The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I spoke to you about the other side of nature-existence, about those super-sensible and invisible beings which accompany the beings and processes visible to the senses. An earlier, instinctive vision beheld these beings of the super-sensible world as clearly as we behold the world of the senses. Today, these beings have withdrawn from human view. It is only because this company of gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings is not perceptible in the same way as animals, plants and so on, only to this is it due that man, in the present epoch of his earth-evolution, is not in a position to unfold his soul-spiritual being without the help of his physical and etheric bodies. In the present situation of earth evolution man is obliged to depend upon the etheric body when making use of his soul, and upon the physical body when making use of his spirit. The physical body, which provides the instrument for the spirit, the sense-apparatus, is not adapted to entering into connection with the beings which exist behind the physical world. It is the same with the etheric body, which man must use to develop his soul-being. Through this, if I may put it so, half of his earthly environment escapes him. He passes over everything connected with these elemental beings about which I spoke yesterday. To this world the etheric and physical bodies have no access. We gain an idea of what actually escapes the man of today when we realize what such gnomes, undines, and so on, actually are.

We have, you see, a whole host of lower creatures—lower at the present time—those beings which consist only of a soft mass, which live in the fluid element, and have nothing in the way of an articulated skeleton to give them inner support.

They are creatures which belong to the latest phase of earth-development; creatures which only now, when the earth has already evolved, develop what man—the oldest earth-being—already developed in his head-structure during the time of ancient Saturn. These creatures have not progressed so far as to form within themselves that hardening of the substance which can become the supporting skeleton.

It is the gnomes which, in a spiritual way, make good in the world what the lower orders of the animals up to the amphibians lack. This applies also to the fishes, which have only indications of the skeleton. These lower animal orders only become complete, as it were, through the fact that gnomes exist.

And just because the conditions of the beings in the world are very different, something arises between these lower creatures and the gnomes which I yesterday called antipathy. The gnomes do not wish to become like these lower creatures. They are continually on the watch to protect themselves from assuming their form. As I described to you, the gnomes are extraordinarily clever, intelligent beings. With them intelligence is already implicit in perception; they are in every respect the antithesis of the lower animal world. And whereas they have the significance for plant-growth which I described yesterday, in the case of the lower animal world they actually provide its completion. They supply what this lower animal world does not possess. This lower animal world has a dull consciousness; the gnomes have a consciousness of the utmost clarity. The lower creatures have no bony skeleton, no bony support; the gnomes bind together what works as the force of gravity and make their bodies from this volatile, invisible force, bodies which are, moreover, in constant danger of disintegrating, of losing their substance. The gnomes must ever and again create themselves anew out of gravity, because they continually stand in danger of losing their substance. Because of this, in order to retain their own existence, the gnomes are constantly attentive to what is going on around them. As far as earth-observation goes no being is more attentive than a gnome. It takes note of everything, for it must know everything, grasp everything, in order to preserve its life. A gnome must always be wide awake; if it were to become sleepy, as men often do, this sleepiness would immediately cause its death.

There is a German saying of very early origin which aptly expresses this characteristic of the gnomes, in having always to remain attentive. People say: Pay heed like a goblin. And goblins are in fact the gnomes. So, if one wishes to make someone attentive, one says to him: Pay heed like a gnome. A gnome is really an attentive being. If one could place a gnome as an object lesson on a front desk in every school classroom, where all could see it, it would be a splendid example for the children to imitate.

The gnomes have yet another characteristic. They are filled with an absolutely unconquerable lust for independence. They trouble themselves little about one another and give their attention only to the world of their own surroundings. One gnome takes little interest in another. But everything else in this world around them, in which they live, this interests them exceedingly.

Now I told you that the human body forms a hindrance to our perceiving such folk as these. The moment this hindrance is removed, these beings are there, just as are the other beings of nature for ordinary vision. Anyone who comes so far as to experience in full consciousness his dreams on falling asleep is well acquainted with these gnomes. You need only recall what I recently published in the “Goetheanum” on the subject of dreams. I said that a dream in no way appears to ordinary consciousness in its true form, but wears a mask. Such a mask is worn by the dream when we fall asleep. We do not immediately escape from the experience of our ordinary day consciousness. Reminiscences well up, memory-pictures from life; we perceive symbols, sense-pictures of the inner organs—the heart as a stove, the lungs as wings—all in symbolic form. These are masks. If someone were to see a dream unmasked, if he were actually to pass into the world of sleep without the beings existing there being masked, then, at the moment of falling asleep, he would behold a whole host of goblins coming towards him.

In ordinary consciousness man is protected from seeing these things unprepared, for they would terrify him. The form in which they would appear would actually be copy images of all those qualities in the man which work as forces of destruction. He would perceive all the destructive forces within him, all that continually destroys. These gnomes, if perceived unprepared, would be nothing but symbols of death. Man would be terribly alarmed by them, if in ordinary consciousness he knew nothing about them, and was now confronted by them on falling asleep. He would feel entombed by them—for this is how it would appear—entombed by them over yonder in the astral world. For it is a kind of entombment by the gnomes which, seen from the other side, takes place on falling asleep.

This holds good only for the moment of falling asleep. A further complement to the physical sense-world is supplied by the undines, the water-beings, which continually transform themselves, and which live in connection with the water just as the gnomes live in connection with the earth. These undines—we have learned to know the role they play in plant-growth—also exist as complementary beings to those animals which stand at a somewhat higher stage, which have assumed a more differentiated earthly body. These animals, which have developed into the more evolved fishes, or also into the more evolved amphibians, require scales, require some sort of hard external shell. The forces needed to provide certain creatures with this outer support, this outer skeleton—for these forces the world is indebted to the activity of the undines. The gnomes support spiritually those creatures which are at a quite low stage. Those creatures which must be supported externally, which must be clad in a kind of armour, they owe their protective sheath to the activity of the undines. Thus it is the undines which impart to these somewhat higher animals in a primitive way what we have in the covering of our skull. They make them, as it were, into heads. All these beings which are invisibly present behind the visible world have their great task in the economy of existence. You will always notice that, where materialistic science wishes to explain something of the kind I have just developed, there it breaks down. It is not in a position, for instance, to explain how the lower creatures manage to propel themselves forward in an element which is scarcely harder than they are themselves, because it does not know about the presence of this spiritual support from the gnomes which I have just described. Equally, the formation of an armour-like sheath will always create a difficulty for purely materialistic science, because it does not know that the undines, in their sensitivity to, their avoidance of their own tendency to become lower animals, thrust off from themselves what then appears upon the somewhat higher animals as scales or some other armour-like covering.

Again, in the case of these beings, it is only the body which hinders the ordinary consciousness of today from seeing them just as, for example, it sees the leaves of plants, or the higher animals.

When, however, man falls into a state of deep, dreamless sleep, and yet his sleep is not dreamless, because through the gift of inspiration it has become transparent, then his spiritual gaze perceives the undines rising up out of that astral sea in which, on falling asleep, he was engulfed, submerged by the gnomes. In deep sleep the undines become visible. Sleep extinguishes ordinary consciousness, but the sleep which is illumined by clear consciousness has as its content the wonderful world of ever-changing fluidity, a fluidity which lends itself in every possible way to the metamorphoses of the undines. Just as for day consciousness we have around us beings with firm contours, a clear night consciousness would present to us these ever-changing beings, which themselves well upwards and sink down again like the waves of the sea. All deep sleep in the environment of man is filled with a moving sea of living beings, a moving sea of undines.

Matters are otherwise with the sylphs. They, too, provide a completing element to the being of certain animals, but now in the other direction. The gnomes and undines add what is of the nature of the head to those animals where this is lacking. Birds, however, as I described to you, are actually pure head; they are entirely head-organization. The sylphs add to the birds in a spiritual way what they lack as the bodily complement of their head-organization. They complement the bird-kingdom in regard to what corresponds to the metabolic limb-system in man. If the birds fly about in the air with under-developed legs, so much the more powerfully developed is the limb-system of the sylphs. They may be said to represent in the air, in a spiritual way, what the cow represents below in physical matter. This is why I could say yesterday that it is in connection with the birds that the sylphs have their ego, have what connects them with the earth. Man acquires his ego on the earth. What connects the sylphs with the earth, that is the bird-kingdom. The sylphs are indebted to the bird-kingdom for their ego, or at least for the consciousness of their ego.

Now when someone has slept through the night, has had around him the astral sea, consisting as it does of the most manifold undine-forms, and then wakes up with an awakening dream, then again, if this dream on awakening were not masked in reminiscences of life or sense-pictures of the organs, if he were to see the unmasked dream, he would be confronted by the world of the sylphs. But these sylphs would assume for him a remarkable form; they would appear much as the sun might if it wished to send to men something which would affect them adversely, something which would lull them spiritually to sleep. We shall hear shortly why this is the case. Nevertheless, if someone were to perceive his dream on awakening unmasked, he would see in it an inflowing, an actual inflowing of light. He would also experience this as unpleasant, because the limb-system of these sylphs would, as it were, spin and weave around him. He would feel as though the light were attacking him from all sides, as if the light were something overwhelming, something to which he was extraordinarily sensitive. Here and there, perhaps, he might also feel this as a caress of the light. But in all these things I only wish to indicate to you how the light, with its upholding, gently touching quality, actually appears in the sylph-form.

And when we come to the fire-beings, we find that they provide the completing element to the fleeting nature of the butterflies. A butterfly itself develops as little as possible of its actual physical body; it lets this be as tenuous as possible. It is, on the contrary, a creature of light. The fire-spirits appear as beings which complement the butterfly's body, so that we can get the following impression. If, on the one hand, we had a physical butterfly before us, and pictured it greatly enlarged, and on the other side a fire-being—they are, it is true, rarely together, except in the circumstances which I mentioned to you yesterday—then, if these two were welded together, we would get something resembling a winged man, actually a winged man. We need only increase the size of the butterfly, and adapt the size of the fire-spirit to human proportions, and from this we would get something like a winged man.

This shows you again how the fire-spirits are in fact the complement to those creatures which are nearest to what is spiritual; they complement them, so to say, in a downward direction. Gnomes and undines complement in an upward direction, towards the head; sylphs and fire-beings complement the birds and butterflies in a downwards direction. Thus the fire-beings must be brought together with the butterflies.

Now in the same way that man can, as it were, penetrate through the sleeping-dream, so can he also penetrate through waking-day life. But here he makes use of his physical body in quite a robust way. This, too, I have described in articles in the “Goetheanum”. Here also man is totally unable to perceive how, in his waking life, he could continually see the fire-beings, in that the fire-beings are inwardly related to his thoughts, to everything which proceeds from the head-organization. But when a man has progressed so far that he can remain completely in waking consciousness, but nevertheless stand in a certain sense outside himself, viewing himself from outside as a thinking being, while standing firmly on the earth, then he will become aware how the fire-beings form that element in the world which, when we perceive it, makes our thoughts perceptible from the other side.

Thus the perceiving of the fire-beings can enable man to see himself as thinker, not merely to be the thinker and, as such, call up the thoughts, but actually to behold how the thoughts run their course. Only then do the thoughts cease to be bound to the human being; then they reveal themselves as world-thoughts; they work and weave as impulses in the world. Then one notices that the human head only calls forth the illusion that thoughts are enclosed inside the skull. There they are only reflected; their mirrored images are there. What underlies these thoughts belongs to the sphere of the fire-beings, one sees in these thoughts not only the thoughts themselves, but the thought-content of the world, which, at the same time, is actually an imaginative content. This is the force which enables us to arrive at the realization that thoughts are world-thoughts.

I venture to add: When we behold what is to be seen upon the earth, not from the human bodily nature, but from the sphere of the fire-beings—that is, from the Saturn-nature which has been carried into the Earth—then we gain exactly the picture of the evolution of the earth which I have described in “Occult Science—an Outline”. This book is actually so composed that the thoughts appear as the thought-content of the world, seen from the perspective of the fire-beings.

You see, these things have in themselves a deep and real significance. But they also have a deep and real significance for man. Take the gnomes and undines: they are, so to say, in the world which borders on human consciousness; they are already beyond the threshold. Ordinary consciousness is protected from seeing these beings, for the fact is that these beings are not all benevolent. The benevolent beings are, for instance, those which I described yesterday as working in the most varied ways upon plant-growth. But these beings are not all well-disposed. And in the moment when man breaks through into the world wherein they live and are active, he finds there not only the well-disposed beings but the malevolent ones as well. And so one must first form a conception as to which of them are well-disposed and which of them malevolent. This is not so easy, as you will see from the way I must describe the malevolent ones. The main difference between the ill-disposed beings and the well-disposed is that the latter are always drawn more to the plant and mineral kingdoms, whereas the ill-disposed are drawn to the animal and human kingdoms. Some, which are even more malevolent, also desire to approach the kingdoms of the plants and the minerals. But one can gain quite a fair idea of the malevolence which the beings of this realm can have, when one turns to those which are drawn to human beings and animals, wishing in particular to consummate in man what is allotted by the higher hierarchies to the well-disposed beings for the plant and mineral world.

You see, there exist ill-disposed beings from the realm of the gnomes and undines, which make for human beings and animals and bring it about that what they should really impart only to the lower animals appears physically in human beings. Certainly, these things are already present in man, but their aim is that this element should be manifested physically in human beings as well as in animals. Through the presence of these malevolent gnomes and undine-beings, animal and plant life of a low order—parasites—exist in human beings as well as in animals. These malevolent beings are the begetters of parasites. The moment man crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, he at once meets the subtleties of this world. Snares are everywhere, and he must first learn something from the goblins—namely, to be attentive. The spiritualists can never manage this! Everywhere there are snares. Now someone might say: Why then are these malevolent gnome and undine-beings there, if they engender parasites? Well, if they were not there, man would never be able to develop within himself the force to evolve the structure of his brain. And here we meet something of extraordinary significance.

I will sketch this for you in a diagram. If you think of the human being as consisting of the metabolic-limb-man, of the breast-man, that is, the rhythmic system, and then of the head-man, that is the system of nerves and senses, there are certain things about which you must be quite clear. Here below processes are taking place—let us leave out the rhythmic man—and here above processes are again taking place. If you look at the processes taking place below as a whole, you find that in ordinary life their essential function is usually disregarded. These processes are those of excretion—through the intestines, through the kidneys, and so on—all of them having their outlet in a downwards direction. They are mostly regarded simply as excretory processes. But this is a misinterpretation. Excretion does not take place merely for the purpose of elimination, but to the same degree in which the products of excretion appear, something appears spiritually in the lower man which resembles what the brain is physically above. What occurs in the lower man is a process which is arrested halfway in regard to its physical development. Excretion takes place because the process passes over into the spiritual. In the upper man the process is completed. What below is only spiritual, there assumes physical form. Above we have the physical brain, below a spiritual brain. And if what is eliminated below were to be subjected to a further process, if the changes in its condition were to be continued, then its final metamorphosis would be preliminary to the human brain.

The human brain-mass is the further evolved product of excretion. This is something which is of immense importance, in regard to medicine for instance, and it is something of which doctors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were still fully aware. Of course today people speak in a very derogatory manner—and rightly in many respects—of the old “quack-apothecaries”. But this is because they do not know that their potions still contained “mummies” of the spirit.

Naturally this is not intended as a glorification of what has figured as “quackery” in the past centuries, but I am drawing attention to many truths which have connections as deep as those which I have just cited.

It is a fact that the brain is a higher metamorphosis of the products of excretion. Hence the connection between brain illnesses and intestinal illnesses, and their cure.

You see, because gnomes and undines exist, because there is a real world in which they live, the forces are present, which, proceeding from the lower man, do indeed give rise to parasites, but yet, at the same time, bring about in the upper man the metamorphosis of the products of excretion into the brain. It would be absolutely impossible for us to have a brain, if the world were not so ordered that gnomes and undines can exist.

What holds good for gnomes and undines in regard to the destructive forces—for destruction, disintegration, also proceed in their turn from the brain—this holds good for sylphs and fire-beings, in regard to the constructive forces. Here again the well-disposed sylphs and fire-beings hold themselves aloof from men and animals, and busy themselves with plant-growth in the way I have described; but there are also those which are malevolent. These ill-disposed beings are above all concerned in carrying what should only have its place up above in the regions of air and warmth down into the watery and earthy regions.

Now if you wish to study what happens when these sylph-beings carry what belongs up above down into the watery and earthy regions, look at the belladonna. The belladonna is the plant, which, if I may put it so, has been kissed in its blossoms by the sylphs, and in it what could be beneficent juices have been changed into juices which are poisonous.

Here you have what may be called a displacement of spheres. It is right when the sylphs develop their enveloping forces up above, as I have already described, where the light touches the surface in a formative way—for the bird-world needs this. But if the sylph descends, and makes use below of what it should employ up above in the plant-world, a potent vegetable poison is engendered. Parasitic beings arise through gnomes and undines; through sylphs the poisons which are in fact a heavenly element which has streamed down too deeply on to the earth. When men or certain animals eat the belladonna, which looks like a cherry, except that it conceals itself in the calyx (in the very way it is pressed down you can see what I have just described)—when men or certain animals eat the belladonna, it is fatal to them. But just look at the thrushes and blackbirds; they perch on the belladonna and get from it the best food in the world. It is to their region that what is present in the belladonna belongs.

It is a remarkable thing that animals and man, who in their lower organs are in fact earth-bound, should experience as poison what has become corrupted on the earth in the belladonna, whereas birds such as thrushes and blackbirds, which should really get this in a spiritual way from the sylphs—and indeed through the benevolent sylphs do so obtain it—should be able to assimilate it, even when what belongs up above in their region has been carried downwards to the earth. They find nourishment in what is poison for beings more bound to the earth.

Thus you get a conception of how, on the one side, through gnomes and undines what is of a parasitic nature strives upwards from the earth towards other beings, and of how the poisons filter downwards from above.

When, on the other hand, the fire-beings imbue themselves with those impulses which belong in the region of the butterflies, and are of great use to them in their development—when the fire-beings carry those impulses down into the fruits, there arises within the species of the almonds, for instance—what appears as the poisonous almonds. This poison is carried into the fruit of the almond trees through the activity of the fire-beings. And yet the fruit of the almond could not come into existence at all if beings from this same world of the fire-beings did not in a beneficial way burn up, as it were, what is the edible part in other fruits. Only look at the almond. With other fruits you have the white core in the centre and around it the flesh of the fruit. With the almond you have the kernel there in the centre, and around it the flesh of the fruit is quite burnt up. That is the action of the fire-beings. And if this activity miscarries, if what the fire-beings are bringing about is not confined to the brown burnt-up shell, where it can still be beneficial, but something of what should be engaged in developing the almond-shell penetrates into the white kernel, then the almond becomes poisonous.

And so you have gained a picture of those beings which are just on the boundary of the world lying immediately beyond the threshold, and of how, if they carry their impulses to their final issue, they become the bearers of parasites, of poisons, and therewith of illnesses. Now it becomes clear how far man in health raises himself above the forces that take hold of him in illness. For illness springs from the malevolence of these beings who are necessary for the upbuilding of the whole structure of nature, but also for its fading and decay.

These are the things which, arising from instinctive clairvoyance, underlie such intuitions as those of the Indian Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma represented the active Being in world-spheres which may legitimately approach man. Vishnu represented those world-spheres which may only approach man in so far as what has been built up must again be broken down, in so far as it must be continually transformed. Shiva represented everything connected with the forces of destruction. And in the earlier stages of the flower of Indian civilization it was said that Brahma is intimately related to all that is of the nature of the fire-beings, and the sylphs; Vishnu with all that is of the nature of sylphs and undines; Shiva with all that is of the nature of undines and gnomes. Generally speaking, when we go back to these more ancient conceptions, we find everywhere the pictorial expressions for what must be sought today as lying behind the secrets of nature.

Yesterday we studied the connection of this invisible folk with the plant-world; today we have added their connection with the world of the animals. Everywhere beings on this side of the threshold are interlocked with those from beyond it; and beings from beyond the threshold with those on this side. Only when one knows the living inter-working of both these kinds of beings does one really understand how the visible world unfolds. Knowledge of the super-sensible world is indeed very, very necessary for man, because in the moment when he passes through the gate of death he no longer has the sense-world around him, but now the other world begins to be his world. At his present stage of evolution man cannot find right access into the other world unless he has recognized, in physical manifestations the written characters which direct him over into this other world; if he has not learned to read in the creatures of the earth, in the creatures of the water, in the creatures of the air, and, indeed, in the creatures of the light, the butterflies, what leads him to the elemental beings which are our companions between death and a new birth. What we see of these beings here between birth and death is, so to speak, their crude, dense part. We only learn to recognize what belongs to them as their super-sensible nature when, with insight and understanding, we transfer ourselves into this super-sensible world.

We only learn to know the beings of the sense-world when we observe them in the way they live and act, and it is the same with those beings about which I have been speaking and shall continue to speak in these lectures, the elemental beings of nature. Invisibly and super-sensibly present behind what is physical and sense-perceptible, they participate in all the happenings of the world just as, or rather in a higher sense than do the physical, sense-perceptible beings.

Now you will readily be able to imagine that to these beings the world appears somewhat other than to the beings of the sense-world, for they do not possess a physical body such as is possessed by these latter. Everything which they grasp or perceive in the world must be different from what enters the human eye. This is indeed the case. The human being experiences the earth, for instance, as the cosmic body upon which he moves about. He even finds it slightly unpleasant when through some atmospheric condition or other, as occasionally occurs, this cosmic body becomes softened and he sinks into it even in a slight degree. He likes to feel the earth as something hard, as something into which he does not sink.

This whole way of experiencing things, this whole attitude towards the earth, is, however, completely alien to the gnomes; they sink down everywhere, because for them the whole earth-body is primarily a hollow space through which they can pass. They can penetrate everywhere; the rocks, the metals, present no hindrance to their—shall I say swimming around. There are no words in our language which really express this wandering about of the gnomes inside the body of the earth. It is just that they have an inner experience, an inner perception, of the different ingredients of the earth; when they wander along a vein of metal they have a different experience from when they take their way along a layer of chalk. All this, however, the gnomes feel inwardly, for through all such things they penetrate unhindered. They have not the least idea that the earth exists. Their idea is that there is a space within which they perceive certain experiences; the experience of gold, the experience of mercury, of tin, of silica, and so on. This is to express it in human language, not in the language of the gnomes. Their language is far more perceptive; and it is just because their whole life is spent in journeying along all the veins and seams—ever and again journeying along them—that they acquire the very pronounced intellectuality about which I have spoken to you. Through this they acquire their all-comprehensive knowledge, for in the metals and in the earth everything outside in the universe is revealed to them; as though in a mirror they experience everything which is outside in the universe. But for the earth itself the gnomes have no perception, only for its different constituents, and for the different kinds of inner experience which they offer.

Because of this the gnomes have a quite particular gift for receiving the impressions which come from the moon. It is towards the moon that they continually direct their attentive listening, and in this respect they are—I cannot say the born—it is so difficult to find the appropriate words—but the inherent neurasthenics. Of course, what for us is an illness is for these gnome-beings their actual life-element. For them this is no illness; it is simply a matter of course. It is what gives them that inner sensibility towards all those things of which I have spoken. But it also gives them their inner sensitivity towards the phenomena connected with the phases of the moon.

They follow the changes in the moon-phenomena with such close attention—I have already described their power of attention to you—that it actually alters their form. When, therefore, one follows the existence of a gnome, one receives quite a different impression at full moon from that one receives at new moon, and again at the intermediate phases.

At full moon the gnomes are ill at ease. Physical moonlight does not suit them, and at that time they thrust the whole feeling of their being outwards. They circumscribe themselves, as it were, with a spiritual skin. At full moon they press the feeling of their existence towards the boundary of their body. And in full moonlight, if one has imaginative perception for such things, they really appear like little shining, mail-clad knights. They are clad in a kind of spiritual armour and this it is which presses outwards in their skin to arm them against the moonlight which so displeases them. But when the time of new moon approaches the gnome becomes transparent, wonderful to see, inwardly irradiated with a glittering play of colours. One sees within him, as it were, the processes of a whole world. It is as though one were to look into the human brain, not as an anatomist investigating the fabric of the cells, but as one who perceives inside the brain the shimmering and sparkling of the thoughts. That is how these transparent little folk, the gnomes, appear to one, its though the play of thoughts is revealed within them. It is just at new moon that the gnomes are so particularly interesting, for each of them bears a whole world within himself; and one can say that within this world there actually lies the mystery of the moon.

If one unveils it, this moon-mystery, one comes upon truly remarkable discoveries, for one reaches the conclusion that at the present time the moon is continually approaching nearer—naturally you must not take this in a crude way, as though the moon would collide with the earth—but each year it does in fact come somewhat nearer. Each year the moon is actually nearer the earth. One recognises this from the ever more vigorous play of the moon-forces in the gnome-world during the time of the new moon. And to this coming nearer of the moon the attentiveness of these goblins is quite specially directed; for it is in producing results from the way in which the moon affects them that they see their chief mission in the universe. They await with intense expectation the epoch when the moon will again unite with the earth; and they assemble all their forces in order to be armed in readiness for the epoch when the moon will have united with the earth, for they will then use the moon substance gradually to disperse the earth, as far as its outer substance is concerned, into the universe. Its substance must pass away.

Because they hold this task in view these kobolds or gnomes feel themselves to be of quite special importance, for they gather together the most varied experiences from the whole of earth-existence, and they hold themselves in readiness, when all earthly substance will have been dispersed into the universe,—after the transition to the Jupiter-evolution—to preserve what is good in the structure of the earth in order to incorporate this in Jupiter as a kind of bony support.

You see, when one looks at this process from the aspect of the gnomes, one gains a first stimulus, a first capacity, to picture how our earth would appear if all the water were taken away from it. Just consider how, in the western hemisphere, everything is orientated from north to south, and how, in the eastern hemisphere, everything is orientated from east to west. Thus, if you were to do away with all the water, you would get in America, with its mountains and what lies under the sea, something which proceeds from north to south; and looking at Europe you would correspondingly find that, in the eastern hemisphere, the chain of the Alps, the Carpathians and so on, runs in the east-west direction. You would get something like the structure of the cross in the earth.

When one gains insight into this, one receives the impression that this is really the united gnome-world of the old Moon. The predecessors of our Earth-gnomes, the Moon-gnomes, gathered together their Moon-experiences and from them fashioned this structure, this firm structure of the solid fabric of the Earth, so that our solid Earth-structure actually arose from the experiences of the gnomes of the old Moon.

These are the things which reveal themselves in regard to the gnome-world. Through them the gnomes acquire an interesting, an extraordinarily interesting relationship to the whole evolution of the universe. They always carry over the firm element of a preceding stage into the stage which follows. They are the preservers in evolution of the continuity of the firm structure, and thus they preserve the firm structure from one world-body to another. It belongs to the most interesting of studies to approach the super-sensible world from the aspect of these spiritual beings and to observe their special task, for it is through this that one first gains an impression of how every kind of being existing in the world shares in the task of working upon the whole formation of the world.

Now let us pass over from the gnomes to the undines, the water-beings. Here a very remarkable picture presents itself. These beings have not the need for life that human beings have, neither have they the need for life that the animals have even though instinctively, but one could almost say that the undines, as also the sylphs, have rather a need for death. In a cosmic way they are really like the flying creature which casts itself into the flame. They only feel their life to be truly theirs when they die. This is extraordinarily interesting. Here on the physical earth everything desires to live, for all that has life-force in it is prized. It is the living, sprouting life that is valued. But once we have crossed the threshold, all these beings say to us that it is death which is really the true beginning of life. This can be felt by these beings. Let us take the undines. You know, perhaps, that sailors who travel a great deal on the sea find that in July, August and September—further to the west this is already the case in June—the Baltic Sea makes a peculiar impression, and they say that the sea is beginning to blossom. It becomes, as it were, productive; but it produces just those things which decay in the sea. The process of decay in the sea makes itself felt; it imparts to the sea a peculiar putrefactive smell.

