The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In expanding today what we have been discussing in the previous lectures I should like to take up the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival; and in order to do this it will be necessary to touch upon some of the facts referring to the so-called secret of the Moon.

During all epochs in which people knew of the Mystery wisdom, the secret of the Moon was a familiar concept and was invariably associated with the being of man, in so far as the latter is related to the whole cosmos. We must keep clearly in mind that in his entirety man is related to the whole cosmos, just as he is connected with the Earth as regards his physical body. Now, it is a concomitant of the materialistic age that of the vast cosmos, which expresses its spirituality in the form of the fixed star constellations and the movements of the planets, nothing has remained in human consciousness but the outer appearance of the stars and the computation of their movements (if they are planets) and so forth.

The manner in which astronomy is studied today is the same as it would be if one studied the relative measurements and the outer conditions of movement in the human organism, remaining unaware that a psycho-spiritual element pervades the physical organism and comes to expression in these measurements and conditions of movement.

In the human being a unified psycho-spiritual element manifests itself, held together by the ego. But spiritual observation discloses that the cosmic organism expresses itself, not in a unified psycho-spiritual entity, but in a multiplicity, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings that reveal themselves through the forms of the fixed star constellations, through the movements of the planets, through the light raying forth from the stars, and so on.

Inner man is related to this spiritual multiplicity in the stars as is physical man to Earth substances that can serve as nourishment. And man's closest connection with the universe has to do with what we can call the secret of the Moon.

External observation of the Moon shows it to be in a state of metamorphosis as seen from the Earth. We see the full luminous face, we see it half-illuminated, then one-quarter—and there is also that stage in which it entirely withdraws from outer view, called the stage of new Moon. And then we have again the return to full Moon.

All this is nowadays explained as though the Moon were merely some kind of a body moving about in cosmic space, illuminated by the Sun from different directions and hence presenting various aspects. But that does not exhaust what the Moon means to the Earth, and especially to Earth men. In the case of the Moon in particular we must understand that if we look out at something as readily perceptible in its physical surfaces as, say, the full Moon—that is, something that presents a physical aspect—this aspect embodies something totally different from what is inherent in a new Moon. True, the new Moon cannot achieve direct physical expression on account of correlated cosmic conditions; but we must not conclude that because it does not express itself as a physical phenomenon, it has no effect. When our knowledge of the firmament tells us that it is new Moon, this means that the Moon is present in an invisible but all the more spiritual way than when appearing as full Moon in physical light. So the Moon is present—now wholly physical, now wholly spiritual, and we have the rhythmic alternation of its physical and spiritual expression.

And now, in order to understand the crux of the matter, we must recall a fact with which you are familiar from my Occult Science, an Outline, namely, that at one time the Moon was within the Earth: it was part of the Earth body. It passed out of the Earth and became a satellite, as the term goes. In other words, it split off from the Earth and now circles it. When it was one with the Earth its influences upon human beings were exerted from the Earth.

Naturally, in the time when man existed and developed upon an Earth that still contained the Moon, he was a very different being. When this Moon withdrew, the Earth became poorer by exactly what the Moon represented; and henceforth the lower

part of man was formed and held fast by the other forces—no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces, but by the former only. On the other hand, the influences that emanated from within the Earth at the time it still contained the Moon now act upon man from without, from the Moon.

We can put it this way: formerly the Moon forces came in contact first with the lower limbs—the feet and legs—and then streamed upward from below; but since the Moon withdrew from the Earth they act in the opposite direction, from the head downward. But this implies that the task of these forces has become a very different one, and the nature of this task comes into evidence in the experiences man has when he descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly life. When he has completed the period between death and a new birth and has absolved all the requirements of soul and spirit demanded during that period, he prepares to descend to Earth, to unite with the bodily-physical principle transmitted to him by his father and mother. But before it is possible for his ego and astral body to unite with the physical body he must provide himself with an etheric body, which he attracts from the surrounding cosmos.

This process has radically changed since the Moon withdrew from the Earth. Before that time man needed forces, when approaching the Earth again, that would enable him to shape the all-pervading ether into the form of an etheric body around his ego and astral body. These forces he drew, as he approached the Earth, from the Moon which was then within it. He still does; but the point is that since the splitting off of the Moon they come to him from outside the Earth. This means that immediately before entering the Earth life he must appeal to the power of the Moon forces—that is, to something cosmic—if he would build his etheric body.

This etheric body must be formed in such a way that it has, as it were, an outer side and an inner side. Let us think of it quite graphically, formed with an outer side and an inner side. When the outer side is being formed the forces of light are needed, for, like other things of substance, the etheric body is fashioned principally out of the flooding light of the cosmos. But sunlight cannot be employed for this purpose: it does not provide the forces that would enable man to build his etheric body. This calls for sunlight that is reflected by the Moon and thereby radically altered; and all the light coming to us from the Moon—in fact, all the light shining from the Moon into the cosmos—contains the forces that enable man to form the outer side of his etheric body when he descends to Earth.

And on the other hand, the forces man needs to form the inner side of his etheric body are the spiritual emanations of the new Moon; so that his ability to form the outer and the inner side is related to this rhythm of the outer light and dark of the Moon.

But all this that the Moon forces achieve for man, as it were, goes back to the fact that the Moon is truly not the mere physical body about which modern science tells us fairy tales, but a body wholly permeated by spirituality, comprising a multiplicity of spiritual beings. I have repeatedly explained that when the Moon withdrew from the Earth, it was not merely physical matter that streamed out into cosmic space: those ancient beings, man's primordial teachers, who lived on the Earth not in physical bodies but in a spiritual form, these passed with the Moon out into the universe and there founded a sort of Moon colony. We have therefore to distinguish between the physico-etheric and the psycho-spiritual constituents of the Moon, remembering that again the latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

Now, the entire life of this spirituality in the Moon depends upon the manner in which those beings observe cosmic conditions from their point of view, from the point of view of the Moon. Figuratively expressed: the spiritual beings of the Moon direct their gaze primarily to what is of greatest importance for them, to the planets of our orbit; and upon the inferences of these observations depends all that takes place on the Moon, as well as all that contributes to providing man in the right way with the forces needed for forming his etheric body.

Certain of the Mysteries knew this. It was ancient Mystery knowledge in some of the sanctuaries that the constellations and the movements in the planetary system were observed from the Moon, and the actions of the Moon beings determined accordingly. This was expressed by relating, in human consciousness, the Moon with the forces of other planets, the Moon being the point from which are determined those cosmic contexts that are linked with the forming of the human etheric body. This is reflected in the names of the days of the week:

Thus we see how everything pertaining to the point of view of the Moon was brought into relation with all that tended to quicken man's awareness of the planets in connection with reckoning time. And the burden of the admonition given in the old Mysteries was something as follows: Remember, oh man, that before descending to Earth you needed forces engendered in the Moon by the act of the Moon-beings in observing the other planets. For the configuration of your etheric body, when you descended to earthly life, you are indebted to the Moon's share in what is expressed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and so forth.

So on the one hand we have the rhythmical passage of the Moon through light and darkness in its course around the Earth, and on the other we find the whole sequence of the planets inscribed in human consciousness. The Mysteries even added the following: Due to the ability of the Moon-beings to behold Mars, the capacity for speech is organized into man's etheric body, and through their observation of Mercury, the capacity for movement is concentrated there.

If we wish to employ these secrets of the Moon as a medium of expression, this can be done in an entirely different form: speech becomes eurythmy. It comes about as follows: if we study the secrets of speech by finding out what the Moon-beings observed when questioning Mars, and then discover what changes these observations undergo when the Moon-beings turn to Mercury, then speech becomes eurythmy. In other words, if we transform the Moon-beings' Mars experiences into their Mercury experiences, the human capacity for speech becomes the capacity for eurythmy. That expresses the matter cosmically.

The current engendering in man the capacity for wisdom derives from the Moon-beings' experiences with Jupiter; what streams through the soul as love and beauty, from Venus; and that which permeates the etheric body with inner soul warmth is gained from the experience acquired by the Moon-beings' observation of Saturn.

There remains that which must be kept away—pushed back, as it were—to prevent its interfering with the formation of the etheric body immediately before the descent to Earth: that which comes from the Sun. From the Sun—or from the observation of the Sun—derive the forces from which man must be protected if he is to become complete in himself through the integration of the etheric body—that is, through protective forces.

It can be said that in this way we learn what occurs on the Moon, and at the same time we learn how the human etheric body is formed and constituted when man descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence. Those are the facts connected with the secret of the Moon. Nowadays we can recount such matters, but in certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely narrated but actually experienced. What I shall now write on the blackboard was not only known; it was an inner experience.

By means of initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke yesterday, it was possible to get beyond looking outward and listening outward with eyes and ears in the physical vicinity of the Earth. It was possible to become free of the physical body, to keep aloof from it, and to live only in the etheric body; and then the initiate lived with all that has been described. He did not live with the speech formed in the larynx, but with the speech resounding in Mars as cosmic language. He moved in conformity with the way in which Mercury guided the movements in the cosmos: not merely with feet and legs did he move, but in accord with the manner in which Mercury directs the movements of the human being. Nor did he possess that wisdom so laboriously acquired during childhood and early youth—really an unwisdom in the materialistic age—but he lived actually in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he could unite with the Moon-beings who observed Jupiter.

This sort of initiation really meant that the mystic was wholly in the light shining from the Moon. He had left the Earth, no longer a creature of flesh and blood, and lived in moonlight modified by forces from the other planets. During these periods of spiritual observation he simply became a light-being of the Moon—not in a symbolical sense or in any way to be thought of as abstract, but rather, as a man might today go to Basel and back, fully conscious of a reality, knowing he had experienced something real. The mystic was equally conscious of reality when he was led through the initiation ritual to the Moon-beings.

The initiate knew that for the time being he had taken leave of his physical body, that his soul and spirit had passed into the light-sphere of the Moon, and that he had borne a light-body; and because he had been united with the Moon-beings he had looked out into planetary space, truly able to behold what could be revealed in this vast realm.

And what was that? Well, among other things, he observed principally that from the Sun there emanated the forces of beings that must not be allowed to intervene in the building of the human etheric body. The Sun appeared as something that tended to dissolve, destroy the etheric body; hence he knew that forces to be received by the Sun-beings must not proceed from his etheric body, but from his higher principles, from his ego and astral body. Only upon these must the Sun forces be allowed to act. So he knew that for the forming of his etheric body he must not look to the Sun but to the planets, and that he must turn to the Sun for his astral body and especially for his ego and its whole inner strength. The second point, then, that became manifest through this recurring initiation into the secret of the Moon was this, that in what pertained to his etheric body man belonged to the planets; but for the strengthening of his astral body and most of all his ego he must look to the Sun.

This initiation was really of such a nature as to make the mystic one with the moonlight; but it was by means of his own moonlight existence that he looked into the Sun.

And now he reflected as follows: the Sun sends its light to the Moon because this must not be imparted to man directly. The result is moonlight in conjunction with the planetary forces, and out of this the etheric body is formed.—That was the secret known to him who was initiated in this way. He also knew to what extent he bore within him the power of the spiritual Sun: he had seen it, become conscious of it; and this was the stage of initiation at which the initiate became a Christ bearer—that is, a Sun-being bearer, not a Sun-being recipient. Just as the Moon itself, when at full, is a sunlight bearer, so man became a Christ bearer, a christophoros. This initiation leading to the stage of christophoros was thus an absolutely real experience.

Now imagine this actual experience through which the mystic sped away from the Earth, as it were, and ascended as an initiated Earth-man to the light-being; and imagine this inner, human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic festival. In later ages men no longer knew that such things could happen; that man is really able to withdraw from Earth conditions, unite with those of the Moon, and from the Moon behold the Sun. But the memory of it was to be preserved, and this we have in the Easter Festival.

The ability to experience all this did not pass over into the later consciousness that was becoming materialistic; instead it turned into an abstract conception. Men no longer looked inward and said, I can unite with the moonlight. They looked at the Moon, the full Moon, and said, It is not a question of my aspiring upward: it is the Earth that strives to ascend. And when is this effort at its height? When spring begins, when there burst forth from the surface of the Earth all the forces that had lain dormant in seeds and plants under the ground. On the Earth they become plants, but they go further: they stream out into cosmic space.

The old Mysteries employed this image: man can most easily attain to the Moon-Sun initiation and become a christophoros in the season when the inner Earth forces, by means of the stems and leaves of plants, carry out of the ground what then streams forth from the Earth into the cosmos; for then he floats, as it were, on the forces that in spring ray out from the Earth and up to the Moon. But it must be the light of the full Moon.

All this, then, became a memory, but it also became abstract ... It must be the light of the full Moon. ... Subconsciously, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could be a human experience, people imagined that something or other—not man himself—streamed toward the full Moon, the first one after the beginning of spring. And what can this full Moon do now? It beholds the Sun; that is, the first day dedicated to the Sun: the first succeeding Sunday. Just as once a christophoros, from the viewpoint of the Moon, beheld the Sun-being, so now the Moon beholds the Sun—that is, its symbolization in Sunday.

We have the beginning of spring, March 21st, and the forces of the Earth are burgeoning forth into the universe. We must await the proper observer, the full Moon.

March 21st—full Moon—Sunday.

What does the Moon observe? The Sun; and the following Sunday is fixed as Easter Sunday. This is an abstract way of determining the date, surviving from a very real Mystery event that in former times frequently occurred for many men.

That is actually what our present spring Easter Festival has come to be. It represents a Mystery act that has often been performed in spring; but it is not the one I described day before yesterday. The latter led man to a comprehension of the death event. I explained that the idea of resurrection, clarified by something like the Adonis celebration in the fall, really led men to the experience of death, to the spiritual resurrection after about three days; and this process of resurrection really belongs in the autumn, for the reasons I gave.

The process I described today is a different one, performed in other Mysteries for certain initiations—those of the Sun and Moon; and this process confronted the neophyte with life's beginning. So you see, we can look back at a period in which certain Mysteries saw the descent of man from the pre-earthly to the earthly life, while others dwelt on the ascent in the spirit. But in later epochs, when the living substance of man's relation to the cosmic spirit could no longer be discerned, men went so far as simply to combine the autumn Mystery of the ascent with the spring Mystery of the descent into one festival.

Thus the confusion manifesting itself in the course of human evolution is evidence of the gradual effect of materialism: not only has the latter engendered false beliefs, but it has completely confused men's minds concerning an issue that at one period of human events existed, I might say, in a sacred order that caused mankind at the approach of autumn to celebrate a cosmic festival. But this in turn pointed to a Mystery act that evoked the thought: Nature falls into barrenness, it wilts and dies away, and this is like the physical dying of man; but while in Nature only the perishable is seen to be active, there lives in man the eternal, which must now be observed spiritually, disregarding the course of Nature, as the element of resurrection in the spiritual world after death. The spring Mysteries made it clear that Nature is conquered by the spirit, that, in turn, the spirit acts out of the cosmos, and that matter germinates and sprouts from the ground because it is driven by the spirit.

But this was intended to remind men—not of their passing into the spirit through death, but of their origin in the spirit, their descent from the spiritual world. Precisely where Nature begins to ascend, man was to remember his descent into the physical; and where Nature disintegrates, man was to contemplate his ascent, his spiritual resurrection. There is no doubt that such an understanding of man's relation to the cosmos intensified his soul life enormously.

But this varied according to the locality. In olden times some were definitely inclined to be autumn peoples and others rather spring peoples. Among the former were to be found the Adonis Mysteries; among the latter, other Mysteries concerned with what I have set forth today. And only those seekers after wisdom of whom it is correctly reported that, like Pythagoras, they moved about from place to place, from one Mystery to another, only those enjoyed the fullness of human experience. They would pass from a sanctuary where they could participate in the autumn secret, which is really the Sun secret, to one where the spring secret was revealed, the Moon secret. For this reason it was reported again and again of the consummate old initiates that they traveled from one sanctuary to another. It can truly be said of these that they had a certain inner experience of the year and its festivals. An old initiate of that sort could say to himself, I come to a place where the Adonis Festivals are celebrated, and I can witness the cosmic autumn and the rays of the spiritual Sun at the beginning of winter's night; I wander to another, where the Mysteries of spring are observed, and I can behold the secret of the Moon.—Thus he acquired an inner knowledge of all that relates to the whole meaning of the year.

You see, our Easter Festival has really had something saddled on it that is not right. It should really be a spring commemoration of burial; and this commemoration of burial in the spring should at the same time be an incentive to work, such as the more primitive man needed during the summer time: that is what such burial festivals were in their appeal to the human spirit. Easter was a festival of admonition regarding the work of summer, just as the autumn festival of the resurrection of the spiritual world was a festival celebrated in the season when the labor was completed. But it was of the utmost importance for man's soul and spirit that, when his work was finished, he should become aware of and inwardly experience the eternal in himself by contemplating the resurrection in the spiritual world, the days that follow upon death.

In passing, then, from Earth secrets to cosmic secrets, from Earth wisdom to cosmic wisdom, we can come to know what I should like to call the inner structure of the order of the year, as indicated by the festivals. But much of what had been hidden in them has disappeared.

Today I wanted to present this subject to you by considering the conditions of the firmament itself. Tomorrow I shall endeavor, as far as time permits, to penetrate still deeper into it in the light of certain Mystery sanctuaries.

We have seen that out of the Mysteries grew something that made man aware of being related to the world in a way that can be expressed in the annual festivals; and in particular we have learned that Easter is an outgrowth of the principle of initiation. From all that has been set forth it will have become evident what a significant role the Mysteries played in the entire evolution of humanity. Really everything of a spiritual nature that has permeated the world and developed through mankind originated in the old Mysteries. In modern terms we could say that the Mysteries were all-powerful in guiding the spiritual life.

Now, it was intended from the beginning that mankind should develop freedom; and to this end it was necessary for the old Mystery system to recede and for humanity to be less closely linked, for a time, with the powerful guidance that proceeded from the Mysteries, to be cast more upon its own resources, as it were. We certainly cannot assert today that the time has arrived in which men have achieved their true inner freedom and are ready to pass over into the next phase of evolution that is to follow upon that of freedom. This is not the case. Still, many have already passed through a number of incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less strongly felt than formerly; and though the seeds of these incarnations have not yet sprouted, they are nevertheless potentially present in the souls of men. And with the coming of a more spiritual age they will develop what they have not developed in their present dimness of vision. Above all things, however, it will be necessary that the wisdom, the vision, the experience of the spiritual such as can be attained by modern initiation, be met with esteem, with reverence; and this must be offered out of man's freedom. Without esteem and reverence, true enlightenment and a spiritual life of humanity is really not possible.

Surely we make the right use of festivals if with their help we try to implant in our souls this esteem, this reverence for things spiritual as they have evolved during the course of human history; if we try to learn how to observe in the most intimate way possible the spiritual significance of outer events, to understand how these carry spiritual meaning from one age over into another. For the time being men keep returning to Earth in repeating incarnations, thus carrying over their experiences of earlier epochs into later ones. Human beings are the most important factor in the further development of all that takes place within the history of mankind. But men of all periods live in a definite environment, and clearly, one of the most significant environments was that of the Mysteries. A most important factor in the progress of humanity is the carrying over of what has been experienced in the Mysteries and re-experienced, be it again through the medium of Mysteries, whence it acts upon mankind, or by other means of enlightenment. Today it must be the latter, for the true Mystery system has withdrawn from the present outer world and is to reappear only in the future.

If the impulse that went forth from here, from the Goetheanum, at the time of the Christmas Meeting, really takes root in the Anthroposophical Society, it is certain that by leading to ever deeper insight the Anthroposophical Society will be the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. These new Mysteries must be consciously nurtured by the Anthroposophical Society. We recall an event that can be utilized in our development as once a similar one was used: the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Both were the result of a grave wrong; yet on different planes things have different meanings, and it is possible for a frightful iniquity, as it appears on one plane, to be employed on another for the advancement of human freedom—in the sense that precisely such horrible events can bring about a real advance in human progress.

But as I have already said, such matters must be grasped through their inner meaning if they are to be approached understandingly. One must enter into the particular manner in which the spiritual element of the world pervaded the Mysteries. Yesterday I pointed out how the establishment of the annual Easter Festival grew out of a spiritual conception of the constellation of Sun and Moon, and that from the Moon viewpoint the other planets were observed. And I said further that according to what is learned by observing the other planets, the human being, in descending from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence, is guided in forming his light-ether body.

If we would observe and rightly understand how this light-ether body, these ether forces, are transmitted to us by the Moon forces, Moon observations—by what I might call the spiritual Moon observatory, this can be done as we have just endeavored to do it: by turning to the cosmos where it is all inscribed and exists as a fact. But it is important to ponder in our souls the human element as well, the part it plays in the different epochs as a factor of these truths.

As a matter of fact, never did the souls of men take part so intimately, so fervently, in this last phase of the descent to Earth—the enveloping in an etheric body—as in the Mysteries of Ephesus. There the whole service of the Goddess of Ephesus, exoterically called Artemis, was directed toward co-experiencing the spiritual weaving life within the cosmic ether. When members of the Ephesian Mystery approached the image of the Goddess, the feeling this gave them may be said to have become intensified to hearing; and what they heard, as though the goddess were speaking, was something as follows: I rejoice in all that bears fruit in the wide expanse of cosmic ether.—A deep impression was created by this expression of intense joy on the part of the Goddess of the Temple, her joy in all that grows, sprouts and burgeons in the world-ether; and an ardent feeling of close relationship with blossoming and flowering was in particular something that permeated the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as with a magic breath.

Nowhere else was the growth of the plant life, the drive of the Earth forces into the plants, co-experienced so intensely as in the Mystery of Ephesus, for the entire training here tended to that end. And this led to the next step: it was here that instruction was given, if I may so call it, specially intended to induce in the minds of members a feeling for the Moon secret, of which I spoke yesterday. It was everyone's own experience to feel himself as a light-being, because the act of receiving his light-form from the Moon was made so alive for the neophytes and initiates.

A part of the ritual ran something as follows—and one who could take part in it was actually transported into that act of forming himself out of the sunlight that circles around the Moon: as though proceeding from the Sun, there came to him the sound J O A.¹

He knew that this J O A activated his ego, his astral body. J O (ego, astral body) and A (the approach of the light-ether body), joining in J O A. Then, with the J O A vibrating in him, he felt himself to be composed of ego, astral body and etheric body.

And then it seemed as though he heard sounding up to him from the Earth—for he had been transported into the cosmos—something that saturated the J O A: eh v. JehOvA What rose up to him in the eh v were the Earth forces.

