The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today²¹³ we'll be considering the question as to whether other creatures have souls, as human beings do, and above all whether animals have some form of soul. Someone who tends to gloss over things may consider this a waste of time, but great people have also given thought to the matter in the past. Descartes, the philosopher who brought philosophy, which had died away in medieval times, alive again at the beginning of the 17th century raised the question. He did, of course, consider animals to be like machines, creatures one could not say had real souls but were reflex machines.²¹⁴ Anyone observing animal life and giving some thought to it will hardly be able to share his views. We merely have to consider the way some animals in the world around us do things, also making relationships among themselves that one would hardly think possible without a soul. The faithfulness of a dog is an example. It would be hard to think that there isn't something in that dog which is similar to what lives in a human being.

When we observe certain things animals do, can we say they do no involve higher mental activity? Consider a beaver's lodge, for instance. A human being would have to use considerable mental effort and skills to produce such a structure. Profound wisdom is evident in the way certain beams are placed exactly, at absolutely the proper angle, to meet the fall of the river and the given situation.

Look at ants! In every ant heap you see something that would be wise government among humans, actually going beyond anything present-day humanity knows. Ants are divided into three groups—workers, males and females. It can be shown that the workers are very clever, the females less clever and the males quite stupid. Everything in the heap is skilfully organized—the way they transport the things needed for their building and to breed their young, go on forays, and so on. If all such things call for soul activity in human state affairs, we cannot say animals lack soul. People have always thought it was enough to speak of instinct, but they never try to think what instinct really is.

We must now also consider the other side and not fail to realize that there is a fundamental difference between the things an animal achieves by its powers of soul and the things a human being achieves by them. A definite fact, which may serve us as an example. Travellers would often find that when they had lit a fire to ward off the cold and then went away, apes would come to warm themselves by the fire. No ape was ever seen to gather more wood to keep the fire going, however. It does not make this connection, and this is of eminent significance. It cannot add something new by using its own mental faculties, such as stoking a fire, and so on.

To understand the animal soul we must make this difference from the human soul our starting point. Another difference between the animal and the human soul is that you can write a biography of every human being but not of every animal. This is most important. If you consider your own interest in the different life forms, you will find that the interest you have in an individual human being is the same as for a whole group of animals of the same species. If you think of a lion, your feelings for the lion grandfather, father, son and grandson are exactly the same. Such an approach would seem absolutely frivolous if applied to human beings. Yes, the owner of a dog may say he can write a biography of his dog, but this means nothing. You can also write the biography of a steel nib or about differences in the life of a darning needle and a sewing needle. That is merely a transfer of ideas. Just as one whole animal species differs from another, so does a single human being differ from others. A common soul lives in the whole group of animals. Just as your ten fingers are part of your hands, so are all wolves part of the wolf group soul.

Now we also need to consider the human soul more closely. It was not as individual in earlier times as it is today. There was a point in human evolution when man was much closer to a group soul. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus gave a description of individual German tribes in his Germania. All members of a group felt they belonged together, though there were, of course, differences, everything happening by degrees in human evolution. All who belonged to a group saw themselves to be the same. Markedly individual facial features are a sign that the individual soul is more removed from the group soul. You still see more or less the same facial features among savages. We have to remember the fact that marked facial features prove that the individual nature is influencing the bodily configuration. This will be increasingly the case as human beings continue to evolve. A time will come when national characteristics disappear completely. With a soul incarnating now in one nation, now in another, national differences will vanish, with everyone immediately always looking just like himself the more his individual nature has come through. In earlier times, when people still married within the tribe, its members would hold together like the fingers on a hand, with one avenging the dishonour done to another as though it had been done to him. This cohesion is gradually disappearing, and the greater the union, the more general the unity of human beings, the more individual will souls and characters be. So you do not get a mishmash but the more the differences fall away, the greater the individuality.

Where do human group souls differ from animal group souls? We have to go back a long way in evolution. In Lemurian times human beings did not yet have different bodies enveloping a spiritual core. The highest form of life was a kind of human-animal with physical body, ether body, astral body and the potential for an I, but not yet the I as such. They were able to receive the divine seed. The soul which now lives inside man had not yet left the keeping of the godhead and still lived in a soul spirit stratum. Think of a container holding a thousand water droplets that merge into one another, forming a single whole. Take a thousand small sponges, each able to absorb one drop, and put them in, so that each contains one drop. This makes them individual and independent. Now imagine that to begin with the soul did not came to dwell in every individual but that one soul was shared by many bodies, a group soul. At that time, the soul which today dwells in every individual dwelt in a whole tribe.