All this, however, is different for the undines. It causes them no unpleasant sensations; but when the millions and millions of water-creatures which perish in the sea enter into the state of decomposition the sea becomes for the undines the most wonderful phosphorescent play of colours. It shines and glitters with every possible colour. Especially does the sea glitter for them, inwardly and outwardly, in every shade of blue, violet and green. The whole process of decomposition in the sea becomes a glimmering and gleaming of the darker colours up to the green. But these colours are realities for the undines, and one can see how, in this play of colours in the sea, they absorb the colours into themselves. They draw these colours into their own bodily nature. They become like them, they themselves become phosphorescent. And as they absorb the play of colours, as they themselves become phosphorescent, there arises in the undines something like a longing, an immense longing to rise upwards, to soar upwards. Upwards they soar, led by this longing, and with this longing they offer themselves to the beings of the higher hierarchies—to the angels, archangels and so on—as earthly sustenance; and in this sacrifice they find their bliss. Then within the higher hierarchies they live on further.

And thus we see the remarkable fact that each year with the return of early spring these beings evolve upwards from unfathomable depths. There they take part in the life of the earth by working on the plant-kingdom in the way I have described. Then, however, they pour themselves, as it were, into the water, and take up by means of their own bodily nature the phosphorescence of the water, the element of decomposition, and bear it upwards with an intensity of longing. Then in a vast, in a magnificent cosmic picture, one sees how, emanating from earthly water, the colours which are carried upwards by the undines and which have spiritual substantiality, provide the higher hierarchies with their sustenance, how the earth becomes the source of nourishment in that the very essence of the undines' longing is to let themselves be consumed by the higher beings. There they live on further; there they enter into their eternity. Thus every year there is a continual upstreaming of these undines, whose inner nature is formed out of the earthly sphere, and who radiate upwards, filled with the longing to offer themselves as nourishment to the higher beings.

And now let us proceed to the sylphs. In the course of the year we find the dying birds. I described to you how these dying birds possess spiritualized substance, and how they desire to give this spiritualized substance over to the higher worlds in order to release it from the earth. But here an intermediary is needed. And these intermediaries are the sylphs. It is a fact that through the dying bird-world the air is continually being filled with astrality. This astrality is of a lower order, but it is nevertheless astrality; it is astral substance. In this astrality flutter—or hover might be a better word—in this astrality hover the sylphs. They take up what comes from the dying bird-world, and carry it, again with a feeling of longing, up into the heights, only desiring to be inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They offer themselves as that which supplies breathing-existence to the higher hierarchies. Again a magnificent spectacle. With the dying bird-world, this astral, inwardly radiant substance is seen to pass over into the air. The sylphs flash like blue lightning through the air, and into their blue lightning, which assumes first greener, then redder tones, they absorb this astrality which comes from the bird-world, and dart upwards like upward-flashing lightning. And if one follows this beyond the boundaries of space, it becomes what is inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies.

Thus one can say: The gnomes carry one world over into another in regard to its structure. They progress, as it were in a direction—the expression is only used as a comparison—which is horizontal with evolution. The other beings—the undines, the sylphs—carry upwards what they experience as bliss in yielding themselves up to death, in being consumed, in being inhaled. There they continue to live within the higher hierarchies; within them they experience their eternity.

And when we pass over to the fire-beings, only think how the dust on the butterfly's wings seems to dissolve into nothing with the death of the butterfly. But it does not really dissolve into nothing. What is shed as dust from the butterfly's wings is the most highly spiritualized matter. And all this passes over like microscopic comets into the warmth-ether which surrounds the earth, each single particle of dust passes like a microscopic comet into the warmth-ether of the earth. When in the course of the year the butterfly-world approaches its end, all this becomes glittering and shimmering, an inner glittering and shimmering. And into this glittering and shimmering the fire-beings pour themselves; they absorb it. There it continues to glitter and shimmer, and they, too, get a feeling of longing. They bear what they have thus absorbed up into the heights. And now one sees—I have already described this to you from another aspect—how what the fire-beings carry outwards from the butterfly's wings shines forth into world-space. But it does not only shine forth; it streams forth. And it is this which provides the particular view of the earth, which is perceived by the higher hierarchies. The beings of the higher hierarchies gaze upon the earth, and what they principally see is this butterfly-and-insect-existence which has been carried outwards by the fire-beings; and the fire-beings find their highest ecstasy in the realization that it is they who present themselves before the spiritual eyes of the higher hierarchies. They find their highest bliss in being beheld by the gaze, by the spiritual eyes, of the higher hierarchies, in being absorbed into them. They strive upwards towards these beings and carry to them the knowledge of the earth.

Thus we see how these elemental beings are the intermediaries between the earth and the spirit-cosmos. We see this drama of the phosphorescent uprising of the undines, which pass away in the sea of light and flame of the higher hierarchies as their sustenance; we see the up-flashing of the greenish-reddish lightning, which is in-breathed there where the earth continually passes over into the eternal, the eternal survival of the fire-beings, whose activity never ceases. For whereas, here on earth, it is particularly at a certain time of the year that butterflies die, the fire-beings see to it that what it is their task to look to is poured out into the universe throughout the entire year. Thus the earth is as though cloaked in a mantle of fire. Seen from outside the earth appears fiery. But everything is brought about by beings who see the things of the earth quite differently from how man sees them. As already mentioned, man's experience of the earth is of a hard substance upon which he walks about and stands. For the gnomes it is a transparent globe, a hollow body. For the undines water is something in which they perceive the phosphorizing process, which they can take into themselves and feel as their life-element. Sylphs see in the astrality of the air, which emanates from dying birds, that which makes their lightning flashes more vivid than they would otherwise be, for in itself the lightning of these sylphs is dull and bluish. And then again the disintegration of butterfly existence is something which continually envelops the earth as though with a sheath of fire. When this is beheld it is as though the earth were surrounded by a wonderful fiery painting; and, on the other side, when one looks upwards from the earth, one beholds these lightning flashes, these phosphorescent and evanescent undines. All this makes us say: Here on earth the elemental nature-spirits live and weave; they strive upwards and pass away in the fire-mantle of the earth. In reality, however, they do not pass away, but there they find their eternal existence by passing over into the beings of the higher hierarchies.

All this, however, which at first appears like a wonderful world-picture is the expression of what happens on earth, for initially it is all played out upon the earth. We human beings are always present in what is there taking place; and the fact is—even if in his ordinary consciousness man is at first incapable of grasping what surrounds him—that every night we are involved in the weaving and working of these beings, that we ourselves take part as ego and as astral body in what these beings are carrying out.

But it is the gnomes especially which really find it quite an entertainment to observe a person who is asleep, not the physical body in bed, but the person who is outside his physical body in his astral body and ego, for what the gnome sees is someone who thinks in the spirit but does not know it. He does not know that his thoughts live in the spiritual. And again for the undines it is inexplicable that man knows himself so little; likewise with the sylphs, and likewise with the fire-beings.

On the physical plane, you see, it is certainly often unpleasant to have gnats and the like buzzing around one at night. But the spiritual man, the ego and astral body—at night these are surrounded and woven about by elemental beings; and this being surrounded and woven about is a constant admonition to man to give an impetus to his consciousness in order to know more about the world.

Now, therefore, I can try to give you an idea of what these beings—gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings—mean with their buzzing about, of what happens when we begin to hear what amuses them in us, and of what they would have us do when they admonish us to give a forward impetus to our consciousness. Yes, you see, here come the gnomes and speak somewhat as follows:

You dream your self,
And shun awakening.

The gnomes know that man possesses his ego as though in a dream, that he must first awaken in order to arrive at his true ego. They see this quite clearly, and call to him in his sleep:

You dream your self

—they mean during the day—

And shun awakening.

Then there sounds forth from the undines:

You think the deeds of angels

Man does not know that his thoughts are really with the angels

You think the deeds of Angels
And know it not.

And from the sylphs there sounds to sleeping man:

Creative Might shines to you,
You divine it not.
You feel its strength

—the strength of Creative Might—

And live it not.

Such approximately are the words of the sylphs, the words of the undines, the words of the gnomes.

The words of the fire-beings:

Divine Will offers you strength,
You accept it not.
With its strength you will,

—with the strength of Divine Will—

Yet thrust it from you.

The aim of all these admonitions is to give man a forward impetus in regard to his consciousness. These beings, which do not enter into physical existence, wish man to make a move onward with his consciousness, so that he, too, may participate in their world.

And when one has thus entered into what these beings have to say to man, one also gradually understands how they give expression to their own nature, somewhat in this way:

The gnomes:

I maintain the life-force in the root,
It creates for me my body's form.

The undines:

I bestir the water's power of growth,
It forms for me substance of life.

The sylphs:

I quaff the airy force of life,
It fills me with the power of being.

And the fire-beings—there it is very difficult to find any kind of earthly words for what they do, because their sphere is far removed from earthly life and earthly activity.

Fire-beings:

I consume¹ the striving power of fire,
Into soul-spirit it releases me.

You see, I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to give you an idea of how these beings of the elemental kingdom characterize themselves; and of the admonitions which they impart to man. But they are not so unfriendly to man as only to suggest to him what is negative in its nature, but pithy and positive sayings also proceed from them. And man experiences these sayings as being of immense, of gigantic import. In such matters as these you must acquire a sense for whether a saying is uttered merely in human words, however beautiful they may be, or whether it sounds forth as though cosmically from the whole mighty chorus of the gnomes. It is the whole manner of its arising which brings about the difference. And when man hearkens to the gnomes after the admonitions which I have written down have been imparted to him, then there sounds towards him from the massed chorus of the gnomes:

Strive to awaken.

Here the significance is the mighty moral impression created by such words when they stream through the universe, arising from the massed chorus of infinitely many single voices.

And from the undine chorus resounds:

Think in the spirit.

With the chorus of sylphs things are not so simple. When the gnomes appear like shining armoured knights in full moonlight there resounds from them as though from earth-depths:

Strive to awaken.

When the undines soar upwards filled with the longing to be consumed, then in this upsoaring there sounds back to the earth:

Think in the Spirit.

But for the sylphs, in that, up above, they allow themselves to be inhaled, disappearing in bluish-reddish-greenish lightning into the world-light, then, as they flash into the light and therein disappear, from the heights there sounds down from them:

Live creatively breathing existence.

And as in fiery anger—but anger which is not felt to be annihilating, but rather as something which man must receive from the cosmos—as in fiery but at the same time enthusiastic anger, the fire-beings carry what is theirs into the fire-mantle of the earth, their words resound. Here the sound is not like that of single voices massed together, but from the whole circumference there resounds as with a mighty voice of thunder:

Receive in love the Will-Force of the Gods.

Naturally, one can turn one's attention away from all this; then one does not perceive it. Whether or no man does perceive such things depends upon his own free decision. But when man does perceive them he knows that they are an integral part of cosmic existence, that something actually occurs in that gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings unfold their evolution in the way described. And the gnomes are not only present for man in the way I have already portrayed, but they are there to let their world-words sound forth from the earth, the undines to let their world-words soar upwards, the sylphs theirs from above, the fire-beings theirs like a chorus, like the massing of a mighty uplifting of voices.

Yes, this is how it could appear when transposed into words. But these words belong to the Word of worlds, and even though we do not hear them with ordinary consciousness, these words are yet not without significance for mankind. For the primeval idea which had its source in instinctive clairvoyance, that the world was born out of the Word, is indeed a profound truth, but the world-word is not some collection of syllables gathered from here or there; the world-word is what sounds forth from countless, countless beings. Countless, countless beings have something to say in the totality of the world, and the world-word sounds forth from the concordance of these countless beings. It is not the general abstract truth that the world is born out of the Word that can bring this to us in its fullness. One thing alone can do this, namely that we gradually arrive at a concrete understanding of how the world-word in all its different nuances is composed of the voices of individual beings, so that these different nuances contribute their sound, their utterance, to the great world-harmony, the mighty world-melody, in the Word's act of creation.

When the gnome-chorus allows its “Strive to awaken” to sound forth, this—only transformed into gnome-language—is the force which is active in bringing about the human bony system, the system of movement in general.

When the undines utter “Think in the spirit”, they utter—transposed into the undine-sphere—what pours itself as world-word into man in order to give form to the organs of digestion.

When the sylphs, as they are breathed in, allow their “Live creatively breathing existence” to stream downwards, there penetrates into man, weaving and pulsating through him, the force which endows him with the organs of the rhythmic system.

And if one attends to what sounds inwardly—in the manner of the fire-beings—from the fire-mantle of the world, then one finds that this sounding manifests as image or reflection. It streams in from the fire-mantle—this sounding force of the word. And every nerve system of every man, every head I would add, is a miniature image of what-translated into the language of the fire-beings—rings out as: “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. This saying, “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”, this is what is active in the highest substance of the world. And when man is experiencing his development in the life between death and a new birth, this it is which transforms what he brought with him through the gate of death into what will later become the human organs of the nerves and senses. So we have:

System of movement

Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken

Metabolic organization

Undines: Think in the Spirit

Rhythmic system

Sylphs: Live creatively breathing existence.

Nerve-senses system

Fire-beings: Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods.

Thus you see that what lies beyond the threshold is akin to our own nature, you see how it leads us into the creative divine forces, into what lives and works in all forms of existence. And when one calls to mind what an earlier epoch divined, and is expressed in the words:

The power of life, the seeds behold;
Turn thee away from words' cramped mould.²

—one is impelled to say that all this must become actuality in the further course of the development of mankind. We cramp all knowledge into words if we have no insight into the germinating forces which build up the human being in the most varied ways.

We can therefore say that the system of movement, the metabolic system, the rhythmic system, the system of nerves and senses merge into a unity in that they resound in harmony. For there sounds upwards from below: “Strive to awaken”; “Think in the Spirit”—and from above downwards, mingling with the upward-striving words, “Live creatively breathing existence”; “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”.

This “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods” is the calm creative element in the head. Then what strives from below upwards in “Think in the Spirit”, from above downwards in “Live creatively breathing existence”, in their combined activity is what so works and weaves that it creates an image of the way in which human breathing passes over in a rhythmical way into the activity of the blood. And what implants into us the instruments of the senses, this is what streams from above downwards in “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. But what works in our walking, in our standing, in our moving of the arms and hands, everything in fact which brings man into the manifestation of his element of will, this sounds forth in “Strive to awaken”.

Thus you see how man is a symphony of that world-word which can be interpreted on its lowest level in the way I have presented it to you. Then this world-word ascends to the higher hierarchies, whose task it is to unfold other aspects of this world-word in order that the cosmos may arise and develop. But that which has, as it were, been uttered as a call into the world by these elemental beings is the final reverberation of that creative, upbuilding, form-giving world-word which lies at the base of all activity and all existence.

Gnomes:

You dream your Self,
And shun awakening.

I maintain the life-force in the root,
It creates for me my body's form.

Undines:

You think the deeds of Angels
And know it not.

I bestir the water's power of growth,
It forms for me substance of life.

Sylphs:

Creative might shines to you,
You divine it not;
You feel its strength
And live it not.

I quaff the airy force of life,
It fills me with the power of being.

Fire-beings:

Divine Will offers you strength,
You accept it not.
With its strength you will,
Yet thrust it off from you.

I consume the striving power of fire,
Into soul-spirit it releases me.

Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken!
Undines: Think in the Spirit!
Sylphs: Live creatively breathing existence!
Fire-beings: Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods!

GNOMEN

Du träumst dich selbst,
Und meidest das Erwachen.

Ich halte die Wurzelwesenkraft,
Sie schaffet mir den Formenleib.

UNDINEN

Du denkst die Engelwerke
Und weisst es nicht.

Ich bewege die Wasserwachtumskraft,
Sie bildet mir den Lebensstoff.

SYLPHEN

Dir leuchtet die Schöpfermacht,
Du ahnst es nicht;
Du fühlest ihre Kraft
Und lebst sie nicht.

Ich schlürfe die luft'ge Lebekraft,
Sie füllet mich mit Seinsgewalt.

FEUERWESEN

Dir krafter Götterwille,
Du empfangst ihn nicht.
Du willst mit seiner Kraft,
Und stosset ihn von dir.

Ich däue die Feuer strebekraft,
Sie erlöst mich in Seelengeistigkeit.

GNOMENCHOR: Erstrebe zu wachen
UNDINEN: Denke in Geiste
SYLPHEN: Lebe schaffend atmendes Dasein
FEUERWESEN: Empfange liebend Götterwillenskraft.

• 1. Here Rudolf Steiner coins a word from verdauen, to digest: däuen—ich däue, to express, not ordinary digestion, but a fiery consuming process.
• 2. Goethe: Faust, Part I, Scene I.

In the lectures which I have given recently you will have seen that everything was directed towards so bringing together world-phenomena that eventually a really comprehensive knowledge of man might result. Everything we have been studying here has had the knowledge of man as its goal. Such a knowledge of man will only become possible when it begins with the lowest forms of the world of phenomena and relates them to everything that is revealed to man as the material world. But what begins in this way with the study of the entire world of matter must end with the study of the world of the hierarchies. It is in proceeding from the lowest forms of material up to the highest forms of spiritual existence that we must seek to discover what will eventually lead to a true knowledge of man. For the present we will use the lectures I am now able to give you to make a kind of sketch of such a knowledge of man.

We must be quite clear about the fact that what we now recognise as man is a product of that long cosmic evolution which I have always synthesized as the Saturn-Sun-Moon-and-Earth-evolution. The Earth-evolution is not yet completed. But let us be clear about what man owes to this Earth-evolution in the narrower sense, to the epoch, that is to say, which is subsequent to the evolution of old Moon. You see, when you move your arms and stretch them out, when you move your fingers, when you carry out any kind of external movement, everything in your organism which enables you to move your arms and legs, your head, your lips, and so on—and the forces upon which man's external movements depend enter into the most inward parts of the human organism—all this was vouchsafed to man by Earth-evolution in the narrower sense. If, on the other hand, you look into everything connected with the development of the metabolism, which is enclosed by man's outer skin, if you look at all the metabolic functions within the physical body, here you have a picture of what man owes to the Moon-evolution. And you have a picture of what man owes to the old Sun-evolution when you look into everything within him which involves some kind of rhythmic process. Breathing and blood-circulation are of course the most important of these rhythmic processes, and these man owes to the old Sun-evolution. Everything comprised in the system of nerves and senses, which in men of today is distributed over the whole body, this man owes to the old Saturn-evolution.

In regard to all this, however, you must bear in mind that the human being is a whole and that world-evolution is a whole. When today we draw attention to the old Saturn-evolution in the way I did in my “Occult Science”, we mean the period of evolution previous to the primordial epochs of the Sun-Moon-and-Earth-evolution. But this is only one Saturn-evolution, that from which the Earth resulted. But during the period in which the Earth was evolving, a Saturn-evolution also came into being. This Saturn-evolution is included in the Earth-evolution; it is, so to speak, the youngest Saturn-evolution. The one that did not reach the Earth-evolution is the oldest. The Saturn-evolution which was inserted into old Sun is younger; the one inserted into old Moon is younger still. And the Saturn which today imbues the Earth, and is actually responsible for certain aspects of its warmth-organization, this Saturn is the youngest of all. We, with our human nature, are a part of this Saturn-evolution.

Thus are we placed into cosmic evolution. But we are also placed into what surrounds us spacially on the earth. Take, for example, the mineral kingdom. We live in a state of reciprocal action with the mineral kingdom. We take the mineral element into ourselves through our food. We absorb it in other ways, too, through our breathing, and so on. We assimilate the mineral element.

But all evolution, all world-processes, are different within man from what they are outside him. I have already mentioned that it is a real absurdity when people today study chemical processes in laboratories, and then think that when a person eats certain foodstuffs these processes will simply continue inside him. Man is not some kind of confluence of chemical actions; inside him everything is altered. And from a certain standpoint this alteration appears in the following way.

Let us suppose that we take into ourselves something of a mineral nature. Every such mineral substance must be so far worked upon within the human being that the following result is brought about. You know that we have our own individual temperature; in the healthy person this is about 98 degrees Fahrenheit (37° centigrade). In the warmth of our blood we have something which exceeds the warmth outside us. Everything which we take in as mineral substance must, however, be so transformed, so metamorphosed in our organism that, where the warmth of our blood exceeds the average warmth of its external environment, where it rises above the average external warmth of our surroundings, this excess of warmth absorbs with satisfaction the mineral element within us. If you eat a grain of cooking-salt, this grain of salt must be absorbed by your individual warmth, not by the warmth which you have in common with the outside world. It must be absorbed with satisfaction by your own individual warmth. Everything mineral must be transformed into warmth-ether. And the moment a person has something in his organism which prevents any kind of mineral from being changed into warmth-ether, at that moment he is ill.

Now let us proceed to the plant-substances which man takes into himself. Man takes in plant-substances; he, too, belongs to the plant kingdom inasmuch as he develops the plant-element within himself. He contains what is of a mineral nature; this, however, continually has the tendency to become warmth-ether. The plant element continually has the tendency in man to become airy, to become gaseous. So that man has the plant element within himself in its aspect of air. Everything of a plant nature which enters man, or whatever he himself develops as inner plant organisation, must become airy, must be able to assume the form of air within him. If it does not assume the form of air, if his organization is such that it hinders him from letting what is of a plant-nature within him pass over into the form of air, he becomes ill. Everything of animal-nature which man takes in or develops within himself must—in time at least—assume the fluid, the watery form. Man may not have what is of an animal nature within him, whether inwardly produced or absorbed from outside, unless at some time it submits to the process of becoming fluid. If man is not in a position to liquidize either his own or foreign animal substance so as to transform it further into the solid, then he becomes ill. Only that in man which is indigenous to the purely human form, which arises from his nature as a being who walks upright, having within him the impulses to speak and think, only that which gives man his real humanity, which raises him above the animal—and this is at most a tenth of his whole organism—may enter into solid formation, into actual form. If anything of animal or plant nature invades the human solid form, man is ill.

Everything mineral must eventually become warmth-ether in man. Everything vegetable must undergo a transitional airy stage in man. Everything animal must pass through an intermediate watery stage in man. Only what is human may always retain within itself the earthly-solid form. This is one of the secrets of the human organization.

And now to begin with let us leave aside everything that man has from the Earth-epoch—thereby making our further studies of this all the more fruitful—and let us take the metabolic system as such, which, though certainly developed as an Earth-organization, nevertheless received its germinal beginnings from the epoch of old Moon. Let us therefore take digestion in the narrower sense of what takes place inside the human skin—in which we must of course include the excretory processes—and we shall find that all substances become altered in the intake of food. The food-substances, which at first are outside man, enter into him, and merge themselves with the digestive system. This digestive system now converts what belonged to man's surroundings into what is essentially human. Everything mineral begins to assume the condition of warmth-ether, everything vegetable the gaseous-airy-vaporous condition, everything animal, including what is self-produced, begins to assume the fluid condition; and all begin to build what is now essentially human into a firmly organized structural form. All this is inherent in digestion. And digestion is consequently something of remarkable interest.

If we ascend from digestion to breathing, we notice that man produces carbon out of himself, and that this is to be found everywhere within him. This is sought out by oxygen, becomes changed into carbonic acid, and is then exhaled. Carbonic acid is the combination of carbon and oxygen. The oxygen, which is drawn in through breathing, masters the carbon, absorbs the carbon into itself; carbonic acid, the product of oxygen and carbon, is then exhaled. But before exhalation occurs, the carbon becomes the benefactor, so to speak, of human nature. This carbon—in that it combines with the oxygen, in that it combines to a certain extent what the blood-circulation brings about with what the breathing produces—this carbon becomes the benefactor of the human organization, for, before it leaves the human organization, it disperses through it an out-streaming of ether. Physical science merely states that carbon is exhaled with carbonic acid. This, however, is only one side of the whole process. Man exhales the carbonic acid; but in the process of this exhalation something of the carbon taken up by the oxygen is left behind in his whole organism, namely ether. This ether penetrates into man's etheric body, and it is this ether, continually being produced by the carbon, which makes the human organization capable of opening itself to spiritual influences, of absorbing astral-etheric forces from the cosmos. This ether, which is left behind by the carbon, attracts the cosmic impulses, and they in their turn work formatively upon man, so preparing his nervous system, for instance, that it can become the bearer of thoughts. This ether must continually permeate our senses, our eyes, for example, so that they may see, so that they may receive the outer light-ether. Thus we are indebted to carbon for the supply of ether within us which enables us to come into contact with the outer world.

All this is already prepared in the metabolic system. But the metabolism as a human system is so placed into the whole cosmos that it could not exist for itself alone. Isolated in itself the digestive system could not exist. This is why it was the third system to have its rudiments implanted in man. The rudiments of the system of nerves and senses took form in the epoch of old Saturn; the second system, the rhythmic system, was laid down during the epoch of old Sun. Only after these other systems had come into being could the metabolic system be produced, because in and for itself this system could not exist. The metabolic system, if at first we omit its involuntary movements, is intended, in its cosmic connection, to provide for human nutrition. But these processes of nutrition cannot function independently. Digestion is necessary to man, but in and for itself it cannot exist. For if we study the human metabolic system in isolation—in the forthcoming lectures you will again see how necessary it is for the whole human organism—we find it constantly imbued with every kind of tendency towards illness. And the origin of internal illnesses—not those caused by external injury—must always be looked for in the metabolic system. Anyone, therefore, who wishes to put forward a rational observation of illness must start with the metabolic system; and in regard to every metabolic phenomenon he must really ask: Now where did you come from? When we consider all the phenomena, from the taking of food into the mouth, from the way the food is worked upon so that we transform certain substances into starch, sugar and so on, when we take the enveloping action of ptyalin in the mouth, when we go further and take the pepsin process in the stomach, and the assimilation of the products in digestion, following all these as far as their passage into the lymphatic vessels and into the blood—then we realize that each single one of these processes must be investigated—and their number is legion. The mingling of the products of digestion with the secretions of the pancreatic glands, the further mingling of these substances with the secretions from the gall-bladder, and so on—to each single process the question must be put: What is it that you really want? And it will answer: If I am alone I am a process which always makes man ill. No digestive process in human nature may be carried to its conclusion, for every digestive process which is carried to its conclusion makes man ill. The human constitution is only healthy when the metabolic processes are checked at a certain stage.

It might at first seem a folly in world-organization that something should begin in man which, if not checked halfway, would make him ill; but in the next lectures we shall learn to recognize this as something of the utmost wisdom. For the time being, however, let us study the actual facts, and discover what the answer of the separate digestive processes would be if we were to question their inner nature. We are always on the way to making our whole organism ill. Every digestive process, if unchecked, causes illness in the organism. If, therefore, digestion is to exist at all in man, other processes must exist whose germinal beginnings date from earlier times. These are the processes which are present in circulation, the circulatory processes. The circulation continually produces the processes of healing. So that we may really describe the human being by saying: During the old Moon evolution man was born as patient, and the doctor within him was already sent in advance during the epoch of old Sun. In regard to his own organism man was already born as doctor during the evolution of old Sun. It shows great foresight on the part of world-evolution that the doctor came into existence before the patient, for the patient in man himself was only added on old Moon. And if we are to describe man rightly, we must work backwards from the digestive to the circulatory processes, including, of course, all those impulses which underlie the circulatory system. Speaking broadly one substance induces quicker, another substance slower circulation. We have also quite small circulatory processes within us. Take any mineral substance, gold, let us say, or copper. Every such substance when induced into man—by the mouth, by injection, or in any other way—is endowed with the power of causing something to be formed or altered in the circulation, so as to work in a curative way, and so on. And what one must know, in order to gain insight into the essential healing processes in man, is what each single substance in his world-environment releases in man through alterations in his circulation. Thus one may say that circulation is a continual process of healing.