Now he realized that in this JehOvA he felt the complete human being. The premonition of the physical body, which he acquired only on Earth, he felt intimated in the consonants complementing the vowels that in the J O A indicate the ego, the astral and the etheric body.—This becoming one with the JehOvA was what enabled the disciple of Ephesus to sense in their full significance the last steps of the descent from the spiritual world.

But in feeling the import of this J O A the neophyte at the same time felt himself to be the sound J O A in the light. Then he was a human being: resonant ego, resonant astral body, in a shimmering light-ether body. He was sound in light. That is the nature of cosmic man; and in this state the initiate was able to grasp what he saw in the cosmos, just as on Earth he could perceive through his eyes what occurs in the physical environment of the Earth. When the neophyte of Ephesus bore this J O A within him he really felt transported into the Moon sphere, and he took part in all that could be observed from the point of view of the Moon.

In this condition the human being was man in general, in the sense that the differentiation between man and woman did not enter until the descent to Earth occurred. Man felt himself transported into this pre-earthly existence, the region immediately preceding his approach to the terrestrial. The Ephesian disciples were able to achieve this ascent to the Moon sphere in a particularly intimate way; and henceforth they carried in their heart, in their soul, what they had experienced there. It sounded for them something as follows:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.²

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

That expresses what permeated every Ephesian, and he counted it the most important of all that pulsed through his being. When a participant in the Ephesian Mysteries heard these words ringing in his ears, as it were, there was something about them that made him feel himself completely as a human being; for through them he became aware of the relation between the forces of his etheric body and the planetary system. This came to forceful expression. The cosmos speaks to the etheric body:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might.

Now the human being feels himself to be in the power of the moonlight.

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing.

The chiming, endowed with creative force, sounds across from Mars. And what gave strength to man's limbs, endowing him with the power of movement:

And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging.

From Jupiter there rays across:

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming.

And from Venus:

And Venus' love-bearing beauty ...

In order that then Saturn may gather up all that rounds off the human being within and without, prepare him to descend to Earth and there to clothe himself in a physical garb; and then further enable this physically garbed being, who bears the god within him, to live on the Earth:

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being
And to ages now aborning
Consecrate thee.

From what I have described you can readily see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was colorful and aglow with inner light. Epitomized in the thought of Easter, it comprised really everything that had ever been known about man's true dignity in the cosmos, in the whole universe. And many of the wanderers I mentioned yesterday—those who went from one Mystery to another in order to benefit by the totality of the Mysteries—many of these have repeatedly assured us that nowhere else as in Ephesus—at least, not so joyously—did they perceive so intimately and brightly the harmony of the spheres through that Moon point of view, where the radiant astral light of the world shone on them, where they sensed it in the spiritual sunlight flooding the Moon: in other Mysteries the saturation of man's soul and spirit with astral light was not felt with such an intense, inner artistic grasp.

All this was associated with the temple that went up in flames by the hand of a criminal or a lunatic. But as I mentioned during the Christmas Conference, initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were re-embodied in Aristotle and Alexander; and these personalities came close to what was still capable of being sensed, in their time, of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now, what appears to be an outwardly fortuitous event can be of great spiritual significance in world evolution. Among ourselves it has frequently been mentioned for years that the Temple of Ephesus was burned at the hour in which Alexander the Great was born. But as this temple burned, something significant occurred.

What untold experiences had come to the dwellers in that temple through the centuries! What a wealth of spiritual light and wisdom had suffused its halls! And while the flames lept up from the Temple of Ephesus, all that wisdom was imparted to the cosmic ether, so that we may say: the perpetually recurring Easter Festival of Ephesus that had been locked in the temple halls was henceforth inscribed in the dome of the universe, in so far as this is etheric, though in less legible letters.

That is often the way things work out: much human wisdom that in olden times had been enclosed within temple walls was released, was inscribed in the world-ether, and there at once becomes visible to one who ascends to real imagination. And this imagination is the interpreter, as it were, of the secret of the stars: what once was secret within the temples has been inscribed in the world-ether, and there it can be read by means of imagination.

We can put it another way, but it means the same. I go out into the starlit night, contemplate the firmament and throw myself open to it. Then, if I have the right capacity, the forms of the constellations and the movements of the planets are transmuted as into vast cosmic script. And if I read this script, something emerges like that which I explained yesterday in referring to the Moon secret. When the stars no longer remain merely something to be mathematically and mechanically computed, but become the alphabet of cosmic script, these things can indeed be read there.

But I should like to develop the matter further. When Alexander and Aristotle approached the Kabirian secrets in Samothrace at a time when the old Mysteries were already on the decline,² something occurred to them at that moment through the influence of the Kabirian Mysteries like a memory of the old Ephesian time, which both had passed through in a certain century. And once more there resounded the J O A, and again they heard intoned:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.

But in this memory, this historical recollection of something ancient, there resided a certain power, the power to create something new. And from that moment there streamed forth this power to create something new—but it was something strange and little observed by mankind. For you must really first understand the nature of this creative power that went forth from the collaboration of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any notable poem or other work of art—it can be a most beautiful one, such as the Bhagavad Gita or Goethe's Faust or his Iphigenia—anything you value very highly—and reflect on its rich and mighty content—let us say, on the content of Goethe's Faust. Now, by what means, my dear friends, is this rich content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted in the ordinary way, as it is to most people. At some time during your life you read Faust. What did you encounter on the physical plane—on the paper? Nothing but combinations of a b c, and so forth. The means by which the mighty content of Faust is disclosed to us consists only of combinations of the letters of the alphabet. If you know the alphabet, the paper contains nothing that does not correspond with one of the twenty-odd letters. Something is conjured up out of these twenty-odd letters—if you know how to read—that evokes for you the whole glorious substance of Faust. You may find it excessively tiresome to recite the alphabet, and you may consider it as abstract as anything could well be; yet rightly combined, this superlative abstraction gives us the whole of Faust.

Now, when there was heard again the cosmic resounding from the Moon that disclosed to Aristotle and Alexander what the blaze of Ephesus signified, how that fire had carried the secret of Ephesus out into the world-ether, there came to Aristotle the inspiration to found the cosmic script. This, however, is not achieved by means of the alphabet, but rather through thoughts, as book writing is made up of letters. And so the letters of the cosmic script came into being.—When I write them down for you they are just as abstract as the alphabet:

There you have a number of concepts. They originated when Aristotle laid them before Alexander. Learn to accomplish with these concepts what you do with the alphabet, and you will have learned to read in the cosmos by means of Being, Quantity, Quality, Relationship, Space, Time, Position, Having, Doing, Suffering.

In our age of abstractions something peculiar happened to logic, as it is taught in the schools. Imagine a custom existing in some school to teach—not reading, but, for instance, to provide books from which the pupils had to keep learning the letters in all conceivable combinations, but never arriving at using them for envisioning the wealth of the contents: that would be the same as what the world has done to Aristotle's Logic. In the books on logic are listed his categories—that's what people call them. People memorize them, but have no idea what to do with them. It is exactly like memorizing the alphabet without knowing how to apply it.

Reading the cosmic records bases on something just as simple as extracting the content of Faust by means of the alphabet—it must merely be learned. And fundamentally, all that anthroposophy has ever brought forth or ever will has been experienced by means of these concepts, just as what is read in Faust is experienced through the letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are comprised in these simple concepts that are the cosmic alphabet.

Something intervened in Earth evolution at the time of Alexander that stands in contrast with the direct perception so characteristic of Ephesus. It did not develop till later, especially during the Middle Ages; and it is deeply hidden, profoundly esoteric. Profoundly esoteric is the meaning that dwells in those ten simple concepts; and actually we are learning more and more to live in them. But we must keep striving to experience them as livingly in our soul as we do the alphabet when a wealth of spiritual substance is in question.

Thus you see how something that for thousands of years had been a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom flowed into ten concepts, whose inner power and light, however, remain to be re-disclosed. And when man will have learned again to read in the cosmos, when he will experience the resurrection of what has lain buried as though in a grave during this interlude in human evolution between the two spiritual ages, then it will come about at some future time that the world wisdom, the light of the world, will be found again. It is our task, my dear friends, to bring to light again what is hidden. We must make of Easter an experience for all humanity. And just as it could be said on other occasions that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, so it is in its whole manifestation an Easter experience, a resurrection experience coupled with an experience of the grave. And it is especially important during this Easter gathering that we should feel, if I may so express it, the solemnity of anthroposophic striving by realizing that today we can turn to a spiritual Being Who may be close to us, directly beyond the threshold, and appeal to Him thus: Oh, how blessed was mankind at one time with divine-spiritual revelation that still shone so very bright in Ephesus! But now all that is buried. How can I uncover what is so deeply buried?—for one would like to believe that what once existed might in some historical way be found again in the grave where it lies.

Then the Being will reply to us, as did once before a like being in a similar case: What you seek is no longer here. It is in your heart, if only you will unlock your heart in the right way.

Anthroposophy is indeed latent in the hearts of men, but it is for these human hearts to open in the right way. That is what we must deeply feel. Then we will be led back—not instinctively, as of old, but in full awareness—to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

All this I would like to implant in your hearts, my dear friends, at this Easter time; for to permeate yourself with something that can enkindle a feeling of solemnity in every heart dedicated to anthroposophy, that is something which carries up into the spiritual world and which must be correlated with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach. For this impulse must not remain a thought-out, intellectualistic one, but must spring from the heart; it must not be formal or matter-of-fact, nor must it be sentimental: it must issue from the cause itself and bear the mark of solemnity. When the conflagration at Ephesus blazed up, first in the outer ether and then in the heart of Aristotle, it revealed anew to Aristotle the secrets that could then be epitomized in the simplest terms; and we may say in all modesty that, just as he was able to use the fire of Ephesus to this end, so it is our task—and we shall fulfill it—to use what the flames of the Goetheanum carried into the ether: the aims and purpose of anthroposophy.

What do we gather from all this, my dear friends? That at the memorial service in the Christmas-New Year time, the time in which the disaster struck us a year before, it was vouchsafed us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. How could this be? Because we are right in feeling that what had previously been a cause pertaining to this Earth, worked for and established as such, was carried by the flames out into cosmic space. Because this misfortune has come to us we are, recognizing its consequences, justified in saying, Now we understand that we may no longer represent a mere Earth cause, but must know it as one of wide etheric space in which the spirit lives: the cause represented by the Goetheanum is a cause of the cosmic ether in which lives the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried out into the ether; and it is granted us to permeate ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses flowing in from the cosmos.

Take this in any sense—as an image, if you like: even as an image it signifies a profound truth, a truth that can be simply expressed: the Christmas impulse calls for the permeation of anthroposophical activity with an esoteric element. This is present because what had been earthly now reacts on the impulses of the anthroposophical movement through the astral light in the physical fire that rayed forth into cosmic space; but we must be able to receive these impulses.

Then, if we are able to receive them, we feel a certain important link in the chain of all that lives in anthroposophy: it is the anthroposophical Easter spirit, which can never in the world believe that the spirit perishes, but rather that it arises ever and again after dying through the world; and anthroposophy must hold fast to the spirit resurrected again and again out of eternal depths.

That is what we will take into our hearts as the Easter thought, the Easter feeling; and from this gathering we shall carry away feelings, my dear friends, that will fill us with courage and strength for work when we return to our allotted spheres.

• 1. Translator's Note:—For readers not familiar with German it must be explained that j is pronounced like our y in “yet”—in other words, like an excessively short German i. For this reason it is not too strange that one often encounters J for I (but only in capitals), and the above is a case in point. Indeed, there is no choice here but to use it, as the same letter must serve as a pure vowel in J O A and later as a modified vowel in Jehova.—The letters J O A must be pronounced Ee Oh Ah, and Jehova that appears later, Yay-hoh-vah.
• 2. Translation by Henry B. Monges.
• 2. Samothrace still existed as a memorial and also as a sanctuary for work, but in the main the Mystery schools had declined in the time of Alexander.

Easter is felt by many to be associated on the one hand with the deepest feelings and sensibilities of the human soul, and on the other, with cosmic mysteries and enigmas. The connection with cosmic mysteries becomes clear when we consider that Easter is a so-called movable feast, the date of which is fixed each year with reference to a specific constellation in the heavens. We will have more to say about this in the lectures to come. As for Easter's connection with the human soul, if we examine the customs and rites that have become associated with it through the centuries, we cannot fail to observe the great significance with which a large part of mankind has come to invest this festival.

For Christianity, Easter was not important initially, but it became so during the first few centuries. It is linked to Christianity's basic tenet, the Resurrection of Christ, and to the fundamental impulse to become a Christian provided by that fact. Easter is therefore a celebration of the Resurrection, but as such it points back to times and festivals predating Christianity.

These earlier festivals centered around the spring equinox, an event which, though not identical with Easter, enters into the calculation of its date, and celebrated nature's reawakening in the new life burgeoning forth from the earth. And this leads us directly to the heart of our subject, which is the Easter festival as a stage in the evolution of the Mysteries.

For Christians Easter commemorates the Resurrection. The corresponding pagan festival in a sense celebrated the resurrection of nature, the reawakening of what, as nature, had been asleep throughout the winter. However, there the similarity ends. It must be emphasized that with regard to its inner meaning, the Christian Easter festival in no sense corresponds to the pagan equinox celebrations. Rather, a serious examination of ancient pagan times reveals that Easter, in the Christian sense, is related to festivals that grew out of the Mysteries and that were celebrated in the fall.

This most curious fact demonstrates what serious misunderstandings regarding matters of the highest importance have occurred in the course of humanity's development. In the early Christian centuries, nothing less happened than the confusion of Easter with a completely different festival, with the result that Easter was moved from fall to the spring.

With this we touch upon something of enormous importance in the development of humanity. Consider for a moment the essential content of Easter. First, the figure central to Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, experiences death, as commemorated by Good Friday. He then remains in the grave for three days, symbolizing his union with earthly existence. Christians observe this interval, the one between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as a period of mourning. Finally, on Easter Sunday, the central being of Christianity arises from the grave. In essence, then, Easter involves Christ's death, lying in the grave, and resurrection.

Let us now turn to one of the many forms of the corresponding pagan festival, for only in doing so can we grasp the relation of Easter to the Mysteries.

Among many ancient peoples we find celebrations whose rituals enact a content strongly resembling that of the Christian Easter festival. One of these was the festival of Adonis, which was observed by certain Near Eastern peoples over long spans of pre-Christian antiquity. At the center of this festival stood a likeness of the god Adonis, who represented all that manifests itself in human beings as vigorous youth and beauty.

The ancients in many respects undoubtedly confused the god's image with what is represented; hence their religions frequently bordered on fetishism. Many indeed took the image of Adonis to be the actually present god, the god of beauty and youthful strength, of an unfolding seminal power that reveals in splendorous outer existence all the inner nobility and grandeur of which humanity is capable.

To the accompaniment of songs and rites portraying humanity's deepest grief and sorrow, the god's likeness was immersed for a period of three days in the sea if the Mystery site was near the sea, in a lake if it was near a lake, or otherwise in an artificial pond that was dug nearby. For three days a profound and solemn silence took hold of the entire community. When after that time the idol was lifted from the water, the laments gave way to songs of joy and hymns to the resurrected god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an external ceremony, one that profoundly stirred the souls of a great number of people. Even as it did so, however, it hinted at what happened within the sacred Mysteries to every person aspiring to initiation.

In those times every candidate for initiation was led into a special chamber. It was dark and gloomy and its walls were black. The chamber contained nothing but a coffin or at least something like it. Laments and dirges were sung around this coffin by those who had led the neophyte into the chamber. The latter was treated as if he were about to die. His teachers made it clear to him that by being laid in the coffin he was to undergo the experience of death and of the three days following. The candidate was to achieve total inner clarity regarding those experiences.

On the third day, in a spot visible to the occupant of the coffin, a branch appeared, signifying life's renewal. The earlier laments gave way to hymns of joy, and the initiate arose from his grave with transformed consciousness. A new language, a new script were revealed to him, the language and script of the spiritual world. He was permitted to see, and did see, the world from the viewpoint of the spirit.

Compared with these procedures enacted deep within the Mysteries, the external, public rites were symbolic, resembling in their form the initiation ceremonies of the select few. At the proper time these rites, of which the Adonis festival may be taken as typical, were explained to their participants. The rites took place in the fall, and participants were instructed in somewhat the following way:

“Behold, autumn is now upon us; the earth loses its mantle of plants and leaves. All is withering. In place of the greening, burgeoning life that began to cover the earth in spring, snow will now come, or at least a desolating drought. Nature is dying. And as it dies all around you, you shall experience that part of yourself that is similar to nature. Human beings die as well. Each of us has his autumn. And although when life comes to an end it is fitting that the souls of those remaining should be filled with deep sorrow, it is not enough to meet death only when it actually happens. In order that you be confronted with death's full solemnity, that you be able to remind yourselves of death again and again, you are shown each fall the death of that divine being who stands for beauty, youth, and human grandeur. You see that he too goes the way of all nature. Yet, precisely when nature becomes barren and begins to die, you must remember something else. You must remember that although human beings pass through the portal of death, although in this earthly existence they experience only things that are like those that die in autumn, at death they are drawn away from the earth and live their way out into the vast cosmic ether, where for three days they feel their being expand until it encompasses the whole world. Then, while the eyes of those on earth are focused only on death's outer aspect, on what is transitory, in the spirit world the immortal human soul awakens after three days. Three days after death it arises, born anew for the spirit land.”

In a process of intense inner transformation, the candidate for initiation into the Mysteries actually experienced this dying and reawakening within his own soul. The profound shock inflicted upon people by this old method of initiation—we shall see that in our day completely different methods are necessary—awakened within them latent powers of spiritual vision. They knew henceforth that they stood not merely in the world of the senses, but in the spiritual world as well.

What the students of the Mysteries received as timely instruction might be summed up in the following words: “The Mystery ritual is an image of events in the spiritual world, of what occurs in the cosmos; the public rituals in turn are a likeness of the Mysteries.” No doubt was left in the students' minds that the Mysteries encompassed procedures representing what human beings experience in forms of existence other than the earthly, that is, in the vastness of the astral and spiritual cosmos.

Those who could not be admitted to the Mysteries because they were deemed not mature enough to receive directly the gift of spiritual vision were taught appropriate truths in the cultic rituals, which symbolized what occurred in the Mysteries. These rituals, such as the Adonis cult, that took place amid autumn's withering, when all of nature seemed to speak only of the transience of earthly things, of the inexorability of death and decay, served to instill in people the certainty, or at least the idea, that death as experienced by nature in the fall must also overtake human beings, overtake even the god Adonis, representative of all the beauty, youthfulness, and grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis also dies. He disappears into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether, into water. But just as he is lifted out of it, so too is the human soul raised from the waters of the world, the cosmic ether, about three days after it has passed through the portal of death.

The secret of death itself was thus portrayed in the ancient Mysteries through the corresponding autumnal festivals. These festivals coincided in their first half with the withering and decay of nature, and in their second half with the opposite, namely, with the eternal essence of the human being. Humanity was to contemplate the dying of nature in order to recognize that human beings die as well, but that in accordance with their inner nature they arise anew in the spiritual world. The purpose of these ancient pagan Mystery festivals was thus to reveal the true meaning of death.

As humanity developed, the time came when a particular being, Christ Jesus, carried down into bodily nature the process of death and resurrection that the candidate for initiation had achieved in the Mysteries only on the level of the soul. People familiar with the ancient Mysteries can peer into them and perceive that neophytes were led through death to resurrection within their souls, that is, they awakened to a higher consciousness. It is important to note that their souls, not their bodies, died and that they did so in order to rise again on a higher level of consciousness.

What aspirants to initiation experienced only in their souls, Christ Jesus passed through in the body, that is, on a different level. Because Christ was not of the Earth, but rather a sun-being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, he could undergo on Golgotha in the entirety of his human nature what initiates had formerly experienced only their souls.

Those who still possessed intimate knowledge of the old Mystery initiation, from that time on to our own, understood the event at Golgotha most profoundly of all. They knew that for thousands of years people had gained knowledge of the spiritual world's secrets through the death and resurrection of their souls. During the process of initiation body and soul had been kept apart, the soul being led then through death to eternal life.

What a number of select people had thus undergone in their souls was experienced all the way into the body by the being who descended from the sun into Jesus of Nazareth at the time of his baptism in the Jordan. An initiation process repeated over many, many centuries became in this way a historical fact.

That was the essence of what people familiar with the Mysteries knew. They knew that because a sun-being had taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth what had formerly occurred for the neophyte only at the level of the soul and its experiences could now take place on the plane of the body as well. In spite of Christ's bodily death, in spite of his dissolution into the mortal earth, the Resurrection could be brought about because Christ ascended higher in soul and spirit than was possible for a candidate for initiation. The neophyte was incapable of bringing the body into such profoundly subsensible regions as Christ did, so that he could not rise as high in resurrection. Except for this difference in cosmic magnitude, however, it was the ancient initiation process that appeared in the historic deed on sacred Golgotha.

In the first Christian centuries very few people knew that a sun-being, a cosmic being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, or that the earth had actually been made fruitful by the coming of a being previously visible only in the sun for students of initiation. And for those who accepted it with genuine knowledge of the old Mysteries, Christianity consisted essentially in the fact that Christ, who could be reached in the old Mysteries by ascending through initiation to the sun, had descended into a mortal body. He had come down to earth, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

A mood of rejoicing, even of holy elation, filled the souls of those who understood something of this Mystery when it occurred. Living awareness then gradually gave way, through developments we shall discuss presently, to a festival in memory of this historical event on Golgotha.

While this memory was taking shape, awareness of Christ's identity as a sun-being grew dimmer and dimmer. Those familiar with the ancient Mysteries could not be mistaken about that identity. They knew that genuine initiates, by being made independent of the physical body and experiencing death in their souls, had ascended to the sphere of the sun and there found the Christ. From the Christ they received the impulse to resurrection. Having raised themselves up to him, they were cognizant of his true nature. From the events on Golgotha they knew that the being formerly accessible only in the sun had descended to mankind on earth.

Why? Because the old rite of initiation, through which neophytes had risen to Christ in the sun, could no longer be performed. Over time human nature had changed. Evolution had progressed in such a way as to make initiation by means of the old ritual impossible. Human beings on earth could no longer find Christ in the sun. For this reason he came down to enact a deed to which earthly humanity could now turn its gaze. This secret is among the holiest things of which we may speak here on earth.