And here you have to accept a new idea. Such a group soul also does not die. The beautiful, significant aspect of death is something specific, something given to the individual human soul. When one unit which is part of a group soul dies, it is replaced immediately, just like the process when you cut off a polyp. And so the group soul, which does not come down on to die physical plan, is sentient of death as the loss of a part, and birth as a new one growing in its place. It does not have the special quality that comes with death. It is only when a sentient entity says: ‘It is I’ that death begins to intervene in individual life. Man gains a higher life by facing death. If death were not overcome, he could not go through death into a higher life.

On the astral plan we find the souls of animals that are linked by a thread to each individual in the group. To understand the origin of animal group souls you have to know what makes man the kind of physical being he is.

When the divine seeds came down, they found very different vessels to contain them. Some were specially developed to be fighters, others were similar, but more developed for work, for patience, and so on. The various bodies thus became different in their development and also in their external form. The lower animals of today insects and others, had branched off during an earlier stage in earth evolution and become something separate.

We'll now only consider animals from the fishes upwards. Mammals did not yet exist when the descent came into the waiting body which externally, not inwardly, was more or less at the level of a fish's body. The human being of that time had to move around half by swimming and half by floating, and had fin-like organs for that purpose. What happened to his body on earth happened because of the human soul that dwelt in it. It took long periods of evolution to transform it into the god-like body of today. Much came to a standstill along that long route. But because the earth continued to go through its transformation, coming to a standstill became bodily regression. Take two siblings, for an example. One changes at every stage of life, the other remains at childhood level. He will no longer look like a child when he's 60, however. That is how the fishes of today have regressed, looking different from the way they did before.

Humanity continued to evolve, configuring everything, finally also the mammalian body. All the time some would come to a standstill, human bodies grown decadent. If you really enter into it you will realize that all animals have aged at their juvenile stage, prematurely, assuming fixed forms which they should have gone beyond. They have crystallized, as it were, in the whole of their development.

Further evolution did, however, put man in a peculiar position where some of his qualities are concerned. He lost his certainty. Apes kept imprisoned will soon develop tuberculosis and other diseases. Animals do not tolerate the human way of life. They also have some degree of certainty where the choice of foods is concerned. A cow walking across a pasture knows exactly which herb is good for it. Man no longer has this. He needs uncertainty in order to determine his free choice. Present-day uncertainty is necessary so that certainty may be gained at a higher level. Man adapts to the higher level. Growing uncertain thus guarantees his independence. Certainty has remained where development has not gone so far that the I is at work in the individual entity. We should not be surprised at the wisdom we see in the animal world any more than at the wisdom of our own hand. An individual beaver is just the group soul's unskilled worker on the physical plan. The ant is at a very different level from the beaver and much further removed from us, for it separated off at a much earlier planetary existence of the earth. In taking just a single route it has gone further than man. For human beings, thinking, feeling and doing are firmly connected. If I see something I like, I reach out for it. The idea leads to the action. Without this firm connection people would be very unsure of themselves. Spiritual training tears will, idea and feeling apart, separating them completely. This will only come true for the whole of humanity at the Jupiter stage of earth evolution. But before he experiences this, the pupil meets the guardian of the threshold who gives him clarity concerning the whole of his life so far.

Some animal group souls went prematurely through this separation of soul functions into three. It is a fact that some parts in the brain of a spiritual pupil are differentiated like the ants in an ant heap. The ant did this prematurely and continues to be immature but clever like a child. The beaver group soul will have to catch up on things it has missed, the ant soul has thrown away its opportunity, going in a completely different direction. Animal souls are human souls that have grown one-sided. Oken said the tongue was a cuttlefish. This should not be taken literally, of course, but the creature in whom tongue properties came too much to the fore has remained stationary at that point. Paracelsus said the profound words: ‘Looking at nature, we see individual letters, together they create the word that is the human being.’ All the different qualities you find combined in man can be thought of as distributed among different bodies, each belonging to an animal group soul. Animals are human beings who have come to a standstill in developing their particular qualities. Man became inventive because he lost his certainty. The first element he learned to make serve him was fire. With this he climbed the first step towards civilization and became productive. He is an encyclopaedia of the different animal souls.