You can if you wish work this out for yourselves. Recall how I told you that on an average man draws eighteen breaths a minute. Here we find a remarkably regular agreement with the cosmos, for the number of breaths man draws in a day equals the number of circulatory rhythms carried out by the sun in its course through the solar year. As regards its rising, point at the vernal equinox the sun traverses the entire zodiac in the course of 25,920 years. In middle life man draws on an average 25,920 breaths a day. The pulse-beats are four times as many. The other circulation, the circulation which is concentrated more inwardly, is influenced by the digestion. Breath-circulation brings man into outer intercourse with the surrounding world, into reciprocal relationship with it. This breath-rhythm must continually restrain the rhythm of blood-circulation, so that it remains in its proportion of one to four, otherwise man would come into a quite irregular rhythm, not reaching the number 103,680. This corresponds to nothing in the cosmos; it would completely sever man and cosmos. His digestion tears him out of the cosmos, estranges him from the cosmos; the rhythm of his breathing continually pulls him back into it. In this holding the rhythm of circulation in control by the rhythm of breathing, you see the primal healing process which is continually at work in man. In a certain delicate way, in the case of every internal cure, we must assist the breathing process, continued as it is into the whole body, and this in such a manner that everywhere in the human being the process of circulation is held in control, is brought back into the general relationships of the cosmos.

Thus we may say: We pass over from nutrition to healing inasmuch as from below upwards man always has the tendency to become ill, and therefore in his central organism, in his organism of circulation, he must continually develop the tendency to remain well. And in that in our central organism healing impulses continually arise, they leave something behind in the head-nerve-senses system. Thus we are brought to the third part of our organism, the system of nerves and senses.

What kind of forces do we find in the nerve-senses system? We find those forces which, so to speak, the doctor in us leaves behind. On the one hand he works down into the metabolism in a health-giving way. But through this curative working upon the digestive process he actually does something which affects the whole cosmos. What I am saying is nothing fantastic, but an absolute reality. This process, which continually works downwards in us in a healing way, calls forth a feeling of pleasure in the higher hierarchies. It constitutes the joy of the higher hierarchies in the earthly world. They look down and continually feel the uprising of illness out of what streams upwards in man from the earthly, from what remains of the earthly attributes of the substances. And they also see how the forces which work away from the earthly, the forces which lie in the encircling air, and the like, are continually active as processes of healing. This arouses satisfaction in the higher hierarchies.

And now try to gain an idea of what may be studied in regard to that cosmic body which, as the spiritual object most deserving of study, is situated at the outer boundary of our planetary system. In the centre of this body we find those forces concealed which, if you think of them as concentrated upon the earth, are the illness inducing forces, and surrounding this same body the encircling forces reveal themselves as the forces which bring about healing. Anyone sensitive to such things will see encircling health in the rings of Saturn, and this in a more distinct way than it can be perceived in what surrounds the earth, because there we stand in the midst of it. A Saturn ring is something essentially different from what astronomers have to say about it. It is encircling health, where-as the inner part of Saturn develops illness; it is the illness-inducing element seen in its most radical concentration.

Thus we see in Saturn, which is situated at the outer-most boundary of our planetary system, the very same process at work which we continually bear within ourselves through our digestive and circulatory organism. But we also find, when we look at all this, that our spiritual gaze is directed further to the worlds of the first and second hierarchy, to the beings of the second hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis, and to the beings of the first hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. If with our spiritual eye we are attentive to Saturn and its ring, we shall be led to these upper hierarchies, as they survey with satisfaction the illness-inducing and health-restoring processes.

And this satisfaction is in itself a force in the universe. It streams through our system of nerves and senses and forms within it the forces of the spiritual evolution of mankind. These are the forces which blossom forth, as it were, from the healing-process which is continually at work in man. Thus in the third place we have the forces of spiritual evolution.

And if we now describe man in the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon, we must say: In the first place man is born out of the cosmos as spirit, he then develops within himself the “healer”, and thus enables himself to deal with the cosmic “patient”. And through the inter-working of all these activities man came into being upon the earth possessed of full freedom of movement.

Every single branch of human knowledge must in a certain sense be inspired by what I have said here. Let us suppose that someone wishes to found a system of healing, a really rational system of healing. What would this have to contain? In the first place, naturally, the processes of healing. But these healing-processes, from where must they take their start? They must take their start from the metabolic processes; and everything else can at most be supposition—we shall have something further to say about this later—anatomy too, even in a delicate form, can at most be a starting point, because it is concerned with the formed and solid. This immediately expresses the human element. But it is the digestive processes which must be studied in the first place by a rational system of medicine, and this in such a way that one always perceives in them tendencies leading towards the inducement of illness. A modern system of medicine must always take the metabolic system, that is to say the normal processes of digestion, as its point of departure; and starting from there it must deduce how internal illnesses, in the widest sense, can arise from the metabolism. Then, through an intimate knowledge of the action of the rhythmic processes, the true nature of therapy must be discovered. A modern system of medicine must, therefore, be founded on a study of the metabolic processes, and then, from this initial study, the transition must be made to everything which can make its appearance in the sphere of the rhythmic processes in man. Further, a kind of crowning of the whole will be attained in that one shows how a sound development of man's spiritual possibilities presupposes a knowledge of what arises from the healing forces. Today you will find no true pedagogy—no art, that is to say, of the sound development of man's spiritual nature—if you do not take your start from the processes of healing; for these healing processes are nothing other than applying to the central nature of the human being what must already be made use of in pure thinking when developing the spiritual processes of man.

The artist in education must work in a spiritual way with the forces which, whether concentrated in the physical or concentrated in the etheric, are processes of healing. Whatever I may do to a child in the sphere of education is a process which has something spiritual as its basis. If I transpose this process, so that what was an activity in the spirit I now carry out in such a way that I make use of some kind of substance or physical process, then this process or substance becomes a remedy. So that it may really be said that medicine is the treatment of man in the spiritual sphere metamorphosed downwards into the sphere of the material. If you call to mind the way in which I dealt with things in the teachers' course held some time back for English visitors, [* See Lectures to Teachers, a report by Albert Steffen.] you will see how I everywhere drew attention to the fact that the work of the teacher is the beginning of a kind of general therapy, and I showed how this or that set of educational ideas can be the initial cause of unhealthy conditions in the excretory processes or of digestive irregularities in later life. So that what the teacher does, projected downwards, gives us therapy. And the antithesis of this therapy—what works from below upwards—this is brought about by the process of digestion.

Here you also see why a system of medicine today must be born out of a knowledge of man as a whole. And this is possible. Many people feel it. But nothing can really be achieved until such a system of medicine is actually developed. Today this must be counted among the most urgent of necessities. If you look at modern text-books of medicine, you will see that, with the rarest exceptions, they do not take their start from the metabolic system. But this must be the point of departure, otherwise one does not learn to know the real nature of illness.

You see, the whole matter proceeds in such a way that the processes of human nutrition can pass over into processes of healing, these again into spiritual processes; and, working backwards, spiritual processes can pass over into healing processes. If, on the other hand, spiritual processes are the direct cause of digestive disturbances, these spiritual processes must again enter into a condition in which they must be cured by the central system of man. All these things pass one into the other in man, and the whole human organization is an example of continual and wonderful metamorphosis. Take, for example, the processes inherent in the whole marvelous circulation of the human blood. What kind of processes are these?

To begin with, separating it entirely from the rest of the organism, let us gain an idea of the human blood, how it flows through the veins; and let us consider the human form, the system of veins, the muscular system in its connection with the bony system, all the solid structure of the body and what flows through it as fluid. And first let us confine ourselves in the fluid condition to the blood. There are, of course, other fluids present, but let us confine ourselves to the blood. Now what are the processes which are continually happening in this streaming fluidity? These processes in the flowing blood can seize hold, in one direction or another, on the walls of the organs, on the bony structure, on anything which can take on a solid formation in man: then what belongs to the blood enters into the walls of the vessels, into the muscles, into one or another of the bones, or into any containing organ. What does it become there? It becomes the impulse towards inflammatory conditions.

What we find here or there as impulses towards inflammatory conditions is continually to be found as normal processes in the flowing blood. What appears as inflammation is something in the wrong place; that is to say processes which must always be present in the fluid blood have trespassed into the solid structure. A perfectly healthy normal process, displaced, transferred to another situation where it does not belong, becomes a process which induces illness. And certain illnesses of the nervous system consist just in this, that the nervous system, which in its whole organization is the polar opposite of the blood-system, is subjected to invasion by processes which are normal in the blood. If these processes which are normal in the blood-channels invade the paths of the nerves even in the slightest degree, then the nerves are attacked by inflammation in its initial stages; and this can develop into the most diverse forms of illness in the nervous system.

I mentioned that the processes in the blood are entirely different from those in the nerves; they are the antithesis of each other. In the blood-processes the urge is towards the phosphorizing element. When these phosphorizing processes take hold of what encloses or is adjacent to the blood, they lead to inflammatory conditions. But if the processes in the paths of the nerves themselves deviate into the adjacent organs and even into the blood, then impulses towards every kind of swelling arise in man. When these processes are carried over into the blood so that they affect the other organs in an unhealthy way, the formation of swellings or tumours makes its appearance. Every swelling or tumour is a metamorphosed nerve-process wrongly situated in the human organism.

What has its course in the nerve must remain in the nerve, and what has its course in the blood must remain in the blood. If what belongs in the blood trespasses into what is adjacent to it, inflammatory conditions arise. When what belongs in the nerve trespasses into what is adjacent to it, all kinds of formations arise which can be grouped together under the designation of swelling-formations. The aim must be to establish the correct rhythm between the processes in the nervous system and the processes in the system of the blood.

Not only have we in general the rhythm of breathing contrasted with the rhythm of the blood, but we have delicate processes in the circulation of the blood, which, when they depart from the blood, become the causes of inflammation. These delicate processes must also enter into a certain rhythmic connection with what is proceeding in the adjacent nerves, just as breathing must stand in a certain connection with the circulation of the blood. And the moment something is disturbed between blood-rhythm and nerve-rhythm it must once more be brought into adjustment.

Here again, you see we come into the domain of therapy, of healing. All this serves to show you how everything must be present in man, how above all an element of illness must be present so that in another situation it may become an element of health; it has only been brought into the wrong situation through an incorrect process. For if it were not there at all man could not exist. Man could not exist if he were unable to get inflammations, for the inflammation-inducing forces must continually be present in the blood. This was my meaning when I often said that everything one gains in the way of knowledge must be won from a real knowledge of man. Here you see the reasons why an education carried out in an up-in-the-air, abstract fashion is really something absurd. Education must in fact be so carried out that everywhere the start is taken from certain pathological processes in man, and from the possibility of curing them.

If one understands a brain-illness and the means by which brain-illness may be cured, then, to put things bluntly—from a certain point of view this is of course also a subtle matter, but I put it “bluntly” because we are dealing with a physical process—then, in the treatment of the brain, we are concerned precisely with what must be applied in the art of education. It is therefore the case that, if we ever came actually to founding a training college for teachers we should have to introduce the pathological-therapeutical aspect to the teachers, and here their thinking should be schooled by means of more perceptible things, because these are more rooted in the material, so preparing them to grasp things concerned with actual education. On the other hand, nothing is of greater assistance in therapy, particularly in the treatment of internal illnesses, than to know the effect produced by the way in which this or that aspect of the art of education is handled. For if one finds the bridge from this to the material, then, from the very way in which one should act in education, the remedy is also to be found.

If, for example, one discovers the right educational means of treating certain lethargic conditions in the children, arising from certain disturbances in the metabolic system, one develops quite remarkable inner faculties. It is necessary, of course, really to immerse oneself in the education, and not have such an external approach that, when school is over, one prefers to spend all the evening in a convivial club and forget all about what happens in the classroom. From the very way one handles a lethargic child one gains the faculty to perceive the whole working of the head-processes, and their relation to the processes of the abdomen. And further, when in mineralogy one studies the processes which take place in copper when it gives rise to this or that formation in the earth, then what copper does in becoming one or another kind of copper ore makes one say to oneself: The copper-force in the earth actually does what you as teacher do with a boy or a girl! In what is accomplished by copper one sees an image of what one carries out oneself. And it is extraordinarily fascinating for a teacher to develop an instinctive, an intuitive clarity of feeling in regard to what he himself does, and then to have the delight of going out into nature in order to see what nature accomplishes in the way of education on an immense scale. There he may see, for example, how, wherever harmful results might ensue from some lime-process, a copper-process is introduced into it. Yes, in these copper-processes, in these ore-forming processes, which have their place within the other processes of the earth, remedial effects are continually present. If somewhere or other one finds pyrite-ores, or the like, it is fascinating to be able to say: Yes, this is exactly the same as when a patient receives the right treatment. But here the treatment is accomplished by the spirits of nature, from the hierarchies down to those elemental spirits about which I have spoken to you, in their capacity as healers of all the destructive, illness-inducing processes which can appear in life. This is in fact nothing more than reading from nature. For if one sees what is happening outside, if one accepts this or that substance as a remedy or prepares it as such, one has only to ask oneself: Where do the foodstuffs grow? Where does this or that metal appear in the veins of the earth? Study their environment and you will always find that, wherever some form of metal appears here or there, which has been dealt with by nature in one or another way, a remedial process is at work within it. Only appropriate this and continue it on into the human organism and you will create a therapy which nature has demonstrated to you in the world outside.

Yes, all the goings-on of the world are in reality a true education in all questions of nutrition, of healing, of the spiritual; for in nature illness is continually being induced and is continually being cured. They are there outside, the great cosmic processes of healing. We must only apply them to man. This is the wonderful inter-working of the macrocosm with the microcosm. What I have said to many of you in one context or another is profoundly true:

Willst du dich selber erkennen,
Blicke in die Welt nach allen Seiten.
Willst du die Welt erkennen,
Schaue in alle deine eigenen Tiefen.

Wouldst thou know thyself,
Look into the world on every side.
Wouldst thou know the world,
Look into the depths of thine own being.

You can, however, apply this to everything. Wouldst thou heal man, look into the world on every side, see how on every side the world evolves processes of healing. Wouldst thou know the secrets of the world in the processes of illness and healing, look down into the depths of human nature. You can apply this to every aspect of man's being, but you must direct your gaze outwards to the great world of nature and see man in a living relationship with this great world.

People today have accustomed themselves to something different. They depart as far from nature as possible. They do something which shuts their own sight off from nature, for what they wish to examine they lay beneath a glass on a little stand—the eye does not look out into nature, but looks into the glass. Sight itself is cut off from nature. They call this a microscope. In certain connections it might as well be called a nulloscope, for it shuts one off from the great world of nature. People do not know, when something under the glass is magnified, that for spiritual knowledge it is exactly as though the same process were to take place in nature herself. For only think, when you take some minute particle from the human being for purposes of observation under a microscope, what you then do with this minute fragment is the same as if you were to stretch the man himself and tear him apart. You would be an even worse monster than Procrustes if you were to wrench man and tear him asunder in order to enlarge him as that minute particle is enlarged under the microscope. But do you believe that you would still have the person before you? This would naturally be out of the question. Just as little have you the reality there under the microscope. The truth which has been magnified is no longer the truth; it is an illusory image. We must not depart from nature and imprison our own sight. For other purposes, this can of course be useful; but for a true knowledge of man it is immensely misleading.

Knowledge of man in the true sense must be sought in the way we have indicated. Starting from the processes of nutrition, it must be followed through the processes of healing to the processes of human and world education in the widest sense. Or we can put it thus: from nutrition, through healing, to civilization and culture. For all that is concentrated in the nourishment of man is the groundwork, as it were, of his physical processes; the healing processes are derived from what continually encircles man, they are concentrated in the rhythmic system; and what comes from above is concentrated in man in the processes of the nerves and senses. Thus world-structure is erected on three levels.

This is what I wished to give you in the first place as a kind of foundation. We can now build further upon it. We shall see how, from such points of departure, we can actually progress to the business of practical affairs; and from thence we can lead over to a knowledge of the hierarchies.

You will have gathered from the foregoing descriptions that man's relation to his environment is very different from what modern ideas often conceive. It is so easy to think that what exists in man's surroundings, what belongs to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and is then taken into the body, that these external material processes which are investigated by the physicist, the chemist and so on, simply continue on in the same way within man himself. There can, however, be no question of this, for one must be clear that within the human skin-processes everything is different from outside it, that the world within differs entirely from the world without. As long as one is not aware of this one will ever and again reach the conclusion that what is examined in a retort, or investigated in some other way, is continued on inside the human organism, and the human organism itself will simply be regarded as a more complicated system of retorts.

You need only recall what I said in yesterday's lecture, that everything mineral within man must be transformed until it reaches the condition of warmth-ether. This means that everything of a mineral nature which enters into the human organism must be so far metamorphosed, so far changed, that at least for a certain period of time, it becomes pure warmth, becomes one with the warmth which man develops as his own individual temperature independent of the warmth of his environment. No matter whether it is salt or something else that we absorb, in one way or another it must assume the form of warmth-ether, and it must do this before it is made use of in the upbuilding of the living organism.

But something quite different is also connected with this: solid substance loses its solid form, when it is changed in the mouth into fluid, and is further transformed into the condition of warmth-ether. It loses weight when it gradually passes over into the fluid form, becomes more and more estranged from the earthly, but only when it has ascended to the warmth-etheric form is it fully prepared to absorb into itself the spiritual which comes from above, which comes from world-spaces.

Thus, if you would gain an idea of how a mineral substance functions in man, you must say the following: There is the mineral substance; this mineral substance enters into man. Within man, passing through the fluid conditions, and so on, it is transformed into warmth-ether. Now it is warmth-ether. This warmth-ether has a strong disposition to absorb into itself what radiates inwards, what streams inwards, as forces from world-spaces. Thus it takes into itself the forces of the universe. And these forces of the universe now form themselves as the spiritual forces which here imbue the warmth-etherized earth-matter with spirit. And only then, with the help of the warmth-etherized earth-substance, does there enter into the body what the body needs for its formation.

So you see—if in the old sense we designate warmth as fire—we can say: What man absorbs in the way of mineral substance is carried upwards within him until it becomes of the nature of fire. And what is of the nature of fire has the disposition to take up into itself the influences of the higher Hierarchies; and then this fire streams back again into all man's internal regions, and builds up, in that it re-solidifies, the material basis of the separate organs. Nothing that man takes into himself remains as it is; nothing remains earthly. Everything, for example, that comes from the mineral kingdom is so far transformed that it can take into itself the spiritual-cosmic, and only then, with the help of what comes from the spiritual cosmos, does it become re-solidified into the earthly condition.

Take from a bone, for instance, a fragment of calcium phosphate. This is in no way the calcium phosphate which you find outside in nature, or which, let us say, you introduce into the laboratory. It is the calcium phosphate which, while it arose from what was absorbed from outside, could only take part in building the human physical form, with the help of the forces which penetrated it during the time when it was changed into the warmth-ether condition.

This, you see, is why man needs substances of the most diverse kinds during the course of his life in order to be able, in accordance with the way he is organized at his particular age, to transform what is lifeless into the condition of warmth-ether. A child is as yet quite unable to change what is lifeless into the warmth-etheric condition; he has not enough strength in his organism. He must drink the milk which is still so nearly akin to the human organism in order to bring it into the condition of warmth-ether, and apply its forces to carrying out the full diffusion of plastic activity which is necessary during the years of childhood for the processes of bodily formation. One only gains insight into the nature of man when one knows that everything which is taken in from outside must be worked upon and basically transformed. Thus, if you take some external substance and wish to test its value for human life you simply cannot do this by means of ordinary chemistry. You must know how much force the human organism must exert in order to bring some external mineral substance, for example, to the fleeting condition of warmth-ether. If it is unable to do this, the external mineral substance is deposited, becoming heavy earth-matter before it has passed over into warmth, and penetrates into the human organism as inorganic matter which remains alien to human tissues.

An example of this kind can appear when the human being is not in a position to bring a substance, in its origin organic but appearing in him mineralized, namely sugar, to the tenuous condition of warmth-ether. Then arises the condition which must result when the whole organism has to share in the assimilation of what is thus present within it, the very serious condition of sugar diabetes. In the case of every substance one must therefore bear in mind to what degree the human organism can be in a position to transmute lifeless substance—whether its nature is already lifeless as when we eat cooking salt, or whether it becomes so as with sugar—into warmth-substance, whereby the organism which is rooted in the earth finds its union with the spiritual cosmos.

Every such deposit in man which remains untransmuted—as in diabetes—signifies that the human being does not find a union of the matter present within him and the spiritual of the cosmos. This is only a specific application of the general axiom that whatever approaches man from outside must be entirely worked over and transformed within him. And if we wish to look after a person's health it is of paramount importance to see to it that nothing enters into him which remains as it was, nothing which cannot be dealt with by the human organism until the least of its particles is transformed. This is not only the case in regard to substances; it is also the case, for instance, in regard to forces.

External warmth—the warmth we feel when we grasp things, the external warmth in the air—this, when taken up by the human organism, must become so transformed that the inner warmth is on a different level from the warmth outside. The external warmth must be transformed within us, so that this external warmth, in which we are not present, is laid hold of by the human organism even down to the very smallest quantity.

Now imagine that I go somewhere where it is cold, and because the cold is too intense, or, because of moving air or draught, the temperature fluctuates, I am not in a position to change the world warmth into my own individual warmth quickly enough. Through this I run the danger of being warmed by the world-warmth from outside like a piece of wood, or a stone. This should not be. I should not be exposed to the danger of external warmth flowing into me as though I were merely some object. At every moment, from the boundary of my skin inwards, I must be able to lay hold of the warmth and make it my own. If I am not in a position to do this I catch cold.

This is the inner process of catching cold. To catch cold is a poisoning by external warmth which is not taken possession of by the organism.

You see, everything in the external world is poison for man, actual poison, and it only becomes of service to him when, through his individual forces, he lays hold of it and makes it his own. For only from man himself do forces go up to the higher hierarchies in a human way; whereas outside man they remain with the elemental nature-beings, with the elemental spirits. In the case of man this wonderful transformation must happen so that within the human organism the elemental spirits may give over their work to the higher hierarchies. For the mineral in man this can only occur when it is absolutely and entirely transformed into warmth-ether.

Let us look at the plant world. Truly this plant world possesses something which bewitches man in the most varied ways when he begins to contemplate the plant covering of the earth with the eye of the spirit. We go out into a meadow or a wood. We dig up, let us say, a plant with its root. If we regard what we have dug up with the eye of the spirit we find a wonderfully magical complex. The root shows itself as something of which we can say that it came into existence entirely in the sphere of the earthly. Yes, a plant root—the more so, the coarser it appears—is really something terribly earthly. It always reminds one—especially a root like a turnip, for instance—of a particularly well-fed alderman. O, yes, it is so; the root of a plant is extremely smug, and self-satisfied. It has absorbed the salts of the earth into itself, and feels a deep sense of gratification at having soaked up the earth. In the whole sphere of the earthly there exists no more absolute expression of satisfaction than such a turnip-root; it is the representative of root-nature.

On the other hand let us look at the blossom. When we observe the blossom with the eye of the spirit we only experience it as our own soul, when it cherishes the tenderest desires.

Only look at a spring flower; it is a sigh of longing, the embodiment of a wish. And something wonderful streams forth over the flower world which surrounds us, if only our soul-perception is delicate enough to be open to it. In spring we see the violet, maybe the daffodil, the lily-of-the-valley, or many little plants with yellow flowers, and we are seized by the feeling that these blossoming plants of spring would say to us: O Man, how pure and innocent can be the desires which you direct towards the spiritual! Spiritual desire-nature, desire-nature bathed, as it were, in piety, breathes from every blossom of spring.

And when the later flowers appear—let us at once take the other extreme, let us take the autumn crocus—can one behold the autumn crocus with soul-perception without having a slight feeling of shame? Does it not warn us that our desires can tend downwards, that our desires can be imbued with every kind of impurity? It is as though the autumn crocuses spoke to us from all sides, as if they would continually whisper to its: Consider the world of thy desires, O Man; how easily you can become a sinner!

Looked at thus, the plant-world is the mirror of human conscience in external nature. Nothing more poetical can be imagined than the thought of this voice of conscience coming forth from some point within us and being distributed over the myriad forms of the blossoming plants which speak to the soul, during the season of the year, in the most manifold ways. The plant-world reveals itself as the wide-spread mirror of conscience if we know how to look at it aright.

If we bear this in mind it becomes of special significance for us to look at the flowering plants and picture how the blossom is really a longing for the light-being of the universe, and how the form of the blossom grows upwards in order to enable the desires of the earth to stream towards this light-being of the universe, and how on the other hand the substantial root fetters the plant to the earth, how it is the root which continually wrests the plant away from its celestial desires, wishing to re-establish it in the substantiality of the earth.

And we learn to understand why this is so when, in the evolutionary history of the earth, we meet the fact that what is present in the root of a plant has invariably been laid down in the time when the moon was still together with the earth.

In the time when the moon was still together with the earth the forces anchored in the moon within the body of the earth worked so strongly that they hardly allowed the plant to become anything but root. When the moon was still with the earth and the earth still had quite another substance, the root element spread itself out and worked downwards with great power. This can be pictured in such a way that one says: The downward thrust of the plant's root-nature spread out powerfully, while up above the plant only peeped out into the cosmos. We could say that the plants sent their shoots out into the cosmos like delicate little hairs. We feel that, while the moon was still with the earth, this moon element, these moon-forces, contained in the earth-body itself, fettered plant-nature to the earthly. And what was then transmitted to the being of the plant remains on as predisposition in the nature of the root.

After the moon left the earth, however, there unfolded in what had previously existed only as tiny little shoots peeping out into the world a longing for the wide light-filled spaces of the cosmos; and now the blossom-nature arose. So that the departure of the moon was a kind of liberation, a real liberation for the plants.

But here we must also bear in mind that everything earthly was grounded in the spiritual. During the old Saturn period—you need only take the description which I gave in my “Occult Science”—the earth was entirely spiritual; it existed only in the warmth-etheric element, it was entirely spiritual. It was out of the spiritual that the earthly was first formed.

And now let us contemplate the plant. In its form it bears the living memory of evolution. It bears in its root-nature the process of becoming earthly, of assuming the physical-material. If we look at the root of a plant we discern that it says something further to us, namely that its existence only became possible because the earthly-material evolved out of the spiritual. Scarcely, however, was the earth relieved of its moon-element than the plant again strove back to the spaces of the light.

And when we consume the plant as nourishment we give it the opportunity of carrying further in the right way what it began outside in nature, the striving back not only to the light-spaces, but to the spirit-spaces of the cosmos. This is why, as I have already said, we must deal with the plant-substance within us until it becomes aeriform, or gaseous, so that the plant may follow its longing for the wide spaces of light and spirit.

I go out into a meadow. I see how the flowers, the blossoms of the plants, strive towards the light. Man consumes the plant, but within him he has a world entirely different from the one outside. Within him he can bring to fulfillment the longing which, outside, the plant expresses in its blossoms. Spread abroad in nature we see the desire-world of the plants. We eat the plants. Within ourselves we drive this longing towards the spiritual world. We must therefore raise the plants into the sphere of the air so that in this lighter realm they may be enabled to strive towards the spiritual.