What was the situation then for those living in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha? If I were to draw it, I would have to sketch something like this:

In the old initiation center (red, at right), neophytes gazed up to the sun and through initiation became aware of the Christ. To find him they looked out into space, so to speak. In order to show later developments, I must here represent time in terms of the earth proceeding along a line from right to left—its subsequent positions from year to year represented by arcs beneath the line—even though the earth does not actually move this way through space. At the left, let us say, is the eighth century; the Mystery of Golgotha (cross, at center) had already taken place. Human beings, instead of seeking Christ in the sun from a Mystery temple, now look back toward the turning point of time, to the beginning of the Christian era. They look back in time (yellow arrow in figure) toward the Mystery of Golgotha, and there find Christ performing an earthly deed.

The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was that it changed a previously spatial perception into perception through time. Furthermore, if we reflect upon what transpired in the Mysteries during initiation, remembering that initiation was an image of human death and resurrection, and then consider the form taken by the cult—the festival of Adonis, for example—which was itself a picture of the Mysteries, then these three things appear raised to the ultimate degree, unified and concentrated, in the historical deed on Golgotha.

The profoundly intimate rites of the Mystery sanctuaries now stood forth as an external, historical event. All humankind now had access to what was previously available only to initiates. No longer was it necessary to immerse an image in the sea and symbolically resurrect it. Instead human beings were to think of, to remember, what actually took place on Golgotha. The physical symbol, referring to a process experienced in space, was to be supplanted by the internal, immaterial thought, by the memory of the historical deed on Golgotha experienced within the soul.

A remarkable development began to take place during the centuries that followed. Human beings were less and less cognizant of spiritual realities, so that the substance of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer gain a foothold in their souls. Evolution tended toward the development of a sense for material reality. Human beings could no longer grasp in their hearts that precisely where nature presents itself as ephemeral, as dying and desolate, the spirit's vitality can best be witnessed. The autumnal festival thus lost its meaning. It was no longer understood that the best time to appreciate the resurrection of the human spirit was when outer nature was dying, that is, during the fall.

Autumn simply became an unsuitable time for the festival of resurrection, for it could no longer turn people's minds to spiritual immortality by underscoring nature's transience. People began to depend upon material symbols, upon enduring elements of nature, for their understanding of immortal things. They focused upon the seed's germinating force, which, though buried in the fall, sprouts forth again in spring. People adopted material symbols for spiritual things because matter could no longer stimulate them to perceive the spirit in its reality. Human souls lacked the strength to receive autumn's revelation of the spirit's permanence in contrast to the impermanence of nature. Help from nature, in the form of an outwardly visible resurrection, was now necessary. People needed to see plants sprouting from the ground, the sun gaining strength, light and warmth increasing, in other words, a resurrection of nature, in order to celebrate the idea of resurrection itself.

But this meant that the immediate connection to the spirit present in the festival of Adonis, and potentially present in the Mystery of Golgotha, disappeared. An intense inner experience that was possible in ancient times at every human death gradually faded out. In those times people had known that although a departed soul's first experiences beyond the gate of death were indeed a matter for solemn reflection, after three days the living could rejoice, for they knew that then the departed soul arose out of earthly death into spiritual immortality.

Thus the power inherent in the festival of Adonis disappeared. It lay in humanity's nature that this power should at first arise with great intensity. Ancient peoples beheld the death of the god, the death of human beauty, grandeur, and youthful vigor. This god was immersed in the sea on a day of mourning. The mood was somber, for people were at first to develop a feeling for the ephemeral. This mood, however, was to yield in turn to a different one, to that evoked by the human soul's super-sensible resurrection after three days. When the god—or rather his likeness—was raised out of the water, rightly instructed believers saw in it an image of the human soul as it exists a few days after death. The fate of departed souls in the spiritual world was placed before them in the image of the risen god of beauty and youth.

Thus each year in the fall human minds were awakened to a direct contemplation of something deeply connected with human destiny. At that time it would have been deemed inappropriate to convey this by means of outer nature. Truths that could be experienced spiritually were represented in the cult's symbolic rituals. However, when the time came for the ancient, physical idol to be replaced with the inner experience of the unseen Mystery of Golgotha, a Mystery that embodied the same truth, humanity at first lacked the strength, for the spirit had retreated into deeply hidden regions of the human soul.

The need to look to nature for symbols of the spirit has continued into our own time. Nature, however, provides no complete image of our destiny in death; and while the idea of death has survived, that of resurrection has increasingly disappeared. Even though resurrection is spoken of as a tenet of faith, the fact of resurrection is not a living one for people of more recent times. It must, however, once more become so through anthroposophical insight that awakens a feeling for the true concept of resurrection.

If, therefore, as has been said on appropriate occasions, we as anthroposophists must cherish the Michael idea as a heralding thought, and must deepen our understanding of the Christmas idea, so too must our experience of the Easter idea be particularly festive. For it is anthroposophy's task to add to the thought of death that of resurrection, to become an inner celebration of the resurrection of the human soul, imbuing our philosophy with an Easter mood. Anthroposophy will be able to achieve this when people understand how the ancient Mystery concepts can live on in the true concept of Easter, and when once again a proper view prevails of the body, soul, and spirit of the human being and of the fates of these in the physical, soul, and divine-spiritual worlds.

We can say that the original purpose of festivals is to make human beings look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things. The Easter festival in particular can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries we in the civilized world have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has made us focus less and less upon our connection with cosmic forces and powers. We have gradually been reduced to contemplating only our relation to earthly forces and powers. Of course, given the means for acquiring knowledge recognized as legitimate today this could scarcely be otherwise. However, if in pre-Christian times or even in the early centuries of Christianity someone who was connected with a Mystery center could have experienced what we moderns call knowledge, and if he were to approach the matter with the state of mind characteristic of those earlier times, he would not at all understand how human beings can live without an awareness of their connection to extra-earthly, cosmic things.

I would now like to sketch various matters that you will find dealt with more thoroughly in this or that lecture cycle. As the present lectures are intended to acquaint us specifically with the Easter idea, I naturally cannot elaborate on every detail, but only touch upon the most important points.

If we go back to certain ancient monotheistic religious systems—for example, to the Hebrew-Judaic system, with which we are most familiar—we naturally find the veneration and worship of one deity. That deity is the one of whom we speak in our Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead, as God the Father.

Now all the religions in which the concept of the Father-God played a part had a greater or lesser awareness of his connection to the cosmic moon forces, forces that stream down to the earth from the moon; the Mystery priests were particularly aware of this connection. In our time this consciousness of our relationship to the moon has all but disappeared. Perhaps the only place it lives on is in the inspiration of poetic imagination by the forces of the moon, or in medicine in the counting of human embryonic life in ten lunar months. But older world views were clearly aware that the human being, who exists in the spiritual world as a being of spirit and soul, is permeated and strengthened by forces emanating from the moon as he descends into earthly existence.

If we want to know what shapes our living form, to know what lives in us as nutritive and respiratory processes, as overall forces of growth, we must look not to earth forces but rather to cosmic forces. For a consideration of earth forces readily reveals their relation to us. If we did not hold our bodies together with extra-earthly forces, if our bodies did not receive their form from cosmic forces, how could the earth forces alone hold them together? The moment the human body is forsaken by cosmic forces and exposed to merely terrestrial forces, it falls apart, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. Earth forces can only make us into corpses; they cannot shape us. It is to the influence of the moon that we owe the uplifting forces within us, the forces that give us a cohesive, organized form, a form that during life does not succumb to forces that seize and destroy us at our death. It is due to this that throughout our earthly lives we can resist destruction, as indeed it must be resisted.

Although in this way we may say theoretically how the form of our body is dependent upon the forces of the moon, we must also see that these forces, which guide us, so to speak, through birth into a physical existence, were revered by ancient religions as the forces of the divine Father. The ancient Hebrew initiates knew that the moon radiates those forces that lead us into our earthly life and maintain us there. Our physical being is severed from these forces only when we pass through the gate of death.

To look up lovingly to these divine Father forces, to express devotion to them in ritual and prayer, this was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these religions were more consistent than you might think. For history completely misrepresents them, basing itself, as it must, merely upon external evidence, not upon what can be observed in spiritual vision.

Religions that focused on the moon and the spiritual beings living in it were really of relatively late origin. The truly primordial religions had in addition to this a clear perception of the sun forces and even, it must be added, of the forces of Saturn. However, with this we are entering into a period of history of which no physical documents survive, one that antedates the foundation of Christianity by many thousands of years. In my Outline of Occult Science I called this period the ancient Indian—partly to have a name for it, but also because it took place in the area we now call India. The civilization following this was the ancient Persian. During these civilizations human beings still developed very differently than they did later, and this is reflected in their religious beliefs.

During the last two thousand years or more, human beings have been developing in such a way that they no longer notice a certain discontinuity in their earthly development, and indeed, the break is really hardly noticeable. Something that takes place in human beings around the thirtieth year today remains largely in the subconscious or the unconscious. However, this was not the case among people who lived eight or nine thousand years before Christ. At that time a person's development was continuous up until about the thirtieth year, when a profound metamorphosis set in, which I shall be quite direct in describing. Although what I have to say might sound somewhat strange, it nevertheless fits the relevant facts.

In those ancient times the following could happen. Let us say that before turning thirty, a man had made the acquaintance of someone much younger, say three or four years younger, who would therefore experience the thirtieth-year metamorphosis much later than the former. Suppose now that the two men had not seen each other for some time and were then reunited. It could happen, and in today's words this sounds indeed strange, that if the younger person were to address the older one, the latter might not recognize him. The metamorphosis would have completely transformed his memory.

Because in these very ancient times people around the age of thirty tended to forget all they had experienced previously, it was the custom in the small communities of the time to record events in young peoples' lives in order to inform them of their earlier experiences after they had passed through the profound transformation. And then, when such people realized they had become different persons in their thirtieth year, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their earlier experiences—yes, it really happened this way—then at the same time they were also taught that before their thirtieth year only moon forces had acted upon them, whereas now sun forces were entering into their development.

The sun forces' influence on the human being is entirely different from that of the moon forces. Of course, people today know little of sun forces, for they know only their external, physical effects. They know, for example, that because of sun forces—pardon my bluntness—they sweat, feel hot; they are also no doubt aware of sunbathing and its therapeutic uses, but this is all superficial. The average person nowadays cannot even begin to conceive of the effect that the forces spiritually connected with the sun have upon him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, acquired some knowledge of the sun forces in the dwindling Mysteries, and was murdered on his expedition to Persia because he wanted to make it official again. [Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus), A.D. 331–363. Roman emperor 361–363. ] That is how strong the powers that wanted to exterminate such knowledge in the early Christian centuries were. It is therefore not surprising that no knowledge of such matters has survived.

While the moon forces determine the human being, permeate us with an inner necessity so that we must act according to our instincts, our temperament, our emotions, in a word, our whole physical and etheric nature, the spiritual sun forces free us from this. They dissolve, so to speak, the forces of compulsion, and it is really through their agency that we become free.

In ancient times the influence of the moon and that of the sun were sharply divided. Around the age of thirty people simply became sun people, that is, free, whereas up until then they had been moon people, or unfree. Nowadays these two overlap; even in childhood the sun forces act along with the moon forces, and the moon forces continue to work on us in later years. Thus in our time necessity and freedom intermingle.

As has been said, however, this was not always the case. In the prehistoric times of which we have been speaking, the effects of the moon and the sun upon human life were sharply separated, it was considered pathological when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the new beginning in his thirtieth year. By the same token, people spoke of having been born not once, but twice. As humanity began to develop in such a way that the second or solar birth (the first was called the lunar birth) became less noticeable, certain facts, including exercises and cult rituals, began to be applied to initiates in the Mysteries. In this way the initiates experienced something that the rest of mankind no longer did. They were now the twice-born.

The term twice-born that may be found in ancient oriental writings even today no longer carries its original meaning. It would be interesting to ask every orientalist and Sanskrit scholar—I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst, you can ask him how things stand according to his professional studies—whether they think modern scholarship can explain the meaning of this expression clearly and in no uncertain terms. [Professor Hermann Beckh, 1875–1937, orientalist. From 1922 on priest in the Christian Community. ] In fact, any number of formal analyses are available, but the essential meaning remains a mystery. Only those who know it derives from such a reality as I have just described can grasp its true meaning. About such things spiritual observation does, after all, have something to say; and once it has spoken, I would challenge any unprejudiced researcher in a conventional academic discipline to prove that existing documents do not at every step bear it out. Ordinary science will confirm spiritual research, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain things transcending ordinary science must be brought to light since the study of documents cannot lead to a true understanding of human life.

Thus we look back to an ancient time when people spoke of their lunar birth as of a creation by the Father. Regarding their solar birth people understood that in the sun's spiritual rays Christ's power, the power of the Son, is active, and that it sets human beings free. Consider what it does for us. Only through its action can we make something of ourselves in earthly life. Without the liberating forces and impulses of the sun, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable determinism, and not even the determinism of fate, but merely that of nature.

People in ancient times knew this. To them, the sun was a celestial eye from which the power of Christ streamed forth. They knew that this power released them from the bondage of iron necessity into which the moon forces had placed them at birth and which would otherwise govern their entire lives. The sun forces, the Christ forces looking down upon them through the cosmic eye of the sun, enabled them to make something of themselves in inner freedom, something they could not have become merely by virtue of the moon forces. Thus in the sun forces people saw the possibility of transforming or making something of themselves here on earth.

For completeness' sake I should briefly mention that ancient people also looked to the forces of Saturn, in which they saw all that sustains us when we pass through the portal of death, that is, when we experience the third earthly metamorphosis.

After death the human being is maintained by the Saturn forces that reign at what was in ancient times considered to be the outer limit of our planetary system. These forces support us and carry us out into the spiritual world; they maintain our being's integrity when the third metamorphosis occurs. This was unquestionably the world view of ancient times.

But humanity changes, and the time came when the sun forces' effects were known only in the Mysteries. This knowledge survived longest in the Mysteries' therapeutic sections, because the same forces that give us our freedom, our ability to make something of ourselves—namely, the sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and in other earthly beings and substances, which as a result possess healing properties.

For the most part, however, human beings lost this knowledge of the sun. Although knowledge of our dependence on the moon or Father forces remained with people for a long time, consciousness of our dependence on the sun forces, or we must really say, of our emancipation through those forces, disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of nature, which seem to be the sole topic in modern philosophy, are really nothing but a completely abstract version of the moon forces.

One person who still knew the sun forces and was able to let himself be guided by them was the Christ-bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them. For, whereas in the old Mysteries the sun forces could be reached only by looking up spiritually to the sun, it was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to receive these forces in his own body as they streamed down to earth. This I explained yesterday. The essential point, however, is that in his thirtieth year a transformation occurred in Jesus of Nazareth's body. It was the same transformation everyone experienced in primeval times, except that in those times only the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual sun entered into people, whereas here the primordial sun being himself, the Christ, descended into human evolution and dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This event central to all earthly life is at the root of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will be able to understand these things in their full significance if you consider the way Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, one might say, was as yet a human affair, for it was initiation.

Basic initiation consisted of three stages. The very first requirement for initiation was to develop, through exposure to what the Mysteries had to offer, a degree of inner humility we cannot fathom today. Although today people do indeed consider themselves enormously modest with respect to knowledge, anyone who can see through them knows they are truly possessed by arrogance.

Above all, at the outset of initiation the candidate had to believe that he was not yet really human, that this was a goal yet to be achieved. Today it would be asking too much of people at any stage of life that they should not consider themselves human beings. But for initiation this was the very first requirement. The candidate had to know that it was only before descending into an earthly body that he had been a human being, that in pre-earthly existence he had been a human being of soul and spirit, which then entered a physical body provided by a natural mother, by the natural parents. It did not “clothe itself” with the body—for that is an inaccurate expression—rather it permeated itself with a physical body.

Now just how, over a long period of time, the spirit and soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—is something most people are not aware of. What everyone is aware of, what everyone perceives through the senses, is the physical world around us. When spirit and soul have completed their permeation of our physical bodies at adulthood, we can only look to the outside with our eyes, listen with our ears to what is outside us, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness outside us through our skin; in other words, we perceive only what is outside not what is inside us. We cannot look into ourselves with our eyes: the most we can do is to dissect a human corpse and imagine we are looking into ourselves. But in reality we are not.

Suppose I have a house here before me. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I take some tools and, if I am strong enough, I can demolish the house. The individual bricks then lie before me in a heap; they are all that is left of the house. This is the way things are done today; people dissect the human being, cut him up, in order to get to know him. But in this way they do not get to know him; what they get to know this way is not at all a human being. To really know ourselves we must be able, just as today we look out of our eyes, to look in through them, to listen in with our ears, and so on.

All this taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the door to the human being. Initiation started from the candidate's realization that he knew nothing about the human being, and that, having no consciousness of himself as human, he could not really claim to be one. He would first have to learn to look in through his senses, in the same way he otherwise looks out.

That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment a person learned in this way to look inside himself, he experienced how he had been in pre-earthly existence, for then he knew himself to be a being of spirit and soul.

The initiate thus learned to look in (red) instead of out (yellow), and in so doing became aware of what had entered him as pre-earthly existence through his eyes, ears, skin, and so forth (green—see diagram). Aware now that he had had such an existence, he was told that now he could begin to acquaint himself with what today we would call natural science.

When we learn about natural science today, we are taught to observe the phenomena of nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is analogous to being told upon meeting someone we have known for a long time to forget everything we have ever had in common with that person. Fancy, if you will, a married couple being told upon seeing one another after a long separation to forget everything they had ever been through together. Well, yes, I can imagine that once in a while such a thing might actually be preferable, but life could not be carried on in that way.

Such, however, are exactly the circumstances imposed upon us by our modern system of civilization. We all become acquainted with the kingdoms of nature from their spiritual aspect before we descend to earth. And while today people are encouraged to forget all they learned then about minerals, plants, and animals, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, attempted to remember it. He was shown, for example, a quartz crystal, and then everything possible was done to remind him of what he had known about quartz—or about lilies, or roses—before he descended to earth. The knowledge of nature taught in the Mysteries was essentially recognition.

After a candidate had mastered the method of recollecting things viewed in pre-earthly existence, he was admitted to the second stage, which consisted of learning the music, architecture, geometry, surveying, etc., of the time. This was because the second stage comprised everything a person could learn not only by looking inside with his eyes and listening to what is inside him with his ears, but by actually entering into himself. Here the candidate for initiation was told he was entering the Temple Grotto of Man, which was the part of himself physically permeated by the soul-spiritual forces of which he had consisted before descending to life on earth. Into this he penetrated.

The Temple Grotto, he was told, consisted of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought. There he became acquainted with everything—well, yes, when looked at externally, it is the human head, which is small, but when entered into and viewed from within, it is as big as the world. The candidate came to know himself there as spirit. That was the first chamber. In the second he acquainted himself with feeling; and in the third with willing.

In this way initiates learned how the human being is organized with respect to the organs of thinking, feeling, and willing; they acquainted themselves, that is, with what matters on earth. Knowledge of nature, on the other hand, transcends such merely earthly matters. One acquires it before one even descends to earth. After that, it is simply a question of recalling it. By contrast, no houses are built in the spiritual world with earthly architecture. Similarly, the music that exists in the spiritual world is entirely spiritual; earthly music is merely its projection into the terrestrial air. Surveying is concerned with the dimensions of the earth; both it and geometry are earthly sciences.

It was important for the novice of the second stage to realize that all talk of gaining knowledge by purely earthly means, except as it applies to geometry, architecture, and surveying, is nonsense. He realized that a genuine science of nature must consist of recalling pre-earthly knowledge; however, geometry, architecture, music, and surveying are sciences that can be learned here on earth.

The candidate thus entered into himself and came to know the cosmic human being. This consisted of three chambers, unlike the single earthly organization we encounter by approaching the human being only from the outside.

In the third stage the candidate not only delved down into himself, coming to know himself spiritually, but as spirit he came to know the body as well. Initiates in all the old Mysteries called this level of knowledge “the Portal of Death.” Here one learned what it is like to lay aside the earthly body. There was, however, a difference between actual death and the death experienced in initiation. I will explain in the following lectures why this had to be so; at the moment I only want to point out the facts.

When we die, we discard our physical bodies and are no longer bound to them. We cease to respond to, and are henceforth free from, earth forces. But while we are still connected to our physical bodies, as was the case in the initiations of old, we must achieve by inner exertion something that in death happens of itself, namely, freedom from the body; we must hold ourselves outside the body for a time. Initiation required that one attain strong inner forces of soul, by virtue of which one could remain free from the physical body.

These same forces also provided higher knowledge of matters that could neither be perceived with the senses nor thought with the intellect. They brought human beings into relation with the spiritual world, just as our physical bodies bring us into relation with the physical world. At this point a candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a human being of spirit and soul, as an initiate, while still living on earth. From that time on he experienced the earth as outside himself and could live with the sun rather than with the earth, particularly in the older Mysteries. He knew what he had from the sun, how the sun forces were active in him.

After this third stage followed then the fourth. The fourth stage had an effect that may be explained as follows: When a human being on earth eats, he recognizes, for example, that he is eating cabbage or venison. He can drink various things, and know that first these things are outside, then inside him. He breathes the air; first it is outside, then inside, then outside again. In short, he carries within him earthly forces and substances that also exist outside him. What the Mysteries made clear to the student was that before initiation he had been an earth-bearer, a bearer of cabbage, venison, pork, and so on, but that upon completing the third stage of initiation and experiencing what it is possible to experience when one frees oneself from the body he would no longer be a bearer of cabbage, pork, and veal, but rather of what the sun forces gave him.

In all the Mysteries this spiritual gift of the sun forces was called Christos. Hence the candidate who had gone through the three stages and now felt himself to be a bearer of the sun forces, just as he had been a cabbage-bearer on earth, was called a christophor, a Christ-bearer. This was the term applied to a neophyte of the fourth stage in most of the ancient Mysteries.

In the third stage the candidate had to understand certain things thoroughly, most importantly that his craving for the physical body had to cease during moments of knowledge. He had to understand that the human being, as far as the physical body is concerned, belongs to the earth, but that the earth actually only destroys the physical body and does not build it up. It was at this point that the initiate came to know the upbuilding forces that originate in the cosmos.

He also learned something else. Precisely when he became a christophor, the initiate realized that spiritual forces are at work even in the substances of the earth, albeit in a way imperceptible to earthly senses. Had our modern way of speaking, which is the only one I can use, been comprehensible to people of ancient times, the sense of what the neophyte was told might be expressed as follows: “If you wish to know and understand substance, to see how the different elements combine and separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter from the cosmos. You can only do this, however, once you have been initiated into the fourth stage. For only when you are able to perceive by means of forces of the sun-existence will you be able to study chemistry.”