Another thing you must clearly understand is that when you go to the lower animals you will find that they are not able to give direct expression to pleasure and pain in sound. Insects produce noises, but those are boa noises. In occult science, clear stages are established between animals that sound and those that do not. But it is only in man that the inner sound becomes word, becomes speech. Even the more highly developed animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds. At a later time animal group souls, not individual animals, will become human beings, but their constitution will differ greatly from that of present-day humans.

Goethe was aware of this and put it most beautifully in his Metamorphosis of Animals,²¹⁵ saying that they were like a human being separated into his individual parts. The whole animal world, he said, looked at us in the human form. And in looking at the whole of animal creation, the human being thus says: ‘All this brought together in one, that is you.’

Questions and answers

Will more of creation split off as human evolution continues?

Yes, and this is what theosophists call ‘going through the crisis’.²¹⁶ We are now in the 5th epoch; the 6th epoch will see a completely different race, noble and beautiful compared to the split-off decadent race of revoltingly ugly, bestial, sensual people who have many vices, arousing much greater revulsion than is possible with present-day humanity, because there will have been downward development. And you can see it clearly stated in the Book of Revelation, in what is called The Last Judgement. Anyone who is completely selfless may be ripe now for the 6th epoch. He may still incarnate a number of times, but only in order to help others. Some may find that the Last Judgement sounds harsh, but they do, after all, have the choice. Please do not misunderstand me. I mean not concerning reincarnation but concerning the 6th epoch.

Why do old people grow weak-minded, seeing that the soul remains unchanged?

The soul does not change. It never descends from the level it has reached, but its instrument has grown weak. It is like a great pianist who cannot play as well as before if the instrument is poor.

You will say the soul no longer knows its own level. Yes, for it cannot see itself for as long as it is in a physical body. There you altogether have only the reflection of the soul, the mirror reflection. When the mirror grows dim or breaks, it can no longer give a reflection. It is only the occult student who is truly able to perceive his soul.

• 213. See also lectures given in Berlin on 10 November 1910 (in GA 60—Engl, as The human spirit and animal spirit. The human soul and the animal soul. Typescript Z-55 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London).
• 214. Descartes, Rene (1596–1650). Creator of the mechanistic view of the universe. According to Descartes, basic laws of mechanics govern the objects not only of physics and astronomy but also of physiology and psychology, the exception being 'thinking substance\ See his philosophical works.
• 215. See Goethean Science (GA la) (Rudolf Steiner's lectures on the first three chapters of the draft for a general introduction to comparative anatomy, with osteology as the starting point, 1796). Tr. W. Lindemann. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1988.
• 216. See Steiner R. Karmic Relationships of the Anthroposophical Movement (GA 237), lecture of 3 August 1924. Tr. G. Adams, D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

Translated by Anna R. Meuss

Today we are to deal with the question of the ensoulment of creatures other than man, especially the question whether animals have any kind of soul. Such things appear superfluous to one who hurries by them without attention, and yet noted men of the past have already occupied themselves with them. Cartesius (Descartes), who at the beginning of the 17th Century was a keen renewer of the philosophy which decayed in the Middle Ages, put the question. But he regarded animals as machines—beings of which one could not really speak of a real ensoulment—reflex machines.

Whoever thoughtfully regards animal life can only share this view with difficulty. We need merely to point out that many animals in our environment perform actions, and enter into relationships even among themselves, which are difficult to imagine without a soul. One example is the faithfulness of the dog. We can only with difficulty give ourselves to the thought that nothing lives in its inner being analogous to what lives in man. If we consider certain performances, can we disregard a higher, spiritual activity? Let us consider, for example, a beaver's dam. This so artistically constructed performance would denote for a man a great spiritual effort. A deep wisdom lies, for instance, in the way certain beams are adapted most exactly in the correct angle, to the fall of the water, and the prevailing conditions.

