woman is in this form: formed out of the clouds, endowed with the forces of the Earth: with the Moon-forces below, with the Sun-forces in the middle, and above, towards the head, with the forces of the stars. The picture of Mary with the little Jesus-child arises out of the cosmos itself.

If we understand the cosmos in autumn, so as to represent all its formative forces in a picture, we come by necessity to an artistic portrayal of Michael and the Dragon, as I indicated yesterday. In the same way, everything we feel at Christmas-time flows together into the picture of Mary and the child—that picture which hovered so often before painters in earlier times, especially in the first Christian centuries, and of which the last echoes have been preserved in Raphael's Sistine Madonna.

The Sistine Madonna was born out of the great instinctive knowledge of nature and the spirit which prevailed in ancient times. For it is a picture of the Imagination which must in fact come to a man who transposes his inner vision into the secrets of Christmas in such a way that they become for him a living picture.

Hence we can say: The course of the seasons must come to expression for inner vision in clear and glorious Imaginations. If one goes out with one's whole being into the world, the approach of autumn becomes the glorious Imagination of Michael's fight with the Dragon. Just as the Dragon can be represented only in a sulphurous form—born out of the sulphur-clouds—and just as the sword of Michael emerges when we think of the meteoric iron as concentrated in the sword and blended with it, so out of all that we can feel at Christmas time, arises the picture of Mary the mother, the folds of her robe following the forces of the Earth, while in the region of the breast—even these details are apparent in the painting—her garment has to be inwardly rounded, taking on the quicksilver form, so that here one has a feeling of inward enclosure. Here the Sun-forces can find entry, and the innocent Jesus-child, who must be thought of as having yet received no earthly nourishment, is the Sun-activity resting on Mary's arm, with the radiance of the stars above. That is how we have to represent the head and eyes of Mary, as though a light were shining out from within them towards men. And the Jesus-child in Mary's arm must appear as though emerging from the rounded cloud-shapes, tender and lovable, inwardly sheltered; and then the garment, subject to earthly gravity, expressing what the force of earthly gravity can become.

All this is best rendered in colours. Then we have the picture which comes to shine out for us as a cosmic Imagination at Christmas-time—a picture we can live with until Easter, when out of cosmic relationships once again an Easter Imagination can arise; we will speak of it tomorrow.

You will see from this that art is drawn from the heavens and their interplay with the Earth. True art is an expression of that which man experiences in the cosmos, spiritual-psychical-physical, which reveals itself to him in magnificent Imaginations. So, in order to represent all that is involved in the inner struggle for the development of self-consciousness out of nature-consciousness, nothing will do but the grand picture of Michael's fight with the Dragon; and in order to bring before us everything that can work from nature into our souls during the deep winter season, we have an artistic, imaginative expression of it in the picture of the Mother and child.

To observe the course of the seasons is to follow the great cosmic artist, so that the things which the heavens imprint on the Earth are brought to life again in powerful pictures—pictures which grow into realities for the mind of man.

Thus the course of the year can reveal itself to us in four Imaginations: the Michael Imagination, the Mary Imagination and—as we shall see later on—the Easter Imagination and the St. John Imagination.