The plant here undergoes a remarkable process. When man eats plant food the following occurs: If we depict the root below, and above what strives through the leaf to the blossom, then, in this inner transference to the airy condition, we have to experience a total reversal of the plant. The root, which is fettered to the earth, just for the very reason that it is so rooted, strives upwards; it strives upwards towards the spiritual with such power that it leaves the striving of the blossom behind it. It is actually as if you were to picture the plant unfolding in such a way that the upper is pushed down below and the lower up above. The plant reverses itself completely. The part which has already won its way to the blossom has had enjoyment in its material striving towards the light, has brought the material up into the sphere of the light. For this it must now suffer the punishment of remaining below. The root has been the slave of the earthly; but, as you can see from Goethe's theory of the metamorphosis of plants, it bears the whole plant-nature within it. It now strives upwards.

If a man is a really stiff-necked sinner, he is likely to remain so. But the root of a plant, which as long as it is earth-bound makes the impression of a well-fed alderman, immediately it has been eaten by man becomes transformed and strives upwards; whereas that which has brought the material into the sphere of the light, the blossom, must remain down below. Hence in what belongs to the root-element of the plant we have something which, when it is eaten, strives upwards towards man's head out of its inherent nature, while what lies in the direction of the blossom remains in the lower regions, and, in the general process of digestion, does not reach up to forming the head.

Thus we have the remarkable, the wonderful drama that when man consumes something of plant-nature—he need not eat the whole plant, because in each single part the whole plant is inherent (I refer you again to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis)—when man consumes a plant, it transforms itself within him into air, into air which develops plant-wise from above downwards, which grows and blossoms in a downward direction.

In times when such things were known through instinctive clairvoyance, people looked at the external constitution of plants in order to see whether they were such as could be beneficial to man's head, whether they showed a strong root-development, and in consequence a longing for the spiritual. For, when digestion is completed, what we have eaten of such a plant will seek out the head and penetrate it, so that it may there strive upwards towards the spiritual cosmos and enter into the necessary connection with it.

In the case of plants which are strongly imbued with astrality, for example, in the pod-bearing plants, their products remain in man's lower organism, and are unwilling to rise up to the head, with the result that they produce a heavy sleep, and dull the brain on waking. The Pythagoreans wished to be clear thinkers and not introduce digestion into the functions of the head. This is why they forbade the eating of beans.

You see, therefore, that from what happens in nature we can divine something of nature's relation to man, and to what happens in man. If one possesses spiritual initiation-science, one simply cannot imagine how materialistic science comes to grips with human digestion. (Certainly matters are different in regard to a cow's digestion; about this, too, we shall have something further to say later.) Materialistic science states that plants are assimilated just as they are. They are not assimilated just as they are, but are completely spiritualized. The plant is so constituted in itself that in digestion the lower turns into the upper and the upper into the lower. No greater transposition can be imagined. And man immediately becomes ill if he eats even the smallest quantity of a plant where the lowest is not changed into the uppermost, and the uppermost into the lowest.

From this you will realize that man bears nothing in himself which is not produced by the spirit; he must first give to what he assimilates as substance a form which will enable the spirit to influence it.

Turning now to the animal world, we must be clear that the animal has a digestion, and mostly consumes plants. Let us take the herbivorous animal. The animal world takes the plant world into itself. This again is a very complicated process, for when the animal eats the plant it does not possess human processes to set against the plant. Within the animal the plant cannot turn the above into the below and the below into the above. The animal has its vertebral column parallel with the surface of the earth. This means that in the case of the animal what should happen in digestion is brought into complete disorder. What is below strives upwards, and what is above strives downwards, but the whole process gets dammed up in itself, so that animal digestion is something essentially different from human digestion. In animal digestion, what lives in the plant dams itself up. And the result of this is that with the animal the being of the plant is given the promise: “Thou mayest indulge thy longing for world-spaces”—but the promise is not kept. The plant is thrown back again to earth.

Through the fact, however, that in the animal organism the plant is thrown back to earth, there immediately penetrate into the plant—not, as with man in whom the reversal takes place, cosmic spirits with their forces, but certain elemental spirits in their place. And these elemental spirits are fear-spirits, bearers of fear. Thus spiritual perception can follow this remarkable process: The animal itself enjoys its nourishment, enjoys it with inner satisfaction; and while the stream of nourishment goes in one direction, a stream of fear from elemental spirits of fear goes in the other. Through the animal's digestive tract there continually flows along the path of digestion the satisfaction felt in the assimilation of nourishment, and in opposition to this there flows a terrible stream of elemental spirits of fear.

This is what animals leave behind them when they die. When animals die—not those species, perhaps, which I have already described in another way, but including such as belong, for instance, to the four-footed mammals—when these animals die there also dies, or rather comes to life in their dying, a being which is entirely composed of the element of fear. With the animal's death, fear dies, that is to say fear comes to life. In the case of beasts of prey this fear is actually assimilated with their food. The beast of prey, which tears its booty to pieces, devours the flesh with satisfaction. And towards this satisfaction in the consumption of flesh there streams fear, the fear which the plant-eating animal only gives off from itself when it dies, but which already streams out from the beast of prey during its life-time. Through this the astral bodies of such animals as lions and tigers are riddled with fear which they do not as yet detect during their lifetime, but which after death these animals drive back because it goes in opposition to their feeling of satisfaction. Thus carnivorous animals really have an after life in their group soul, an after life which must be said to present a much more terrible Kamaloka than anything which can be experienced by man, and this simply on account of their essential nature.

Naturally you must regard these things as being experienced in quite a different consciousness. If you were suddenly to become materialistic, and began to imagine what the beast of prey must experience by putting yourself in its place, thinking: What would such a Kamaloka be like for me? and were then to judge the beast of prey according to what such a Kamaloka might be for you, then certainly you are materialistic, indeed animalistic, for you transpose yourself into animal nature. These things must of course be understood if one is to comprehend the world; but we must not put ourselves into their category, as when the materialistic puts the whole world into the category of lifeless matter.

Now we come to a subject about which I can only speak on a soul level; for anthroposophy should never come forward to agitate for anything, should never advocate either one thing or another, but should only put forward the truth. The consequences which a person attracts to himself by his manner of living, this is his personal affair. Anthroposophy presents no dogmas, but puts forward truths. For this reason I shall never, even for fanatics, lay down any kind of law as to the consequences of what an animal makes of its plant nourishment. No dogmatic rulings shall be given in regard to vegetarianism, meat-eating and so on, for these things must be relegated to the sphere of individual judgment and it is really only in the sphere of individual experience that they have value. I mention this in order to avoid giving rise to the opinion that anthroposophy entails standing for this or that kind of diet, whereas what it actually does is to make every diet comprehensible.

What I really wished to say was that we must work upon the mineral until it becomes warmth-ether in order that it may absorb the spiritual; then, after the mineral has absorbed the spiritual, man can be built up by it. I mentioned that when the human being is still quite young he has not as yet the strength to work upon what is entirely mineral until it becomes warmth-ether. It has already been worked upon for him in that he drinks milk. Milk has already undergone a preliminary change, whereby the process of transformation to warmth-ether has become easier. Hence in a child the milk with its forces flows up quickly into the head, and can there develop the form-building forces in the way in which the child needs them. For the whole organization of the child proceeds from the head.

If at a later age man wishes to receive these form-building forces, it is not good to promote them by the drinking of milk. In the case of the child what ascends into the head, and is able by means of the forces of the head, which are present until the change of teeth, to ray out formatively into the whole body—this is no longer present in an older person. In later age the whole of the rest of the organism must ray out the formative forces. And these formative forces for the whole organism are particularly strengthened in their impulses when one eats something which works in quite another way than is the case with the head.

You see, the head is entirely enclosed. Within this head are the impulses used in childhood for the formation of the body. In the rest of the body we have bones within, and the formative forces outside. Here, then, the form-building forces must be stimulated from outside. While we are children these form-building forces are stimulated when we bring milk into the head. When we are no longer children these forces are no longer there. What should we now do in order that these formative forces may be stimulated more from outside?

It would obviously be a good thing to be able to have in outer form what is accomplished within by the head, enclosed as it is inside skull. It would be good if what the head does inside itself could somehow be accomplished in outer form from outside. The forces which are there within the head are suited to the consumption of milk; when the milk is there in its etheric transformation it provides a good basis for the development of these head forces. We must, therefore, have something which acts like milk, which, however, is not fabricated within the human being, but is fabricated in outer nature.

Well, there is something existing outside in nature which is a head without an enclosing skull, and which therefore activates from outside those very forces which work inside the head in children who need the milk, and must indeed create it anew; for the child must first bring the milk into the warmth-etheric condition and so create it anew.

Now a stock of bees is really a head which is open on all sides. What the bees carry out is actually the same as what the head carries out within itself. The hive we give them is at most a support. The bees activity, however, is not enclosed, but produced from outside. In a stock of bees, under external spiritual influence, we have the same thing as we have under spiritual influence inside the head. The stock of bees produces its honey, and when we eat and enjoy honey it gives us the up-building forces, which must now be provided more from outside, with the same strength and power which milk gives us for our head during the years of childhood.

Thus, while we are still children we strengthen through the consumption of milk the formative forces working from the head outwards; if at a later age we still need formative forces we must eat honey. Nor do we need to eat it in tremendous quantities—it is only a question of absorbing its forces.

Thus one learns from external nature how strengthening forces must be brought into human life, if only this external nature is fully understood. And if we would conceive a land where there are beautiful children and beautiful old people, what kind of a land would this be? It would be “a land flowing with milk and honey”. So you see ancient instinctive vision was in no way wrong when it said about lands of promise that they are such as flow with milk and honey.

Many such simple sayings contain the profoundest wisdom, and there is really no more beautiful experience than first to make every possible effort to experience the truth, and then to find some ancient holy saying abounding in deep wisdom such as “a land flowing with milk and honey”. That is indeed a rare land, for in it there are only beautiful children and beautiful old people.

You see, to understand man presupposes the understanding of nature. To understand nature provides the basis for the understanding of man. And here the lowest spheres of the material always lead up to the highest spheres of the spiritual: the kingdoms of nature—mineral, animal, vegetable—at the one, the lowest pole; above, at the other pole, the hierarchies themselves.

When we realize that everything of external nature is transformed inside the human organism, and this in so radical a way that the mineral must be brought to the warmth-etheric condition, we will also find that all that lives in man, in the human organization, flows out into the spiritual. If—according to the ideas so frequently deduced in current text-books on anatomy and physiology—we imagine man to be a firmly built form taking into itself the products of external nature and returning them almost unchanged, then we will always labour under the absence of the bridge which must be thrown from what man is as a natural being to what is present in him as his essential soul-nature.

At first we shall be unable to find any link to join the bony system and system of muscles, composing the solid body which man believes himself to be, with, let us say, the moral world-order. It will be said that the one is simply nature and that the other is something radically different from nature. But when we are clear about the fact that in man all types of substantiality are present and that they must all pass through a condition more volatile than that of muscles and bones, we shall find that this volatile etheric substance can enter into connection with the impulses of the moral world-order.

These are the modes of thought we must use if we are to develop our present considerations into something which will lead man upwards to the spiritual of the cosmos, to the beings whom we have called the beings of the higher hierarchies. Today, therefore, let us do what was not done in the foregoing lectures—for those were more occupied with the natural world—and take our start from the spiritual moral impulses active in man.

The spiritual-moral impulses—well, for modern civilization these have more or less become mere abstract concepts. To an ever greater degree the primal feeling for the moral-spiritual has receded in human nature. Through the whole manner of his education modern civilization leads man to ask: what is customary? what has convention ordained? what is the code? what is the law?—and so on. Less account is taken of what comes forth as impulses, rooted in that part of man which is often relegated in a vague way to conscience. This inner directing of oneself, this determining of one's own goal, is something which has retreated to an ever greater degree in modern civilization. Hence the spiritual-moral has finally become a more or less conventional tradition.

Earlier world-conceptions, particularly those which were sustained by instinctive clairvoyance, brought forth moral impulses from man's inner nature; they induced moral impulses. Moral impulses exist, but today they have become traditional. Of course nothing whatever is implied here against the traditional in morality—but only think of the ten commandments, how old they are. They are taught as commands recorded in ancient times. Is it to be expected today that something might spring forth from the primary, elementary sources of human nature which could be compared to what once arose as the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments? Now from what source does the moral-spiritual arise, which binds men together in a social way, which knits the threads uniting man to man? There exists only one true source of the moral-spiritual in mankind, and this is what we may call human understanding, mutual human understanding, and, based upon this human understanding, human love. Wheresoever we may look for the arising of moral-spiritual impulses in mankind, in so far as these play a role in social life, it will invariably prove to be the case that, whenever such impulses spring forth with elemental power, they arise from human understanding based upon human love. These are the actual driving force of the social moral-spiritual impulses in mankind. And fundamentally speaking, in so far as he is a spiritual being, man only lives with other men to the degree that he develops human understanding and human love.

Here one can put a deeply significant question, a question which is indeed not always voiced, but which, in regard to what has just been said, must be on the tip of every tongue: If human understanding and human love are the real impulses upon which communal life depends, how does it come about that the very reverse of human understanding and human love appears in our social order?

This is a question with which initiates more than anyone else have always concerned themselves. In every age in which initiation science was the primal impulse, this very question was regarded as one of their most vital concerns. When this initiation science was still a primary impulse, however, it possessed certain means whereby to get behind this problem. But if one looks at conventional science today, one is forced to ask: As the god-created soul is naturally predisposed to human understanding and human love, why are these qualities not active as a matter of course in the social order? Whence come human hatred and lack of human understanding? Now, if we are unable to look for this lack of human understanding, this human hatred, in the sphere of the spiritual, of the soul, it follows that we must look for them in the sphere of the physical.

Yes—but now modern conventional science gives us its answer as to what the physical-bodily nature of man is: blood, nerves, muscles, bones. No matter how long one studies a bone, if one only does so with the eye of present-day natural science, one will never be able to say: It is this bone which leads man astray into hatred. Nor yet, to whatever degree one is able to investigate the blood according to the principles by which it is investigated today, will one ever be able to establish the conviction: It is this blood which leads man astray into lack of human understanding.

In times when initiation science was a primal impulse matters were certainly quite otherwise. Then one turned one's gaze to the physical-bodily nature of man and perceived it to be the counter-image of what one possessed of the spiritual through instinctive clairvoyance.

When man speaks of the spiritual today he refers at most to abstract thoughts; this for him is the spiritual. If he finds these thoughts too tenuous, all that remains to him is words, and then, as Fritz Mauthner did, he writes a “Critique of Language”. Through such a “Critique of Language” he manages to dilute the spirit—already tenuous enough—until it becomes utterly devoid of substance. The initiation-science which was irradiated with instinctive clairvoyance did not see the spiritual in abstract thoughts. It saw the spiritual in forms, in what produced pictures, in what could speak and resound, in what could produce tones. For this initiation science the spiritual lived and moved. And because the spiritual was seen in its living activity, what is physical—the bones, the blood—could also be perceived in its spirituality. These thoughts, these notions, which we have today about the skeleton, did not exist in initiation science. Today the skeleton is really regarded as something constructed by the calculations of an architect for the purposes of physiology and anatomy. But it is not this. The skeleton, as you have seen, is formed by mineral substance which has been driven upwards to the state of warmth-ether, so that in the warmth-ether the forces of the higher hierarchies are laid hold of, and then the bone formations are built up.

To one who is able to behold it rightly, the skeleton reveals its spiritual origin. But one who looks at the skeleton in its present form—I mean in its form as present-day science regards it—is like a person who says: there I have a printed page with the forms of letters upon it. He describes the form of these letters, but does not read their meaning because he is unable to read. He does not relate what is expressed in the forms of the letters to what exists as their real basis; he only describes their shapes. In the same way the present-day anatomist, the present-day natural scientist, describes the bones as if they were entirely without meaning. What they really reveal, however, is their origin in the spiritual.

And so it is with everything that exists as physical natural laws, as etheric natural laws. They are written characters from the spiritual world. And we only understand these things rightly when we can comprehend them as written characters proceeding from spiritual worlds.

Now, when we are able to regard the human organism in this way, we become aware of something which belongs to the domain of which the true initiates of all epochs have said: When one crosses the threshold into the spiritual world, the first thing one becomes aware of is something terrible, something which at first it is by no means easy to sustain. Most people wish to be pleasantly affected by what seems to them worthy of attainment. But the fact remains that only by passing through the experience of horror can one learn to know spiritual reality, that is to say true reality. For in regard to the human form, as this is placed before us by anatomy and physiology, one can only perceive that it is built up out of two elements from the spiritual world: moral coldness and hatred.

In our souls we actually possess the predisposition to human love, and to that warmth which understands the other man. In the solid components of our organism, however, we bear moral cold. This is the force which, from the spiritual worlds, welds, as it were, our physical organism together. Thus we bear in ourselves the impulse of hatred. This it is which, from the spiritual world, brings about the circulation of the blood. And whereas we may perhaps go through the world with a very loving soul, with a soul which thirsts for human understanding, we must nevertheless be aware that below in the unconsciousness, there where the soul streams down, sends its impulses down into the bodily nature, for the very purpose that we may be clothed in a body—coldness has its seat. Though I shall always speak just of coldness, what I mean is moral coldness, though this can certainly pass over into physical coldness, traversing the warmth-ether on its way. There below, in the unconsciousness within us, moral coldness and hatred are entrenched, and it is easy for man to bring into his soul what is present in his body, so that his soul can, as it were, be infected with the lack of human understanding. This is, however, the result of moral coldness and human hatred. Because this is so, man must gradually cultivate in himself moral warmth, that is to say human understanding and love, for these must vanquish what comes from the bodily nature.

Now it cannot be denied—this presents itself in all clarity to spiritual vision—that in our age, which began with the fifteenth century and has developed in an intellectualistic way on the one hand and in a materialistic way on the other, much human misunderstanding and human hatred has become imbedded in men's souls. This is so to a greater degree than is supposed. For only when man passes through the gate of death does he become aware of how much failure to understand, how much hatred, is present in our unconsciousness. There man detaches his soul-spiritual from his physic bodily nature. He lays his physical-bodily nature aside. The impulses of coldness, the impulses of hatred, then reveal themselves simply as natural forces, as mere forces of nature.

Let us look at a corpse. Let us look with the spiritual eye at the actual etheric corpse. Here we are looking at something which no longer evokes moral judgment any more than does a plant or a stone. The moral forces which have previously been contained in what is now the corpse have been changed into natural forces. During his lifetime, however, the human being absorbed very much from them; this he takes with him through the gate of death. The ego and astral body withdraw, taking with them as they go what remained unnoticed during life because it was always entirely submerged in the physical and etheric bodies. The ego and astral body take with them into the spiritual world all the impulses connected with the human body, all the impulses of human hatred and coldness towards other men which had gained access to their souls. I mentioned that it is only when one sees the human being pass through the gate of death that one perceives how much failure to understand, how much human hatred have been implanted into mankind just in our civilization by various things about which I shall still have to speak. For the man of today carries much of these two impulses through the gate of death, immensely much.

But what man thus carries with him is in fact the spiritual residue of what should be in the physical, of what the physical and etheric bodies should deal with themselves. In the lack of human understanding and in human hatred which man carries into the spiritual world we have the residue of what really belongs in the physical world. He carries it thither in a spiritual way, but it would never profit him to carry it onward through the time between death and a new birth, for then he would be quite unable to progress. At every step in his further evolution between death and a new birth he would stumble if he were obliged to carry further this failure to understand the other man, this human hatred. Into the spiritual world, which is entered by the so-called dead, people today continually draw with them definite currents which would halt them in their development if they had to remain as they actually are. From whence do these currents proceed?

To discover this we need only look at present-day life. People pass one another by; they pay little heed to the individual characteristics of others. Are not people today mostly so constituted that each one regards himself as the standard of what is right and proper? And when someone differs from this standard we do not take kindly to him, but rather think: This man should be different. And this usually implies: He should be like me. This is not always brought into the consciousness, but it lies concealed in human social intercourse.

In the way things are put forward today—I mean in the whole manner and form of people's speech—there lies very little understanding of the other man. People bellow out their ideas about what man should be like, but this usually means: Everyone should be like me. If someone different comes along, then, even if this is not consciously realized, he is immediately regarded as an enemy, an object for antipathy. This is lack of human moral understanding, lack of love. And to the degree in which these qualities are lacking, moral coldness and human hatred go with man through the gate of death, obstructing his path. Now, however—because man's further development is not his own concern alone, but is the concern of the whole world-order, the wisdom-filled world-order—he finds the beings of the third hierarchy, Angels, Archangels, Archai. In the first period after man has passed through the gate of death into the world lying between death and a new birth these beings stoop downward and mercifully take from man the coldness which comes from lack of human understanding. And we see how the beings of the third hierarchy assume the burden of what man carries up to them into the spiritual world in the way I have described, in that he passes through the gate of death.

It is for a longer period that man must carry with him the remains of human hatred; for this can only be taken from him by grace of the spirits of the second hierarchy, Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. They take from him all that remains of human hatred.

Now, however, the human being has arrived about midway in the region between death and a new birth, to the abiding place of the first hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, which I described in my Mystery Play as the midnight hour of existence. Man would be quite unable to pass through this region of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones without being inwardly annihilated, utterly destroyed, had not the beings of the second and third hierarchies already taken from him in their mercy human misunderstanding, that is to say moral coldness, and human hatred. And so we see how man, in order that he may find access to those impulses which can contribute to his further development, must at first burden the beings of the higher hierarchies with what he carries up into the spiritual world from his physical and etheric bodies, where it really belongs.

When one has insight into all this, when one sees how this moral coldness holds sway in the spiritual world, one will also know how to judge the relation between this spiritual cold and the physical cold here below. The physical cold which we find in snow and ice is only the physical image of that moral-spiritual cold which is there above. If we have them both before us, we can compare them. While man is being relieved in this way from human misunderstanding and human hatred, one can follow with the spiritual eye how he begins to lose his form, how this form more or less melts away.

When someone first passes through the gate of death, for the spiritual vision of imagination his appearance is still somewhat similar to what it was here on earth. For what a man bears within him here on earth is in fact just substances in more or less granular form, let us say, in atomistic form; but the human figure itself—that is spiritual. We must really be clear about this. It is sheer nonsense to regard man's form as physical; we must represent it to ourselves as spiritual. The physical in it is everywhere present as minute particles. The form, which is only a force-body, holds together what would otherwise fall apart into a heap of atoms. If someone were to take any of you by the forelock and could draw out your form, the physical and also the etheric would collapse like a heap of sand. That these are not just a sand heap, that they are distributed and take on form, this stems from nothing physical; it stems from the spiritual. Here in the physical world man goes about as something spiritual. It is senseless to think that man is only a physical being; his form is purely spiritual. The physical in him may almost be likened to a heap of crumbs.

Man, however, still possesses his form when he goes through the gate of death. One sees it shimmering, glittering, radiant with colours. But now he loses first the form of his head; then the rest of his form gradually melts away. Man becomes completely metamorphosed, as though transformed into an image of the cosmos. This occurs during the time between death and a new birth in which he comes into the region of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus, when one follows man between death and a new birth, one at first still sees him hovering, as it were, while he gradually loses his form from above downwards. But while the last vestige of him is vanishing away below, something else has taken shape, a wonderful spirit-form, which is in itself an image of the whole world-sphere and at the same time a model of the future head which man will bear on his shoulders. Here the human being is woven into an activity wherein not only the beings of the lower hierarchies participate, but also the beings of the highest hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

What actually takes place? It is the most wonderful thing which, as man, one can possibly conceive. For all that was lower man here in life now passes over into the formation of the future head. As we go about here on earth we only make use of our poverty-stricken head as the organ of our mental images and our thoughts. But thoughts also accompany our breast, thoughts also accompany our limb-system. And in the moment that we cease to think only with the head, but begin to think with our limb-system, in that moment the whole reality of Karma is opened up to us. We know nothing of our Karma because we always think only with that most superficial of organs, our brain. The moment we begin to think with our fingers—and just with our fingers and toes we can think much more clearly than with the nerves of the head—once we have soared up to the possibility of doing so—the moment we begin to think with what has not become entirely material, when we begin to think with the lower man, our thoughts are the thoughts of our Karma. When we do not merely grasp with our hand but think with it, then, thinking with our hand we follow our Karma. And even more so with the feet; when we do not only walk but think with our feet, we follow the course of our Karma with special clarity. That man is such a dullard on earth—excuse me, but no other word occurs to me—comes from the fact that all his thinking is enclosed in the region of his head. But man can think with his entire being. Whenever we think with our entire being, then for our middle region a whole cosmology, a marvelous cosmic wisdom, becomes our own. And for the lower region and the limb-system especially Karma becomes our own.

It already means a great deal when we look at the way a person walks, not in a dull way, but marking the beauty of his step, and what is characteristic in it; or when we allow his hands to make an impression upon us, so that we interpret these hands and find that in every movement of the fingers there lie wonderful revelations of man's inner nature. Yet that is only the smallest part of what moves in unison with t he walking man, the grasping man, man as he moves his fingers. For it is man's whole moral nature which moves; his destiny moves with him; everything that he is as a spiritual being. And if, after man has passed through the gate of death, we are able to follow how his form dissolves—the first to melt away being what is reminiscent of his physical form—there then appears what does indeed resemble his physical structure, but which is now produced by his inner nature, his inner being, thus announcing that this is his moral form. Thus does man appear when he approaches the midnight hour of existence, when he comes into the sphere of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Then we see how these wonderful metamorphoses proceed, how there his form melts away. But this is not really the essential point. It looks as though the form would dissolve away, but the truth is that the spiritual beings of the higher worlds are there working together with man. They work with those human beings who are working upon themselves, but also upon those with whom they are karmically linked. One man works upon the other. These spiritual beings, then, together with man himself, develop out of his previous bodily form in his previous earth-life, what, at first spiritually, will become the bodily form of his next earth-life.

This spirit-form first connects itself with physical life when it meets the given embryo. But in the spiritual world feet and legs are transformed into the jaw bones, while arms and hands are transformed into the cheek-bones. There the whole lower man is transformed into the spiritual prototype of what will later become the head. The way in which this metamorphosis is accomplished is, I do assure you, of everything that the world offers to conscious experience the most wonderful. We see at first how an image of the whole cosmos is created, and how this is then differentiated into the structure which is the seat of the whole moral element—but only after all that I have mentioned has been taken from it. We see how what was, transforms itself into what will be. Now one sees the human being as spirit-form journeying back once more to the region of the second hierarchy and then to that of the third hierarchy. Here this reversed spirit-form—it is in fact only the basis for the future head—must, as it were, be welded to what will become the future breast-organism, to what will become the future limb-organization and the metabolic system. These must be added. Whence come the spiritual impulses to add them?

It is by grace of the beings of the second and third hierarchies, who gathered these impulses together when the man was on the first half of his journey. These beings took them from his moral nature; now they bring them back again and form from them the basis of the rhythmic system and metabolic-limb-system. In this later period between death and a new birth man receives the ingredients, the spiritual ingredients, for his physical organism. This spiritual form finds its way into the embryonic life, and bears within it what will now become physical forces and etheric forces. These are, however, only the physical image of what we bear in us from our previous life as lack of human understanding and human hatred, from which our limb-organization is spiritually formed.

If we wish to have such conceptions as these, we must acquire a manner of feeling and perceiving quite other than that needed in the physical world. For we must be able to behold what arises out of the spiritual becoming physical in the way I have described; we must be able to sustain the knowledge that coldness, moral coldness, lives as physical image in the bones and that moral hatred lives as physical image in the blood. We must learn to look at these matters quite objectively. It is only when we look into things in this way that we become aware of the fundamental difference between man's inner being and external nature.