Consider the ants. In each ant heap, you meet something like a wise state order of human beings—indeed transcending that of modern man. The ants are divided into three groups: workers, males, and females. It is demonstrable that the workers are very clever, the females more stupid, and the males very stupid. Everything in the structure is elaborately organized—the way they procure everything necessary for the building and for the rearing of the young, the way they lead their foraging expeditions, etc. If all this within a human state needs a soul, then we cannot deny an ensouling to these creatures. People always satisfy themselves with “instinct,” but they never attempt to think about anything underlying this “instinct.”

We must now also consider the other side, and not overlook the radical distinction between what man performs with his soul, and the animal with its soul. As an example, we will start from a definite fact. Travelers have often noticed that if they kindled a fire because of the cold, after they left it the apes would come and warm themselves at it. They never observed, however, that an ape had fetched some wood, to keep the fire going. It cannot arrive at this combination, and that is eminently important. It can never, from its own spiritual powers, do anything new, such as stir up the fire, etc.

If we want to make clear to ourselves the animal soul, we must start with this difference from the human soul. A further difference between the animal and human soul is that you can write a biography of each human soul, but not of the animal. That is very important. If you ask yourselves about your interests in different beings, you will find that you bring the same interest to an individual man as in the case of the animals, to a whole group of similar ones. Think of a lion. You feel the same towards the lion-grandfather, father, son, grandson, etc., but this idea would appear to you nonsensical, if applied to human beings.

It says nothing when a dog owner perhaps maintains that he could write a biography of his dog. You could also write a biography of a pen, or the differences in the life of a pin and a needle. That is only an overdrawn distinction. Just as strongly as one whole animal species differs from another, does the single individual person differ from another.

One common soul lives in the entire animal group. As your ten fingers are members of your hands, so are all wolves members of the wolf group soul.

Now we must enter more exactly into the nature of the human soul, which formerly was not as individualized as it is today. At one point of human evolution, man stood far closer to the group soul. Tacitus, one hundred years after Christ, gives us a picture of the different tribal groups. All members of a group then felt themselves belonging together, naturally with gradations, for everything in human evolution is in stages. All members of a group then looked alike. The markedly individual physiognomies are the sign of this freeing of the individual souls from the group soul. You still find today, among savages, more or less the same features. We must hold fast to this fact, that the physiognomy coming to expression is the proof that the individuality works formatively on the body. This will be more and more marked among the further evolved human races. A time will come when the racial character entirely recedes. If a soul incarnates, now in this, now in that nationality, then the national distinctions vanish, and each one will always only remember himself the more his individuality has worked itself out. Formerly, when marriage only took place within the tribe, the members held together like the fingers of the hand, one revenging the wrong done to another, as if it had happened to himself, etc. This cohesion disappeared more and more; the larger, and more general, the aggregation of human beings, all the more individual became the soul and character. A medley does not arise, but the more the distinctions fall away, the more does individuality arise.

Now, in what way are the human group souls distinguished from the animal? For this we must go back far into the story of their origin.

There was a time in which man did not yet live, as now, in his various bodily sheaths and spiritual germ of his being. I mean the Lemurian Age. At that time the highest beings were a kind of human-animal, with physical, etheric, astral bodies, and the tendency to the ego, but not yet the ego itself, beings that were adapted to take up the divine germ. The soul which now lives in their inner being, had not yet left the bosom of the Godhead. It still lived in a soul-spiritual stratum. Think of a vessel of water with 1000 drops, which pass over without separation into each other, thus forming a unity. Take 1000 tiny sponges, each one of which can absorb one drop, and immerse them. Then each will be filled with one drop. You must think similarly that the human sheaths absorb the divine germ; thereby they first become individual and independent.

Now imagine that in the beginning the soul did not take up its dwelling in each single one, but that one soul distributed itself as group soul among many. What today dwells in one, then inhabited a whole tribe. Here you must grasp a new concept. Such a group soul does not die. The beautiful, significant side of death is a specific privilege of the individual human soul. If one part of the group soul dies, then it immediately replaces it, like the tentacle you cut from a polypus. Thus the group soul, which does not descend to the physical plane, feels death as the loss of one member, and birth as the growing of a similar one. It has not the privilege of death. Only when a sense being says “It is I,” death begins to enter individual life. Man struggles for and attains his higher life through death. Unless death were overcome, he could not attain through it to higher life.