Now in our time it would be thought quite absurd, wouldn't it, to require of candidates for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry that they experience sun forces in the same way that they do earthly cabbage. In the old days, however, such demands were made. Furthermore, initiates realized that all the forces of ordinary cognition alive in the body can be used only to study geometry, surveying, music, and architecture. They are useless for the study of chemistry.

Chemistry as we know it today deals only with superficial realities, and has done so ever since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine knowledge must despair at having to learn the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon descriptions, not upon an inner penetration of the subject. If people were open-minded, they would realize that something more is necessary, that a different method of cognition is required, for a true study of chemistry. That this is not realized is simply the result of the cowardice so prevalent today.

When a candidate had passed the fourth stage, he was ready to become an adept in astronomy, which was an even higher stage of initiation. The merely external study of the stars, based on calculations and the like, ancient people considered thoroughly trivial. For the stars are inhabited by spiritual beings, and these beings can be known only after physical observation and even geometry have been left behind, when one can literally live in the universe and know the spiritual nature of the stars. At this stage the candidate became one of the resurrected and could observe the forces of the moon and sun at work, particularly in their effects upon earthly humanity.

Today I have described for you from two sides how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries, not in a particular season but at a certain stage of human development. Easter, we have seen, was the inner human being's resurrection out of the physical body into the spiritual universe. Those still cognizant of ancient Mystery wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha saw that Mystery in this light. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?

In ancient times it had been possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for even earlier than that it had been a matter of course for people to experience a second birth around their thirtieth year. Memories of this had been preserved, as had the knowledge of the Mystery schools, and thus what had been experienced directly in earlier epochs was kept alive as tradition. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, this had all been lost or forgotten. Humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not the power to whom the initiates had raised themselves in becoming christophors descended into Jesus of Nazareth and remained on earth since then, enabling people to unite themselves with it through Christ Jesus.

Easter as we know it today is thus a link in the evolution of the Mysteries, and we can become aware of its true content only by reviving that evolution. In the lectures to come you will be able to get at least an idea of what the ancients experienced in initiation. A new initiate could say to himself: “Initiation has revealed to me how sun and moon, as celestial opposites, work within me. I know now that my physical form—the particular shape of my eyes, nose, indeed of my entire body, inside and out—as well as the fact that this form could grow, and continues to grow through nourishment, is a result of the moon forces. Upon them all necessity depends. But that I can come to life within my physical body as a free human being, that I can alter my character and master myself, this is due to the sun forces, to the Christ forces. These I must awaken within me if I am to achieve through my own efforts a conscious freedom over and above that given me by the sun forces through another kind of necessity.”

From all this one can understand why even today human beings calculate the date of Easter from a particular constellation of sun and moon. All that remains of the old consciousness is an interest in finding the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. That Easter is set on that Sunday indicates, as I shall elaborate tomorrow, that people see in Easter's nature and form something that must be determined from above, that is, from the cosmos.

More than this, however, is necessary. The very content of Easter must be grasped anew, and this can happen only if we examine the old Mysteries. These showed first of all what people could experience if they looked inside themselves, the portal of Man, then when they descended into themselves and came to know the remotest inner recesses of their being, the three-chambered, cosmic human being; when they liberated themselves from the body—the portal of Death; and when they moved freely in the spiritual world, they became christophors.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear at the time human freedom started to assert itself, but the time to rediscover them has arrived. The Mysteries must be found anew, and we should be fully conscious that preparations to that end must now be made.

It was with this in mind that the Christmas Conference was held. An earthly sanctuary for the re-founding of the Mysteries is urgently needed. The Anthroposophical Society, as it continues in its development, must lead the way to that re-founding. It will be partly your task, my dear friends, to help this along in the right spirit. But for that you will need to examine the three stages of human life: introspection, self-penetration, and a consciousness one has in outer reality only in death.

As a reminder of what has been said in this hour, I would like us now to carry away and meditate upon the following words:

As an extension of my comments of the last few days, I would like today to take a closer look at the astronomical aspect of Easter. To do this, however, I will first have to touch upon certain facts relating to the so-called mystery of the moon.

For as long as there was Mystery knowledge people spoke of a secret of the moon. Inasmuch as human beings participate in the cosmos as a whole, this secret was related to human nature. It must be understood that with respect to our whole nature we are connected with the cosmos, just as through our physical bodies we are connected with the earth. Our materialistic times, however, have deprived us of the ancient awareness of the spirituality pervading the universe, spirituality that lives in the forms of constellations and in the motions of heavenly bodies. Our perception of heavenly bodies is now purely external; all we can do with them is calculate their movements, as we do with the planets.

Such an approach to astronomy, however, is like studying the human organism while ignoring that it is animated by a being of soul and spirit. Attending only to measurable quantities and to mechanical laws of motion, we overlook the spirit and soul that express themselves through these phenomena.

This spirit and soul, as they manifest themselves in the human being, are unified by the ego into a single entity, whereas in the cosmos as a whole we have to do in spiritual observation not with one but with a multitude, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings. Some of these express themselves in the forms of the constellations, others in the wanderings of the planets, still others in the radiant light of the stars, and so on.

This many-faceted heavenly spirituality is related to humanity's inner nature in the same way that earthly foodstuffs are related to our physical nature. The secret of the moon represents the most basic of these inner relations between us and the cosmos.

To the earthly eye the moon appears engaged in a constant metamorphosis. From a round, luminous disk such as we see now, it diminishes to half, then to a quarter, until finally it vanishes from sight in a phenomenon we call the new moon. This is followed by a gradual growth in size back to the full moon.

The usual explanation for this is, of course, that the moon is just a body that moves about in space and is illuminated from different angles by the sun, so that its shape apparently changes. Such an explanation, however, does not encompass everything the moon means to earth and to earthly humanity. Instead it must be realized that when we look at something as physically conspicuous as the full moon, something that presents us with a physical aspect, we are dealing with a completely different thing than when the same object presents itself to us as the new moon, which obviously cannot manifest itself in a visible, physical way due to the celestial configuration connected with it. However, we must not conclude from this that the new moon is completely without effect. When the state of the heavens is such that we know the moon to be new, it is simply a matter of the moon being present in an invisible and therefore more spiritual manner than when it appears in the physical light as full moon. The moon is therefore present at one time in a completely physical way, at another in a completely spiritual way, always rhythmically alternating between these two forms of expression.

In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to recall certain facts with which you may be familiar from the account I give of them in my Outline of Occult Science. [Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1972). ] We must particularly call to mind that the moon was once inside the earth. It was part of it. Then it split away, becoming a satellite, as they say, and since then has orbited around it. But during the time when it was still joined with the earth, it acted upon human beings from within it.

Humanity, of course, lived and developed completely differently on the earth when it still had the moon within it. Earth was impoverished when the moon split off, because the forces by which humanity was shaped and held fast from then on were entirely earthly rather than both earthly and lunar. Lunar forces that once acted upon human beings from within the earth now exert their influence from without.

At one time the lunar forces radiated into the human being from below upwards, affecting first the feet and legs and coursing upwards from there into the entire body. Since the moon split off, however, these forces have acted in the opposite direction, from the head downwards, and in doing so have acquired a completely different role in the life of humanity from the one they had previously.

Where do we see this different function of the moon? In descending from pre-earthly existence to a new life on earth the human being has very definite experiences. When he has undergone everything necessary in the period between death and a new birth, the human being prepares to come down to earth, to unite himself with a physical body provided by an earthly father and mother. But before his ego and astral body can unite themselves with a physical body, he must clothe himself in an etheric body, which he gathers form the surrounding cosmos. It is here that the new role of the lunar forces comes to expression, for this process has changed fundamentally since the moon separated from the earth. Prior to that time, human beings who had completed the life between death and a new birth and again approached earth needed forces to gather the ether, which is scattered throughout the cosmos, around their ego and astral bodies, in order to fashion from it the shape of their etheric bodies. Such forces were provided by the moon from within the earth. Since the moon split off, human beings have obtained the necessary forces from outside the earth, that is, from the moon. Immediately before they enter earthly existence, then, human beings must call upon what lies in the moon forces, that is, upon something cosmic, in order to fashion their etheric bodies.

This etheric body must be shaped in such a way that it has, so to speak, an outside and an inside. This may be depicted as follows:

In fashioning the outer side of the etheric body human beings need forces of light, for in addition to other substances the etheric body is composed primarily of the streaming light of the cosmos. Sunlight, however, is of no use for this. Sunlight cannot bestow the forces that enable human beings to shape their etheric bodies. To obtain these we need the light that shines from the sun to the moon and is then reflected back, for in this process the light is essentially changed. All the light we receive from the moon, the light that the moon sends out into the cosmos, contains the forces we need to form the outside of our etheric bodies. Conversely, the spiritual forces that radiate from the new moon are the ones we need to shape the inside of our etheric bodies.

Thus our ability to form the outside and inside of our etheric bodies is related to the moon's rhythmic alternation between light and darkness. And this is possible only because the moon, contrary to the idle chatter of modern science, is really more than just a body in space; in reality it is permeated with spirit; it bears a multiplicity of spiritual beings within it.

On various occasions I have explained that when the moon separated from the earth not only did physical matter stream out into space but also a class of spiritual beings who had lived on earth in spiritual rather than physical form and who were mankind's original teachers. These beings went with the moon into space and founded a sort of lunar colony. We must therefore distinguish between the moon's physical-etheric and its soul-spirit aspects, keeping in mind that the latter is a multiplicity rather than a unity.

The activity of the moon's spiritual beings is entirely determined by how they view the surrounding world from their standpoint. To express myself pictorially, these beings first direct their gaze to what is most important to them, namely, to the planets. All occurrences on the moon, including those that assure human beings of the forces they need to fashion their etheric bodies, depend upon the results of observations that the beings living in the moon make of our solar system's planets—Mercury, sun, moon, and so on.

This was known in certain of the old Mysteries. Initiates of such Mysteries were aware that the moon-beings acted according to observations of the planets' positions and motions. This was expressed by bringing the moon, by which celestial configurations important to the fashioning of the human etheric body were determined, into human awareness and in connection with the other planetary forces. This was done by means of the names given to the days of the week:

In this way the moon's viewpoint was incorporated into a structuring of time that reminded human beings of the entire planetary context. In this way the ancient Mysteries attempted to awaken people's memories of pre-earthly existence, of a time when they had needed forces created on the moon by the moon-beings' observation of the planets. People were to be reminded that they owed the particular form of their etheric bodies to what the moon had been able to glean from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so on.

Thus we have on the one hand the moon's rhythmic oscillation between light and darkness as it orbits around the earth, and on the other the entire planetary system, inscribed into human consciousness by the names of days of the week. And to this the Mysteries could add even more. They taught, for example, that because the moon-beings can look toward Mars, we receive etheric bodies endowed with the capacity for speech. Likewise, because the moon-beings can observe Mercury, our etheric bodies are infused with the capacity for movement. In fact, if we consider these same teachings from an altogether different point of view, we can discover how eurythmy arises from human speech. Eurythmy develops out of speech when we explore the mysteries of speech by asking the moon-beings about their observations of Mars, and then watch how these observations change when they shift their gaze to Mercury. If we transform the Mars experiences of the moon-beings into their Mercury experiences, then we see the capacity for eurythmy develop out of our capacity for speech. This is the cosmic perspective on how speech is metamorphosed into eurythmy.

The capacity for wisdom that lives within us is made possible by the moon-beings' experiences of Jupiter. Our ability to love and to appreciate beauty derives from their experiences of Venus. Inner warmth of soul is planted into our etheric bodies by what the moon-beings learn from observing Saturn. And in order that our etheric body's formation not be disturbed during the period immediately preceding our descent to earth, everything that derives from the sun is kept at a distance; one could almost say, it is pushed away. It is from the sun or rather from the sight of the sun that protective forces must shield us if we are to become self-contained beings through the formation of an etheric body.

In this way we come to know what takes place on the moon, as well as how the etheric body is fashioned as the human being descends from pre-earthly into earthly existence. These are the facts I mentioned relating to the secret of the moon.

Such things may be spoken of today. In certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely spoken of, but actually lived through. What I wrote on the blackboard was not just known, but inwardly experienced:

The Mysteries of which I spoke to you yesterday enabled initiates to transcend the merely external use of their bodily senses, to free or distance themselves from their physical bodies, and to live exclusively in their etheric bodies. When they did so, however, they lived with all the realities of which I have just spoken. Rather than the speech that is formed in the larynx, they experienced the cosmic language that resonates from Mars. Their movements, too, were in harmony with the guidance Mercury exerts over the cosmos. They moved, that is, not with feet and legs, but in their essential being in accordance with Mercury's direction. And instead of having the wisdom we normally acquire with such difficulty as we progress through childhood and youth—nowadays it is really a lack of wisdom—the initiates lived entirely within the wisdom of Jupiter, not directly, but by uniting themselves with the moon-beings who observed it.

Through this form of initiation one could live entirely in the moon's radiant light. One actually left the earth.

No longer a being of earthly flesh and blood, one lived within the moonlight, but in the moonlight structured and modified by what lived in the other planets of the solar system. Through this kind of spiritual observation one actually became a light-being of the moon.

This must not be taken symbolically or abstractly. Just as today when we take a walk into Basel and back, we are fully conscious that what we are experiencing is real, so at that time people could be conscious of actually paying the moon-beings a visit through initiation. Initiates were conscious of taking leave for a while of their physical bodies and of moving into the moon's luminous realm as beings of spirit and soul. Clothed in bodies of light and united with the moon-beings, they could gaze out into the solar system and observe what revealed itself there.

Primary among the things they observed was that sun-beings exerted forces that could not be permitted to play any part in the fashioning of the human etheric body. They perceived, that is, that the sun tends to disintegrate or destroy the etheric body. And for that reason they knew that the forces emanating from the sun-beings must be received by the higher human members, the ego and the astral body, but not by the etheric body. Only upon the higher members could the sun-forces be allowed to work. For the etheric body, on the other hand, one turned not to the sun but to the planets. For the astral body and even more so for the ego's full inner power one had to turn to the sun.

This was the second thing revealed by the Mysteries that had access to the secret of the moon. Initiates knew that through their etheric bodies they belonged to the system of the planets, but that their ego forces in particular and also those of their astral bodies derived from the sun. In other words, through this form of initiation they became one with the moonlight, but looked at the same time toward the sun.

Initiates grasped that the sun shines its light upon the moon because it may not directly transmit that light to human beings. We then have moonlight in conjunction with the influences of the planets, out of which, as we have seen, the human etheric body is fashioned. That was the knowledge conveyed by this particular form of initiation, which thus also revealed the extent to which an initiate carried within himself the power of the spiritual sun. The initiate observed this directly, achieving thereby the level of a Christ-bearer. He became the bearer of a sun-being, not a vessel, but a bearer. Just as the moon itself, when it is full, is a sunlight-bearer, the initiate became a Christ-bearer, a christophor. His initiation into this was a thoroughly real experience. He escaped form the earth and ascended to become a being of light.

Now try to imagine this real experience, this earlier, inner Easter experience, transformed into a cosmic festival. In later times people no longer knew that they could rise above the earthly, unite themselves spiritually with the moon, and from there observe the sun. However, a reminder of all this had to be preserved, and it was preserved in the Easter festival.

Although in later times people with a more materialistic outlook could not recognize the possibility of such experiences, they did retain an abstract recollection of them. Rather than looking within themselves and knowing that they could unite themselves with the moonlight, they looked up to the full moon, imagining that not they but rather the entire earth was striving up towards it.

At no time could this be experienced more strongly than at the beginning of spring, when forces rise upward from the earth's surface out of the seeds buried in it.

Even after developing into plants these forces continue to stream upward into the cosmos. In the ancient Mysteries it was known that human beings could most readily achieve the lunar and solar initiation and become christophors when the earth's inner forces streamed up in this way into the cosmos through the stems and leaves of plants. The Mysteries represented this in the image of a human being floating upward on these forces toward the moon. This could only happen, however, when the moon was full.

Something of this knowledge survived into later times, but it became abstract. “The moon must be full.” Dimly, no longer realizing it could be an actual human experience, people subconsciously imagined something other than themselves streaming upward in the spring toward the first full moon. The moon itself, they thought, then looked toward the sun, that is, toward the first following Sunday. In other words, instead of a christophor looking at the sun from his newly-gained vantage point in the moon, people imagined that the moon looked at the sun, that is, at its symbolization in Sunday. Thus we have the following sequence:

March 21: Full moon: Sunday.

March 21 is the beginning of spring; the earth's forces burgeon forth into the cosmos. One must then wait until the proper observer, the full moon, is there. The moon then observes the sun, making the following Sunday Easter. Our method for fixing Easter's date is thus an abstract vestige of what was once a thoroughly real Mystery procedure, one that in ancient times many people experienced.

This procedure, however, is different from the one I described the day before yesterday. The latter, as you will recall, led to an understanding of the nature of death. I said that the process of resurrection, which was symbolized by the rituals of the Adonis cult and of others like it, demanded that one first undergo a kind of death experience in order to rise in the spiritual world after three days. For reasons I have already set forth, this resurrection process took place in the fall. By contrast, the procedure I have described today was celebrated or enacted in a different set of Mysteries, those conferring the solar and lunar initiation. It carried the initiates back before the beginning of earthly life.

Thus we look back to a time when certain Mysteries recognized our descent from pre-earthly into earthly life, while others, the autumnal Mysteries, recognized our ascent into the spiritual. In later times, however, when people no longer sensed this living relationship between themselves and the cosmos, the autumnal Mystery of ascent was mistakenly combined with the spring Mystery of descent.

Here materialism began to show its effects. For materialism not only gave rise to false opinions, it cast people into total confusion concerning things that had previously lent a kind of sacred order to human existence.

Part of that sacred order was that when fall came, a cosmic festival was observed that pointed toward a Mystery procedure, the spirit of which might be captured by the following words: “Nature is falling into decay, withering away. In this it resembles the decay of our own physical being. However, even as we look at nature, perceiving only transient things, the eternal lives within us. This must be viewed with spiritual eyes and is not affected by what happens in nature. After death it rises again in the spiritual world.”

Through the spring Mysteries, on the other hand, humanity realized that nature is overcome by the spirit.

Spirit works in from the cosmos, causing physical life to burgeon and sprout forth from the earth. People were thus reminded, not of how we proceed into the spiritual world at death, but rather of how we emerge from it and descend to earth. In other words, precisely when nature was on the rise, human beings were reminded of their descent into the physical, while when nature fell into decay, they were to reflect upon their rise, their resurrection, into the spiritual.

You can imagine the extent to which inner life was deepened by this experience of humanity's relation to the cosmos.

Different regions stressed different festivals. In ancient times there really were peoples who were more autumnal, while others were more vernal. The autumnal peoples celebrated Mysteries like those of Adonis; the others had Mysteries based upon such realities as I have described today. Only people of whom it is reported, and correctly so, that they traveled like Pythagoras from place to place, from Mystery center to Mystery center seeking knowledge, were able to have the entire range of human experience. Traveling from one place to another, they might at one time behold the autumnal Mystery, which is actually the Mystery of the sun, and at another the spring Mystery, which is the Mystery of the moon. This is why the ancient universal initiates are always portrayed as traveling from one Mystery center to another. And it may truly be said that they thereby inwardly experienced the year through the various festivals. Coming to a place where an Adonis festival was celebrated, they might say: “I behold the cosmic autumn and the radiance of the spiritual sun at the onset of winter's night.” Where a spring Mystery was celebrated they might say: “I behold the Mystery of the moon.” In this way they came to know the year's full inner meaning.

Thus, as you can see, Easter as we know it today is encumbered with things that do not really belong to it. It should actually be a ceremony of burial, one that goads us into working, just as the spring festivals did for ancient peoples. Such festivals gave them the spiritual incentives they needed for work in the summer; in other words, Easter was an admonishment to prepare for the summer's work. By contrast, the fall festival of resurrection was celebrated at a time when human beings left work behind. In leaving it behind, however, they experienced within themselves something of supreme importance to beings of spirit and soul, namely, an awakening to the eternal in them. This they experienced by contemplating the soul's resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

By proceeding from earthly Mysteries to cosmic Mysteries, from earthly knowledge to cosmic knowledge, we thus begin to recognize the year's inner structure as revealed through the festivals, even though much of the festivals' hidden meaning has been lost. Tomorrow, as time permits, I will try to go more deeply into matters that have been described today in more general, cosmic terms, by focusing on particular Mystery centers.

We have seen how the Mysteries provided human beings with a conscious connection to the world in such a way that this connection could be portrayed in the yearly cycle of festivals. In particular we have seen how Easter developed out of the principle of initiation. It should be obvious from all that has been said that the Mysteries played a highly significant role in humanity's development. Indeed, in ancient times essentially all of humanity's spiritual life and development originated within the Mysteries. To put it in modern terms, the Mysteries wielded great power in the overall guidance of spiritual life.

Human beings, however, were destined to achieve freedom, which meant that the Mysteries' powerful influence had to diminish and for a time leave human beings more or less to their own devices. Although today it can hardly be said that we have already achieved true inner freedom and are ready to proceed with the next evolutionary step, still a significant number of people have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries has been less palpable than it was in earlier times. The fruit of these incarnations, although not yet ripe, is alive in peoples' souls. And when an age finally dawns that is once again more spiritual, the current ignorance will be overcome. People will then freely greet with esteem and reverence the spiritual knowledge and experience that can be achieved through modern initiation. For without esteem and reverence, neither knowledge nor humanity's spiritual life would be possible.

One of the purposes of the festivals is to try to cultivate this reverence in ourselves by understanding how the spiritual has developed throughout human history. Through the festivals we can learn to look very intimately at how historical events pass spiritual contents on from one age to another. For even though human beings are the most fundamental link in the chain of historical development, in that they reincarnate and thereby carry experiences of earlier epochs into later ones, nevertheless each life is lived in a particular milieu, of which the Mysteries are of course a highly significant part. A most important factor for the progress of humanity is the carrying of the contents of Mystery experiences into later incarnations, where they are encountered again, either in new Mysteries, which in turn have their effect upon humanity as a whole, or in some other form of knowledge.

It is in some other form of knowledge that past Mystery wisdom must be experienced in our time, for the actual Mysteries have all but disappeared from outer life, and must rise again. I might say that if the impulse originating from the Christmas Conference that was held here at the Goetheanum truly takes hold within the Anthroposophical Society, then the Society, inasmuch as it leads to the Classes, which have already begun to be established, will become the basis for a renewal of the Mysteries. [The School for Spiritual Science, which was founded at the Christmas Conference in 1923, was divided into subject sections. In addition, the esoteric training was to progress through three classes, only the first of which had been established before Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. ] The Anthroposophical Society must consciously cultivate this renewal. The Society was, after all, witness to an event that, like the burning of the Temple at Ephesus, can be turned to good historical account. In both cases a grievous wrong was perpetrated. However, what is a terrible wrong on one level can turn out to be useful for human freedom on another level. Such harrowing events can indeed call forth a true step forward in human evolution.