Just consider for a moment the fact I mentioned, namely that in the blossoms of the plant-kingdom we see, as it were, human conscience laid out before us. What we see outside us may be considered as the picture of our soul-being. The forces within ourselves may appear to have no relation to outer nature. But the truth is, bone can only be bone because it hates the carbonic acid and calcium phosphate in their mineral state, because it withdraws from them, contracting into itself, whereby it becomes something different from what these substances are in external nature. And one must face up to the conception that for man to have a physical form, hatred and coldness must be present in his physical nature.

Through this, you see, our words gain inner significance. If our bones have a certain hardness, it is to their advantage to possess this physical image of spiritual coldness. But if our soul has this hardness it is not a good thing for the social life. The physical nature of man must be different from his soul-nature. Man can be man precisely because his physical being differs from his being of soul and spirit. Man's physical nature also differs from physical nature around him. Upon this fact rests the necessity for that transformation about which I have spoken to you.

All this forms an important supplement to what I once said in the course on Cosmology, Philosophy and Religion [* Ten lectures at the Goetheanum, September, 1922. Translation in preparation by the Anthroposophic Press, New York.] about man's connection with the hierarchies. It could only be added, however, on such initial considerations as those in our present lectures. For spiritual vision gives insight alike into what the separate members of the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms really are here on earth, and into the acts of the hierarchies—those acts, which continue from age to age, as do also the happenings of nature and the works of man.

When man's life between death and a new birth—his life in the spiritual world—is beheld in this way, one can describe his experiences in that world in just as much detail as his biography here on earth. So we may live in the hope that when we pass through the gate of death, everything of misunderstanding and hatred between man and man will be carried up into the spiritual world, so that it may be given anew to us, and that from its ennobled state human forms may be created.

In the course of long centuries something very strange has come to pass for earthly humanity. No longer is it possible for all the forces of human misunderstanding and human hatred to be used up in new human forms, in the structure of new human bodies. Something has become left over. During the course of the last centuries this residue has streamed down on to the earth, so that in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, in what I may call the earth's astral light, there is to be found an infiltration of the impulses of human hatred and human misunderstanding which exist exterior to man. These impulses have not been incorporated into human forms; they stream around the earth in the astral light. They work into man, but not into what makes up the single person but into the relationships which people form with one another on the earth. They work into civilization. And within civilization they have brought about what compelled me to say, in the spring of 1914 in Vienna, [* The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth (Rudolf Steiner Press).] that our present-day civilization is invaded by spiritual carcinoma, by a spiritual cancerous disease, by spiritual tumours. At that time the fact that this was spoken about in Vienna—in the lecture-course dealing with the phenomena between death and a new birth—was somewhat unwelcome. Since then, however, people have actually experienced something of the truth of what was said at that time. Then people had no thought of what streams through civilization. They did not perceive that actual cancerous formations of civilization were present, for it was only from 1914 onwards that they manifested openly. Today they are revealed as utterly diseased tissues of civilization. Yes, now it becomes evident to what a degree our modern civilization has been infiltrated by these currents of human hatred and human coldness which have not been used up in the forms of the human structure, to what a degree these infiltrations are active as the parasites of modern civilization.

Civilization today is deeply afflicted with parasites; it is like a part of an organism that is invaded by parasites, by bacilli. What people have amassed in the way of thoughts exists, but it has no living connection with man. Only consider how this shows itself in the most ordinary phenomena of daily life. How many people have to learn without bringing enthusiasm to the learning; they simply have to get down to it and learn in order to pass an examination, so as to qualify for some particular post, or the like—well, for them there is no vital connection between what they have to take in and what lives in their soul as an inborn craving for the spiritual. It is exactly as though a person who is not predisposed to hunger were to be continually stuffed with food! The digestive processes about which I have spoken cannot be carried through. What has been taken in remains as ballast in the organism, finally becoming something which definitely induces parasites.

Much in our modern civilization has no connection with man. Like the mistletoe—spiritually speaking—it sucks its life from what man brings forth from the original impulses of his mind, of his heart. Much of this manifests in our civilization as parasitic existence. To anyone who has the power of seeing our civilization with spiritual vision in the astral, the year 1914 already presented an advanced stage of cancer, a carcinoma formation; for him the whole of civilization was already invaded by parasites. But to this parasitic condition something further is now added.

I have described to you in what may be called a spiritual-physiological way how, out of the nature of the gnomes and undines who work from below upwards, the possibility arises of parasitic impulses in man. Then, however, as I explained, the opposite picture presents itself; for then poison is carried downwards by the sylphs and the elemental beings of warmth. And so in a civilization like ours, which bears a parasitic character, what comes down from above—spiritual truth, though not poison in itself, is transformed into poison in man, so that our civilization rejects it in fear and invents all kinds of reasons for this rejection. The two things belong together: a parasitic culture below, which does not proceed from elemental laws and which therefore contains parasites within itself, and a spirituality which sinks down from above and which—in that it enters into this civilization—is taken up by man in such a way that it becomes poison. When you bear this in mind you have the key to the most important symptoms of our present-day civilization. And when one has insight into these things, just out of itself the fact is revealed that a truly cultural education must make its appearance as the antidote or opposing remedy. Just as a rational therapy, is deduced from a true diagnosis of the individual, so a diagnosis of the sickness of a civilization reveals the remedy; the one calls forth the other.

It is very evident that mankind today again needs something from civilization which stands close to the human heart and the human soul, which springs directly from the human heart and the human soul. If a child, on entering primary school, is introduced to a highly sophisticated system of letter-forms which he has to learn as a ... b ... c etc., this has nothing whatever to do with his heart and soul. It has no relation to them at all. What the child develops in his head, in his soul, in that he has to learn a ... b ... c, is—speaking spiritually—a parasite in human nature.

During his years of education a great deal is brought to the child of this parasitic nature. We must, therefore, develop an art of education which works creatively from his soul. We must let the child bring colour into form; and the colour-forms, which have arisen out of joy, out of enthusiasm, out of sadness, out of every possible feeling, these he can paint on to the paper. When a child puts on to the paper what arises out of his soul, this develops his humanity. This produces nothing parasitic. This is something which grows out of man like his fingers or his nose!—whereas, when the child has forced on him the conventional forms of the letters, which are the result of a high degree of civilization, this does engender what is parasitic.

Immediately the art of education lies close to the human heart, to the human soul, the spiritual approaches man without becoming poison. First you have the diagnosis, which finds that our age is infested with carcinomas, and then you have the therapy—yes, it is Waldorf School education.

Waldorf School education is founded upon nothing other than this, my dear friends. Its way of thinking in the cultural sphere is the same as that in the field of therapy. Here you see, applied in a special case, what I spoke about a few days ago, namely that the being of man proceeds from below upwards, from nutrition, through healing, upwards to the development of the spiritual, and that one must regard education as medicine transposed into the spiritual. This strikes us with particular clarity when we wish to find a therapy for civilization, for we can only conceive this therapy as being Waldorf School education.

You will readily be able to imagine the feelings of one who not only has insight into this situation, but who is also trying to implant Waldorf School education into the world in a practical way, when he sees in the cumulative effect of this carcinoma of civilization something which may seriously endanger this Waldorf School education, or even make it altogether impossible. We should not reject such thoughts as these, but rather make them the impulse within ourselves to work together wherever we still can in the therapy of our civilization.

There are many things today such as the following. During my Helsingfors lecture-course in 1913, I indicated from a certain aspect of spiritual knowledge a view as to the inferior nature of Woodrow Wilson, who was at that time a veritable object of veneration for much of civilized mankind and in respect of whom people are only now—because to do otherwise is impossible—gaining some measure of perception. As things went then, so have things also gone in regard to the civilization-carcinoma about which I have been speaking. Well, at that time things went in a certain way; today those things which hold good for our time are proceeding in a similar manner. People are asleep. It devolves upon us to bring about the awakening. And Anthroposophy bears within it all the impulses for a right awakening of civilization, for a right awakening of human culture.

This is what I wished to say to you in the last of these lectures.

I will begin today with the soul-life of man, and lead on from thence to a penetration into cosmic secrets.

Let us start with something of the very simplest. Let us consider the soul-life of a human being as it is seen when he carries his inner self-reflection beyond the point I specially had in mind when I wrote the articles in the Goetheanum on the Life of the Soul. (Now published as a brochure entitled Vom Seelenleben). We shall consider the soul-life more intimately than was done in the Goetheanum articles. Those four articles on the soul-life form a kind of introduction, a preparation for that which we are now to consider.

When we practise self-reflection in a wide and comprehensive way, we see how this soul-life can be raised to a level higher. We begin by letting the external world work upon us—we do this from childhood—and then we form thoughts upon that which the outer world has brought to us. We are really human beings in that we allow the impressions of the outer world to live on further in our thoughts, realising them inwardly in our thoughts, creating a world of mental pictures, which in a certain way reflect the impressions made on us from outside. We are not doing anything specially helpful for the soul-life if we simply form a number of thoughts as to how the outer world is reflected in our soul, for in so doing we only attain what I might call a shadowy picture of the world of ideas in our inner being. We really practise better self-reflection if we focus our attention rather on the inner energy, in the attempt to enter livingly ourselves into the element of thought, without looking at the outer world, and follow further in thought what has come to us as impressions of the outer world. One man may thereby be led, according to his disposition, into mere abstract thinking. He may create world-systems, or he may make schemes about all imaginable things in the world, and so on. Another man, while reflecting upon the things that have made an impression on him, and by spinning out his thoughts further, may perhaps evolve some even more fanciful conception or other.

We will not enter further into the way in which, according to temperament or character or other influences on a man, this inner thinking, devoid of outer impressions, may develop, but we will recognize the fact that it is a matter of especial significance for us when we withdraw in regard to our senses from the outer world and live in our thoughts and ideas, spinning them out even further, often perhaps in the direction of mere possibilities only.

Many people regard it as unnecessary to develop this living in thought, in the direction of mere possibilities. Even in these difficult times one may see people occupied the whole day with their business (which of course is necessary for the outer life) afterwards meeting together in small groups, playing cards or dominoes or such like, in order, as is frequently said, to pass the time. It does not often happen, however, that people come together in such groups in order to exchange thought for instance, about all the things in which they were engaged during the day, and to consider what might have happened if this or that had been different. They would not be so much interested in this as in playing cards, but it would be a spinning out of their thoughts, and if we preserve a sufficiently sound sense of reality such a continuation of our thoughts need not become fantastic.

This life in thoughts leads finally to what you encounter if you read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. If you read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way you must become acquainted with this feeling of living in thoughts. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is wholly drawn from reality, while at the same time it has proceeded entirely from actual thinking. You will find therefore a fundamental tone or feeling in this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I conceived it in the eighties, and wrote it at the beginning of 1890, and I can truly say that in all those who at that time were in a position to make acquaintance with the root-nerve of this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, everywhere I met with lack of understanding. This lack of understanding arises from a definite reason. Human beings, even the so-called thinkers of today in reality only get so far in their thinking as to experience in it an image of the outer sense-world; and then they say: perhaps there might come into a man's thinking something of a super-physical world, but it would have, to enter in the same way as a chair or a table which is outside of us, and which is acknowledged by our thinking to be outside of us. Thus this thinking which is within us would have to be able to experience in some way or other something super-sensible, outside of man in the same way as the table or chair is outside of us and is experienced. In some such way as this, Edward von Hartmann conceived the activity of thinking.

This book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity then came to his notice. In this book thinking is so experienced that within the experience of thinking we come to this realisation, viz. that if a man really experiences thinking, he is living, even if at first somewhat indefinitely, in the cosmos, This union of man in his innermost thinking experience with the cosmic secrets is the root-nerve of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Therefore in this book you find the sentence, “In thinking, man lifts an edge of the veil of the cosmic secret.” This is perhaps simply expressed, but it is meant to imply that when a man really experiences thinking, he no longer feels himself to be outside the cosmic secret, but within it, no longer outside the divine Essence but within It. When a man attains to the reality of thinking within himself he attains to the Divine within himself.

It was this fact which could not be understood. For if a man really understands it, if he has really taken the trouble to acquire this experience of thinking, he rests no longer within the world in which he was previously, but he is living in the etheric world. He is living in a world of which he knows: it is not conditioned from any part of physical earthly space, but by the whole cosmic sphere.

He can no longer doubt the order and reality of the cosmic etheric sphere if he has grasped thinking as it is portrayed in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Thus he reaches what may be called etheric experience. When a man enters into this experience he really makes a noteworthy step forward in his whole life.

I may characterise this step forward thus: If we think in ordinary consciousness, we think: in this room are tables, chairs, human beings and so on. We may perhaps think of much more also; but we think of these things outside us. Thus we comprehend these things in our thinking—and there are various things outside—from the central point of our being. Every man is aware of this; he wants to grasp the things of the world with his thinking.

If however we have acquired the experience of thinking just characterised, it is no longer the world we should grasp. Man is not so much riveted, as I might say, in his own ego; something entirely different happens. He has the feeling, quite a right feeling, that with his thinking, which is not confined to any one place, he can grasp everything inwardly. He feels that he is contracting the inner man. Just as in his ordinary thinking he extends spiritual feelers outwards, as I might say, so with this thinking which experiences itself within him he extends himself continually into his own being. Man himself becomes the object.

This is a very important experience which a man may have when he realises: formerly you always comprehend the world; now that you have this experience in thinking you must comprehend yourself. The result of this process of strong self-comprehension is that he breaks through the skin.

And just as he inwardly grasps his own self he also grasps from within the entire cosmic ether, not in its details, naturally, but he gains the conviction that this ether is spread out over the cosmic sphere within which he exists together with the stars, sun and moon, etc.

A second thing which man can develop in the inner life of his soul is the power not to be stimulated immediately in his thoughts from outside, not to spin these thoughts out and weave them further, but to give himself up to his memories. If he does this, and really makes his memories an inner experience, then again a quite definite experience results. The experiencing of thinking already described leads a man to himself, he grasps himself; and he has a certain satisfaction in this grasping of his own inner being.

When, however, he passes on to the experience in memory, then, if undergone inwardly in the right way, it finally seems to be no longer the most important thing to approach oneself. This is the case in the experience of thinking. That is why one finds in thinking that freedom which depends entirely on the personal element in man. Therefore, a philosophy of spiritual activity must start from the experience of thinking, because man thereby arrives at his own being; he finds himself as a free personality. This is not the case with the experience of memory. In the experience of memory, if a man follows it up seriously and immerses himself entirely in his memory, he will finally acquire the feeling of becoming free from himself, of getting away from himself. Therefore those memories which enable one to forget the present are the most satisfactory. (I will not say that they are always the best, but they are, in many cases the most satisfactory).

We can get an idea of the value of memory if we can have memories which carry us out into the world, in spite of the fact that we may be completely dissatisfied with the present and would like to get away from it. If we can develop memories of such a nature that our feeling of life is intensified while giving ourselves up to our memories this furnishes what I might call a kind of preparation for what memories may become when they are much more real.

You can make memory a real experience if you recall with the utmost possible realism something which you actually experienced say ten, twenty or thirty years ago. I will merely indicate how this can be done. Suppose you go over your old treasured papers and look up, let us say, old letters which you had written or which. were written to you on some occasion or other. Place these letters before you, and by means of them you will live intensely in the past. Or perhaps a better way may be not to take the letters you have written, or which other people have written to you, because too much subjectivity comes into this; it would be still better, if you are able to do so, to take your old school books and look at them as you did long ago when you really sat in front of them as a child at school, and in this way bring back into your life something which formerly existed. That is really an extraordinary experience. If you carry out something of this kind you change the whole mood of soul which you possess at present. It is very extraordinary. But you must be a little resourceful in this connection, and all kinds of things can help you in this. Perhaps a lady may find in some comer or other a garment, or something she wore twenty years ago; she puts this on and thereby transports herself back into the position in which she was at that time; or anything of a like nature which may bring the past with utmost possible reality into the present. In this way you are able to separate yourself thoroughly from your present experience.

When we have experiences in our present consciousness we really stand too intimately in the experiences, too close for the experiences to result in anything, so to speak. We must be able to stand further away. Man is further away from himself when he sleeps than when he is awake; for he is then outside his physical and etheric bodies with his astral body and ego. When you actually invoke past experiences into the present, as I have described, you draw near to the astral body which is outside the physical body in sleep. You may not at first believe that such a vivification of past experiences by means of an old garment perhaps can have the powerful effect I have indicated, but it is really only a question of making an experiment yourself in these matters. If you do make the experiment and you really enchant into the present what has been experienced in past years so that you can live in it and entirely forget the present you will then see that you draw very near to your astral body, to your astral body of sleep.

Now if you expect that it is only necessary to look to right or left and see a cloudy form as your astral body, you will be disappointed, for it does not happen in that way; you must pay attention to what really does occur. What may really occur is, for example, that after a time, through such experiences, you may gradually see the dawn in a new way; you may have a new feeling on seeing a sunrise. Gradually, along this path you will come to experience the warmth of the dawn as something of a prophetic nature, as if it were announcing something, as if the dawn had a natural prophetic force in itself. You will begin to feel the dawn as spiritually forceful, and you will be able to connect an inner meaning with this prophetic force, so that you get a feeling, which you might at first regard as an illusion, that the dawn is related with your own being. Through such experiences as I have described you may gradually bring yourself into a condition in which you feel when you see the dawn: “The dawn does not leave me alone. It is not merely yonder while I am here; I am inwardly united with this dawn; it is a quality of my own inner feeling. I myself at this moment am the dawn.” When you feel thus united with the dawn so that you yourself experience as it were the colour, radiation, and shining, the appearing of the sun out from the colours and the light, so that in your own heart a sun arises, as it were, out of the morning glow as a living feeling,—then you will also feel as if you yourself are traveling with the sun over the vault of heaven; you will feel that the sun does not leave you alone, the sun is not there while you are here but you feel that your existence extends in a certain sense to the sun existence and that you travel with the light throughout the day.

If you develop this feeling which, as we have said, does not come from thinking—for in that way one can only reach man himself—but which we can develop out of memory in the way indicated, when you develop this experience out of your memory, or rather out of the forces of memory, then the things which you perceived formerly with your physical senses begin to wear a different aspect; they begin to be spiritually and psychically transparent. When a man has once attained this feeling of traveling with the sun, of gaining strength at dawn to go with the sun, he sees all the flowers of the meadow in a different aspect. The blossoms do not remain passive, showing the yellow or red colours which they have on the surface but they begin to speak. They speak to our hearts in a spiritual way. The blossoms become transparent. The spiritual part of the plant stirs inwardly, and the blossoming becomes a kind of speaking.

In this way man really unites his soul with the external life of nature, and he thus gains the impression that there is something behind the existence of nature, that the light with which he has united himself is borne by spiritual Beings, and in these spiritual Beings he gradually comes to recognize the features of that which has been pictured by Anthroposophy.

Let us now consider the two stages of feeling which I have described. Let us take the first feeling which can be brought about through thinking as an inner experience; this inner experience of thinking carries him far, and the feeling of being in a confined space entirely ceases. Man's experience widens out; he feels quite distinctly that in his inner being there is a portion which extends right out into the entire cosmos, and which is of the same substance as the cosmos. He feels himself one with the whole world, with the etheric substance of the world; but he feels too that standing on the earth, his feet and legs are drawn down by the gravity of the earth. He feels that he is bound with his entire human nature to this earth. But in the moment man has this thinking-experience he no longer feels bound to the earth, but he feels himself dependent on the wide spaces of the cosmic sphere. Everything comes from the universe, no longer from below, up from the centre of the earth, but everything comes in from the expanses of space. One feels that if one is to understand man, this feeling of streaming in from space must be there.

This extends even to the understanding of the human form. If I wish to grasp the human form either in sculpture or in painting I can really only do so as regards the lower part of the form by thinking of something proceeding out of the inner bodily nature of man. I shall not be bringing the right spirit into this unless I can draw the upper part in such a manner that I think of it as borne in from outside. Our brow, the upper part of our head is from without and is really placed on the rest of the body. He who has looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small cupola in the Goetheanum (now destroyed) will have seen that the lower part of the countenance was always so represented as having grown out from within man, and the upper portion of the head as something given to him from the cosmos. In the ages when men had a feeling for such things this was especially felt. You will never understand the form of a true Grecian sculptured head unless you have this feeling for it, for the Greeks created under the inspiration of such feelings.

Thus man feels himself united with the environment in his experience of thinking.

Now one might imagine that this process was simply carried further, and that one would go still further out when one passes on from the experience of thinking to the experience of memory; but this is not the case. If you really develop this experience of thinking in yourself you will ultimately gain an impression of the third Hierarchy, of the angels, archangels and the Archai.

Just as you may picture man's bodily experience here on earth in the forces of gravity and in the transmutation of nourishment in digestion, so you may also form an idea of the conditions under which these beings of the third Hierarchy live, if, through this experience of thinking, instead of wandering about on the earth you feel yourself carried by forces which stream towards you from the furthest expanses of the cosmos.

Now when man passes from the experiences of thinking to that of memory it is not as if this were the end of the cosmic sphere, the limit to which man can attain. We can reach such a cosmic boundary if we really enter into the reality of this thinking-experience; but we do not then go further out; the matter presents itself differently. Here, for instance, we may have an object of some kind, a crystal, a flower or an animal; and if we pass from the experience of thinking to all that the experience of memory can bring us, then we look right into this object. The gaze which has extended to the universe can, if carried further through the memory-experience, look into things. It is not that you press forward into indefinite abstract distances; the gaze that is carried further looks into things and sees the spiritual in everything. It sees, for example, in the light the active spiritual beings of light, and so on. It sees in the darkness the spiritual beings active therein. So that we can say: the experience of memory leads us into the second Hierarchy.

There still exists something in the human soul-life which goes out beyond memory. Let us make clear to ourselves what this is. Memory gives our soul its colouring. We can know quite exactly, when we approach a man who judges everything in a disapproving way, one who emanates his sour atmosphere over everything, a man who, if one tells him something beautiful immediately replies with something unpleasant, and so on, we can know with certainty that all this is connected with his memory. Memory gives the soul its colouring.

We may meet a man who always has an ironic twist of the mouth, especially if we say something to him; or he may wrinkle up his brow or pull a tragic face. Another man may look at us in a friendly way, so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by the way he looks at us. Indeed it is interesting, at some special statement in a lecture to glance at the countenances in the audience, to see the expression of the mouth, or to look at the foreheads or the blank expression on many of the countenances, or the nobility of many others and so on. In what you see there is expressed not merely what has remained as memory in the soul and has given the soul a certain colouring, but something is expressed which has passed over from the memory into the physiognomy, into the gesture, into the whole attitude of a man. If a man has taken nothing in, if he shows by his countenance that he has not learnt anything by what he has experienced of sorrow, pain or joy in his life, that too is characteristic. If his countenance has remained quite smooth, that is as characteristic as if it expresses in deep wrinkles the tragedy or the earnestness of life, or even perhaps its many satisfactions. That which remains in the soul as the result of the power of memory passes over into and moulds the physical body; and so markedly does this take place that man later actually has from it outwardly his physiognomy and his gestures, and inwardly his temperament, for we have not always the same temperament in old age as we had in childhood. The temperament in old age is often the result of what we have undergone in life, and which has inwardly become memory in the soul.

That which passes inwardly into man in this way can also be carried into reality, though this is more difficult. It is still fairly easy to bring before our soul-vision things which we experienced in childhood or, many years ago, in order to realize memory to a certain extent, but it is more difficult to transpose oneself into the temperament of one's childhood, into one's earlier temperament. But the practice of such an exercise may be of infinite significance for us; and more is really attained when we can do this inwardly in the depths of the soul than if we do something externally.

Something is already attained in a man if, say at the age of forty or fifty, he plays a child's game, or jumps as he did when a child or if he tries to make a face such as he made when an aunt gave him a bonbon when he was eight years of age; and things of that kind.

To transpose oneself back to the very gesture, to the very attitude, brings something into our life which leads convincingly to the feeling that the outer world is the inner world, and the inner world is the outer world.

We then enter with our whole being, e.g., into the flower, and we have in addition to the thought-experience and the memory-experience what I may call the experience of gesture, in the truest sense of the words. From this we gain an idea of how the spiritual everywhere works unimpeded in the physical world.

You cannot apprehend inwardly with full consciousness your behaviour of say twenty years ago as regards your gesture on any occasion without realizing the union of the spiritual and the physical in all things; that is, if you penetrate into the depths of this matter with all earnestness and energy. Then you have arrived at the experience of the first Hierarchy.

 Thought-experience: third Hierarchy. Memory-experience: second Hierarchy. Gesture-experience: first Hierarchy. 

The memory-experience leads us to identify ourselves with the dawn when we stand face to face with the morning glow. It enables us to feel inwardly, to experience inwardly all the warmth of the dawn; but when we rise to the experience of gesture, then that which approaches us in the dawn unites with everything that can be experienced objectively as colour or tone.

When we regard the objects around us illuminated by the sun and simply look at them as they appear to us, we see them in the light. But we do not see the dawn in this way, especially when we pass over gradually from the memory-experience to the experience of gesture; then everything which is experienced as colour gradually separates itself off from all material existence. The experience of colour becomes living, it becomes psychic, spiritual. It forsakes the space in which the external dawn appears to us. The dawn begins then to speak to us of the secret of the connection of the sun with the earth; and we learn how the Beings of the first Hierarchy work. When we again turn our gaze to the dawn and it appears to us almost as it did formerly in the mere experience of memory we learn to recognize the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away. The colour becomes living, becomes psychic, becomes spiritual, becomes a Being, and speaks to us of the relation of the sun to the earth as it once existed in the old Sun-period; it speaks to us in such a manner that we learn what the Cherubim are. And then, when full of enthusiasm and veneration we are carried away by this two-fold revelation of the dawn, the revelation of the Thrones and of the Cherubim, and we live on further within the soul, there presses into our own inner being, from out of the living Being which the dawn has now become, that which constitutes the nature of the Seraphim.

Everything which I have described to you today, I have done simply to point out how, from the simple following on in the soul from thinking to the gesture that is full of thought and permeated by soul, man can acquire for himself a feeling (for, to begin with he has only feelings) about the spiritual foundations of the cosmos, right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.

I wanted to give you this as a kind of introduction to the studies which are to lead us on from the soul-life out into the expanses of the spiritual cosmos.

If we seek to continue the study of the soul-nature to which we devoted our attention in yesterday's lecture, and investigate the activity of the soul-nature in physical man in reference to those things which we also discussed yesterday we are led in two directions. Memory points the soul back into former experiences; thinking leads the soul, as I explained yesterday, into etheric existence. That which can lay hold of man, even more strongly than memory, so strongly that the inner impulses pass over into his bodily substance, I called in yesterday's lecture, gesture. In observing gesture and its nature we have advanced to the revelation of the soul and spirit in the physical.

The whole entrance of man into physical earthly life is a taking possession of the physical by the soul and spirit, and if, to begin with, we limit our considerations to memory, we find that this consists in what we experienced at an early age being carried over into later years.

The question now arises just as memory points back to things in the past course of earthly life, is there anything in human life that points us still further back? Can we look back to that which lies before the entrance of man into earthly life?

Here we come to two things, namely, that which man has undergone spiritually and psychically in pre-earthly existence (which we will leave to a later consideration) and something else connected with the physical bodily nature which man as an individual being brings into it. I mean, everything which we are accustomed from our natural-scientific ideas to designate as heredity. Man bears within him right into the tendencies of his own temperament those impulses, those characteristics which play so great a part in the soul, and which are connected with that which was peculiar to his physical ancestors.