The soul of the animal is to be found on the astral plane, and is connected with each single member of its group by a thread. In order to understand how animal group souls arise, you must be clear what makes man the physical being that he is. When the divine germs descended, they found the bearers very different. Many were especially developed for conflict; others were similarly formed but more developed for work, for patience, etc., so that the various bodies differed greatly in development even in external form. What today exist as lower animals, as insects, etc., had already branched off during a former incarnation of the earth, and originated by themselves. We are now concerned only with animals from the fishes upwards. When that descent occurred into the waiting bodies, which outwardly (not inwardly) stood approximately at the stage of the fish body, there were no mammals yet existing. The human being who lived then had to move forward half swimming, half floating, and for this purpose had fin-like organs. That which took place in his body on earth, took place through the indwelling human soul. Only in the course of a long evolution was this body transformed to the present god-like body.

Many things remained stationary on this long path. Since, however, the earth was meantime transformed, this standing still caused a decline in the development of the bodies. Take two brothers—the one is transformed through the different ages of life, the other remains stationary at the childhood stage. At the age of 60, however, he no longer looks like a child. Thus the present fishes have come down and look different from how they looked formerly.

Humanity developed further, and fashioned everything to the mammalian body. Everywhere, again, are those who remain stationary—decadent human beings. If you really grasp aright, you will understand that all animals have aged at the youth stage, have aged too early, have adopted fixed forms which they should have gone beyond. They have, as it were, crystallized in their whole evolution. The upward development, indeed, now brought man into a peculiar position, with reference to certain characteristics. He lost security. Monkeys in captivity soon end through tuberculosis and other illnesses. Animals cannot stand the human way of life. Even as regards nourishment, they have a certain security. If a cow goes over a meadow, she knows exactly what plants are good for her. Man has that no more. He needs insecurity in order to come to freedom of choice. The present insecurity is necessary to reach security at a higher stage. Man adapts himself to higher stages. Thus his becoming insecure is the guarantee that he becomes independent. To have remained secure denotes something that has not advanced to the point where the ego can work in the individual being. We should wonder as little about animal wisdom as about the wisdom of our own hand. The single beaver is merely the handyman of the group soul on the astral plane.

The ant stands at quite a different stage from the beaver, and much further from us, because it already separated off at a much earlier planetary condition of the earth. In its one-sided development it has advanced much further than man. Man thinks, feels, wills, in fixed connection. If I see something which pleases me I grasp at it; the idea evokes the will. Without this interaction man would be very insecure. With the Chela, will, idea, and feeling are torn asunder, and must be quite separate. For general humanity that will first be attained at the Jupiter stage of the earth. But before he experiences this, the Guardian of the Threshold meets him, and gives him clarity about the whole of his previous life.

This falling apart into threefoldness has been gone through prematurely by certain animal group souls. As a matter of fact, individual parts in the brain of the Chela are differentiated like the ants in the ant hill. The ant has undertaken that prematurely and now remains like an unripe, clever child. The beaver group soul will have to make up for what it has missed; the ant soul has lost it once and for all, and goes quite other paths.

The animal souls are human souls that have become one-sided. Oken says: “The tongue is an ink fish.” Naturally, that is not to be taken literally. The being, however, in which the characteristics of the tongue have become too prominent, remains stationary at that point. Paracelsus uttered the profound words: If we survey nature we simply see separate letters and the word they form is the human being. Imagine all the different qualities which you find together in man, allocated to different bodies, then you need a group soul. Animals are human beings which have remained stationary in the one-sided development of their characteristics.

Man became a discoverer through the loss of security. The first element which he learned to put to his service was fire. Therewith he reached the first stage of civilization which made him a productive being. He is an encyclopedia of the different animal souls.

Now you must still be clear on one point. If you go to the lower animals, you will find that they cannot directly express pain and pleasure through sound. The insects, indeed, produce noises, but they are body noises. Occult science here makes a quite decisive distinction between the sounding animals and the non-sounding ones. But, first, in man, does the inner sound become word, speech. Even the highest animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds. In a later epoch the animal group souls, not the single animals, will become human beings but quite differently constituted from the man today. Even before Theosophy, Goethe felt this and expressed it wonderfully in his “Metamorphosis of Animals”; that they (animals) are like a man laid asunder, that the entire animal kingdom looks out from out of the human form.