To understand such matters we must examine them, as I mentioned before, on as intimate a level as possible. We must look at the particular way in which the world's spirituality lived within the Mysteries.

As I indicated yesterday, the fixing of Easter's date grew out of a spiritual appreciation of the constellation of the sun and the moon. I also indicated that moon-beings observe the planets, and that these observations guide human beings in their descent from pre-earthly into earthly life, guide them in the formation of their etheric bodies. Now in order to understand how the lunar forces or, one might say, the spiritual observatory on the moon makes etheric forces available to human beings, we can look to the cosmos; for, as we have had occasion to see, it is inscribed there, it exists there as a fact. However, it is also important to appreciate the interest human beings have taken in these matters throughout history. And that interest was nowhere more sincere than in the Mysteries at Ephesus.

Every aspect of the service to the goddess of Ephesus, known exoterically as Artemis, was designed to give an experience of the creative spiritual forces pervading the cosmic ether. When the participants in the Mysteries approached the statue of the goddess, they had the sensation of hearing her speak, in words such as this: “I delight in all that bears fruit within the vast cosmic ether.”

To hear the goddess thus express her heartfelt delight in everything that grows, buds, and sprouts within the cosmic ether was a truly profound experience. Indeed, the spiritual atmosphere of Ephesus was aglow with heartfelt sympathy for all budding and sprouting things. The Mysteries there were instituted in such a way that nowhere else could one find such sympathy with vegetative growth, with the budding and sprouting of the earth into the plant world.

One consequence of this was that the lessons, if I may call them that, that dealt with the mystery of the moon, of which I spoke yesterday, could be given at Ephesus with particular force and clarity. As a result of such instruction, each student was able to experience himself as a figure of light formed by the moon. One exercise in particular directly placed a person capable of performing it into a process of building himself up out of sunlight transformed by the moon. In the midst of this the sounds I, O, A * rang forth, as if emanating from the sun.

[*Translator's note: Pronounced as in English “eagle,” “boat,” “father.”]

These sounds, the Mystery student knew, enlivened his ego and astral body. I, O: ego, astral body, and with A, the approach of the luminous etheric body: I, O, A. As these sounds vibrated within him, he experienced himself as ego, as astral body, and as etheric body. Then, as if resounding from the earth, for the student was now outside the earth, came the sounds eh-v, which mingled with the I, O, A.

In this word, IehOvA, the Mystery student experienced himself as a complete human being. Through the consonants, he felt a premonition of his earthly physical body. These consonants are bound up with the vowels, I O A, which express the ego, astral body, and etheric body.

It was through such immersion in the word IehOvA that the Ephesian apprentice was able to experience the final stages of his descent out of the spiritual world. As he did so, however, he felt himself living within the light. Now truly human, he was a sounding ego and sounding astral body within a light-filled etheric body. Sound within light—such is the cosmic human being.

In this way it was possible to take in what is visible in the cosmos, just as what happens in the earth's physical surroundings can be taken in through the eyes.

While carrying I O A within himself, the Ephesian student felt himself transported to the sphere of the moon, where he shared in the observations that could be made from there. In this condition he was still a human being in general, undifferentiated; only upon descending to earth did he become man or woman.

It was a pre-earthly state into which the student was transported, a state preparatory to the descent to Earth. In the Ephesian Mysteries this self-elevation into the sphere of the moon was an especially vivid experience, which the initiates inwardly cherished, and whose content might be expressed in the following words:

Every Ephesian bore this reality within himself, counting it among the most important things that permeated his being. Indeed, he felt himself to be truly human when these verses sounded in his ears, to use a somewhat trivial expression. For he associated them with a newly-awakened consciousness of his connection with all the planets through his etheric body's forces. The verses, pregnant with meaning, were addressed by the cosmos to the etheric body:

The human being is experiencing himself here within the power of the shining moon.

Creative tones resonate forth from Mars. Then comes the force that animates our limbs, makes us into beings of movement:

Jupiter sends forth its rays:

As does Venus:

So that Saturn may gather all together and complete our inner and outer development, preparing us to descend to Earth and to clothe ourselves in a physical body, so that we might live on Earth as physical beings who carry the god within us:

From these descriptions you may gather that a brilliant inner light permeated the spiritual life of Ephesus. In fact, all that had ever been known about humanity's true stature within the cosmos was gathered and preserved there in the concept of Easter.

Yesterday I mentioned that certain people wandered from place to place in order to experience the totality of Mystery wisdom. Of these, many expressed wonder at the richness of the spiritual life at Ephesus. They assure us repeatedly that nowhere but there could they perceive so clearly and richly the harmony of the spheres as heard from the standpoint of the moon. The most brilliant astral light of the cosmos appeared to them there: they sensed it in the sunlight glimmering around the moon, pervading that light with spirit in the same way that the human soul pervades the physical body. Nowhere else than in Ephesus could they experience this, at least not with the same sense of joy or artistic vision.

Such was the Mystery center that went up in flames through the deed of a criminal or a madman. Ephesian initiates later reincarnated in Aristotle and Alexander, as I mentioned at the Christmas Conference. [Alexander the Great, 356–323 B.C., king of Macedonia 336–323, conqueror of Greek city-states and of the Persian empire. Pupil of Aristotle.
Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. Greek philosopher, pupil of Plato. Tutor of Alexander the Great.] These individualities then came into contact with what remained of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

As an example of how a seemingly meaningless outer coincidence can actually be of great significance in the world's spiritual evolution, I may mention, as I have before, indeed for many years now, that the temple at Ephesus was burning at the very moment as Alexander the Great was born. As it burned, however, something else happened as well.

Consider for a moment how much the devotees of the temple had experienced throughout the centuries, how much spiritual light and wisdom had passed through its halls. All that was passed on to the cosmic ether by the flames. One might indeed say that the temple's continuous, concealed celebration of Easter was henceforth inscribed, although in somewhat less legible characters, into the vault of the heavens, to the extent that that vault is etheric. This is also true of much other human wisdom as well. Surrounded in ancient times by temple walls, it later escaped and was written into the cosmic ether, where those who have risen to true Imagination may perceive it directly. Because of this, Imagination may be said to be an interpreter of the secrets of the stars. It is the key to former temple secrets now inscribed into the cosmic ether.

The same thought may be expressed in another way. Imagine that you are looking at a crystal clear night sky, allowing your perceptions to sink deep into your soul. Provided you are properly prepared, the forms of the constellations, the movements of the planets will all begin to transform themselves into something like a cosmic script. And by reading this script you will grasp the outlines of the mystery of the moon, which I set forth yesterday. Such things can be read in the cosmic script, provided the stars are no longer seen merely as objects of mathematical and mechanical calculation, but as letters of a cosmic alphabet.

To continue with the Ephesian Mysteries: as I mentioned, Aristotle and Alexander came into contact with the Cabeirian Mysteries in Samothrace at a time when all the ancient Mysteries were in decline. At Samothrace, however, these Mysteries were remembered and preserved, even practiced. Under their influence, Alexander and Aristotle experienced something akin to a memory of Ephesus, in whose spiritual life both had of course participated in an earlier incarnation. Once more the I O A sounded forth for them, as well as the verses:

Cosmic-born being, thou clothed in light,
Strengthened by sun in the realm of moon's might,

Blessed art thou by Mars' creative ringing
And Mercury's swiftness, mobility bringing,

Illumined by wisdom from Jupiter raying
And by Venus's beauty, love portraying—

So that Saturn's venerable spirit-ways
Might consecrate thee to the world of space and time.

But this was more than just a memory of times past. Rather, it gave them the strength to create something new, something unusual and hence little regarded by humankind. Before I reveal it, you must understand just what kind of creation it was.

Take any significant work of literature, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, or Goethe's Faust, or Iphigenia, in short, any work that you admire, and think about its richness and powerful content. Now, how is that content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it was transmitted in the usual way, that is, that at some point in your life, you read it. Physically speaking, what precisely did you have before you? Nothing but combinations of letters of the alphabet on paper. The entire magnificent content comes to you through mere combinations of the twenty odd letters of the alphabet. But provided you can read, something comes to life through these twenty odd letters that enables you to experience the entire rich content of Goethe's Faust.

On the other hand, you may decide that the alphabet is a frightfully boring thing, that such a concatenation of letters is the most abstract thing imaginable. And yet these little abstract letters, properly combined, can give you all of Goethe's Faust!

When Aristotle and Alexander heard the celestial harmonies once again at Samothrace, they realized what the burning of the temple at Ephesus had meant. They perceived that the Ephesian Mysteries had been carried out by the flames into the vast cosmic ether. At that moment they became inspired to found the cosmic script, which is composed not of letters of the alphabet, but of thoughts.

Thus the letters of the cosmic script were discovered, which in their own way are as abstract as the alphabet:

What we have here is a collection of concepts, first introduced by Aristotle to his pupil Alexander. One can learn to use them in much the same way that one learns to use the letters of the alphabet and read the cosmic script with them.

In later times, particularly in the abstract phase of scholastic logic, a very unusual thing occurred. Imagine a school in which the students are taught not to read, but rather only to learn the various letters of the alphabet in every imaginable combination—ac, ab, ae, and so on. In essence, this is what happened to Aristotelian logic. Works on logic would enumerate the above concepts, called categories. Students would learn them by heart, but not know what else to do with them next. It was as if they learned the alphabet but never learned to spell.

In a way, the concepts of quantity, quality, relation, and so on, are as simple as the letters of the alphabet, but knowledge of them is required in order to read in the cosmic script, just as to read Faust one must know the alphabet. And in essence, all past and future achievements of anthroposophy are experienced in terms of these concepts. For all the secrets of the physical and spiritual worlds are contained in them. These simple concepts, in other words, constitute the alphabet of the cosmos.

Starting in the time of Alexander, the earlier, direct perceptions characteristic of practices at Ephesus were replaced by something deeply hidden, something esoteric, that really began to develop only during the Middle Ages and that is embodied in the above-mentioned eight concepts (they may actually be expanded to ten). We are learning to live more and more with these, but we must strive to keep them as alive in our souls as the letters of the alphabet are when we read any rich and spiritual work of literature.

And so you see how ten concepts, whose illuminating and effective power has yet to be rediscovered, came to embody an enormous wisdom known instinctively for thousands of years. And although this light-filled wisdom lies, as it were, in the grave, someday it will rise again. People will then be able to read once again in the cosmic script, and to experience the resurrection of what has been hidden in the time between the two spiritual epochs.

It is of course our mission, my dear friends, to bring to light what has been hidden. We are here, after all, to find the human meaning of Easter. On another occasion I said that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, but in all its endeavors it is also an Easter experience, a resurrection experience, bound up with the experience of the grave. It is essential, particularly at an Easter gathering such as this, to experience something of the solemnity, if I may put it that way, of our anthroposophical striving. We should sense the presence of a spiritual being just beyond the threshold to whom we can go and say: “How blessed mankind once was by divine-spiritual revelation! How glorious that revelation was in the temple at Ephesus! Now all that is buried; where must I dig for it?” To which the being beyond the threshold will reply, just as another did on a similar occasion, “What you seek is no longer here; it is in your hearts, if only you know how to open them.”

Anthroposophy is indeed in people's hearts, and these hearts need only be opened in the right way. That should be our conviction, and if it is, we shall be led back, not instinctively as in ancient times but in full awareness, to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

I offer you these Easter words in the hope that they might reach your hearts, for by devotedly cultivating the solemn mood that anthroposophy can enkindle within our souls, we reach up into the spiritual world. At the same time, this solemn mood is connected with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach, which must not be allowed to remain abstract or intellectual, but must issue from the heart. Avoiding both joylessness and sentimentality, it must be a natural expression of the solemn facts.

Just as the fire of Ephesus flared anew within the hearts of Aristotle and Alexander, after scorching the cosmic ether and revealing to them the secrets that they compressed into the simplest of forms, just as they used the burning of Ephesus, so too must we—and this may be said in all modesty—be able to make use of what the flames of the Goetheanum carried out into the ether as the substance of our anthroposophical aims, both past and to come.

It was in keeping with this, my dear friends, that at Christmas time, at the beginning of the new year, the very time of year in which our misfortune occurred, we were permitted to let issue forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. Why? Because we could feel that a previously earthly concern had been carried out by the flames into the vastness of the cosmos, and that because of this misfortune, what we represent is no longer a merely earthly concern, but rather of significance for the whole cosmic-etheric world. This world, filled with spiritual wisdom, has adopted the Goetheanum's cause, which was carried out by the flames. The Goetheanum impulses with which we imbue ourselves now stream in from the cosmos.

Take this any way you like; take it as a picture. But as a picture it points to a profound reality. To put it simply, since the impulse at Christmas all anthroposophical endeavor must be infused with esotericism. This is because impulses are now working their way in from the cosmos as a result of the astral light that streamed up from the burning Goetheanum. These impulses can strengthen the anthroposophical movement, provided we are in a position to receive them. If we are, then everything anthroposophical, including the Easter mood, will be sensed as an essential part of the whole that is anthroposophy.

The anthroposophical Easter mood convinces us that the spirit never dies, that though it may die to the world, it always rises again. Anthroposophy must base itself upon this spirit that rises ever anew from its eternal foundations.

Such is the feeling and concept of Easter that we may take into our hearts. And from this gathering, my dear friends, we shall carry away courage and strength for our work in other places.

In close connection with what I had to bring before you in the lectures given at our Christmas Foundation Meeting, I should like, in the lectures that are now to be given, to speak further of the movement that is leading us in modern times to research into the life of the spirit. I refer to the movement spoken of under the name of Rosicrucianism or some other occult designation, and I should like to take this opportunity of giving you a picture of it in its inner aspect and nature. It will be necessary first of all to say something, by way of introduction, about the whole manner of forming ideas which had become customary round about the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries A.D., and which only very gradually disappeared; for it is even to be found here and there among stragglers, as it were as late as the nineteenth century. I do not want today to deal with the matter from a historical point of view, but rather to place before your mind's eye conceptions and ideas that you are to think of as inwardly experienced by certain people belonging to these centuries. In point of fact it is not generally realised that we have only to go back a comparatively short time in history, to find that the men who were accounted to be scholars were possessed of a world of ideas altogether different from our own.

In these days we speak of chemical substances, we enumerate seventy or eighty chemical elements; but we have no idea how very little we are saying when we name one substance as oxygen, another as nitrogen, and so on. Oxygen, for instance, is something that is present only under certain well-defined conditions—conditions of warmth, e.g., and other circumstances of earthly life, and it is impossible for a reasonable person to unite a conception of reality with something that, when the temperature is raised by so and so many degrees, is no longer present in the same measure or manner as it is under the conditions that obtain for man's physical life on Earth. It was the realisation of facts like this that underlay research during the early and middle part of the Middle Ages; the life of research of those times set out to get beyond the relative in existence, to arrive at true existence.

I have marked a transition as between the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., because before this time man's perceptions were still altogether spiritual. It would never, for example, have occurred to a scholar of the ninth century to imagine Angels, Archangels, or Seraphim as falling short in respect of reality—purely in respect of reality—of the physical men he saw with his eyes. You will find that before the tenth century, scholars always speak of the spiritual Beings, the so-called Intelligences of the Cosmos, as of beings one actually meets in life. The people of that time were of course well aware that the day was long past when such vision had been common human experience, but they knew that in certain circumstances the meeting could still take place. We must not, for instance, overlook the fact that on into the ninth and tenth centuries countless priests of the Catholic Church were quite conscious of how, in the course of their celebration of the Mass, it happened that in this or that enactment they met spiritual Beings, the Intelligences of the Cosmos. With the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the direct and immediate connection with the Intelligences of the Universe began to disappear from men's consciousness; and there began to light up, in its place, the consciousness of the Elements of the Cosmos, the earthy, the fluid or watery, the airy, the warm or fiery. And so it came about that just as hitherto men had spoken of Cosmic Intelligences that rule the movements of the planets, that lead the planets across the constellations of the fixed stars, and so forth, now they spoke instead of the immediate environment of the Earth. They spoke of the elements of earth, water, air, fire. Of chemical substances, in the modern sense of the word, they did not as yet take account. That came much later. It would, however, be a great mistake to imagine that the scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—even in a sense, the scholars of the eighteenth century—had ideas of warmth, air, water, earth, that resembled the ideas men have today. Warmth is spoken of today merely as a condition in which bodies exist. No one speaks any longer of actual warmth-ether. Air, water—these have likewise become for the modern man completely abstract. It is time we studied these ideas and learned to enter into a true understanding of them. And so today I should like to give you a picture, showing you how a scholar of those times would speak to his pupils.

When I wrote my Outline of Occult Science I was obliged to make the account of the evolution of the Earth accord at any rate a little with the prevailing ideas of the present day. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would have been able to give the account quite differently. The following might then have been found in a certain chapter, e.g., of Outline of Occult Science. An idea would have been called up, to begin with, of the Beings who may be designated as the Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The Seraphim would have been characterised as Beings with whom there is no subject and object, with whom subject and object are one and the same, Beings who would not say: Outside me are things—but: The world is, and I am the World, and the World is I. Such Beings know only of themselves, and this knowledge of themselves is for them an inner experience of which man has a weak reflection when he has the experience of being filled, shall we say, with a glowing enthusiasm. It is, you know, quite difficult to make the man of today understand what is meant by “glowing enthusiasm.” Even in the beginning of the nineteenth century men knew better what it is than they do today. In those days it could still happen that some poem or other was being read aloud and the people were so filled with enthusiasm—forgive me, but it really was so—that present-day man would say they had all gone out of their minds. They were so moved, so warmed! Today people freeze up just when you expect them to be “enthused.” Now it was lifting this element of enthusiasm, this rapture of the soul that came naturally especially to the men of Middle and Eastern Europe—it was by lifting it into consciousness, by making it alone the complete content of consciousness, that men came to form an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim. Again as a bright, clear element in consciousness, full of light, so that thought turns directly into light, illuminating everything—such an idea did men form of the element of consciousness of the Cherubim. And the element of consciousness of the Thrones was conceived as sustaining, bearing the worlds in Grace.

There you have one such sketch. I could go on speaking of it for a long time. For the moment I only wanted to show you that in those days one would have tried to describe the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the true qualities of their being.

And then one would have gone on to say: the Choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones works together, in such wise that the Thrones found and establish a kernel; the Cherubim let their own light-filled being stream forth from this centre or kernel; and the Seraphim enwrap the whole in a mantle of warmth and enthusiasm that rays far out into cosmic space. [Footnote: Drawings were made on the blackboard, with coloured chalks.]

All the drawing I have made is Beings: in the midst the Thrones; in the circumference around them the Cherubim; and, outermost of all, the Seraphim. All is essential Being, Beings who move and weave into one another, do, think, will, feel in one another. All is of the very essence of Being. And now, if a being having the right sensitiveness were to take its path through the space where the Thrones have in this manner established a kernel and centre, where the Cherubim have made a kind of circling around it and the Seraphim have, as it were, enclosed the whole—if a being with the required sensitiveness were to come into this realm of the activity of the First Hierarchy, it would feel warmth in varying differentiations—here greater warmth, there less; but it would all be an experience of soul, and yet at the same time physical experience in the senses; that is to say, when the being felt itself warm in soul, the feeling would be actually the feeling you have when you are in a well-warmed room.

Such a united building-up by Beings of the First Hierarchy did verily once take place in the Universe; it formed what we call the Saturn existence. The warmth is merely the expression of the fact that the Beings are there. The warmth is nothing more than the expression of the fact that the Beings are there.

A picture will perhaps make clearer to you what I mean. Let us suppose you have an affection for a certain human being. You feel his presence gives you warmth. But now someone comes along who is frightfully abstract and says: “The person himself doesn't interest me, I will imagine him absent; the warmth he sheds around him, that alone is what interests me.” Or suppose he doesn't even say “The warmth he sheds around him is all that interests me.” Suppose he says: “The warmth is all that interests me.” He talks nonsense, of course, you will see that at once; for if the man is not there who sheds the warmth, then the warmth is not there either. The warmth is in any case only there when the man is there. In itself it is nothing. The man must be there, if the warmth is to be there. Even so must Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones be there; if the Beings are not there, neither is the warmth. The warmth is merely the revelation of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now in the time of which I speak, everything was exactly as I have described it. Men spoke of Elements. They spoke of the Element of Warmth, and by the Element of Warmth they understood Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones—and that is the Saturn existence.

The description went further. It was said: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—these alone have the power to bring forth something of the nature of Saturn, to place it into the Cosmos. The highest Hierarchy alone is capable of placing such an existence into the Cosmos. But when this highest Hierarchy had once placed it there and a new world-becoming had taken its start, then the evolution could go on further. The Sun, as it were, that is formed of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones could carry evolution further. And it came to pass in the following manner. Beings of the Second Hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Beings that had been generated by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, press into the space that has been formed through the working of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, that has been fashioned to Saturn warmth. Thither entered younger, cosmically younger Beings. And how did these cosmically younger Beings work? Whereas the Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones reveal themselves in the Element of Warmth, the Beings of the second Hierarchy form themselves in the Element of Light. Saturn is dark; it gives warmth. And now within the dark world of the Saturn existence arises that which can arise through the working of the Sons of the First Hierarchy, through Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

What is it that is able now to arise within the Saturn warmth? The penetration of the Second Hierarchy signifies an inner illumination. The Saturn Warmth is inwardly shone through with light and at the same time it becomes denser. Instead of only the Warmth Element there is now also Air. And in the revelation of Light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

You must clearly understand that it is in very deed and truth Beings who thus press their way into the Saturn existence. One who had the requisite power of perception would see the event as a penetration of Light; it is Light that reveals the path of the Beings. And wherever Light occurs, there occurs too, under certain conditions, shadow, darkness, dark shadow. Through the Penetration by the Second Hierarchy in the form of Light, shadow also comes to pass. What is shadow? It is Air. And indeed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men knew what Air is. Today men know only that air consists of oxygen, nitrogen and so forth. When that is said, it is very much as if someone were to say about a watch that it consisted of glass and silver. He would be saying nothing at all about the watch. And nothing at all is said about Air as a cosmic phenomenon when we say that it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. We say very much, on the other hand, if we know: Air comes forth from the Cosmos as the shadow of Light. In actual fact we have, with the entry of the second Hierarchy into the Saturn warmth, the entry of Light and we have too the shadow of Light, Air. And when we have this we have Sun. Such is the way one would have had to speak in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries.