Of course our modern humanity treats such things with superficiality, with foolishness. For instance, this very morning I read a book which deals with a ruler of a well-known royal house, now extinct. This book devotes itself to the question of heredity in this house. Qualities are mentioned which can be traced back in heredity to the seventh century. In this book dealing with heredity there occurs a peculiar sentence, running somewhat as follows: “In this royal house there are members who show clearly that they incline towards extravagance, to absurdities of life, excesses, and so on. Yet there are also members of this house who have none of these tendencies.” As you see, this is a peculiar kind of thinking, for one might really suppose that a writer who makes a remark of this kind would have to admit that one cannot draw conclusions from such circumstances. But if you go into many of the things which at the present time lead to what are called well-founded views you will find many things of this kind.

Even though the prevailing views on heredity may appear somewhat superficial one must admit that man does carry inherited characteristics within him. That is the one side; man has often to fight these inherited characteristics. He must, as it were, strip them away in order to attain that for which he was prepared by the life before earthly existence.

The other side to which our attention is drawn is that which man acquires through education, through intercourse with his fellowman, and also through intercourse with external nature. From the habits acquired through observing the lower kingdoms of nature, this is called the adaptation of man to the conditions around him. As you know, our modern natural science considers these two impulses of heredity and adaptation the most important influences on living beings.

When we penetrate into these facts we feel, if we regard them without prejudice, that unless a man finds his way into the spiritual world he can come to no conclusion about such things. We will therefore today consider in the light of spiritual knowledge things which we meet with in life at every turn.

For this we must go back to something which has occupied us repeatedly in former studies. We have often had to refer to the exit of the moon from the earthly planet, and have shown that the moon was formerly united with the earth-planet, and, at a definite point of time left the earth in order to influence it from afar. I have also pointed out that a spiritual cause underlies this exit of the moon. I have told you how once upon a time on the earth there lived super-human beings who were the first great Teachers of humanity, and from whom proceeded what on the basis of our human earthly thought may be designated the Primeval Wisdom, which is everywhere to be found as an original woof or weft, which is of deep significance and arouses reverence even in the shape of the fragmentary remains which exist today. This wisdom was once the content of the teachings of these great superhuman Teachers at the starting-point of earthly human evolution.

These Beings found their way into the moon-existence and are there today, united with the moon. They belong to the population of the moon, as it were. Now the point is that when man passes through the gate of death he travels by a series of stages through the realm of the planetary world which belongs to our earth. We have already considered how, after having passed through earthly existence, he enters first into the sphere of activity of the moon, then into the sphere of activity of Venus, Mercury, Sun, and so on. Today it may interest us to learn how he comes into the sphere of the moon-activity.

I have already indicated how the life of man can be followed with Imaginative vision beyond the gate of death, and that that which man is as spirit appears after he has laid aside the physical body which is given over to the elements of the earth, and after he has seen his etheric body taken up by the etheric sphere which is united with the earth; there still remains the spirit and soul part of man, the ego and the astral body.

If with Imaginative vision we follow what thus goes through the gate of death it always presents itself in a form. That is the form which gives actual shape to the physical substance which man carries in himself. This form, compared with the robust physical body, is but a kind of shadowy picture, but on the soul's feeling and perception it makes a powerful and intense impression. In this form the head of man appears but faintly to the gaze of the soul. The rest of it is robust, and gradually on the passage between death and rebirth this form transforms itself into the head of the next incarnation.

We must here say something about this form which can be seen by Imaginative vision after a man has gone through the gate of death. It bears a true physiognomical expression. It is in a sense a true image of the way in which the man here in his physical earthly life was good or evil. Here in physical earthly life a man can conceal the fact as to whether good or evil prevails in his soul, but after his death he can no longer conceal this. When therefore we look at the spirit-form which remains after death we see that it bears the physiognomical expression of what the man was on earth.

One who carries through the gate of death that which is morally evil united with his soul bears a physiognomical expression through which he becomes outwardly similar, if I may say so, to Ahrimanic forms. It is absolutely a fact that, during the first period after death, a man's whole feeling and perception is conditioned by that which he can reproduce in, himself.

If he has the physiognomy of Ahriman because he has carried moral evil in his soul through the gate of death, he can only reproduce, which means perceive, what bears a likeness to Ahriman. He is in a sense psychically blind to those human souls who have passed through the gate of death, having a good moral disposition. Indeed, that belongs to the severest judgment which man can suffer after he has passed through the gate of death, that in so far as he himself is evil he is only able to see those beings like unto himself, because he can only reproduce in himself that which forms the physiognomy of evil men.

Having passed through the gate of death he now enters the sphere of the moon. There he comes into the presence of super-sensible, super-physical beings, but always such as are similar in physiognomy to himself; thus he who carries evil through the gate of death comes into the vicinity of Ahrimanic forms. This passage through an Ahrimanic world has in the case of certain human beings a quite definite significance in the whole connection of cosmic events; and we shall understand what really happens there if we bear in mind the actual purpose of the journey of the wise human Guides of old to the moon-colony of the cosmos.

Besides the Beings of the higher Hierarchies whom we usually call angels, archangels and so on, there are also, bound up with the whole cosmic evolution those Beings who belong to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic kingdoms. These Beings work in the whole cosmic connection just as do those who are developing normally. The Luciferic beings work in such a way that they seek to draw further away from physical materiality that which has the tendency in itself to press forward to that materiality. In the sphere of humanity the Luciferic beings work so that they use every opportunity to lift man away from his physical body. The Luciferic beings endeavour to make of man a purely spiritual psychic etheric being. The Ahrimanic forms however endeavour to separate off everything from man which can develop him towards a psychic and spiritual nature, which should now develop in humanity. They would like to change what is sub-human—that which lies in the impulses, instincts, and so on, and which expresses itself in the body—and transform it into the spiritual. To transform man into a spiritual being is the tendency both of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings. Lucifer seeks to draw out of man the spirit and soul, so that he should no longer trouble himself about earthly incarnations but wish to live solely as a being of soul and spirit. The Ahrimanic beings on the other hand prefer not to trouble at all about the soul and spirit of man; but that which is given him as a covering, as a garment, as an instrument, namely the physical and etheric bodies, these they seek to separate and bring into their own world.

Man is on the one hand facing the Beings of the normally developing Hierarchies, but because he is woven into the whole of existence he faces also the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forms.

The point is that every time the Luciferic forms make efforts to approach man their object is to estrange him from the earth. On the other hand, when the Ahrimanic forms make efforts to dominate him they seek to make him more and more earthly, although they also wish to spiritualise the earth into dense spiritual substance and permeate it with dense spiritual forces.

When we discuss spiritual matters we have to use expressions which may perhaps appear grotesque in such a connection, but we must make use of human language. Therefore permit me to use ordinary human words for something which takes place purely in the spirit; you will understand me. You will have to raise what I must express in this way into the spiritual.

The same beings who as the great Teachers brought that ancient wisdom to man at the beginning of earthly existence withdrew to the moon in order, so far as lay in their power, to bring the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements into the right relation to human life. Why was this necessary? Why did such exalted beings as these great primeval Teachers decide to leave the earthly sphere in which they had worked for a time, and proceed to the moon-sphere outside the earth, in order as far as was possible to bring the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements into the right relationship with man?

When man, as a being of soul and spirit, descends to the earthly sphere from his pre-earthly existence he traverses that path which I have described recently in the course of lectures on Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy. He has a definite spiritual-psychic existence. He unites this with what is given him on the pure line of inheritance through father and mother, with the physical embryonic existence. These two, the physical embryonic and the spiritual existence interpenetrate each other. They unite with each other; and in this way man comes into earthly existence. But in that which lives in the line of inheritance, in that which comes down from the ancestors in the way of inherited characteristics is contained that which gives the Ahrimanic beings their point of attack on the nature of man. The Ahrimanic forces dwell in the forces of heredity, and when man carries in himself many of these inherited impulses he has a bodily nature into which the ego cannot enter very satisfactorily. It is indeed the secret of many human beings that they have within them too many of these inherited impulses. This is called today “being burdened with heredity.” The consequence of this is that the ego cannot enter fully into the body; it cannot completely fill out all the individual organs of the body. So the body in a sense develops an activity of its own side by side with the impulses of the ego which actually belongs to this body. Thus these Ahrimanic powers, in making efforts to put as much as possible into heredity, succeed thereby in making the ego fit very loosely into the human being; that is the one thing.

Man is however also subject to the influence of external conditions. You may realize how strongly man is subject to this influence from external conditions if you consider all the influence which climatic or other geographical conditions have on him. This influence of the purely natural environment is indeed of extraordinary significance to man. There were even times when this influence of the natural environment was utilized in a special way in the guidance of the wise Leaders of humanity.

When, for example, we consider something very remarkable in Ancient Greece, the distinction between the Spartans and the Athenians, we must say this difference which is described in a very superficial way in our ordinary history books rests on something which goes back to the regulations of the ancient Mysteries, which worked so as to bring about different results for the Spartans and the Athenians.

In ancient Greece much attention was paid to gymnastics as the chief factor in the education of the child; for according to the Greek method, by acting on the body in a certain way they also worked indirectly on the soul and spirit. But this took place in one way by the Spartans and in a different way by the Athenians. By the Spartans it was above all considered necessary to allow the boys to develop in such a way that through their gymnastic exercises they acquired as far as possible that which worked inwardly on the body, by means of the body alone. Therefore the Spartan boy was urged to do his gymnastic exercises regardless of the weather.

This was different by the Athenians. The Athenians laid great stress on their gymnastic exercises being adapted to the climatic conditions. They were very careful to see that the boy carrying out his gymnastic exercises should be exposed to the sunlight in the right way. To the Spartans it was a matter of indifference whether their exercises were performed in rain or sunshine, but the Athenians demanded that the climatic conditions, especially the sun-effects, should act as a stimulus to them.

The Spartan boy was so treated that his skin was made impermeable, so that everything which he developed in himself might come from the inner corporality. The skin of the Athenian boy was not massaged with sand and oil, but he was exposed to the action of the sun.

That which can come into man from outside, from the effects of the sun thus passed over into the Athenian boys. The Athenian boy was stimulated to be eloquent, to express himself in beautiful words. The Spartan boy, on the other hand, was shut up in himself, by means of all kinds of massage with oil; indeed with massage of the skin with sand and oil he was trained to develop everything in himself independently of external nature. He was thus made to drive back into his inner nature all the forces which human nature can develop, and not to bring them out.

Thus he did not become eloquent like the Athenian boy, but was in this way made to be reticent, to speak very little, to remain quiet. If he said anything it had to be significant. It had to have content. The Spartan speeches, which were but seldom heard, were noted for the weight of their contents. The Athenian speeches were noted for the beauty of their language. All this was connected with the adaptation of man to his environment by means of a corresponding system of education.

You can also see this elsewhere in the relationship brought about between man and his environment. Men from southern regions on whom the external sun-effects work become rich in gesture; they also become talkative. There develops in them a language which has melody because in their development of inner warmth they are connected with the external warmth. Men of northern regions, on the other hand, develop in such a way that they do not become talkative, because they have to retain in themselves their bodily warmth as impulse. Just consider the men of the north. They are known by their silence. They can sit together for whole evenings without feeling impelled to utter many words. One man may ask a question. The other may perhaps answer him with a “no” or “yes” after two hours, or perhaps not till the next evening. That is connected with the fact that these men of the north are obliged to have within them a stronger urge towards the creation of inner warmth, because warmth does not penetrate into them from outside.

Here we have something which may be called the adaptation of man to external conditions of a natural kind. Then observe how all this is active in education and in the general life of soul and spirit. Now just as the Ahrimanic beings have an essential influence on what lies in heredity, so the Luciferic beings have an essential influence on adaptation. Here they can get at man when he is developing his relationship with the outer world. They entangle the human ego in the outer world; and in so doing they often bring this ego into confusion as regards Karma.

Thus whereas the Ahrimanic beings can put man into a state of confusion in reference to his ego as regards his physical impulses the Luciferic beings put him into confusion as regards his Karma; for that which comes from the outer world by no means always lies in Karma, but has first to be woven into a man's Karma by means of many threads and connections so that in the future it may lie in his Karma.

In this way the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic influences are intimately connected with human life and have to be regulated. They must be regulated in the whole evolution of man. For that reason it became necessary for these primeval Teachers of humanity to leave the earth—on which they could not have undertaken this regulation because it cannot be undertaken during man's earthly life, and man, when outside his earthly life is not on the earth—therefore these primeval Teachers of humanity had to withdraw from the earth, and they pursued their further existence on the moon. Here I am obliged to clothe in human speech something for which one really requires quite other word-pictures. After these primeval Teachers of humanity had withdrawn to the moon they had to seek, during their moon-existence, for an arrangement with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. Now the appearance of the Ahrimanic powers would be especially injurious to man in his existence after death if, during that existence, they could exercise their influence on him; for if man goes through the gate of death carrying the after-effects of anything evil in his soul, then, as I have already explained to you he finds himself entirely in an Ahrimanic environment, indeed, he even has an Ahrimanic appearance. He himself has an Ahrimanic physiognomy and he only perceives those human beings who also bear an Ahrimanic physiognomy. That must remain a purely psychic experience of man. If Ahriman could now intervene, if he could now influence the astral body, this would become a force which Ahriman would send into man which would not only balance itself karmically, but which would relate man closely to the earth and bring him into too strong a connection with the earthly. This is what the Ahrimanic powers are striving for. They desire, after death, while man in his spirit-form still resembles his earthly shape, gradually to insert themselves into those human beings in whom it is possible so to do because of the evil impulses which they carry through the gate of death. They wish gradually to permeate this spirit-form in as many such beings as possible with their own forces, to draw it down to earthly existence and to establish an Ahrimanic earth-humanity.

Therefore the primeval wise Teachers of humanity who now inhabit the moon made a contract with the Ahrimanic powers—which had to be entered into by those powers for reasons which I will later explain, according to which they allow the Ahrimanic powers to exercise influence in the fullest sense of the word on the life of man before he descends into earthly existence.

Thus, when man, in his descent into earthly existence, again passes through the moon-sphere, then, according to the agreement made between the wise primeval Teachers of humanity and the Ahrimanic powers, these powers have a definite influence on him. This influence manifests itself in the fact of heredity. As against this, because, through the efforts of the wise primeval Teachers of humanity this sphere of heredity had been allotted to them the Ahrimanic beings renounce what lives in man's evolution after death.

In reverse manner an arrangement was also concluded with the Luciferic beings by which these beings were only to have an influence on man after he has gone through the gate of death, and not before he descends to earthly existence.

Thereby, through the great wise primeval Teachers of humanity there came about a regulating of the influences of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings exercised outside the earth. We have already seen and only need to ponder the matter when it at once becomes clear that man is brought under the influence of nature through the Ahrimanic beings being able to work on him. Before his descent to the earth man is exposed to the influences of the impulses of heredity. Through the influences of the Luciferic beings he is exposed to those impulses which lie in his physical environment, in climate and such like, also to the impulses which lie in his psychic, spiritual and social environment through education and so on. Man thus comes into relationship with his natural environment, and into this environment both the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic influences can work.

I should now like to speak from quite another aspect concerning the existence of these Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings in this natural environment. I have already touched on these things in discussing the Michael-problem, but now I will try and make it more clear.

Picture to yourselves the change which takes place in our natural surroundings in the phenomenon of a rising mist. The watery exhalations of the earth rise. We live within the atmosphere which is saturated with this rising of the watery vapours of the earth. One who has developed spiritual vision discovers that something may live in this natural phenomenon which carries the earthly element upwards in a centrifugal direction.

It is not without reason that men who live in the mists are inclined to become melancholic, for there is something in the experiencing of the fog and mist which weighs down our will. We experience a weighing down of our will in mist.

Now by means of certain exercises one can so develop his imagination that he can himself weigh down his own will. He can do this by means of exercises which consist in man’s concentrating inwardly on certain organs of the body, and producing a kind of inner feeling of the muscles (when a person walks and feels his muscles that is different from contracting a muscle through concentration when standing still). When this exercise is regularly practised like the other exercises described in The Way of Initiation he then burdens his will through his own activity. He then begins to see what is present in the rising mist which can make a person morose and melancholy. He then sees, spiritually and psychically, that in the rising mist there, live certain Ahrimanic spirits. He must then say with spiritual cognition: In the rising mist there arise from the earth into cosmic space Ahrimanic spirits who thus extend their existence beyond the earth.

It is again different when, as here in the region of the Goetheanum where the beautiful neighbourhood offers so many opportunities, we turn our gaze evening and morning to the sky, and see the clouds upon which rests the sunlight. A few days ago you could see in the late afternoon a kind of red-golden sunlight incorporated in the clouds which produced the most beautiful forms in a quite wonderful way. The evening of that same day the moon shone with special intensity. But anywhere you may see the clouds with this illumination spread out over them in a wonderful play of colour. This can be seen everywhere; I am simply speaking of something which can be specially beautifully observed here.

In that radiating light which spreads out in the atmosphere over the clouds there live the Luciferic spirits, just as the Ahrimanic spirits live in the rising mist. In fact, for one who can see things of this kind in the right way, consciously, with imagination, allowing his ordinary thoughts to go forth and accompany the forms and colours of the changing clouds, giving play to his thoughts instead of their having sharp outlines, and who is able to change or transform them when the thoughts themselves expand or contract as they go out with these cumuli and accompany their form and colour—then he really begins to regard the play of colour in the clouds, especially in the evening or morning, as a sea of colour in which Luciferic shapes are moving. And whereas, through the rising mist melancholy feelings are aroused in man, it is now that his thoughts and at the same time to a certain extent his feelings learn to breathe as it were in a superhuman freedom on viewing this Luciferic flowing ocean of light. That is a special relationship with his environment which man can cultivate, for he can then really raise himself to the feeling that his thinking is like a breathing in light. Man then feels his thinking, he feels it like a breathing in the light.

If you voluntarily undertake these exercises you will understand better that part of my Mystery Plays where I speak of the Beings who breathe light. Man may even now get a premonition of what such Beings as those light-breathing Beings are, if he undertakes the exercises I have described.

We then discover how the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings are incorporated into the phenomena of external nature. When we study the phenomena of heredity and of adaptation to environment in the human being we realize that in these man carries his soul and spirit into nature. If we observe phenomena of nature such as the rising mist and the clouds bathed in light we see how the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings unite themselves with nature. But the approach of the human soul and spirit to nature through heredity and adaptation to environment is also, as I have shown today, only an approach to what is Luciferic and Ahrimanic.

Thus when we look at man's nature we find in it the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic influences; and in those phenomena of nature which hold within them that with which the physicist does not concern himself we again find the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic elements. That is the point from whence we can be led to observe an activity of nature upon man which extends beyond earthly existence.

Let us fix that firmly in our minds today. We find Ahriman and Lucifer in human heredity and in human adaptation to environment. We find Ahriman and Lucifer in the rising mist and in the light which pours down upon the clouds and is retained by them; and we find in man a striving to create rhythm and equilibrium between heredity and adaptation to environment. But we also find in nature outside the striving to create rhythm between the two powers whose existence in nature I have shown, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic.

If you follow the whole process outside in nature you have a wonderful drama. Observe the rising mist and see how therein the Ahrimanic spirits strive outwards into cosmic space. The moment the rising mist forms itself into clouds, these beings have to give up their efforts and return again to the earth. In the clouds the presumptuous striving of Ahriman finds its limits. In the clouds the mist ceases, and with it the dwelling place of Ahriman; in the cloud the possibility begins for the light to rest upon the cloud—Lucifer resting on the clouds.

Grasp the full significance of this. Picture the rising mist with yellowish-grey Ahrimanic forms building itself into clouds; while in that which is formed in the flowing light above the clouds Luciferic forms are striving downwards, and you have the picture of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic in nature.

You will then understand the times when there was a feeling for what lies on the other side of the Threshold, for that which weaves and lives in the bright clouds, for that which weaves and lives in the mist rolling up; so that in those days painters, for instance, were in a quite different position from what they were later. Then, colour which to them was of a spiritual essence took its right place on the canvas. The poet, then conscious that the Divine, the Spirit spoke in him could say: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles,” or “Sing to me O Muse of the great traveler.” Thus do Homer's poems begin. Klopstock, who lived at a time when the sense for the divine-spiritual was no longer alive, put in its place: “Sing, Immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful men.” I have often spoken of this. Just as poets in olden times could speak thus, so the old painters, even at the time of Raphael or Leonardo could say, because they also felt it in their own way: “Paint for me, O Muse. Paint for me, O Divine Power. Direct my hands for me. Carry my soul into my hands, so that Thou canst guide the brush in my hands.”

It is really a question of understanding this union of man with the spiritual in all the situations of life, and most of all in the most important ones.

So let us keep this clear, that on the one side, in heredity and in adaptation to environment, we bring the human being to Lucifer and Ahriman; whereas, on the other side, in a true understanding of nature, we bring the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements into external nature. From this viewpoint we will continue our observations in our next lecture.

In the last lecture I spoke to you of the way in which man is subject during his life to that which, from the natural scientific point of view, we are accustomed to call heredity. I spoke further of how man is subject to the influences of the outer world, to adaptation to environment; how everything which is bound up with heredity is connected with the Ahrimanic sphere, while that which, in the widest sense, is comprised in adaptation to the external world is connected with the Luciferic realm. I told you also how in the cosmos, i.e., within the spiritual substance which lies at the foundation of the cosmos care has been taken that the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences should play their part in the right way in human life. We shall add certain things today to what has been said, keeping in mind, at the same time what was explained in the first of these lectures.

We have seen how memory, everything in the nature of memory, fashions man within as regards the soul. In reality, far more than we think we are fashioned as soul-beings by our memories. The way in which our experiences have become memories has really fashioned our souls; we are a result of our memory-life more than we think, and he who can exercise even a little self-observation, so far as to enter into the life of memory will see what a great part the impressions of childhood play throughout the entire earthly life. The manner in which our childhood was spent, which indeed plays no great part in conscious life, the time, for instance, during which we learned to speak and walk, during which we received our first, the inherited teeth, the impressions received during all these periods of development play a great part in the human soul-life throughout the entire life on earth. Many things which rise up inwardly as thoughts which are connected with memories—and everything we grasp in thought that is not caused by external impressions is connected with memories—everything which arises in this way making us inwardly joyful or causing us inner pain (these are generally delicate shades of pleasure and pain which accompany our thoughts when they arise freely) all the life of memory within us is carried out by our astral body when we pass over into the condition of sleep. If now with Imaginative vision we can behold man in sleep as a psychic spiritual being the matter presents itself in the following way. Picture to yourselves during sleep the etheric and physical bodies remaining within the human skin while the astral body is outside (the ego we will consider later). We can then observe the astral body, really consisting in memories. We can also see how these memories which live in the astral body outside of man whirl around in and out of each other. Experiences which lie far asunder in time and in regard to space also are brought together, while some things are left out of certain experiences altogether. In this way the whole memory-life is transformed during sleep. If man dreams it is just because this transformed life of memory appears before his consciousness, and in the constitution of the dream he can inwardly perceive that whirling in and out, inwardly perceive that which, observed from outside can be seen by Imaginative clairvoyance.

But something else presents itself; that which from falling asleep until waking up figures in this way as memories, that which forms the chief content of the human astral soul-life unites during sleep with the forces which lie behind the phenomena of nature. We can therefore say: All that lives as astral body in these memories forms a union with the forces that lie behind the minerals, actually in the inner being of the minerals, in the inner being of the plant forces, and the forces which lie behind the clouds, and so on.

To one who can perceive this truth it is really terrible, I must say, when people say that behind the phenomena of nature there are only material atoms. Not with material atoms do our memories unite during sleep, but with that which really lies behind the phenomena of nature, with the spiritually active forces. It is with these that our memories unite during sleep. Our memories rest in them during sleep.

Thus we can really say: During sleep our soul with its memories dives down into the inner being of nature, and you are saying nothing untrue, nothing unreal if you utter the following: “When I fall asleep I consign my memories to the powers which rule spiritually in the crystal, in plants, in all the phenomena of nature.” You may go for a walk and see by the wayside yellow flowers, blue flowers, green grass and shining promising ears of corn and you can say: “When I pass you by in the daytime I see you from outside, but when I sleep I sink my memories into your spiritual being. You take up what I have transformed during life from experiences into memories. You take up these memories of mine when I go to sleep.” It is perhaps the most beautiful of all feeling for nature to have with the rose-bush not only an external relationship but to be able also to say: “I love the rose-bush especially because the rose-bush has this peculiarity (bear in mind that space plays no part in these things; no matter how far the rose may be removed from us in space we find our way to it in sleep)—the rose-bush has this peculiarity, that it receives the earliest memories of our childhood.” That is the reason why people love roses so much, only they are not aware of it; but they love roses because they are the recipients of the very first memories of childhood.

When we were children other people loved us and often made us smile. We have forgotten it but it forms part of our life of feeling; and the rose-bush absorbs into its own being while we are asleep at night the memories which we have ourselves forgotten. Man is far more united than he realizes with the outer world of nature, that is, with the spirit which rules in the external world. These memories of the first years of childhood are especially remarkable with reference to human sleep, because in reality, during those years and during the years extending to the change of teeth—that means to about the seventh year of life—the soul-element alone is taken up during sleep. As regards human beings it is the case that the spiritual inner part of nature takes into itself of our childhood only the soul part. Other things also of course hold good. The soul-element which we develop during our early childhood (for instance if we were childishly cruel) remains also in us but this is taken up by the thistle. This is said by way of comparison, but nevertheless it actually points to a significant reality. That which is not taken up from the child into the inner part of nature will be immediately evident from what follows.

In the first seven years of life everything has been inherited that is of a bodily nature. The first teeth are entirely inherited; everything of a material nature which we have within us in the first seven years of life is essentially inherited. But after about seven years all the material substance is thrown off; it falls away and is formed anew. Man remains as a form, as a spiritual form, his material part he gradually throws off. After seven or eight years everything that was in his body seven or eight years before has gone. It is a fact that when we have reached the age of nine years our whole human being has been renewed. We then build it in accordance with our external impressions.

As a matter of fact it is extremely important, especially for the child in the first periods of life, that it should be in a position to build its new body—now no longer the inherited body but a body developed out of its inner being—according to good impressions from its environment, and in a healthy adaptation to its environment. Whereas the body which a child has when it comes into the world depends on whether the inherited impulses it has received are good or bad, the later body which it bears from the seventh to fourteenth year depends very much on the impressions it receives from its environment.

Every seven years we build our body anew, but it is our ego that builds it anew. Although the ego is not yet born as regards the outer world in a child of seven years (as you know it is only born later), yet it is working already, for naturally it is bound up with the body, and it is the ego which is building therein. It develops those things of which we have already spoken; it builds up that which appears as the physiognomy, the gestures, the external material revelation of the soul and spirit in man. It is a fact that a human being who has an active interest in the world, who is interested in many things, and because of his active interest in them ponders over them and inwardly digests them, reveals in a material way in the external expression of his countenance and in his gestures what he has been interested in and absorbed. On the face of the human being who has an intensely active interest in the outer world, who inwardly works upon the fruits of this interest in external things one will see in each wrinkle later in life how he formed these himself, and one will be able to read much in his countenance, for the ego is expressed in the gestures and in the physiognomy. A man who goes through the world bored or without interest in the outer world remains throughout his whole life with an unchanged countenance; finer experiences are not imprinted in the physiognomy and gestures. In many a face we may read a whole biography; in many others we cannot read much more than the fact that he was once a child—which is nothing very special.