Thus man says to all animal beings (speaking of himself), “All this, comprised in one, art thou!”

Question: Will further cleavages come in human evolution?

Answer: Yes, and in fact that is what is called in Theosophy “going through the Crisis.” We now stand in the Fifth Root Race. The Sixth Race will see quite another race, noble and beautiful, in contrast to the thrown off, decadence which will be a race of men, horribly ugly, animal-like, sensual, vicious, far more horror-provoking than our present humanity, because these will go on developing downwards. It is shown quite clearly in the Apocalypse how the division will occur in the so-called Last Judgment. He who is quite selfless can even now become ripe for the Sixth Race. He may still indeed continue to incarnate, but only in order to help the others. Many may perhaps find that the Judgment sounds harsh, but they have, as we know, the choice. Understand me aright, not for reincarnation, but for the Sixth Race.

Question: Why do old people become mentally weak, even if the soul cannot change?

Answer: The soul, indeed, does not change. It never descends from the stage once reached. But its instrument has become weak, like a great pianist who can no longer play as he played formerly, if he has a bad instrument. You will say the soul no longer knows its own stage. Yes, the soul does not see itself as long as it is in a physical body. There is only to be found the reflection of the soul, the mirror image. Now the mirror becomes clouded or broken. Then it can no longer reflect. The Chela is really the first able to perceive his soul.

Let us first send our thoughts to those who are outside on the battlefields, where the great events of the present are taking place, to those who must stand for these serious events with their life, body and soul:

Geister ihrer Seelen, wirkende Wächter!
Eure Schwingen mögen bringen
Unserer Seelen bittende Liebe
Eurer Hut vertrauten Erdenmenschen,
Dass, mit Eurer Macht geeint,
Unsre Bitte helfend strahle
Den Seelen, die sie liebend sucht!

(TRANSLATION)

Spirits of their Souls, working Guardians!
May your pinions bring
Our souls' beseeching love
To the human beings on this earth, entrusted to your care,
That, united with your might,
Our prayer may helpfully ray out
To the souls whom it lovingly seeks!

And let us remember those who have already passed through the portal of death, as a result of these events:

Geister ihrer Seelen, wirkende Wächter!
Eure Schwingen mögen bringen
Unsrer Seelen bittende Liebe
Eurer Hut vertrauten Sphärenmenschen,
Dass, mit Eurer Macht geeint,
Unsre Bitte helfend strahle
Den Seelen, die sie liebend sucht.

(TRANSLATION)

Spirits of their Souls, working Guardians!
May your pinions bring
Our souls' beseeching love
To the human beings of the spheres, entrusted to your care,
That, united with your might,
Our prayer may helpfully ray out
To the souls whom it lovingly seeks!

And the Spirit Whom we seek through our spiritual-scientific endeavours, the Spirit Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha for the welfare of the earth and for mankind's freedom and progress, may He be with you and with your difficult tasks!

The time in which we live, reminds us daily and hourly of death, this significant event in human life, it reminds us of man's passage through the portal of death. For only in the light of spiritual science, death becomes a real event, in the true meaning of the word, because spiritual science shows us the eternal forces that are active within us, that pass through births and deaths and take on a special form of existence between birth and death, in order to assume another form of existence after their passage through the portal of death. In the light of spiritual science, death becomes an event, instead of being merely the abstract end of life (only a materialistic world-conception can look upon death as the end of life), it becomes a deep and serious event within the whole compass of human life. Even from our own ranks, dear friends of ours have left us in order to pass through the portal of death, chiefly as a result of the present historical events, but also for other reasons, and so it may perhaps be particularly appropriate just now to say a few things on death, on this great event, and on the facts of human life that are connected with it.

Explanations have often been given in our spiritual-scientific lectures on the life between death and a new birth, so that we were able to gain many essential facts, particularly in regard to this subject. The course which spiritual science has followed up to now, will have shown you that in every single case it can only speak of things from one definite standpoint, so that a more accurate knowledge can gradually be acquired by speaking of things repeatedly and throwing light upon them from many points of view. To-day I shall therefore add to the facts that you already know in connection with this subject, a few things that may be useful to our comprehension of the world as a whole.