And what follows after this? The further evolution comes about through the working of the Sons of the Second Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels. The Second Hierarchy have accomplished the entry of the Element of Light, Light that has drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air—not the indifferent, neutral darkness that belongs to Saturn, the darkness that is simply absence of Light, but the darkness that is wrought out as the antithesis of Light. And now to this Element of Light the Third Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels—add through their own nature and being a new Element, an Element that is like our human desire, like our impulse to strive after something, to long for something. Thereby the following comes to pass.

Let us suppose an Archai or Archangel Being enters, and comes upon an Element of Light, encounters, as it were, a place of Light. In this place of Light the Being receives, through its receptivity for the Light, the urge, the desire for darkness. The Angel Being bears Light into darkness—or an Angel Being bears darkness into Light. These Beings are mediators, messengers between Light and Darkness. It follows from this that what previously has only shone in Light and drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air, begins now to shine in colour, to glow in a play of colour. Light begins to appear in darkness, darkness in light. The Third Hierarchy create colour out of light and darkness.

Here we may find a connection with something that is historical, with something that is to be found in written document. For in the time of Aristotle men still knew, when they contemplated in the Mysteries, whence colours come; they knew that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have to do with colour. Therefore Aristotle, in his colour harmony, showed that colour signifies a working together of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element in man's thought, whereby he knew that behind Warmth he has to see Beings of the First Hierarchy, behind Light and its shadow Darkness, Beings of the Second Hierarchy, and behind the iridescent play of Colour he has to see in a great cosmic harmony, Beings of the Third Hierarchy—this spiritual element in man's thought has been lost. And nothing is left for man today but the unhappy Newtonian Theory of Colour. The Initiates continued to smile at Newton's theory till the eighteenth century, but in that time it became an article of faith for professional physicists.

One must indeed have lost all knowledge of the spiritual world when one can speak in the sense of Newton's Theory of Colour. If one is still inwardly stimulated by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, then one resists it. One places before men the truth of the matter, as Goethe did, and attacks with might and main. For Goethe never censured so hardly as when he had to censure Newton, he went for him and his theory hammer and tongs! Such a thing is incomprehensible nowadays, for the simple reason that in our time anyone who does not recognise the Newtonian Theory of Colour is a fool in the eyes of the physicists. But things were different in Goethe's time. He did not stand alone. True, he stood alone as one who spoke openly on the matter; but there were others who really knew, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, whence colour comes, who knew with absolute certainty how colour wells up from within the Spiritual.

But now we must go further. We have seen that Air is the shadow of Light. And as, when Light arises, under certain conditions we find the dark shadow, so when colour is present and works as a reality—and it can do so, for when it penetrates into the Air-element, it flames up in this Air, works in it, in a word is something, is no mere reflection but a reality flashing and sparkling in the Air-element—when this is so, then under certain conditions we get pressure, counter-pressure, and out of the real Colour there comes into being the fluid, the Element of Water. As, for cosmic thinking, the shadow of Light is Air, so is Water the reflection, the creation of Colour in the Cosmos.

You will say: No, that I cannot understand! But try for once really to grasp Colour in its true meaning. Red—surely you do not think that red is, in its essence, the neutral surface it is generally regarded as being? Red is something that makes an attack upon you.—I have often spoken of this.—You want to run away from red; it thrusts you back. Blue-violet, on the other hand, you want to run after! It runs away from you all the time; it grows deeper and ever deeper. Everything is contained in the colours. The colours are a world, and the soul element in the world of colour simply cannot exist without movement; we ourselves, if we follow the colours with soul-experience, must follow with movement.

People gaze open-eyed at the rainbow. [Footnote: A sketch of a rainbow was made on the blackboard with chalks of the colours as seen in the sky: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.] But if you look at the rainbow with a little imagination, you may see there elemental Beings. These elemental Beings are full of activity and demonstrate it in a very remarkable manner. Here (at yellow) you see some of them streaming forth from the rainbow, continually coming away out of it. They move across and the moment they reach the lower end of the green they are drawn to it again. You see them disappear at this point (green). On the other side they come out again. To one who views it with imagination, the whole rainbow manifests a streaming out of spirit and a disappearing of it again within. It is like a spiritual dance, in very deed a spiritual waltz, wonderful to behold. And you may observe too how these spiritual Beings come forth from the rainbow with terrible fear, and how they go in with invincible courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see fear streaming out, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling: there all is courage and bravery of heart.

Now picture to yourselves: There before me is no mere rainbow! Beings are coming out of it and disappearing into it—here anxiety and fear, there courage ... And now, here the rainbow receives a certain thickness and you will be able to imagine how this gives rise to the element of Water. In this watery element spiritual Beings live, Beings that are actually a kind of copy of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy.

There is no doubt about it: if we want to get near the men of real knowledge in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we must understand these things. Indeed we cannot even understand the men of still later times, we cannot understand Albertus Magnus, if we read him with the knowledge we have today. We must read him with a manner of knowledge that takes account of the fact that spiritual things like these were still a reality for him: only then shall we understand how he expresses himself, how he uses his words.

Thus we have, as a reflection of the Hierarchies, first Air and then Water. The Hierarchies themselves dive in, as it were—the second Hierarchy in the form of Light, the third Hierarchy in the form of Colour. And with this latter event the Moon existence is attained.

And now we come to the Fourth Hierarchy. (I am telling it, you remember, as it was thought of in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) We today do not speak of the Fourth Hierarchy; but men still spoke in that way in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is Man. Man himself is the fourth Hierarchy. But by the Fourth Hierarchy was not meant the two-legged being that goes about the world today, ageing year by year! To the true man of knowledge of those times, present-day man would have appeared as something very strange. No, in those times they spoke of original Man, of Man before the Fall, who still bore a form that gave him power over the Earth, even as the Angels and Archangels and Archai had power over the Moon existence, the second Hierarchy over the Sun existence and the first Hierarchy over the Saturn existence. They spoke of Man in his original Earthly existence and then they were right to speak of him as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift it is true, of the higher Hierarchies, but the higher Hierarchies have held it only as a possession they did not themselves use but guarded and kept—with the Fourth Hierarchy came Life. Into the world of Colour, into the iridescent world of changing colour, of which I have only been able to give you the merest hints and suggestions, came Life.

You will say: Then did nothing live before this time? My dear friends, you can understand how it is from the human being himself. Your Ego and your astral body have not life, and yet they exist, they have being. That which is of the soul and the spirit does not need life. Life begins only with your etheric body. And the etheric body is something external, it is of the nature of a sheath. Thus only after the Moon existence and with the Earth existence does Life enter into the domain of that evolution to which our Earth belongs. The world of moving, glancing colour is quickened to life. And now not only do Angels and Archangels and Archai experience a longing desire to carry Darkness into Light, and Light into Darkness, thereby calling forth the play of colour in the planet; now a desire becomes manifest to experience this play of colour as something inward, to feel it all inwardly; when Darkness dominates Light, to feel weakness, laziness; when Light dominates Darkness, to feel activity. For what is happening really, when you run? When you run, Light predominates over Darkness in you; when you sit and are lazy and indolent, then Darkness predominates over Light. It is a play of Colour, an activity of Colour, not physical, but of the soul. Colour permeated with Life, in its iridescence streamed-through with Life—that is what appeared with the coming of the Fourth Hierarchy, Man. And in this moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the play of colour began to build contours, began to fashion forms. Life, as it rounded off and moulded the colours, called into being the hard, fast form of the crystal. And we have come into Earth existence.

Such things as I have been describing to you were fundamental truths for the mediaeval alchemists and occultists, Rosicrucians and others, who flourished—though history tells us little of them—from the ninth and tenth on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of whom stragglers are to be found as late as the eighteenth and even the beginning of the nineteenth century—always however in these later times regarded as strange and eccentric people. Only with the entry of the nineteenth century did this knowledge become entirely hidden. Only then did men come to acquire a conception of the world that led them to a point of view which I will indicate in the following way. Imagine, my dear friends, that here we have a man. Suppose I cease to have any interest in this man, but I take his clothes and hang them on a coat-hanger that has a knob here above like a head. From now on I take no further interest in the man and I tell myself: There is the man! What does it matter to me what can be put into these clothes? That, the coat-hanger with the clothes, is the man! This is really what happened with the Elements. It does not interest us any longer that behind Warmth or Fire is the First Hierarchy, behind Light and Air the Second Hierarchy, behind what we call Chemical Ether or Colour Ether and Water the Third Hierarchy, and behind the Life Element and Earth the Fourth Hierarchy, Man.—The peg, the hanger and on it the clothes.—That is all!

There you have the first Act of the drama. The second Act begins with Kant! One has there the hanger and the clothes hanging on it, and one begins to philosophise in true Kantian fashion as to what the “thing-in-itself” of these clothes may be. And one comes to a realisation that the “thing-in-itself” of the clothes cannot be known. Very clever, very clever indeed! Of course, if you first take away the man and have only the coat-hanger with the clothes, you can philosophise over the clothes, you can make most beautiful speculations! You can either philosophise in Kantian fashion and say: “The ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known,” or in the fashion of Helmholtz and think to yourself: “But these clothes, they cannot of themselves have forms; there is nothing really there but tiny, whirling specks of dust, tiny atoms, which hit and strike each other and behold, the clothes are held in their form!”

Yes, my friends, that is the way thought has developed in recent times. It is all abstract, shadowy. And yet we live today in this way of thinking, in this way of speculating; it gives the stamp to our whole natural-scientific outlook. And when we do not admit that we think in this atomistic way, then we do it most of all! For we are very far from admitting that it is quite unnecessary to dream of a whirling dance of atoms, and that what we have rather to do is to put back the man into the clothes. This is however the very thing which the renewal of Spiritual Science must try to do.

I wanted to indicate to you today, in a number of pictures, the nature and manner of thinking in earlier centuries and what is really contained in the older writings, although it has become obscure. The very obscurity, however, has led to incidents that are not without interest. A Norwegian scientist of today has reprinted a passage from the writings of Basilius Valentinus and has interpreted it in terms of modern chemistry. He could not possibly say otherwise than that it is nonsense, because this is what it appears to be if, in the modern sense, one thinks of a chemist standing in a laboratory, making experiments with retorts and other up-to-date apparatus. What Basilius Valentinus really gives in this passage is a fragment of embryology, expressed in pictures. That is what he gives—a fragment of embryology. According to the modern mode of thought it seems to indicate a laboratory experiment, which then proves to be nonsense. For you will not expect to reproduce the real processes of embryology in a retort—unless you be like the mediaevally minded Wagner of Goethe's Faust.

It is time that these things were understood. And in connection with the great truths of which I was able to speak during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I shall have more to say concerning the spiritual life and its history during the last few centuries.

Yesterday I began to speak to you of the spiritual-scientific strivings of the ninth or tenth century after Christ. We learnt how such strivings were still seriously followed as late as the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries; and I endeavoured to tell you something of the content of these strivings. Today I should like to touch more on their historical aspect. We have to remember that the Mysteries of ancient times were of such a nature and character that in the places of the Mysteries an actual meeting with the Gods was able to take place. I described in the lectures recently given at the Christmas Foundation how the human being who was an Initiate or was about to receive Initiation could verily meet with the Gods. And it was also possible, in the Mysteries, to discover places which by their very locality were expressly fitted and prepared to induce such meeting with the Gods.

The preparation of these centres and the adoption of them as the official places—if I may use so crude an expression—is at the foundation of the impulses for all the older civilisations. Gradually, however, knowledge and understanding of these places disappeared; we may even say that from the time of the fourth century it is no longer to be found in its old form. Here and there we can still find survivals, but the knowledge is no longer so strict and exact. Notwithstanding this, however, Initiation never ceased; it was only the form in which the candidates found their way that changed. I have already indicated how things were in the Middle Ages. I have told you how here and there were individuals, living simple, humble unpretentious lives, who did not gather around them a circle of official pupils in one particular place, but whose pupils were scattered in various directions in accordance with the karma of mankind or the karma of some people or nation. I have described one such instance in what I said about Johannes Tauler in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought. There is no need for me to speak about that here. I should like however to tell you of another typical example, one that had very great influence, lasting from the twelfth and thirteenth on into the fifteenth century. The spiritual streams that were working during these centuries are in large measure to be traced to the events of which I would like now to speak. Let me give you first, as it were, a sketch of the situation.

The time when these events took place is round about the year 1200 A.D. There were at that time a great number of people, especially younger people, who felt within them the urge for higher knowledge, for a union with the spiritual world—one may truthfully say, for a meeting with the Gods. And the whole situation and condition of the times was such that very often it looked as though a man who was searching and striving in this way found his teacher almost by chance. In those days one could not find a teacher by means of books, it could only come about in an entirely personal way. And often it looked from without like a chance happening, although in reality deep connections of destiny were at work in the event. And it was so in the case of the pupil of whom I am now going to tell you.

This pupil found a teacher in a place in Middle Europe through just such an apparently chance event. He met an older man of whom he at once had the feeling: He will be able to lead me farther in that search which is the deepest impulse of my soul. And now let me give you the gist of a conversation between them. I do not of course mean that only one such conversation took place between teacher and pupil, but I am compressing several into one.

The pupil speaks to the teacher and tells him of his earnest desire to be able to see into the spiritual world; but it seems to him as though the nature of man as it is in that time—it is about the twelfth century—does not allow him to penetrate to the spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, he feels that in Nature one has something that is the work, the creation of divine-spiritual Beings. When one looks at what the objects of Nature are in their deeper meaning, when one observes how the processes of Nature take their course, one cannot but recognise that behind these creations stands the working of divine-spiritual Beings. But man cannot come through to these spiritual Beings. The pupil, who was a young man somewhere between 25 and 28 or so, felt strongly and definitely that the humanity of the time, because of the kind of connection of the physical body with the soul, cannot come through, it has hindrances in itself.

The teacher began by putting him to the test. He said to him: You have your eyes, you have your ears: look with your eyes on the things of Nature, hear with your ears what goes on in Nature; the Spiritual reveals itself through colour and through tone, and as you look and listen, you cannot help feeling how it reveals itself in these.

Then the pupil replied: Yes, but when I use my eyes, when I look out into the world, with all its colour, then it is as though my eye stops the colour, as though the colour suddenly turns numb and cold when it reaches the eye. When I listen with my ear to tones, it is as though the sounds turn to stone in my ear; the frozen colours and the dead, hard sounds will not let the spirit of Nature through. And the teacher said: But there is still the Revelation of the religious life. In Religion you are taught how Gods made and fashioned the world, and how the Christ entered into the evolution of time and became Man. What Nature cannot give you, does not Revelation give?

And the pupil said: Revelation does indeed speak powerfully to my heart, but I cannot really comprehend it, I cannot connect what is out there in Nature with what Revelation says to me. It is impossible to bring them into relation with one another. And so, since I do not understand Nature, since Nature reveals nothing to me, neither do I understand the Revelation of Religion.

And the teacher made answer: I understand you well; it is even so. If you must speak thus, if it is with your heart and soul as you say, then you, as you stand in the world today, will not be able to understand either Nature or Revelation: for you live in a body that has undergone the Fall—such was the manner of speaking in those days—and this “fallen” body is not suited to the earthly environment in which you are living. The earthly environment does not afford the conditions for using your senses and your feeling and your understanding in such a way that you may behold in Nature and in Revelation a light, an enlightenment that comes from the Gods. If you are willing, I will lead you away out of the Nature of your earthly environment, which is simply unsuited to your being, I will lead you away from it and give you the opportunity to understand Revelation and Nature better. And the teacher and the pupil discussed together when this should take place.

One day, the teacher led the pupil up a high mountain, whence the surface of the Earth with its trees and flowers could no longer be seen at all—you know how this is so on high mountains—but as the pupil stood there with his teacher he could see below him as it were a sea of cloud, which completely covered the Earth with which he was familiar; up there one was far removed from the affairs of Earth—at all events, the situation suggested this. One looked out into space with its great masses of cloud, and one saw below as it were a sea, a moving, surging sea composed entirely of cloud. Morning mist, and the breath of morning in the air! Then the teacher began to speak to the pupil. He spoke of the wide spaces of the worlds, he spoke of the cosmic distances, of how, when one gazes out into these vastnesses in the night time, one sees the stars shining forth from thence. He told him many things, so that gradually the heart of the pupil, removed as it were far away from the Earth, became wholly given up to Nature and the manner of Nature's existence.

The preparation continued until the pupil came into a mood of soul which may be indicated by the following comparison. It was as though, not for a moment only, but for quite a long time, all that he had ever experienced during his earthly life in this incarnation were something he had dreamed. The scene now spread out before him, the rolling waves of cloud, the wide sea of cloud, with here and there a drift rising up like the crest of a wave; the far spaces of the worlds, broken here and there by rising shapes of cloud—and scarcely even that, for there was no more than a glimpse here and there of cloud forms at the farthest end of space—this whole scene showing so little variation, having so little content in comparison with the manifold variety of all his experiences down below on the surface of the Earth, was now for the pupil like the content of his day-waking consciousness. And everything he had ever experienced on Earth was for him no more than the memory of a dream he had dreamed. Now, now, so it seemed to him, he had woken up. And whilst he continued to grow more and more awake, behold, from a cleft in the rock which he had not hitherto noticed, came forth a boy of 10 or 11 years old. This boy made a strange impression upon him, for he at once recognised in him his own self in the 10th or 11th year of his age. What stood before him was the Spirit of his Youth.

You will easily guess, my dear friends, that to this scene is due one of the impulses that made me introduce into the Mystery Plays the figure of the Spirit of Johannes' Youth. [Footnote: The Soul's Awakening. Scene 6. Four Mystery Plays.] It is the “motif” alone you must think of, certainly not of anything like photography. The Mystery Plays are no occult romances where you have but to find the key, and all is plain!

The pupil stood before the Spirit of his boyhood, his very self. He, with his 15 or 28 years, stood face to face with the Spirit of his youth. And a conversation could take place, guided by the teacher, but in reality taking place between the pupil and his own younger self. Such a conversation has a unique character; you may see that for yourselves in the Mystery Plays, from the style that is there followed. For when a man is face to face with the Spirit of his own youth—and such a thing is always possible—then he gives something of his ripe understanding to the childlike ideas of the Spirit of his youth, and at the same time the Spirit of his youth gives something of his freshness, his childlikeness, to what the man of older years possesses. The meeting becomes fruitful in a spiritual way through the very fact of this mutual interchange. And this conversation had the result that the pupil came to understand Revelation, the Revelation that is given in religion.

The conversation turned especially on Genesis, the beginning of the Old Testament, and on the Christ becoming Man. Under the guidance of the teacher and because of the special kind of fruitfulness that worked in the conversation it ended with the pupil saying these words: “Now I understand what Spirit it is that works in the Revelation. Only when one is transplanted, as it were, far away from the earthly into the heights of the Ether, there to comprehend the Ether-heights with the help of the power of childhood—this power of childhood being projected into the later years of life—only then does one understand Revelation aright. And now I understand wherefore the Gods have given to man Revelation—for the reason that men are not able, in the state in which they are on Earth, to see through the works of Nature and discover behind them the works of the Gods. Therefore did the Gods give them the Revelation which is ordinarily quite incomprehensible in the mature years of life, but which can be understood when childhood becomes real and living in the years of maturity. Thus it is really something abnormal, to understand the Revelation.”

All this made a powerful impression on the pupil. And the impression remained; he could not forget it. The Spirit of his youth vanished. The first phase of the instruction was over. A second had now to come. And the second took its course in the following way.

Once more the teacher led the pupil forth, but this time on a different path. He did not now lead him to a mountain top, but he took him to a mountain where there was a cave, through which they passed to deep, inner clefts, going down as far as the strata of the mines. There the pupil was with the teacher in the deep places of the Earth, not now in the Ether-heights raised high above the Earth, but in the depths, far down below the surface of the Earth.

Once again it was for the consciousness of the pupil as though all that he had ever experienced on Earth went past him like dreams. For he was living down there in an environment in which his consciousness was particularly awakened to perceive his relation with the depths of the Earth. What took place for him was really none other than what lies behind such legends as are told, for example, of the Emperor Barbarossa and his life in Kyffhauser, or of Charles the Great and his life beneath a mountain near Salzburg. It was something of this nature that took place now, if only for a short time: it was a life in the depths of the Earth, far removed from the earthly life of man.

And again the teacher was able, by speaking with the pupil in a special way, to bring to his consciousness the fact—this time—of his union with the Earth-depths. And now there came forth out of a wall an old man, who was less recognisable to the pupil than the Spirit of his Youth, but of whom he nevertheless felt that after many years he would himself become that old man. He knew that there stood before him his own self in future old age. And now followed a similar conversation, this time between the pupil and his own older self—himself as an old man—once more a conversation under the guidance of the teacher.

What resulted from this second conversation was different from what came from the first; for now there began to arise within the pupil a consciousness of his own physical organisation. He felt how his blood flowed, he felt every single vein in his body; he went with it, went with the nerve fibres; he was made aware of all the single organs of his human organisation and the meaning and significance of each for the whole. And he felt too how all that is related to man out in the Cosmos works into him. He felt the inworking of the plant-world, in its blossoming, in its rooting; he felt how the mineral element in the Earth works in the human organism. Down there in the depths he felt the forces of the Earth—how they are organised and how they circulate within his being; he felt them creating there within him, undergoing change, destroying and building substances; he felt the Earth creating, and weaving and being, in man. The result of this conversation was that when the old man, who was himself, had disappeared, the pupil could say: “Now has the Earth, in which I have been incarnated, at last really spoken to me through her beings; now a moment has been mine when I have seen through the things and processes of Nature, seen through them to the work of the Gods that is behind these things and processes of Nature.”

The teacher then led the pupil out again on to the Earth, and as he took leave of him, said: Behold now! The man of today and the Earth of today are so little suited to one another that you must receive the Revelation of Religion from the Spirit of your own Youth, receiving it on the mountain high up above the Earth, and you must receive the Revelation of Nature deep below the Earth, in clefts that are far down below the surface of the Earth. And if you can succeed in illuminating what your soul has felt in the hollow clefts of the Earth, with the light your soul has brought from the mountain, then you will attain unto wisdom.

Such was the path by which a deepening of the soul was brought about in those times—it was about the year 1200 A.D.—this is how the soul became filled with wisdom. The pupil of whom I have told you was thereby brought verily to Initiation, and he now knew what power he must put forth in his soul to arouse to activity the light of the heights and the feeling of the depths. Further instruction was then given him by the teacher, showing him how self-knowledge really always consists in this:—one perceives on the one hand that which lies high above Earth-man, and on the other hand that which lies deep below Earth-man: these two must meet in man's own inner being. Then does man find within his own being the power of God the Creator.