The fact that man in this way through the changing of his substance every seven or eight years shapes his own outer appearance signifies a great deal. This work of man on his own external appearance, in physiognomy and gesture, is also something which he carries in sleep into the inner being of nature. If one then looks at a man with imaginative clairvoyance and observes the ego outside him as it is during sleep one sees that it really consists in physiognomy and gesture. With those human beings who express much of their inner being in their countenance we find a radiating and shining ego. Now this resulting gesture and physiognomy unites itself also with forces in the inner being of nature. If we have been friendly and kind nature is inclined, as soon as this kindliness has become a facial expression, shown in the countenance, to take this up during our sleep into its own being. Nature takes up our memories into her forces and our gesture-formation into her very essence, into the nature-beings.

Man is so intimately connected with external nature that what he experiences in his inner being as memories is of enormous significance to external nature, as is also the way in which he expresses his inner soul-life in his physiognomy and gestures, for that lives on further in the inner being of nature.

I have often mentioned a saying of Goethe, which was really a criticism of a remark by Haller. Haller said: “Into the inner being of nature no created spirit can enter. Fortunate is the man to whom she reveals even her external husk.” To this, Goethe replied: “You pedant! We are everywhere in the inner being of nature. Nothing is within her, nothing is outside her; that which is within is without, and that which is without is within. Only ask yourself which you are, whether the kernel or the husk.” Goethe says that he heard this remark in the sixties and secretly cursed it; for he felt (naturally he did not then know Spiritual Science) that when one whom he could only regard as a pedant said: “Into the inner being of nature no created spirit can enter,” he knows nothing of the fact that man, simply because he is a being of memories, and a being of physiognomy and gesture is continually entering into the inner being of nature. We are not beings who only stand at the door of nature and knock in vain. Just through that which is our innermost being do we stand in most intimate communion with the inner being of nature.

Because the young child, up to his seventh year, has a body which is entirely inherited, nothing of his ego, of his physiognomy and gesture pass over into the inner being of nature. Only at the change of teeth do we begin to develop our real being. Therefore only after the change of teeth do we gradually become ripe to think about nature. Before that time more important thoughts arise in the child, thoughts which have not much to do with nature, and are so full of charm just for that reason.

The best way to approach a child is to make poetry in its presence, to represent the stars as the eyes of heaven, for example, when things we speak of to the child are as far as possible from external physical reality.

Only from the change of teeth onwards does the child grow in such a way that his thoughts can coincide with the thoughts of nature; fundamentally the whole life from the age of seven to fourteen is such that the child grows in an inward direction, and he then carries his memories outside his soul into nature, as also his gestures and physiognomy, and this then continues throughout his whole life. As regards any relationship with the inner being of nature we, as single human individuals, are only born at the change of teeth. For this reason those beings whom I have designated as elementary spirits, the gnomes and undines, listen so eagerly when man relates something of his child life up to the seventh year, because, as far as these spirits of nature are concerned man is only born at the change of teeth. The change of teeth to them is an extremely interesting phenomenon. Previous to this age man is to the gnomes and undines a being “on the other side,” and it is for them something of an enigma that man appears at this age having already reached a certain perfection! It would be extraordinarily inspiring for pedagogical or educational phantasy if a man, having imbibed spiritual knowledge, could really transpose himself into these dialogues with the nature-spirits, and enter into the soul of the spirits of nature in order to obtain their views concerning what he is able to tell them about children; for in this very way the most beautiful fairy-tales arise. When, in ancient times fairy-tales were so wonderfully apt and rich in content, this is because the poets who composed them could converse with gnomes and undines, could tell them something and not merely hear something from them.

These nature-spirits are often very egoistic, they become silent also if one does not tell them something of that concerning which they are curious. Their favourite stories are about the deeds of babies. In return, one may hear many things from them which can then be woven into the form of fairy-tales.

Thus, for the practical spiritual life that which today appears highly fantastic to us may become extremely important. It is the case that these dialogues with the spirits of nature, on account of the conditions I have mentioned, may be extremely instructive to both sides.

On the other hand, what I have said may in a sense naturally cause anxiety, because while he is asleep man continually creates pictures of his innermost being. Behind the phenomena of nature, behind the flowers of the field, and extending right up into the etheric world there exist reproductions of our memories, both good and useless memories; for the earth is simply teeming with what lives in human souls, and in reality human life is very intimately connected with such things.

We find therefore first of all the spirits of nature, those beings into whom we penetrate with our world of gesture; but we also find the world of the Angels, Archangels and Archai, and grow also into these Beings. We enter into them. We plunge into the deeds of the Angels through our memories. We enter into the living beings of the angelic world through what we have imprinted in ourselves as physiognomy and gesture. This penetration which takes place in sleep is such that we can say: When we pass over livingly into nature the process is that the further we go out in a direct line the more do we come into the regions of the Angels and Archangels and the Archai. We come into the sphere of the third Hierarchy. And when in sleep we dive down with our memories and our gestures as into a flowing sea of weaving beings of Angels, Archangels and Archai, then from one side there comes another stream of spiritual beings, the second Hierarchy, Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. If we wish to express in the outer world that which we have just described, we must say: This stream flows in such a way that the course of the sun by day from east to west marks the way the second Hierarchy crosses the third Hierarchy. The third Hierarchy, the Angels, Archangels and Archai, are as if floating up and down “offering one another the golden buckets.” In this presentation we have the second Hierarchy going with the sun, as it were, from east to west. This is not apparent, because here the Copernican world-conception does not hold good, but this stream actually does go from east to west, following the course of the sun during the day.

Thus we see—i.e., if we have the ability to see—how man during sleep grows into the third Hierarchy; but this third Hierarchy is continually being graciously permeated from one side by the second Hierarchy. Thus this second Hierarchy also makes itself felt in the life of our soul.

I pointed out in the last lecture but one the significance of transposing oneself vividly again into the experiences of one's youth. In this connection you can get a very impressive feeling if you take up the Mystery Plays, and there read, perhaps now with greater understanding than was formerly the case, what is represented there in regard to the appearance of the Youth of Johannes. It is indeed the case that man can vivify his own inner nature and make it intensely perceptible to himself if he goes back actively over his youth. I told you how he might take up old school-books from which he might perhaps have learned something (or perhaps not!). He immerses himself in what he learnt, or did not learn. It makes no difference whether one learned anything or not; the point is that one should immerse oneself intensely in what one formerly went through with it. For in this way one may have personal experiences. For instance, it was of immense significance to me personally, a few years ago, to transpose myself into such a situation belonging to my own youth. I then needed to intensify the forces of spiritual understanding. The following events occurred to me quite accidentally when I was just eleven years of age. I was given a school-book. The first thing that happened to it was that I carelessly upset the ink-pot on it and thereby damaged two pages, so that I could no longer read them. That was an event of many years ago, but I have often lived through this event again, this school-book with the damaged pages, with all that I experienced thereby; for this book had to be replaced by a poor family. It was something dreadful, all that one could experience through this school-book, with its gigantic ink smudges. As I said, it is not a question of having behaved well in connection with the circumstance which one recalls; it is rather a question of having experienced them with intensity. If you attempt this with all inner intensity you will also experience something else. You will experience in a true vision a scene which you have inwardly lived through and evoked in the soul. When night has come and everything is dark around you and you are by yourself you will experience the situation as if spread out in space, which you had previously experienced in time. Suppose, for instance, that you evoke before your soul a scene which you once experienced, let us say, at 11 o'clock. Afterwards you went to a place where you sat with and amongst other human beings. You sat down and other people sat around you. Here you have recalled something which you experienced inwardly. What was then around you externally now meets you entirely as a spatial vision. One only needs to look for such connections and then quite important discoveries can be made. Let us say for instance, that when you are seventeen years of age you had your midday meal in a pension where the guests were continually changing. Call up inwardly in your soul one such scene which you experienced. Recall it vividly. Then in the night you find yourself sitting down at the table. Around you people are sitting, people whom you did not often see, because in this pension they continually came and went. In one face you recognize, “That is something I experienced at that time.” External space is added to the soul-experience, when you make your memories active in this way.

This means in reality that you are living with this stream which flows from east to west; because gradually you feel more and more strongly: There in the spiritual world which you enter in sleep your life does not merely consist in being merged with the spiritual, but in this spiritual there transpires something which was reflected externally at the time you sat around the pension table with these human beings. You have forgotten it long ago but it is still there. You behold, it as you can behold those things which can often be seen inscribed in the Akashic Record. The moment you have this before you, you have identified yourself with this stream flowing from east to west, the stream of the second Hierarchy. In this stream of the second Hierarchy something lives which is outwardly reflected by day.

Now days vary in the course of the whole year. In Spring a day is longer, in Autumn shorter; in summer it is longest, in winter shortest. The day is subject to change throughout the year. That is caused by a stream which flows from west to east, counter to the stream from east to west; and that is the stream of the first Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, the Cherubim and the Thrones. Observe therefore how the day changes in the course of the year. If you pass on from the day to the year then you come in contact with what meets you during sleep as the opposite stream. As a matter of fact it is the case that we go forth in sleep into the spiritual world in a direct line, not in the direction which goes from west to east, nor in the direction which goes from east to west.

If we realize this, then, as I have told you, when we vividly recall some memory we must place spatial winter before our souls.

This is also the case when we become conscious of our will. When we become conscious of our will, that is what enters into our gestures and our physiognomy.

That which I am now saying should have a certain significance especially for eurhythmists, although, naturally there is not any intention in Eurhythmy of bringing to expression what I am now about to say. It is a fact that when a man really fashions his external appearance more and more from out of his inner being, when his ego is expressed more and more in his physiognomy and gestures, he not only receives an impression from the day to pass over from vivid inner experiences of memory to the vision of spatial external things. He experiences over again what he learnt, let us say at the age of seventeen, and sees the people with whom he sat in that pension. He sees them in picture-form, as in the Akashic Record. That is Day experience. But one can also experience the year. This is done by paying attention to the way in which the will works in us, and observing that it is relatively easy to bring the will to expression when we are really warm, whereas it is difficult to let the will stream through the body if we are very cold. Anyone who can experience in this way the relation between the will and the fact of being warm or cold will gradually be able to speak of a winter-will and a summer-will.

We find that the best expression of this will comes from the seasons. Let us observe, for example, the will that carries our thoughts out into the cosmos. They escape, as it were, out of the finger-tips, and we feel that it is easy to develop the will.

If we stand before a tree, something at the top of the tree may give us particular pleasure; and if the will becomes warm in us our thoughts are carried to the top of the tree. Indeed they often go even to the stars, if in summer nights we feel endowed with this warm will.

On the other hand, if the will has cooled within us it is as though all our thoughts were carried in our heads, as if they could not penetrate into the arms or legs; everything goes into the head. The head carries this coldness of the will, and if the coldness does not become so severe as to produce a frosty feeling the head becomes warm through its own inner reaction and then develops thoughts.

Thus we can say: summer-will leads us out into the expanses of the universe. Summer-will, warm will carries our thoughts in all directions. Winter-will carries them into our head. We can thus learn to differentiate our will, and then we shall feel that the will which carries us out everywhere into the cosmos is related to the course of summer; while the will which carries the thoughts into our head we feel to be related to the winter. Through the will we come to experience the year in the same way as we formerly did the day.

There is a possibility of feeling as a reality the words which I am now going to write on the board. If a man experiences winter in his human will he can perceive it in such a way that he says:—

O, Cosmic Pictures!
Ye float down to me
From cosmic distances,
Ye strive to reach me,
Ye penetrate into
The thinking forces
Of my head.

These words are not a mere abstraction; for if a man feels his own will united with nature, he can, at the approach of winter feel as if from out of space his own experiences are borne towards him, experiences which he himself had first given to nature. He can perceive on the waves of these words his own experiences which have already passed over into nature.

That is the feeling of the winter-will; but man can also feel the summer-will which expands our thoughts out into the universe:—

Ye creative Soul-forces of my head
Ye fill out mine own being.
Ye press out of my being
Into universal space,
And unite me
With world-creative powers.

That means, the thoughts which are first experienced in the head pass over into the whole body. They first fill the body and then press out of the body again. These words express the nature of the summer-will, the will in us which is related to the summer. We may also say: “I have called up from my inner being the active memory of something experienced long ago; the day with its night confronts me with it in supplementing it with the external perception of space; and that corresponds to the stream from east to west.” We may also say: “In us winter-will changes into summer-will, and summer-will into winter-will.” We are no longer related to the day with its interchange of light and darkness. We are related to the year through our will, and thereby are identified with the stream flowing from west to east, the stream of the first Hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and the Thrones.

As we go on we shall see how man is hindered or helped through heredity or external adaptation to environment with reference to this relationship with the inner being of nature; for what I have explained to you today relates to the way in which man, if he is hindered as little as possible by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, can grow in this way with his thought and will into the inner being of nature, and is received by the time-forces, the day-forces and the year-forces,—the third Hierarchy, the second Hierarchy and the first Hierarchy. But the Ahrimanic forces as they appear in heredity and the Luciferic forces as they appear in adaptation to environment have an essential influence on all this. This great question shall occupy us in the next lecture.

The continuation of the studies we made here on the last occasion leads us today first of all to something which will furnish a preparation for the next two lectures. It leads us to glance at the connection of man, and indeed of the whole man, with our earth. I have often said in various connections that man is subject to a kind of deception if he ascribes to himself a totally separate existence, if he ascribes to himself, as a physical human being, an independent separate existence. He is indeed independent and individual as a psychic and spiritual being; but as physical earth man he belongs to the earth in its organic entirety, and this applies in a certain sense to his etheric body also.

I will describe to you today how this connection of man with earthly existence can appear to super-sensible vision, and I will do so in a more narrative form by way of preparation for the next two lectures. Let us suppose that someone possessing Imaginative consciousness—which I have often described—takes a journey through the primeval Alps, among those rocks and stones which consist chiefly in quartz, i.e. in rocks containing silicates and other similar minerals. When we come into this primeval mountainous region we walk upon the hardest rocks on earth, which, when they appear in their own characteristic form have something virgin in them, one might say, something which is untouched by the ordinary everyday life of earth. We can indeed understand Goethe quite well when, in one of the beautiful utterances we have often quoted here, he speaks of his experience among these primeval mountains. He speaks of the solitude he felt when sitting among these granite mountains receiving impressions from those hard and stern rocks towering up from the earth. Goethe addresses the granite as “the everlasting son of the earth,” the granite which consists in quartz, i.e. in silicates, in mica and in feldspar.

Now when a man approaches these primeval rocks with his ordinary consciousness he may of course admire them from outside. He is struck by their forms, by the perfectly wonderful primitive plastic art which is, however, extraordinarily eloquent. When however, with Imaginative consciousness he approaches these rocks, the hardest on the earth, he penetrates by their means directly into the depths of the mineral kingdom. He is then able to grow together as it were in thought with the rock. One might say that his soul-being extends everywhere down into the depths of the rock, and he actually enters in spirit as into a holy palace of the gods. The inner nature of these rocks reveals itself as permeable to Imaginative cognition, while the outer surfaces appear as the walls of this palace of the gods. But at the same time he has the knowledge that within this rock there lives an inner reflection of all that is in the cosmos. Once more the world of the stars stands before the man’s soul reflected in this hard rock. Finally he receives the impression that in everyone of these quartz rocks something is present like an eye of the earth itself for the whole cosmos.

One is reminded of the eyes of insects, those many-faceted eyes which divide all that approaches them from outside into very many separate parts. One would like to imagine, and indeed one cannot help doing so, that there are countless quartz and similar formations on the surface of the earth that are just so many eyes of the earth, in order that the cosmic environment may be reflected and the earth can inwardly perceive it. Gradually one acquires the knowledge that each crystal form existing within the earth is a cosmic sense-organ of the earth.

This is the marvelous, the majestic fact about the covering of snow, and even more about the falling snow-flakes, that in each single one of these snow-flakes there is a reflection of a great part of the cosmos, that with this crystallized water everywhere reflections fall to the earth of parts of the starry heavens.

I need not mention that the stars are also there during the day only that the sunlight is of course too strong for us to perceive them. The stars do not appear by day, but if you have at any time the opportunity of going down into a deep cellar over which there is a tower open at the top, then, because you are looking out of the darkness and the sunlight does not confuse you, you can see the stars even by day. There is a certain tower in Jena, for instance, from which one can see the stars during the day. I only mention this by the way to make clear to you that this reflection of the stars in the snowflakes and generally in all crystals is of course present also during the day. And it is not a physical but a spiritual reflection. The impression one receives of this must be communicated inwardly.

But this is not all. Out of the spiritual sense-impression which is thus received there arises in the soul the feeling that just as we live imaginatively into the crystal covering of the earth so do we grow together with everything which the earth experiences of the cosmos in this crystal covering.

In this way we extend our own being out into the cosmos. We feel ourselves one with the cosmos. And above all else it now becomes a truth, a deep truth to the imaginative observer, that what we call our earth-body with all its various parts was once in the course of time born out of the cosmos; for the relationship of the earth with the cosmos then appears most intensely before the eyes of the soul. Thus, through this experience of living ourselves into the millions of crystal eyes of the earth we are prepared to feel the whole inner relationship of the earth with the cosmos, to experience it in the Feeling-Soul.

Thereby, however, we feel ourselves as Man once again united with the earth—I shall explain this point specially later on. For this process of the earth being born out of the cosmos took place when Man himself was still a primitive being, not a physical but a spiritual being. But the process which the earth then went through after it had been born out of the cosmos Man himself went through in his own being together with the earth. It is really the case that the earth once upon a time had the same inner relationship with the neighbouring cosmos surrounding it as the human embryo has to the body of its mother before it is born. Later, however, the child begins to be independent. Similarly the earth itself developed independence, whereas in the first Saturn period it was more united with the cosmos. This process of becoming independent was shared by man in such a way that he has learnt to say: The finger which I carry about on me is a finger only as long as it is a part of my organism; the moment I cut it off from my organism it is no longer a finger, it decays. In the same way, if we think of man as a physical being separated by a few miles from the body of the earth he would decay just as a finger does if it is cut off from the man's body. The delusion of man that as a physical being he is independent of the earth arises only from the fact that he can move about freely on the surface of the earth, whereas the finger cannot move about on the rest of his organism. If the finger could walk about on the rest of the body it would have the same delusion concerning man as he, as a physical being, has concerning the earth. It is just through the higher cognition that the intimate belonging-together of the physical man with the earth is made clear.

That is the first acquaintance which man makes by means of Imaginative cognition when it is applied to the hardest part of the earth's surface.

We can make further progress in this knowledge if we go somewhat deeper into the earth and learn to know all that is in the interior of the earth, in veins or lodes of metal, or anything of a metallic nature generally. Here we penetrate under the surface of the earth; but here, when we meet what is metallic we come to something quite special, to an existence separate from the rest of the earth. Metals have something of an independent nature in them, they can be experienced as something independent; and this experience has much, very much to do with man.

Even one who has already attained a certain higher knowledge by Imaginative vision is not yet quite at home when he experiences the quartz and other rocks of the primeval mountains in such a way that by becoming one with the million eyes of the earth he himself lives, feels and projects himself in experience into the whole cosmos. When, however, such a man approaches the interior of the earth there come to him the first impulses which accompany such a wonderful and deep experience as he may have in the stimulus to be had in a mine. Once, however, these impulses have come to him he only requires spiritual vision to be able everywhere to enter into relationship with that which is metallic, even if he does not go down into the borings of the mine.

But the first feeling of which I am speaking may be acquired with special intensity in metal mines. Even metal miners (though this is not so much the case as it was a few decades ago) who have inwardly grown up with their calling show something of what we may call a deep sense of the spiritual element in metals; for the metals not only perceive the environment of the cosmos but they speak, they speak spiritually. They relate things, they speak to us. And they speak in such a way that this language which they utter is very like that which one receives as an impression in another domain also.

When we succeed in setting up a psychic connection with human beings who are going through the development between death and re-birth (I have often mentioned this point before) we require for this a special language. The utterances of spiritualists are indeed childish in this domain for the reason that the dead do not speak the language of earthly man. Spiritualists believe that the dead speak in such a way that one can write down what they say, just as one may receive a letter from a contemporary, living here on the earth. For the most part it is high-flown matter that comes from spiritualist sittings, but even among our living contemporaries on the earth high-flown things are also written. But that is not the question here. The first necessity is to find the right approach to the language which the dead speak, which has no resemblance to any language on earth. It certainly has a vocal-consonantal character but not like that of earthly speech. This language which can only be perceived by the spiritual ears is spoken also by the metals in the interior of the earth. And this language through which man can approach those souls who are living between death and re-birth relates to us the memories of the earth, the things that the earth has experienced in its passage through Saturn, Sun and Moon. We must let the metals relate to us what were the experiences of the earth. The experiences of the whole planetary system (I have already spoken of this) are told us by that which Saturn has to communicate to the planetary cosmic system in which we live. What the earth has undergone in the process, of this the metals of the earth speak.

The language spoken by the metals of the earth can assume two different forms. When this language has the ordinary form, so to speak, there appears before us what the earth has gone through in its evolution beginning in the Saturn period. What you find in my Outline of Occult Science regarding this evolution originated for the most part, in the way I have often described, through direct spiritual perception of the events. That is a mode of acquiring knowledge of these earth processes which is somewhat different from the mode to which I am now referring. For the metals speak more—if I may express myself thus; it is of course somewhat oddly expressed—the metals speak more of the personal experiences of the earth. They speak of what the earth has experienced as a cosmic personality. Thus, if I were to take into account the narratives of the metals, to which one can listen by penetrating spiritually into the inner part of the earth, I should have to add many details to what I have written about the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, etc.

The first thing, for example, would be that those forms of Saturn which you will find described in my Outline of Occult Science as forms which consist in differentiations of heat would appear as powerful gigantic beings consisting in heat; beings of heat who, even as early as the ancient Saturn period, had reached a certain density. If such a thing could be (of course it is impossible, but let us suppose it could happen) that an earthly man were to meet these beings, he could become aware of them, he would be able to lay hold of them. At a certain time, about the middle of this Saturn period these beings were not merely spiritual beings but they also displayed a physical existence; if a man had touched them he would have been blistered. It would however, be a mistake to suppose that these beings had a temperature of millions of degrees of heat. That is not the case, but they had inwardly such a temperature that if one could have grasped them the contact would have caused blisters.

As regards the Sun period we should have to relate how in these formations described in my Occult Science as present in the Sun period other beings appear, displaying wonderful transformations, wonderful metamorphoses. From gazing at, from observing these self-transforming beings one receives the impression, for instance, that the metamorphoses described by classical authors such as Ovid have something to do with these communications imparted to us, naturally indirectly, by the metals. Ovid was certainly not himself capable of directly understanding the language of the metals, and what he describes in his Metamorphoses does not perfectly correspond with the impression which one receives; but in a certain sense the correspondence is conveyed.

Paracelsus again was a personality who lived much later than those to whom I have just referred. The most important things Paracelsus wanted to learn he did not learn at the University. I cannot say that Paracelsus did not attend the University, for he did, and I will not bring forward any objections against going to the University, but Paracelsus did not go there to learn the most important things he wanted to know. He went everywhere where men could tell him more important things; he went to such men as metal-miners, for instance, and in this way he acquired a great part of his knowledge.

Now anyone acquainted with the right way of gaining knowledge for oneself knows how extremely illuminating for instance, the simple remarks of a farmer may be, a man who has to do sowing and reaping and all that is connected with work of that kind. You will say, yes, but he does not understand the import of what he is saying. It does not matter to you whether the speaker understands or not, so long as you yourself understand when you listen to him. That is the important thing. Certainly in very few cases will the man himself understand what he says; he speaks from instinct. And even more fundamental things can be experienced in the case of those beings who understand nothing of what they say to us—from the beetles and butterflies, from the birds, and so on.

What could be learned in the mines in Asia Minor through the language of the metals was studied very deeply by Pythagoras, for example, on his wanderings, and from thence much penetrated into what became the Greek and Roman civilization. Then it appears in weakened form in such writings as Ovid's Metamorphoses. That then is one form of the language of the metals in the interior of the earth.

The other form—grotesque as it sounds, it is nevertheless true—the other form is that in which this speech of the metals begins to develop cosmic poesy, when it passes over into poetic form. There actually appears in the language of the metals cosmic fantasy. Then there resounds out of this cosmic poetry that which constitutes the most intimate relations between the metals and man. Such intimate relations between man and metals indeed exist. The coarse relationships of which physiology is aware relate only to a few metals. It is known, for instance, that iron plays a great part in human blood; but iron is the only metal of this kind that does this. A certain number of other metals such as potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium, also play a certain role, but a larger number of important metals, important for the structure and functioning of the earth, apparently play no part in the human organism, according to coarse external observation. But this is only apparently the case. When we go down into the earth and there learn to know the colour of the metals we also learn that metals are by no means confined to the interior of the earth, but are everywhere in the surroundings of the earth, though certainly in an exceedingly diluted form—I must here use the expression—in a super-homeopathic dilution they are distributed everywhere in the environment of the earth.

Roughly speaking, we can have no lead in us, but speaking more accurately, we cannot exist without lead. What would become of man if lead did not work upon him from the cosmos, from the atmosphere; if in an infinitely finely divided state lead itself did not penetrate through his eye with the nerve-sense ray; if lead did not penetrate into the body through the breathing and in an endlessly finely-divided state enter into us through food? What would man be if lead did not work in him?

Man would indeed have sense-perceptions without lead. He would perceive colours, he would perceive sounds; but in his perceptions of colours and sounds it would be as if, with every perception he became slightly unconscious. He would never be able to withdraw from his perceptions and reflect in thought, or form concepts of what he had perceived. If we did not take lead, as I have said, in super-homeopathic dilution into our nervous system and most of all into our brain we should be given up entirely to our sense-perceptions as to something outside of us. We should not be able to think about our sense-perceptions, nor should we be able to preserve the memory of them. This capacity is given us by the finely divided lead in our brain.

If lead be introduced into the human body in large quantities it results in the terrible lead-poisoning. But he who knows the connection can see from this lead-poisoning that, while lead when introduced into man's body in large quantities works excessive harm, in this fine super-homeopathic dilution it is something which causes as much to die off in man each moment as is necessary in order that he may become a conscious being, and not suffer unconsciousness through continual sprouting, budding, growing. For in sprouting and budding, in the over pressure of the pure forces of growth man becomes powerless.

It is thus that man is connected with all the metals, even with those concerning which our coarse physiology does not speak. The knowledge of these connections is the basis for a positive genuine true therapy; but instruction concerning these connections between the metals and man can only be given in that language which is the poetic speech of the metals in the earth. Thus it may be said that concerning the past experiences of the earth itself the ordinary language of the metals instructs man; but the metals instruct man concerning their curative properties when they become poetic, when their language becomes poetry.

This is indeed a noteworthy connection. From the cosmic aspect, medicine is cosmic poetry; indicating how many secrets of the world are contained in the fact that something which on one niveau of the world is harmful and brings about disease, on another niveau is most beneficent, most perfect, most beautiful. This is shown us when Inspired cognition penetrates to the veins of metal in the earth, and to all that is metallic in the earth.

We may enter into another relationship with the metals, that relationship which becomes apparent when they are subjected to the forces of nature, for instance, to, fire or similar natural forces. Observe the remarkable form assumed in the earth by antimony, a metal. It is composed of single spikes, which shows that when it is being formed it follows certain directions of force which are operative in the cosmos. This grey antimony has also the property that if it is heated and spread on glass it forms a mirror. Antimony has also other characteristics, for instance, that of exploding if it is treated electrically in a certain way and then brought to the cathode (the negative pole).