The Initiation that I have described to you is a characteristic example of the Initiations which led afterwards to what we may designate as “mediaeval Mysticism.” It was a mysticism that sought for self-knowledge, but always in order to find in the self the way to the divine. In later times this mysticism became abstract. The concrete union with the external world, as it was given for these pupils who were carried up into the Ether-heights and down into the Earth-depths, was no longer sought for. Consequently there was not the same deep stirring of the soul, nor did the whole experience attain to such a degree of intensity. And yet there was still the search, there was still the inner impulse to seek within for the God, for God the Creator. Fundamentally speaking, all the seeking and striving of Meister Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler and of the later mystics whom I have described in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought owes its impulse to these earlier mediaeval Initiates.

Those who worked faithfully in the sense of such mediaeval forms of Initiation were however very much misunderstood, and it is by no means easy for us to find out what these pupils of the mediaeval Initiates were really like.

It is, as you know, possible to come a considerable distance along the path into the spiritual world. Those who follow thoroughly and actively what is given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment do find the way into the spiritual worlds. Everything that has been physically real in the past is of course only to be found now by way of the spiritual world—therefore also such scenes as I have now described, for there are no material documents that record such scenes. There are however regions of the spiritual world which are hard of access even for a very advanced stage of spiritual power. In order to research into these regions, we must have come to the point of actually having intercourse with the Beings of the spiritual world, in a quite simple, natural way, as we have with men on Earth. When we have attained so far, we shall come to perceive and understand the connection between these Initiates of whom I have told you, and their pupils, e.g., such a pupil as Raimon Lull, who lived from 1235 to 1315 and who, in what history can tell of him, seems to leave us full of doubts and questions.

What you can learn of Raimon Lull by studying historical documents is indeed very scanty. But if you are able to enter into a personal relationship with Raimon Lull—you will allow me to use the expression: perhaps, in the light of all I have been telling you lately, it will not sound so paradoxical to you after all—if you are able to do this, then he shows himself to you as someone quite different from what the historical documents make him out to be. For he shows himself to be pre-eminently a personality who, under the influence and inspiration of the very Initiate of whom I have spoken to you as the “pupil,” made the resolve to use all his power to bring about a renewal in his own time of the Mysteries of the World, of the Logos, as they had been in olden times. He set himself to renew the Mysteries of the Logos by means of that self-knowledge for which so powerful an impulse was working in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The so-called Ars Magna of Raimon Lull is to be adjudged from this point of view. He said to himself: When man speaks, then we really have in speech a microcosm. That which man utters in speech is in truth the whole man, concentrated in the organs of speech; the secret and mystery of each single word is to be sought in the whole human being, and therefore in the world, in the Cosmos.

And so the idea came to Raimon Lull that one must look for the secret of speech first in the human being, by diving down, as it were, from the speech organs into the whole organism of the human being; and then in the Cosmos, for the whole human organism is to be explained and understood out of the Cosmos. Let us suppose, for example, we want to understand the true significance of the sound A (as in “father”). The point is that the sound A, which comes about through the forming and shaping of the outgoing breath, depends on a certain inner attitude of the etheric body, which you can easily learn to know today. Eurhythmy will show it you; for this attitude of the etheric body is carried over in Eurhythmy to the physical body and becomes the Eurhythmic movement for the sound A.

All this was not by any means fully clear to Raimon Lull; with him it was more of a dim, intuitive feeling. He did however get so far as to follow the inner attitude or gesture of the human being out into the Cosmos and say, for example: If you look in the direction of the constellation of the Lion (Leo), and then look in the direction of the Balance (Libra), the connection between the two lines of vision will give you A. Or again, turn your eye in the direction of Saturn. Saturn stops your line of vision, comes in the way. And if Saturn, for example, stands in front of the Ram (Aries), you have, as it were, to go round the Ram with Saturn. And then you have from out of the Cosmos the feeling of O. [Footnote: Readers unfamiliar with the movements in Eurhythmy for the sounds of speech, are recommended to turn to the first three chapters of the book Eurhythmy as Visible Speech (15 lectures) by Rudolf Steiner]

From ideas like these, though dimly perceived, Raimon Lull went on to find certain geometrical figures, the corners and sides of which he named with the letters of the alphabet. And he was quite sure that when one experiences a feeling and impulse to draw lines in the figures—diagonals, for instance, across a pentagon, uniting the five points in different ways—then one has to see in these lines different combinations of sounds, which combinations of sounds express certain secrets of the World-All, of the Cosmos. Thus did Raimon Lull look for a kind of renaissance of the secrets of the Logos, as they were known and spoken of in the Ancient Mysteries. You will find it all quite misrepresented in the historical documents. When however one enters little by little into a personal relationship with Raimon Lull, then one comes to see how in all these efforts he was trying to solve once more the riddle of the Cosmic Word. And it is a fact that the pupils of the mediaeval Initiates continued for several centuries to spend their lives in endeavours of this kind. It was an intensive striving, first to immerse oneself in man, and then to come forth as it were, to rise out of the human being into the secrets of the Cosmos.

Thus did these wise men—for we may truly call them so—seek to unite Revelation with Nature. They believed—and much of their belief was well-founded—that in this way they could come behind the Revelation of Religion and behind the Revelation of Nature. For it was quite clear to them that man, as he is now living on the Earth, was destined and intended to become the Fourth Hierarchy, but that he has “fallen” from his true and proper nature, and become more deeply involved in physical existence than he should be, thereby at the same time losing the power adequately to develop his soul and spirit. It was from such strivings that there arose, later on, what we know as the Rosicrucian Movement.

It was at a place of instruction of the Rosicrucians, of the first, original Rosicrucians, that the scene I have depicted to you today, the scene between the teacher and the pupil, at first upon a high mountain and then down in a deep cleft of the Earth, emerged like a kind of Fata Morgana, came again as it were like a ghost, reflected within a Rosicrucian school as knowledge. And it taught the pupils to recognise how man has by inner effort and striving to attain to two things, if he would come to a true self-knowledge, if he would find again his adjustment to the Earth and be able at last to become in actual reality a member of the Fourth Hierarchy. For within the Rosicrucian School the possibility was given to recognise what it was that had taken place with the pupil when he had seen before him in bodily form the Spirit of his Youth. A loosening of the astral body had taken place; the astral body, that was stronger at that moment than it otherwise ever is in life, was loosened. And in this loosening of the astral body the pupil had come to know the meaning and significance of Revelation. And again, what took place with the pupil in the depths of the Earth was also made clear and comprehensible in the Rosicrucian School. This time the astral body was drawn right back within. It was contracted and drawn together, so that the pupil was able to perceive and apprehend the certainty of man's own inner being.

And now exercises were found within Rosicrucianism, comparatively simple exercises, consisting in symbolic figures, to which one gave oneself up in devotion and meditation. The force and power of which the soul became possessed through devotion to these figures, enabled the students on the one hand to loosen the astral body and become like the pupil on the mountain top in the Ether-heights, and on the other hand, through the compression and contraction of the astral body, to become like the pupil in the clefts of the Earth. And it was then possible, without the help, as before, of external environment, simply through performing a powerful inner exercise, to enter into the inner being of man.

I have given you here a picture of something to which I have made a slight allusion in my preface to the new edition of the book Mysticism and Modern Thought. I said there that what we find in Meister Eckhart, in Johannes Tauler, in Nicolas Cusa, in Valentine Wiegel and the rest, is a late product of a great and mighty striving of mankind, an earlier, original striving that preceded them all. And this earlier striving in the Spirit, this search for self-knowledge, in connection on the one hand with Revelation and on the other hand with the illumination of Nature—I wanted to show you today how this is one of the currents that take their course in the so-called “Dark Ages.”

The man of modern times conjures darkness into the Middle Ages out of his own imagination. In reality there were in those times many enlightened spirits, of such a kind however, that the “enlightened” spirits of today cannot understand their light and consequently remain in the dark.

It is indeed characteristic of modern times, that men take light for darkness and darkness for light. If however we can look into what lies behind the literature of those earlier times and are able to see that of which the literature gives only a dim reflection, then we may receive a powerful and lasting impression.

Something of this I wanted to show you today: tomorrow we will complete the picture.

I spoke to you yesterday of the special form in which the results of research in the realm of spiritual knowledge were communicated in the Middle Ages. This form was, so to speak, the last Act before a door was shut for the evolution of the spirit of man, a door that had been open for many centuries and given entrance by way of natural gift and faculty into the spiritual world. The door was shut when the time came for man, so far as his instinctive faculties were concerned, to be placed out-side the kingdom of the divine-spiritual Will that ruled over him. From that time forward he had to find in his own inmost being, in his own will, the possibility to evolve conscious freedom in the soul.

All the great moves of evolution, however, take place slowly, gradually, step by step. And the experience that had been attained by the pupil when the teacher led him up into the Ether-heights and down into the deep clefts of the Earth—even in those times it was no longer possible in the form it had taken in the ancient Mysteries—this experience was now, in later times, directly connected with an experience of Nature (though not with Nature on the Earth's surface itself) which came to man in a more unconscious form.

Think for a moment how it was with those persons who strove after knowledge about the year 1200 and on through the following century. They heard tell how, only a short time before, pupils were still able to find teachers, like the one of whom I told you yesterday; but they themselves were directed to human thinking as the means of attaining knowledge.

In the succeeding time of the Middle Ages we can see this human thinking developing and spreading, asserting itself in an impressive manner. It sets out on new paths with inner zeal, with sincere and whole-hearted devotion, and these paths are followed by large circles of knowledge-seekers. What we may truly call the knowledge of the Spiritual, that too continued its way. And after a few centuries we come to the time when Rosicrucianism proper was founded. Rosicrucianism is connected with a change that took place in the whole spiritual world in respect of man. I shall best describe the change by giving you once again a picture.

Mysteries in the old sense of the word were no longer possible in the time of which I have been speaking. There were however men who yearned for knowledge in the sense of the ancient Mysteries, and who experienced hard and heavy conflicts of soul when they heard how in the past men had been led up to the mountain and down to the clefts of the Earth, and had thus found knowledge. They developed all possible inner methods, they made all possible inner efforts in order to rouse the soul within them, that it might after all yet find the way. And he who is able to see such things can find in those times, as we said just now, not places of the Mysteries, but gatherings of knowledge-seekers who met together in an atmosphere warmed through and through with the glow of piety. What appears later as Rosicrucianism, sound and genuine Rosicrucianism, as well as the debased and charlatan kinds, comes in reality from men who gathered together in this simple way and sought so to temper their souls that genuine spiritual knowledge might yet be able to arise for them. In such a gathering, that took place in most unpretentious surroundings, the simple living-room of a kind of manor house, a few persons were once met, who, through certain exercises half thoughtful and meditative in character, half of the nature of prayer, done in common by them all, had developed a mystical mood in which all shared. It was the same mystical mood of soul that was cultivated in later times by the so-called “Brothers of the Common Life,” and later still by the followers of Comenius and by many other Brotherhoods. In this small circle, however, it showed itself with a peculiar intensity, and whilst these few men were there gathered together, making devotion, so to say, of their ordinary consciousness, of their whole intellect, in this intense mystical atmosphere of soul, it happened that a being came to them, not a being of flesh and blood like the teacher whom the pupil met and who led him to the mountains and to the clefts of the Earth, but a being who was only able to appear in an etheric body in this little company of men. This being revealed himself as the same who had guided the pupil about the year 1200. He was now in the after-death state. He had descended to these men from the spiritual world; they had drawn him thither by the mood of soul that prevailed in them—mystical, meditative, pious.

My dear friends, in order that no misunderstanding may arise, let me expressly emphasise that there is there no question of any mediumistic power. The little company who were gathered there would have looked upon any use—or any sanctioning—of mediumistic powers, as deeply sinful; they would have been led to do so by certain ideas belonging to old and honoured tradition. Just in those very communities of which I am telling you, mediumship and all that is related to it was regarded not merely as harmful but as sinful—and for the following reason. These persons knew that mediumship goes together with a peculiar constitution of the physical body; they knew that it is the physical body that gives the medium his spiritual powers. But the physical body they looked upon as “fallen,” and information that came by the help of mediumship they could not but regard under all circumstances as acquired by the help of Ahrimanic or Luciferic powers.

In those times, things like this were still clearly and exactly known. And so we have not to think of anything mediumistic in this connection. There was the mood of mysticism and meditation, and that alone. And it was the enhancing and strengthening of this mood through fellowship of soul, that, so to speak, enchanted into the circle, but of his own free-will, that disembodied human being, purely spiritual, and yet at the same time human.

The being spoke to them thus, in a deeply solemn manner:—“You are not altogether prepared for my appearance but I am among you discarnate, without physical body, forasmuch as a time has come when for a short period of Earth existence the Initiate of olden times is unable to appear in a physical body. The time will come again when he can do so, when the Michael period begins. But I am come to reveal to you that the inner being of man nevertheless remains unchanged, that the inner being of man, if it holds itself aright, can yet find the way to the divine-spiritual existence. For a period of time, however, the human intellect and understanding will be so constituted that it will have to be suppressed in order for that which is of the Spirit to be able to speak to the human soul. Therefore remain in your mystic and pious mood of soul ... You have received from me, all of you together, the picture, the imagination. I have, however, been able to give you no more than a mere indication of that which will come to fulfilment within you; you will go on further and find a continuation of what you have here experienced!”

And now, three from the number gathered there together, were chosen, to the end that they might establish a special union with the spiritual world, once more not at all through any kind of mediumistic powers but through a development of that mystic, meditative, pious mood of soul. These three, who were guarded and protected by the rest of the circle, closely and intimately cared for by the others, experienced from time to time a kind of absence of mind. They were at these times, in their external bodily nature, wonderfully lovely and beautiful, they acquired a sort of shining countenance, shining like the sun, and they wrote down, in symbols, revelations which they received from the spiritual world. These symbolic revelations were the first pictures by which the Rosicrucians were shown when it behoved them to know of the spiritual world. The revelations contained a kind of philosophy, a kind of theology and also a kind of medicine.

And the remarkable thing was that the others (it seems to me as though the others were four in number, so that the whole was a company of seven), after the experience they had with their brothers, beholding how their eyes shone like the sun and how their countenances were bright and radiant—these other four were able to give again in ordinary language what was conveyed in the symbols. The brothers whose destiny it was to bring the symbols from the spiritual world, could only write down the symbols, they could only say, when they returned again into their ordinary consciousness: “We have been among the stars, and have found the old teachers of the secret knowledge.” They could not themselves turn the symbolic pictures that they drew, into ordinary human speech. The others could and did. And this is the source of a great deal of knowledge that passed over into the literature of theology, more particularly such as was philosophical in character (not the theology of the Church but rather of the laity) and into the literature of medicine. And what was thus received from the spiritual world in symbols was afterwards communicated to small groups that were organised by the first Rosicrucians.

Again and again, in the time from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, there was still the possibility in certain very small groups for experiences of this nature. Revelations came frequently to men from the spiritual world in this or some similar way. But those who had to translate what was thus revealed in pictures were not always capable of doing it quite faithfully. Hence the want of clarity in the philosophy of this period. One has to discover for oneself what it really means, by seeking for it again in the world of the Spirit. For those however who have had knowledge of this kind of revelation received from the spiritual world, it has always been possible to link on to such revelations.

But picture to yourselves, my dear friends, what strange feelings must gradually have come over these men, who had to receive the very highest knowledge—for what was given to them was so accounted—from a direction that was growing more and more foreign, almost uncanny, to them; for they could no longer see into the world out of which the secrets came to them; ordinary consciousness could not reach so far. It can readily be understood that such things easily led to charlatanism and even to fraud. Indeed at no time of human evolution have charlatanism and the highest and purest of revelation stood so close to one another as in this period. It is difficult to distinguish the true from the false—so much so that many regard the whole of Rosicrucianism as charlatan. One can understand this, for the true Rosicrucians are extra-ordinarily hard to find among the charlatans, and the whole matter is all the more difficult and problematic for the reason that one has always to bear in mind that the spiritual revelation comes from sources which in their real quality and nature remain hidden.

The small circles gathered by the first Rosicrucians grew to a larger brotherhood, who always went about unrecognised, appearing here and there in the world, generally with the calling of a physician, healing the sick, and at the same time spreading knowledge as they went. And it was so that in regard to very much of this knowledge, the spreading of it was not without a certain embarrassment, inasmuch as the men who carried it on were not able to speak of the connection in which they stood to the spiritual world.

But now something else was developed in this pursuit of spiritual knowledge and spiritual research, something that is of very great beauty. There were the three brethren and the four. The three are only able to attain their goal when the four work together with them. The two groups are absolutely interdependent. The three receive the revelations from the spiritual world, the four are able to translate them into ordinary human language. What the three give would be nothing but quite unintelligible pictures, if the four were not able to translate them. And again, the four would have nothing to translate, if the three did not receive their revelations, in picture form, from the spiritual world. This gave rise to the development within such communities of an inner brotherhood of soul, a brotherhood in knowledge and in spiritual life, which in some circles of those times was held to be among the very highest of human attributes. Such small groups of men did indeed learn to know through their striving the true worth of brotherhood. And gradually they came more and more to feel how the evolution of humanity towards freedom is such that the bond between men and Gods would be completely severed were it not kept whole by such brotherhood, where the one looks to the other, where the one is in very truth dependent on the other.

We have here a picture of something in the soul which is wonderfully beautiful. And much that was written in those days possesses a certain charm which we only understand when we know how this atmosphere of brotherhood which permeated the spiritual life of many circles in Europe in those times, shed its radiant light into the writings.

There is however another mood that we find in those who are striving for knowledge, and this mood began gradually to pervade their whole endeavours and made people anxious. If in those times one did not approach the sources of spiritual revelation, ultimately it was so that one could no longer know whether these revelations were good or evil. And a certain anxiety began to be felt in regard to some of the influences. The anxiety spread later over large circles of people, who came to have fear, intense fear of all knowledge.

The development of the mood of which I speak may be particularly well studied in the examples of two men. One is Raimund of Sabunda, who lived in the fifteenth century, being born about 1430. Raimund of Sabunda is a remarkable man. If you study carefully what remains to us of his thought, then you will have the feeling: This is surely almost the very same revelation that was communicated in full consciousness about the year 1200 by the teacher who took his pupil to the mountain tops and to the chasms of the Earth! Only in Raimund of Sabunda of the fifteenth century, it is all given in a vague, impersonal style, philosophical in character, theological too and medical. The truth is that Raimund of Sabunda had also received his revelations by way of the genuine Rosicrucians, that is to say, by the path that had been opened by the great Initiate of the twelfth century, whose work and influence I described to you yesterday, and who continued to inspire men from out of the spiritual world, as I have been relating to you today. For the revelation that afterwards came through Rosicrucianism, as I have often described to you, came originally from this great Initiate and those who were with him in the spiritual world; the mood and feeling of the whole teaching was set by him. Anxiety, however, was at this time beginning to take hold of men. Now Raimund of Sabunda was a bold, brave spirit, he was one of those men who can value ideas, who understand how to live in ideas. And so, although we notice in him a certain vagueness due to the fact that the revelations have their source after all in the spiritual world, yet in him we find no trace of anxiety or fear in regard to knowledge.

All the more striking is another and very characteristic example of that spiritual stream: Pico della Mirandola, who also belongs to the fifteenth century.

The short-lived Pico della Mirandola is a very remarkable figure. If you study deeply the fruits of his thought and contemplation, you will see how the same initiative I have just described is everywhere active in them, due to the continuation of the wisdom of that old Initiate by way of the Rosicrucian stream. But in Pico della Mirandola you will observe a kind of shrinking back before this knowledge. Let me give you an instance. He established how everything that happens on Earth—stones and rock coming into being, plants living and growing and bearing fruit, animals living their life—how all this cannot be attributed to the forces of the Earth. If anyone were to think: There is the Earth, and the forces of the Earth produce that which is on the Earth, he would have quite a wrong notion of the matter. The true view, according to Pico della Mirandola, is that up there are the Stars and what happens in the Earth is dependent on the Stars. One must look up to the Heavens, if one wants to understand what happens on Earth. Speaking in the sense of Pico della Mirandola we should have to say: You give me your hand, my brother man, but it is not your feeling alone that is the cause why you give me your hand, it is the star standing over you that gives you the impulse to hold out your hand to me. Ultimately everything that is brought about has its source in the Heavens, in the Cosmos; what happens on Earth is but the reflection of what happens in the Heavens.

Pico della Mirandola gives expression to this as his firm conviction, and yet at the same time he says: But it is not for man to look up to these causes in the stars, he has only to take account of the immediate cause on Earth.

From this point of view Pico della Mirandola combats—and it is most characteristic that he does so—the Astrology that he finds prevalent. He knows well that the old, real, and genuine Astrology expresses itself in the destinies of men. He knows that; it is for him a truth. And yet he says: one should not pursue Astrology, one should look only for the immediate causes.

Note well what it is we have before us here. For the first time we are confronted with the idea of “boundaries” to knowledge. The idea shows itself in a significant manner, it is still, shall we say, human in character. Later, in Kant, in du Bois-Reymond, you will find expressed in them: “Man cannot cross the boundaries of knowledge.” The idea is said to rest on an inner necessity. That is not the case with Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth century. He says: “What is on Earth has undoubtedly come about through cosmic causes. But man is called upon to forgo the attainment of a knowledge of these cosmic causes; he has to limit himself to the Earth.” Thus we have in the fifteenth century, in such a markedly characteristic person as Pico della Mirandola, voluntary renunciation of the highest knowledge.

My dear friends, we have here a spiritual event in the history of culture of the greatest imaginable importance. Men made the resolve: We will renounce knowledge! And that which comes to pass externally in such a person as Pico della Mirandola has once more, in very deed and fact, its counterpart in the Spiritual.

It was again in one of those simple gatherings of Rosicrucians that in the second half of the fifteenth century, on the occasion of a ritual arranged for this very purpose, man's Star-knowledge was in deeply solemn manner offered up in sacrifice. What took place in that ritual, which was enacted in all the solemnity proper to such a festival, may be expressed as follows.—Men stood before a kind of altar and said: “We resolve now to feel ourselves responsible not for ourselves alone nor our community, nor our nation, nor even only for the men of our time; we resolve to feel ourselves responsible for all men who have ever lived on Earth, to feel that we belong to the whole of mankind. And we feel that mankind has deserted the rank of the Fourth Hierarchy and has descended too deeply into matter” (for the Fall into Sin was understood in this sense) “and in order that man may be able to return to the rank of the Fourth Hierarchy, may be able to find for himself in freedom of will what in earlier times Gods have tried to find for him and with him, let now the higher knowledge be offered up for a season!”