All these characteristics of antimony show the relation of such a metallic substance to the forces of the earth and its environment. This however, can be noticed in the case of all metals. We can observe all metals when they are subjected to fire, and we see how, if ever a higher temperature is developed they pass over into that super-homeopathic condition and at this high temperature take quite a different form. In this respect the ideas of our modern physicists are the most limited one can imagine. For example, they imagine that when they melt lead it becomes softer and softer, and of course that is quite correct as far as it goes. It does become softer as the temperature grows higher; the lead becomes hotter and hotter. It becomes more fluid until it gives off lead fumes. But all the time something is being thrown off that does not go beyond a certain temperature. This they do not know. It is just this finest, this super-homeopathic part of the lead which passes over continually into what I may call universal invisible life, and this is something which acts upon man.

The matter may be presented thus. In the earth down below you have the various metals, but these metals exist also in a finely-divided state everywhere above. I might say that these metals vapourize. Down below in the earth we have the metals with their sharp contours, with their rigid forms, and still further down they would certainly be in a fiery fluid condition. But in the environment of the earth they exist in this finely-divided state; there they reveal themselves in continual radiations so that a constant radiation goes out into the cosmos. The metals ray forth into space; but there is a certain elasticity in this cosmic space, and the forces which go forth in this way do not radiate without limit into space as the physicists imagine to be the case with light rays. They proceed to a certain boundary and then return. One can observe this radiating back of the metals returning in all directions from the periphery of the cosmos as if they came from everywhere. One notices that these back-raying forces are active in that sphere of human life which is really the most wonderful and beautiful, that is, when, in the first years of its life a child learns to walk, speak, and think. The way in which a child raises itself from the crawling position to get its bearings in the world is really the most wonderful thing we can observe in earthly life—this realization of itself as a human being. Inwardly, in these forces which I have so often described work the backward-raying forces of the metals. While the child learns to raise itself upright from its horizontal crawling position it is permeated by these metallic forces which are being reflected back. It is these forces which really raise the child up. If one can inwardly perceive and understand this connection, then at the same time one has another experience. One learns in his actions and in his being the connection of man as he lives here on the earth with his former earth lives.

It requires the same capacity to perceive the workings of metals in the cosmos as it does to perceive the karmic connection of successive earth lives. These capacities are the same, the one arises with the other, and the one does not exist without the other. For this reason I said in a different connection that in the power of orientation, in the raising itself of the child from crawling to standing upright and walking, in learning to speak and in learning to think lies that which comes over from former earthly lives. Anyone who has a feeling for these things can see in the way a child makes its first steps, in the way it walks, whether it has the inclination to press more on the toes or the heel, whether it bends the knees more or less strongly—in all this anyone who has an eye for these things can see a karmic tendency from a former earth life. This reveals itself primarily in the gait and it can now be perceived because the capacity to see the backward-raying forces of the metals and the power to observe the connection of man with his former earth lives belong together.

When people say Anthroposophy cannot be proved that assertion is really without foundation. People are accustomed to prove things in such a way that sense perception is always brought forward as proof. That is just as if someone were to say: If you tell me that the earth moves in cosmic space without support that is impossible; the earth must have something to rest on, otherwise it would fall. Now cosmic bodies do mutually support one another, and only with regard to things of the earth can one say that everything must have something to rest on. For the truths which concern everyday consciousness we demand proofs. The truths which relate to the spirit mutually support one another. But one must be able to trace this mutual support.

Some weeks ago I told you how, by observing the way a child or a man walks—whether he first raises his toes or his heel, whether he treads lightly or firmly, whether he bends the knees or holds them stiffly, etc.—that in all these things one can see the realization of his karma as the result of his former earth life. Today I have shown you how the reflected forces of the metals enable one to recognize how the several lives on earth are connected together.

Here we perceive two truths that mutually support each other. It is always the case that we must first hear a truth, then other things intervene, and then we hear the same truth again from a different point of view, then perhaps a third time. Thus do the truths of Anthroposophy support one another, as the heavenly bodies in the cosmos uphold and support each other. This must be so when we ascend from the truths which are valid for ordinary consciousness to those truths which are self-subsisting in the cosmos. And self-subsisting in the cosmos is that Which is to be grasped through the knowledge given by Anthroposophy.

So we must really bring together all the truths which have been given out at different times, truths which really support one another, attract one another, and sometimes also repel one another, in this way showing the inner life of anthroposophical knowledge; for anthroposophical knowledge lives on its own inspiration. Other systems which obtain today depend upon the supports on which they rest, but anthroposophical knowledge is self-supporting.

Through that which I gave you in my last lecture it is now possible to speak more exactly of many of those events which occurred in the course of the evolution of the earth, and which have brought about its present form. You will remember I said that one who has attained to knowledge through inner vision comes into a certain relationship with the metals of the earth, with all that has its being in the earth, through the fact that the earth is permeated with veins of metal, that the earth in general carries within itself various kinds of metals. This relationship into which man can enter with the metals enables him to look back on that which has happened to the earth.

It is particularly interesting to look back to what happened on the earth in the times preceding the Atlantean evolution, that period which I have described in a somewhat external way, as the Lemurian epoch; to look back also to the period of time which immediately preceded this, when the Earth went through the Sun stage. During the Lemurian epoch the Earth went through the Moon stage. It is interesting to look back on all these events, for we thereby receive an impression of how wonderful is everything in the sphere of earthly existence.

Nowadays we are accustomed to regard the earth as complete in the form which it presents to us today. We live on the continents as human beings, and are surrounded by what the earth bears upon it in the way of plants, animals, birds of the air, and so on. We know that we ourselves live, in a certain sense, in a sort of air-ocean, the atmosphere which surrounds the earth, that out of this atmosphere we take oxygen into ourselves, that our relation to the nitrogen also plays a certain role. We picture to ourselves in general that this atmosphere, consisting in oxygen and nitrogen, surrounds us. Then we look upon the oceans, the seas—I need not go into every detail—and we form a picture of the planet which we inhabit in the universe.

The earth was not always as it is today; it has undergone tremendous changes. If we go back to the times I have just indicated, to the Lemurian age and a little further back we find quite a different condition of the earth from what we have today.

Let us begin with the atmosphere in which we now live, and which we regard as non-living, lifeless; even this atmosphere shows itself in those early ages as something quite different. If we go still further back we have to observe something else. Today, we have this firm solid earth-kernel and around it the atmosphere. A similar mental picture might also be made even for those very ancient times, but there could be no question of there being round the earth anything like the air we now breathe. In the air we breathe today oxygen and nitrogen play the chief part, carbon and hydrogen play a less important part, and sulphur and phosphorous a still less significant one.

As regards those very ancient times it is really not possible to speak of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and so on, simply because what the chemist calls by these names today did not exist in this ancient period. If a chemist of today were to meet a spiritual being of that time and speak of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc., that being would reply “such things do not exist.” It is possible to speak today of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc., but in those ancient times there was absolutely no possibility of speaking of these things for they could only be present as such after the earth had reached a certain density and had acquired forces such as it has within it today. Oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, sodium and so on, all the lighter so-called metals simply did not exist in that ancient epoch. On the other hand there was at that time around the earth, in the place where today we have the atmosphere something which was of an exceedingly fine fluid nature, of a consistency halfway between our present air and water. It was of a fluid nature, but in its fluidity it was similar to albumen; so that in reality the earth at that time was entirely surrounded by an albuminous atmosphere. The albumen in eggs today is very much denser, but it may be compared with that of which we are now speaking.

From this environment of the earth when later the earth become denser, what we now call carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so on were gradually differentiated. They were not there in such a way that we can say this ancient albuminous atmosphere was composed of these elements, for it did not have these several elements as ingredients. Today we generally think of things as being formed by combination, but that is nonsense. What we know as certain higher substances are not always composed of what appears when they are analysed, for these things cease to be present in the higher substance. Carbon is not present there as carbon, nor oxygen as oxygen, but there is a substance of a higher nature. As I have said, this substance according to its qualities may really be described as albumen in an excessively fluid condition. The whole of this substance surrounding the earth at that time was permeated from the universe with cosmic ether, which gave it life. So that we have to represent to ourselves the cosmic ether as projecting into this substance and giving it life.

This substance lived because the cosmic ether projected itself into it. Not only was it alive, it was also differentiated in a remarkable manner, e.g. in one part there appears a large structure in which man would be suffocated, in another part another large structure appears in which man could specially have regained new life and activity if he could have been there at that time as a human being, and so forth. Formations arose, producing effects which remind one of the chemical elements of today, but chemical elements in our modern sense did not exist. Then the whole was pervaded by reflections of light, gleams of light, rays of light, sparkles of light. And finally the whole was warmed through by the cosmic ether.

Such were the characteristics at that early period of the earth's atmosphere. The first thing to be fashioned from out of the cosmos is what I described in the last lecture as the very first primeval mountains. These were fashioned from out of the cosmos. Thus the quartz that is found out there in the primeval mountains in its beautiful form, in its relative transparency, was formed in the earth to a certain extent from out of the universe. That is why, today, if we transfer ourselves through Imaginative vision into these rocks of the primeval mountains into what are now the hardest formations of the earth they are to us as the eyes of the earth through which it gazes out into the universe. But also it was the universe which implanted these eyes in the earth. They are there now. The universe has placed them in the earth. The quartz, the silica and such like which then permeated the whole atmosphere and were gradually deposited as primeval mountains were not so hard as today. This only came afterwards, this hardened state through circumstances which developed later. All that was thus fashioned out of the cosmos in that far-off time was scarcely harder than wax.

If you go now into those mountainous regions and there see a quartz crystal, it is so hard that, as I have said before, if you were to knock your head against it your skull would crack but not the quartz. At that far-off time, however, because of the life which pervaded everything the quartz was actually as soft as wax. We may, therefore, say that these rocks of the primeval mountains came out of the cosmos as a kind of trickling wax.

All that thus slipped into the earth from out of the cosmos was transparent, and its relative hardness, its wax-like hardness can only be described by mentally employing the sense of touch. If we could have grasped it, it would have felt like wax.

It was in this way that these ancient mountains were deposited from out of the cosmos as a kind of wax-substance trickling in and then gradually hardening. Silica had a wax-like consistency at the time in which it was deposited out of the cosmos into the earth.

That which today is present more spiritually and which I described in the last lecture, viz. that by transposing oneself into this hard rock one has pictures of the cosmos—this phenomenon was at that time quite perceptible spiritually, and in such a way that when such silicates in the wax-like condition began to condense one could distinguish in them something like a kind of plant-form. Anyone who has looked round a little on nature knows quite well that something like distinctive marks of an ancient time are to be found. in the mineral world today. We find stones, we take them in our hands, we look attentively at them, and we find they have within them something like the outline of a plant-form. At that time it was quite a usual phenomenon which came into this albuminous atmosphere, pushed in as it were as outlines which could not only be seen but which were substantially photographed in this wax-like body.

Then the peculiar configuration came about that the fluid albumen which existed in the atmosphere filled in these outline forms and thereby they became somewhat harder, somewhat denser. Then they were no longer merely outline forms. The silicious part fell away from them and was dispersed in the rest of the atmosphere. In the earliest part of the Lemurian epoch we have those gigantic floating plant-formations reminding us somewhat of the forms of the algae of today, which are not rooted in the soil, for as yet there was no soil there. They floated in this fluid albumen with which they were permeated and out of which they formed their own substance. Not only did they float in this fluid albumen, they also shone forth I might say, they lit up and then faded away. They were capable of transformation to the extent that they could arise and disappear.

Place this picture clearly before your minds. It is a picture which is indeed very different from anything around us today. If we as modern men could transpose ourselves into that ancient epoch, if, let us say, we could set up a little sentry box somewhere and watch what happened around, if from it we could look out into that ancient world we should see all round us, over there a plant-form shoots up, a tremendous plant-form, like our present algae (sea-weed) or even like a palm. But it shoots up. It does not grow out of the earth in spring and die down in autumn; it shoots up, appearing in the spring-time (the spring-time was much shorter then) and reaches a tremendous size. Then it disappears again into the fluid albumen-like element. Such an observer would see green ever appearing and then fading away. He would not speak of plants covering the earth but of plants which like air-clouds appear from out of the cosmos, become dense and then dissolve away, something which grows green in this element of albumen. Then in the time which would somewhat correspond to our summertime today he would say: This is the time when the environment of our earth grows green. But he would have to look up to the green rather than look down on it.

In this way the idea comes to us how the flinty part of the earth atmosphere draws down into the earth, and how the plant-force which is really out there in the cosmos attracts it up to itself, how the plant-world comes down to the earth from out of the cosmos. In the period of which I am now speaking we have to say: This plant-world is something which arises and passes away in the atmosphere.

Something else must also be said. If today as human beings we transfer ourselves through this relationship with the metallic elements of the earth back into those ancient times we feel as if all this belonged to ourselves, as if we had something to do with that which at that time within the atmosphere grew green and then faded away. When today we recall our own childhood our memory extends over a relatively short span of time. Yet just as we can recall a pain which we experienced in childhood—and that is something which belongs to us—in the same way in this cosmic recollection aroused by the metallic element of the earth we experience this process of the becoming green and fading away as something which belongs to us. Man was already at that time connected with the earth, that earth which lived in this watery albuminous atmosphere. He was united with it as a human being but in such a way that as man he was still wholly spiritual. We express a reality when we say: Man must acquire the concept that these plants which we see there in the atmosphere at that time are something separated, something thrown off from that which is human. Man puts this out of his own being which itself is still united with the whole earth. And he has this conception, or should have it, of something else that he places outside of him, something quite different. The following also happened. Everything I have hitherto described was brought about through the silica substance in the atmosphere having been already deposited in the wax-like substance of which I have spoken. But apart from that, this albuminous atmosphere extends everywhere. Upon this atmosphere the cosmos works. Upon this atmosphere there work the countless manifold forces which stream down to the earth from the cosmos everywhere, those forces of which our modern science has no wish to know anything. Hence our modern science is indeed no true knowledge, for the most various phenomena which occur on the earth would indeed not occur if they were not brought about by cosmic impulses and cosmic forces.

Because the learned men of today do not speak of these cosmic forces they do not speak of what above all things is reality. They take nowhere into account that which is really living. Even in the smallest particle which we look at under the microscope there live not only earthly but cosmic forces, and if this is not taken into account there is no reality.

Thus were the cosmic forces active at that time upon this fluid albumen in the environment of the earth. These cosmic forces worked on many parts of this albumen in such a way that they congealed, so that one could see everywhere albumen congealed by the forces of the cosmos; this cosmically congealed albumen swam in the earth environment. These forms of cosmically congealed albumen were not merely imaginary masses of clouds, they were living things having definite forms. These were actually animals which consisted in this congealed albumen thickened to the density of jelly or even to that of our present-day gristle. Such jelly-like animals existed in this fluid albuminous atmosphere. They had a shape which we find today on a smaller scale in our reptiles, in lizards and creatures of that kind; they were not so dense as these are, but they had gelatinous bodies and the power of movement. At one moment they had long limbs, at another these limbs were drawn back into the body. In short, everything about these limbs is like a snail which can extend and withdraw its feelers.

While all this was being formed outside something else was being deposited in the earth from out of the cosmos, another substance in addition to the silica, and that is what you find today as the chalk or limestone of the earth. If you go into the primeval mountains, or merely into the Jura mountains, you find this limestone rock. This limestone rock certainly came to the earth later but it came in the same way as the silica out of the cosmos on to the earth. Thus we find chalk as the second substance in the earth.

This chalk continually oozes in and the essential thing is that it works in such a way that the kernel of the earth gradually becomes denser and denser. In certain localities the silica incorporates itself into the chalk. But the chalk retains the cosmic forces. Chalk indeed is something quite different from the coarse material which the chemists of today represent it to be. It contains formative forces, relatively active though unrecognized.

Now we come to a peculiar thing. If we consider a somewhat later time than that which I have described in connection with the phenomenon of the arising and passing away of the green, we find that in this albuminous atmosphere there is a continual rising and falling of chalky substance. Chalk-mist is formed and then chalk-rain. There was a period on the earth when the water which today rises in mist and falls as rain was of a chalk nature which rose and fell, ascending and descending. Now the peculiar thing comes about that this chalk is specially attracted by the gelatinous, the gristly forms; it permeates them, impregnates them with itself. And through the earth forces which are in it (I told you the earth-forces are in the chalk) through these forces the whole gelatinous mass is gradually dissolved, the mass which, as we have seen, formed itself there as coagulated albumen. The chalk abstracts the albumen and carries it down nearer to the earth, and from this gradually arise the animals which have bones containing lime. That is what develops in the later part of the Lemurian epoch.

We have, therefore, first of all to look upon the plants in their most ancient form as pure gifts from heaven. In the animals, in everything possessing an animal form we have to see something which the earth, after the heavens had given it chalk, took and made into an earthly form. These are the marvelous things which we discover in those ancient times. We feel so bound up with these things that we feel this whole process as an expansion of the human being into the cosmos.

Such things naturally sound paradoxical because they touch upon a reality of which the man of the present day usually has no idea; nevertheless they are absolutely true. Does it not correspond with reality today when someone says from what he remembers: “When I was a child of nine years old I had a friend whom I fought or hurt?” That recollection is something which arises from within. The speaker may feel pleasure in it or not. It may cause him pain, but it arises within him. Similarly there arises in man through the relationship with the metals an enhanced human consciousness which becomes an earth consciousness: Whilst thou hast formed on the earth thy whole being from out of the heavens, by the descent thou hast separated the plants from thee. They are cast off from thee. Thou hast also cast off the animal nature. In the form of coagulated jelly or gristle thou didst will first of all that the animal nature should become a separate product from thyself. But in this case thou hast had to see how earlier earth forces have taken this work from thee and have fashioned the animal forms into another shape, which is a result of earth creation. In this way, in, a cosmic memory, one can see this as one's own experience just as one can see the case I have just given you as an experience of a short earthly life. One feels oneself, as has been said, united as a human being with all these things.

But all this is indeed connected with many other processes. I can only sketch for you the chief events. Many other things happened. For example, while all that I have described was taking place the whole atmosphere was filled with sulphur in a finely divided state. This finely divided sulphur united itself with other substances, and from the union there arose what I may call the parents of everything which is found today in the ores as pyrites, galena, native sulphide of zinc, etc. In this way all these substances developed in an older form, soft, thick and wax-like. The body of the earth was permeated with these things.

When these ores, these metallic substances developed out of the general albuminous substance and formed the solid crust of the earth the metals had really not much else to do, unless man made some use of them, than to ponder over what had happened in the past. We find them still doing this, bringing graphically to the mind of one who has inner vision all that has happened to the earth. Now because he has, as his own, this cosmic or at least tellurian experience he says: Through having cast off from thyself all this, through having cast off the primeval plant-form, a form which has since developed into the later plant-forms, through having cast off that which still exists in a more complicated way as the animal creation as I have described it, thou hast separated from thyself that which formerly hindered thee from having as man a will of thine own.

All that I have described to you was necessary. Man had to cast off these things from himself, just as today he has to get rid of perspiration and other matter. Man had to cast off these things so that he might no longer be a being in whom merely the gods willed, but so that he could be a being with a will of his own, certainly not yet a free will, but his own. All this was necessary as preparation for the earthly nature of man.

Through much else that happened everything gradually became transformed. As the metals were now within the earth the whole atmosphere changed also. It became a different atmosphere, much less sulphurous. Oxygen gradually gained the upper hand over the sulphur, whereas in the ancient times sulphur was of very great significance for the atmosphere of the earth. The whole atmosphere of the earth became transformed.

In this transformed atmosphere man could again cast off from himself something else. What man now separated off appeared as the successors of the earlier plants and earlier animals.

Gradually the later plant-forms developed. These had a kind of root by which they held on to a still extremely soft earthy substance. And there arose reptiles, lizard-like animals, more complicated creatures, impressions of which present-day geology can still discover. Of the most ancient creatures of which I have spoken nothing can be found. Only in that later period, when man for the second time separated off from himself more complicated forms, only then were there such creatures as I have been describing to you. First of all cloud-like structures, continually arising and disappearing, growing green and then fading away; soft animal-like forms which were really animals, forms which gradually consolidated themselves, had a life of their own and then disappeared into the common earth-life. This was the case with all these beings. And out of all this arose something which condensed more into itself.

Among these animals was one which may be described as follows: it had a very large eye-like organ surrounded by a sort of aura. Near it was a kind of snout, which besides was elongated forward, then something like a lizard's body, but with powerful fins. Such a form as this arose, which now developed more firmness within itself. Animals arose possessed of what I may just as well call wings as fins, because these animals were not marine creatures, for there was no sea as yet, there was a soft earthy mass and the still soft element of the surroundings from which only the sulphur had been partly removed. In these surroundings such an animal flew or swam, it was an activity between flying and swimming.

Besides these there were other animals which did not have this kind of limbs. They had limbs which already were formed more out of the forces of the earth itself, and which remind us too of the limbs of the lower mammals of today.

Thus if starting from today we could wander back through time rather than through space into that period which unites the Lemurian epoch with that of Atlantis, a peculiar prospect would face us. We should see these gigantic flying lizards, with a sort of lantern on their heads which shines and also gives warmth. Down below is the soft morass-like earth which has something extremely familiar about it, because it offers to the visitors of today a kind of odour, something between a musty smell and the smell arising from green plants, something between the two. Something seductive on the one hand and extremely sympathetic on the other would be offered by the mud of the soft earth. In this morass too we find moving about as swamp-animals creatures which already have limbs more like those of our present lower animals, but spread out below them, something like the webbed feet of a duck but of course very much bigger. With these “shovels” they propel themselves in the swamp, and also rock about from side to side.

Man had to go through all this casting-off process so that he might be prepared for independent feeling during his earth existence.

Thus we have first a vegetable-animal creation consisting in products separated off from man, which prepares the possibility for the earthly human being to become a willing being. If all this had remained in man it would have taken possession of his will. His will would then have become entirely a physical function. Through having separated these things from himself the physical is put outside of him and the will assumes a psychic character.

In like manner, through this second creation feeling assumes a psychic character. Not until the middle of the Atlantean epoch do there develop out of these animals and plants the animals and plants that are similar to ours of today. The earth at that time had reached a stage similar in appearance to what it is now. The same chemical substances as are recognized by the chemists of today were also in existence. Gradually there developed what we know as carbon, oxygen, the alkaline heavy metals, and the like. These things were developed by that time.

Thereby man was able to make the third separation from himself, viz., that which he today forms in his surroundings as the plant-animal world. And inasmuch as he separated this off from himself and inasmuch as there arose around him the present-day creation he has become prepared for his life on earth as a thinking being.

Thus we must say that humanity was not then divided as it is today into single individuals. There was one common humanity, still of a psychic and spiritual nature, sinking itself in the ether. For this common humanity came down from the cosmos with the ether which streamed down to the earth from the cosmos.

Humanity then went through those events which you find described in my Outline of Occult Science. It came to the earth, went away to the other planets, and came back again in the Atlantean epoch. This went on continually alongside the other happenings, for whenever something was separated off humanity could not remain on the earth. It had to go away in order to strengthen the inner forces, which were now of a much finer, more psychic nature. Then humanity came down again. You may read about these events in more detail in my Outline of Occult Science. They are as follows: Man, humanity, really belonged to the cosmos, and prepared for himself his own earthly environment by sending into the domain of the earth those things which he separated from him, and which then became the other kingdoms of nature. They are now in the domain of the earth, where man is surrounded by them. And now we can say: By sending these castoff products into the domain of the earth man gradually developed within him that which furnished him as an earthly human being with willing, feeling and thinking.

For that which man is today as a thinking, feeling and willing being, which, during the period between birth and death rests upon a physical organic foundation, has only gradually developed, and it is connected with those beings who, for the sake of human evolution, have separated in the course of time from the human kingdom. Owing to this separation they have metamorphosed themselves to their present forms.

You see from what has now been said that we do not speak merely in a general abstract way about this relationship with that which is of a metallic nature in the earth. For when one is united with these metals, which conceal within them the memory of earthly events one can then really speak of what one remembers, one really finds what I have related today.

When we travel back into those earlier times we find everything more fleeting, more quickly vanishing. Just contemplate the grandiose, the majestic outlook which I have described to you. Those wax-like mobile silicate forms in which the outlined forms of the plant-world arise which suck themselves full of the soft albuminous substance, and thereby present in the earthly environment to which we look up something which grows green and fades away again. Think over these things and you yourselves will say: In contrast with plants growing on the earth today with firm roots and solid leaves; or, compared with present-day trees with their hard trunk, all that is a fleeting picture. Just think how fleeting those earlier forms were compared with the oak-tree of today! (The oak itself is not proud of its firmness, but those living round it generally are, for they confound their own frequent weakness with the firmness of the oak.) If you compare the hardness of the oak of today with the substance of those ancient plant-forms, how feeble is their rising, how feeble their fading away, like shadows rising in the atmosphere, condensing, then vanishing away! Or if you compare this with a coarser case, say, a hippopotamus or an elephant of today, or any living mammal in its stout skin—compare these with the creatures of that early time, when as coagulated albumen they came out from the common albuminous mass and were seized on by the chalk, and through that process in somewhat denser fashion developed indications of bones in the animal nature of the earth; how in this way they become somewhat denser and develop the first indications of a bony system. If you consider all this solidity of today compared with what the earth once was you will no longer be able to doubt that the further we go back the more fleeting and volatile are the conditions.

We then go further back to where there are only colour-formations surging up, weaving and living, which arise and pass away. If you then take the description of the Old Sun, of Old Saturn, the predecessors of the earth as you will find them given in my Outline of Occult Science you will say that all this is comprehensible when we know that we have to go back from the present time to an earlier condition. There this evanescent plant-formation absorbs the albumen and becomes something like a cloud-formation. At a still earlier period we find forms manifesting only in colour, such as I have described when speaking of the Sun existence or the Saturn existence.

Thus gradually, if we follow what is physical backwards through time we get away from the gross and elephantine, through the finer physical to the spiritual, and in this way, by paying attention to actual fact we get back to the spiritual origin of everything which belongs to the earth. The earth has its origin in the spiritual. That is the result of true vision, and I think it is a beautiful idea to be able to say: If you penetrate into the interior of the earth, and let the hard metals tell you what they remember they will relate the following: “We were once spread out in cosmic space in such a way that we were not physical substance at all, but in the spirit we were essence of colour, weaving in the cosmos, arising and vanishing.” The memory of the metals of the earth takes us back to that condition where the metals were cosmic colours, permeating one another, where the cosmos was in essential a kind of rainbow, a kind of spectrum, which then gradually differentiated itself and then became physical.

This is the point at which what I may call the merely theoretical impression communicated by the metallic element of the earth passed over into the moral impression. For each metal tells us at the same time: “I originate from the expanses of space and from earth-forms. I arise out of the heavenly kingdom. I am here drawn down and enchanted into the earth. But I await my redemption, for I shall once again fill the universe with my being.” When in this way we learn to understand the speech of the metals, then gold tells us of the Sun, lead tells us of Saturn, copper tells us of Venus. And then these metals say to us: “Once upon a time we extended far out, copper to Venus, lead to Saturn. Today we are enchanted here. But when the earth shall have so fulfilled her task that man shall have attained what only on the earth he can attain we shall extend out yonder again. We have been enchanted in this way so that man on the earth might become a free being. When freedom has been purchased for man, then our disenchantment too can begin.”

This disenchantment has already begun. We have only to understand it. We must understand how the earth, together with man, will develop further into the future.