And certain Beings of the spiritual world, who are not of human kind, who do not come to Earth in human incarnation, accepted the sacrifice in order to fulfil therewith certain purposes in the spiritual world. It would take us too far to speak of these here; we will do so another time. But the impulse to freedom was thereby made possible for man from out of the spiritual world.

I tell you of this ritual in order to show you how everything that takes place in the external life of the physical senses has its spiritual counterpart; we have only to look for it in the right place. For it can happen that such a celebration, enacted—I will not say in this instance, with full knowledge, but enacted by persons who stand in connection with the spiritual world—may have very deep meaning; from it can radiate impulses for a whole culture or a whole stream of civilisation. Whoever wants to know the fundamental colouring and tone of a particular epoch of time must look for that source in the Spiritual whence spring the forces that stream through this epoch of time.

In the years that followed, whatever came into being of a truly spiritual nature, was an echo of this creative working from out of the unknown spiritual worlds. And side by side with the external materialism that developed in the succeeding centuries, we can always find individual spirits who lived under the influence of that renunciation of the higher knowledge.

I should like to give you a brief description of a type of man who might be met with from the fifteenth century onwards through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. You might find him in some country village as a herb-gatherer for an apothecary, or in some other simple calling. If one takes an interest in special forms and manifestations of the being of man as they show themselves in this or that individuality, then one may meet and recognise such a person. At first he is extraordinarily reserved, speaks but little, perhaps even turns away your attention from what you are trying to find in him by talking in a trivial manner, on purpose to make you think it is not worth while to converse with him. If, however, you know better than to look merely at the content of the words a man says, if you know how to hear the ring of the words, how to listen to the way the words come out of a man, then you will go on listening to such a one, despite all discouragement. And if out of some karmic connection he receives the impression that he really should speak to you, then he will begin to speak, carefully and guardedly. And you will make the discovery that he is a kind of wise man. But what he says is not earthly wisdom. Neither is there contained in it much of what we now call spiritual science. But they are warm words of the heart, far-reaching moral teachings; nor is there anything sentimental about his way of uttering them, he speaks them rather as proverbs.

He might say something like this. “Let us go over to yonder fir-tree. My soul can creep into the needles and cones, for my soul is everywhere. From the cones and needles of the fir-tree, my soul sees through them, looks out into the deeps and distances of the worlds beyond; and then I become one with the whole world. That is the true piety, to become one with the whole world. Where is God? God is in every fir-cone. And he who does not recognise God in every fir-cone, he who sees God somewhere else than in every fir-cone—he does not know the true God.”

I want only to describe to you how these men spoke, men that you might find in the way I have described. Such was their manner of speaking. And they might go on to say more. “Yes, and when one creeps into the fir-cones and into the needles of the fir-tree, then one finds how the God rejoices over the human beings in the world. And when one descends deep down into one's own heart, into the abysses of the innermost of man's nature, there also one finds the God; but then one learns to know how He is made sad through the sinfulness of men.”

In such wise spake these simple sages. A great number of them possessed—to speak in modern language—“editions” of the geometrical figures of the old Rosicrucians. These they would show to those who approached them in the right way. When however they spoke about these figures—which were no more than quite simple, even poor, impressions—then the conversation would unfold in a strange manner. There were many people who, although they took interest in the unpretentious wise man before them, were at the same time overcome with curiosity as to what these strange Rosicrucian pictures really meant, and asked about them. But they received from these wise men, who were often regarded as eccentric, no clear and exact answer; they received only the advice: If one attains the right deepening of soul, then one can see through these figures, as through a window, into the spiritual world. The wise men would give as it were a description of what they themselves had been able to feel and experience from the figures rather than any explanation or interpretation of them. And often it was so, that when one had heard these expressions of feeling in connection with the figures, one could not put them into thought at all; for these simple sages did not give thoughts. What they gave, however, had an after-working that was of immense significance. One left these men, not only with warmth in one's soul, but with the feeling: I have received a knowledge that lives in me, a knowledge I can by no means enclose in thoughts and concepts.

That was one of the ways in which, during this period from the fourteenth, fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the nature of the Divine and the nature of the Human, what God is and what Man is, was taught and made known to man through feeling. We cannot quite say, without words, but we can say, without ideas, although not on that account without content.

In this period much intercourse went on among men by means of a silencing of thought. No one can arrive at a true conception of the character of this period who does not know how much was brought to pass in those days through this silencing of thought, when men interchanged not mere words but their very souls.

I have given you, my dear friends, a picture of one of the features of that time of transition when freedom was first beginning to flourish among men. I shall have more to say on this from many aspects. For the moment, taking my start from all that took place at the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I wanted here to add something further to what was given then.

What I have been telling you in recent lectures requires to be carried a little further. I have tried to give you a picture of the flow of spiritual knowledge through the centuries, and of the form it has taken in recent times, and I have been able to show how from the fifteenth until the end of the eighteenth or even the beginning of the nineteenth century, the spiritual knowledge that was present before that period as clear and concrete albeit instinctive knowledge, showed itself in this later age more in a devotion of heart and soul to the Spiritual, to all that is of the Spirit in the world.

We have seen how the knowledge man possessed of Nature and of how the spiritual world works in Nature, is still present in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a personality like Agrippa of Nettesheim, whom I have described in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought, we have one who was still fully possessed of the knowledge, for example, that in the several planets of our system are spiritual Beings of quite definite character and kind.

In his writings, Agrippa of Nettesheim assigns to each single planet what he calls the Intelligence of the planet. This points to traditions which were still extant from olden times, and even in his day were something more than traditions. To look up to a planet in the way that became customary in later Astronomy and is still customary today, would have been utterly impossible to a man like Agrippa of Nettesheim. The external planet, nay, every external star was no more than a sign, an announcement, so to say, of the presence of spiritual Beings, to whom one could look up with the eye of the soul, when one looked in the direction of the star. And Agrippa of Nettesheim knew that the Beings who are united with the single stars are the Beings who rule the inner existence of the star or the planet, rule also the movements of the planet in the Universe, the whole activity of the particular star. And such Beings he called: the Intelligence of the star.

Agrippa knew also how, at the same time, hindering Beings work from the star, Beings who undermine the good deeds of the star. They too work from out of the star and also into it; and these Beings he called Demons of the star. And together with this knowledge went an understanding of the Earth, that saw in the Earth too a heavenly body having its Intelligence and its Demon. The understanding however for star Intelligence and star Demonology was little by little completely lost, with all that was involved in it. What was essentially involved in it may be expressed in the following way.

The Earth was of course looked upon as ruled in her inner activity, in her movement in the Cosmos, by Intelligences whom one could bring together under the name of the Intelligence of the Earth star. But what was the Intelligence of the Earth star, for the men of Agrippa's time? It is exceedingly difficult today even to speak of these things, because the ideas of men have travelled very far away from what was accepted as a matter of course in those times by men of insight and understanding. The Intelligence of the Earth star was Man himself, the human being as such. They saw in Man a being who had received a task from the Spirituality of the Worlds, not merely, as modern man imagines, to walk about on the Earth, or to travel about it in trains, to buy and sell, to write books, and so forth and so forth—no, they conceived Man as a being to whom the World-Spirit had given the task to rule and regulate the Earth, to bring law and order into all that has to do with the place of the Earth in the Cosmos. Their conception of Man was expressed by saying: Through what he is, through the forces and powers he bears within his being, Man gives to the Earth the impulse for her movement around the Sun, for her movement further in Universal Space.

There was in very truth still a feeling for this. It was known that the task had once been allotted to Man, that Man had really been made the Lord of the Earth by the World-Spirituality, but in the course of his evolution had not shown himself equal to the task, had fallen from his high estate. When men are speaking of knowledge nowadays it is very seldom that one hears even a last echo of this view. What we find in religious belief concerning the Fall really goes back ultimately to this idea; for there the point is that originally Man had quite another position on the Earth and in the Universe from the position he takes today; he has fallen from his high estate. Setting aside however this religious conception and considering the realm of thought, where men think they have knowledge that they have attained by definite and correct methods, it is only here and there that we can still find today an echo of the ancient knowledge that once proceeded from instinctive clairvoyance, and that was well aware of Man's task and of his Fall into his present narrow limitations.

It may still happen, for example, that one may have a conversation with a person—I am here relating facts—who has thought very deeply, who has also acquired very deep knowledge concerning this or that matter in the spiritual realm. The conversation turns on whether Man, as he stands on Earth today, is really a creature who is self-contained, who carries his whole being and nature within him. And such a personality as I have described will say to you, that this cannot be. Man must really in his nature be a far more comprehensive being—otherwise he could not have the striving he has now, he could not develop the great idealism of which we can see such fine and lofty examples; in his true nature Man must be a great and comprehensive being, who has somehow or other committed a cosmic sin, as a consequence of which he has been banished within the limits of this present earthly existence, so that today he is really sitting imprisoned as it were in a cage. You may still meet with this view here and there as a late straggler, as it were. But speaking generally, where shall we find one who accounts himself a scientist, who seriously occupies himself with these great and far-reaching questions? And yet it is only by facing them that man can ever find his way to an existence worthy of him as man.

It was, then, really so that Man was regarded as the bearer of the Intelligence of the Earth. But now, a person like Agrippa of Nettesheim ascribed to the Earth also a Demon. When we go back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, we find this Demon of the Earth to be a Being who could only become what he became on the Earth, because he found in Man the tool for his activity.

In order to understand this, we must acquaint ourselves with the way men thought about the relationship of the Earth to the Sun, or of Earthly man to the Sun, in those days. And if I am now to describe to you how they understood this relationship, then I must again speak in Imaginations: for these things will not suffer themselves to be confined in abstract concepts. Abstract concepts came later, and they are very far from being able to span the truth; we have therefore to speak in pictures, in Imaginations.

Although, as I have described in my Outline of Occult Science, the Sun separated itself from the Earth, or rather separated the Earth off from itself, it is nevertheless the original abode of Man. For ever since the beginning of the Saturn existence Man was united with the whole planetary system including the Sun. Man has not his home on Earth, he has on Earth only a temporary resting place. He is in truth, according to the view that prevailed in those olden times, a Sun-being. He is united in his whole being and existence with the Sun. And since this is so, he ought as a being of the Sun to stand quite differently on the Earth than he actually does. He ought to stand on the Earth in such a way that it should suffice for the Earth to have the impulse to bring forth the seed of Man in etheric form from out of the mineral and plant kingdoms, and the Sun then to fructify the seed brought forth from the Earth. Thence should arise the etheric human form, which should itself establish its own relationship to the physical substances of the Earth, and itself take on Earth substantiality. The contemporaries of Agrippa of Nettesheim—Agrippa's own knowledge was, unfortunately, somewhat clouded, but better contemporaries of his did really hold the view that Man ought not to be born in the earthly way he now is, but Man ought really to come to being in his etheric body through the interworking of Sun and Earth, and only afterwards, going about the Earth as an etheric being, give himself earthly form. The seeds of Man should grow up out of the Earth with the purity of plant-life, appearing here and there as ethereal fruits of the Earth, darkly shining; these should then in a certain season of the year be overshone, as it were, by the light of the Sun, and thereby assume human form, but etheric still; then Man should draw to himself physical substance—not from the body of the mother, but from the Earth and all that is thereon, incorporating it into himself from the kingdoms of the Earth. Thus—they thought—should have been the manner of Man's appearance on the Earth, in accordance with the purposes of the Spirit of the Worlds.

And the development that came later was due to the fact that Man had allowed to awaken within him too deep an urge, too intense a desire for the earthly and material. Thereby he forfeited his connection with the Sun and the Cosmos, and could only find his existence on Earth in the form of the stream of inheritance. Thereby, however, the Demon of the Earth began his work; for the Demon of the Earth would not have been able to do anything with men who were Sun-born. When Sun-born man came to dwell on the Earth, he would have been in very truth the Fourth Hierarchy. And one would have had to speak of Man in the following manner. One would have had to say: First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Second Hierarchy: Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; Third Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, Archai; Fourth Hierarchy: Man—three different shades or gradations of the human, but none the less making the Fourth Hierarchy.

But because Man gave rein to his strong impulses in the direction of the physical, he became, not the being on the lowest branch, as it were, of the Hierarchies, but instead the being at the summit of the highest branch of the earthly kingdoms: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human kingdom. This was the picture of how Man stood in the world.

Moreover, because Man does not find his proper task on the Earth, the Earth herself has not her right and worthy position in the Cosmos. For since Man has fallen, the true Lord of the Earth is not there. What has happened? The true Lord of the Earth is not there, and it became necessary for the Earth, not being governed from herself in her place in the Cosmos, to be ruled from the Sun; so that the tasks that should really be carried out on Earth fell to the Sun. The man of mediaeval times looked up to the Sun and said: In the Sun are certain Intelligences. They determine the movement of the Earth in the Cosmos; they govern what happens on the Earth. Man ought, in reality, to do this; the Sun-forces ought to work on Earth through Man for the existence of the Earth. Hence that significant mediaeval conception that was expressed in the words: The Sun, the unlawful Prince of this world.

And now reflect, my dear friends, how infinitely the Christ Impulse was deepened through such conceptions. The Christ became, for these mediaeval men, the Spirit Who was not willing to find His further task on the Sun, Who would not remain among those who directed the Earth in unlawful manner from without. He wanted to take His path from the Sun to the Earth, to enter into the destiny of Man and the destiny of Earth, to experience Earth events and pass along the ways of Earth evolution, sharing the lot of Man and of Earth.

Therewith, for mediaeval man, the Christ is the one Being Who in the Cosmos saved the task of Man on the Earth. Now you have the connection. Now you can see why, in Rosicrucian times, it was again and again impressed upon the pupil: “O Man, thou art not what thou art; the Christ had to come, to take from thee thy task, in order that He might perform it for thee.”

A great deal in Goethe's Faust has come down from mediaeval conceptions, although Goethe himself did not understand this. Recall, my dear friends, how Faust conjures up the Earth Spirit. With these mediaeval conceptions in mind, we can enter with feeling and understanding into how this Earth Spirit speaks.—

In the tides of Life,
In Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal Sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all glowing:
Thus at Time's humming loom ‘tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears.

Who is it that Faust is really conjuring up? Goethe himself, when he was writing Faust, most assuredly did not fully know. But if we go back from Goethe to the mediaeval Faust and listen to this mediaeval Faust in whom Rosicrucian wisdom was living, then we learn how he too wanted to conjure up a spirit. But whom did he want to conjure up in the Earth Spirit? He did not ever speak of the Earth Spirit, he spoke of Man. The deep longing and striving of mediaeval man was: to be Man. For he felt and knew that as Earth man he is not truly Man. How can manhood be found again? The way Faust is rebuffed, pushed on one side by the Earth Spirit is a picture of how man in his earthly form is rebuffed by his own being. And this is why many accounts of conversion to Christianity in the Middle Ages show such extraordinary depth of feeling. They are filled with the sense that men have striven to attain the manhood that is lost, and have had to give up in despair, have rightly despaired of being able to find in themselves, within earthly physical life, this true and genuine manhood; and so they have arrived at the point where they must say: Human striving for true manhood must be abandoned, earthly man must leave it to the Christ to fulfil the task of the Earth.

In this time, when man's relation to true manhood as well as his relation to the Christ was still understood in what I would call a superpersonal-personal manner—in this time Spirit-knowledge, Spirit-vision was still a real thing, it was still a content of experience. It ceased to be so with the fifteenth century. Then came the tremendous change, which no one really understood. But those who know of such things know how in the fifteenth, in the sixteenth centuries, and even later, there was a Rosicrucian school, isolated, scarcely known to the world, where over and over again a few pupils were educated, and where above all, care was taken that one thing should not be forgotten but be preserved as a holy tradition. And this was the following.—I will give it to you in narrative form.

Let us say, a new pupil arrived at this lonely spot to receive preparation. The so-called Ptolemaic system was first set before him, in its true form, as it had been handed down from olden times, not in the trivial way it is explained nowadays as something that has been long ago supplanted, but in an altogether different way. The pupil was shown how the Earth really and truly bears within herself the forces that are needed to determine her path through the Universe. So that to have a correct picture of the World, it must be drawn in the old Ptolemaic sense: the Earth must be for Man in the centre of the Universe, and the other stars in their corresponding revolutions be controlled and directed by the Earth. And the pupil was told: If one really studies what are the best forces in the Earth, then one can arrive at no other conception of the World than this. In actual fact, however, it is not so. It is not so on account of man's sin. Through man's sin, the Earth—so to speak, in an unauthorised, wrongful way—has gone over into the kingdom of the Sun; the Sun has become the regent and ruler of earthly activities. Thus, in contradistinction to a World-System given by the Gods to men with the Earth in the centre, could now be set another World-System, that has the Sun in the centre, and the Earth revolving round the Sun—it is the system of Copernicus.

And the pupil was taught that here is a mistake in the Cosmos, a mistake in the Universe brought about by human sin. This knowledge was entrusted to the pupil and he had to engrave it deeply in his heart and soul.—Men have overthrown the old World-System (so did the teacher speak) and set another in its place; and they do not know that this other, which they take to be correct, is the outcome of their own human guilt. It is really nothing else than the expression, the revelation of human guilt, and yet men take it to be the right and correct view. What has happened in recent times? (The teacher is speaking to the pupil.) Science has suffered a downfall through the guilt of man. Science has become a science of the Demon.

About the end of the eighteenth century such communications became impossible, but until that time there were always pupils here and there of some lonely Rosicrucian School, who received their spiritual nourishment imbued as it were with this feeling, with this deep understanding.

Even such a man as Leibnitz, the great philosopher, was led by his own thought and deliberation to try and find somewhere a place of learning where the relation between the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems could be correctly formulated. But he was not able to find any such place.

Things like this need to be known if one is to understand aright, in all its shades of meaning, the great change that has come about in the last centuries in the way man looks on himself and on the Universe. And with this weakening of man's living connection with himself, with this estrangement of man from himself came afterwards the tendency to cling to the external intellect that today rules all. Is this external intellect verily human experience? No, for were it human experience, it could not live so externally in mankind as it does. The intellect has really no sort of connection with what is individual and personal, with the single individual man; it is well nigh a convention. It does not flow out of inner human experience; rather it approaches man as something outside him.

You may feel how the intellect became external by comparing the way in which Aristotle himself imparted his Logic to his pupils with the way in which it was taught much later, say in the seventeenth century.—You will remember how Kant says that Aristotle's Logic has not advanced since his time.—In the time of Aristotle, Logic was still thoroughly human. When a man was taught to think logically, he had a feeling as though—if again I may be allowed to express myself in imaginative terms—as though he were thrusting his head into cold water and thereby became estranged from himself for a moment; or else he had a feeling such as Alexander expressed when Aristotle wanted to impart Logic to him: You are pressing together all the bones of my head! It is the feeling of something external. But in the seventeenth century this externality was taken as a matter of course. Men learned how from the major and minor premise the consequent must be deduced. They learned what we find treated so ironically in Goethe's Faust:

“The first was so, the second so.
Therefore the third and fourth are so:
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been!
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots ‘twere laced!”

Whether, like Alexander, one feels the bones of one's head all pressed together, or whether one is laced up in Spanish boots with all this First, Second, Third, Fourth—we have in either case a true picture of what one feels.

But this externality of abstract thought was no longer felt in the time when Logic began to be taught in the schools. Today of course this has more or less ceased. Logic is no longer specifically taught in the schools. It is rather as if there had once been a time when hundreds and hundreds of people had put on the same uniform under direction, and done it with enthusiasm, and then afterwards there came a time when they did it of their own free will without giving it a thought.

During all the time however when the Logic of the abstract was gaining the upper hand, the old spiritual knowledge was incapable of going forward. Hence we see it in its turn becoming external, and assuming a form of which examples are to be found in the writings of Eliphas Levi or the publications of Saint-Martin. These are the last offshoots of the old Spirit-knowledge and Spirit-vision.

What do we find in a book such as Eliphas Levi's, The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic? In the first place there are all kinds of signs—Triangles, Pentagrams and so forth. We find words from languages in use in bygone ages, especially from the Hebrew. And we find that what in earlier times was life and at the same time knowledge that could pass over into man's action and into man's ideas—this we find has become bereft of ideas on the one hand, and on the other hand has degenerated into external magic. There is speculation as to the symbolic meaning of this or that sign, concerning all of which the modern man, if he is honest, would have to confess that he can find nothing particular in it. There are also practices connected with all manner of rites, while those who spoke of these rites and frequently practised them were far from having any clear notion at all of their spiritual connection. Such books are invariably pointers to what was once understood in olden times, was once an inward knowledge-experience, but when Eliphas Levi, for example, was writing his books, was no longer understood. As for Saint-Martin—of him I have already written in the Goetheanum Weekly.

Thus we see how what had once been interwoven into the soul-and-spirit of man's life, could not he held there but fell a victim to complete want of understanding. The common impulse and striving for the Divine that shows itself in the feeling of man from the fifteenth to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is genuine and true. Beautiful things are to be found in this impulse, things lovely and sublime. Much that has come from these times and that is far too little noticed today has about it as it were a magic breath—the genuine spell of the Spiritual.

Side by side, however, with all this, a seed is sprouting, the seed of the lack of understanding of old spiritual truths. We have therewith a hardening, ossifying process, and a growing impossibility to approach the Spiritual in a way that is in accord with the age. We come across men of the eighteenth century who speak of a downfall of all that is human, and of the rise of a terrible materialism. Often it seems as though what these men of the eighteenth century say applies just as well to our own time. And yet it is not so; what they say does not apply to the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. For in the nineteenth century a further stage has been reached. What was still regarded in the eighteenth century with a certain abhorrence on account of its demoniacal character, has come to be taken quite as a matter of course. The men of the nineteenth century had not the power to say: Copernicus!—Yes; but such a conception of the Universe was only able to arise because man did not become on Earth that which he should have become, and so the Earth was left without a ruler, and the rulership passed over to the unrighteous lords of the world (the expression occurs again and again in mediaeval writings), these took over the leadership of the Earth—even as the Christ left the Sun and united Himself with the destiny of the Earth.

Only now, at the end of the nineteenth century, has it again become possible to look into these things with a clear vision such as man possessed in olden times; only now in the Michael Age has the possibility come again. We have spoken repeatedly of the dawn of the Michael Age, and of its character. But there are tasks that belong to this Michael Age, and it is possible now to point to these tasks, after all that we have been considering in the Christmas Meeting and since, about the evolution of Spirit-vision throughout the centuries.