Through spiritual science, we consider, to begin with (and that is a good thing) the human being such as he stands before us, here, in the physical world as an expression of his whole being. We must depart first of all from the manner in which the human being presents himself to us in the physical world, and for this reason, I have frequently pointed out that we obtain, as it were, a general view of man's whole being if we contemplate him so that we first take, as a foundation, his physical body, which we learn to know externally in the physical world through our senses and the scientific-dissection of what we perceive through the senses. We then proceed, by studying that form of organisation which we designate as our etheric body: this already possesses a super-sensible character and cannot, therefore, be contemplated with the aid of the ordinary intellect, which is bound to the brain, and is consequently also inaccessible to our ordinary science. The etheric body is an organism having super-sensible character, concerning which we may say that it was already known to men such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, son of the great thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to Troxler and others. Indeed, man's etheric body can only be grasped through imaginative knowledge owing to its super-sensible character, but as far as imaginative knowledge is concerned, it can be contemplated externally, just as the physical-sensory body can be contemplated externally through our ordinary sensory knowledge.

We then ascend in our contemplation to the astral body. The astral body in man cannot be contemplated in an external-sensory manner, in the same way in which we contemplate the physical body through our external senses, or in the same way in which we contemplate our etheric body through our inner sense; the astral body is something that can only be experienced inwardly. We must experience it inwardly and in order to experience it, we must be within it. The same thing applies to the fourth member which must be grasped in the physical world, to the Ego. With these four members of human nature, we build up our whole being.

Past lectures showed us that what we designate as man's physical body is a very complicated structure, formed during long periods of development that passed through the stages of Saturn, the Sun and the Moon¹ also the evolution of the earth contributed to this development of the physical body, from the very beginning of earthly existence up to our time. A complicated process of development therefore built up our physical body.

That form of contemplation which is, to begin with, accessible to us in the physical world, merely sees the external aspect of everything that lives within the physical body. Even ordinary science merely sees this external aspect. We might say: Our ordinary physical contemplation and ordinary science, in the form in which it now lives in the world, merely know of the physical body as much as we would know of a house, if we would only go round it outside, without ever going inside, so that we would never learn to know what it is like inside, nor what people live in it.

Of course, those who stand upon the foundation of ordinary science, in the usual materialistic meaning, will argue: “We are thoroughly acquainted with the interior of the physical body! We know what it is like, because we have frequently studied the brain inside the skull, when dissecting corpses; we have frequently studied the stomach and the heart.” This interior, however, that can thus be studied from outside, this spatial interior is not what I mean when I speak of man's inner being. Even this spatial interior is nothing but an external thing. Indeed, in the case of the physical body, this spatial interior is far more external than the real spatial exterior.

This must sound strange. But our sense-organs—you know this from other descriptions contained in our spiritual science—were formed already during the Saturn period and we carry them on the surface of our body. Spatially speaking, they are outside. Nevertheless, they were built by forces that are far more spiritual than those that formed our stomach, or everything that exists, spatially speaking, inside our body. What is inside our body, is built up by the least spiritual of forces. Strange though it may sound, I must nevertheless point out that we really speak of ourselves in an entirely mistaken manner—upside down, we might say. Since we live on the physical plane, it is natural to speak in that way; nevertheless the way in which we speak of ourselves is quite wrong. We should really designate the skin of our face as our interior, and the stomach as our exterior. This would lead us far closer to the truth! It would lead us closer to the real truth if we were to say: We eat in such a way that we send the food out of us; when we send food into our stomach, we really send it out, we do not send it into our body, as we generally say at the present time. The more our organs lie on the surface, the more spiritual are the forces from which they come; and the more they lie inside our body, the less spiritual are the forces that gave rise to them,

The descriptions that were given so far in our spiritual science enable you to grasp this with a certain ease. If you carefully remember the descriptions of spiritual science, you will no doubt remember what it says in regard to the Moon stage of development, namely, that something split off during the Moon stage of development, and that something also split off during the Earth-development; it went out into the world's spaces from the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages of development. A very strange thing is connected with this splitting-off process: namely, we were turned inside out! Our inside became our outside, and our outside became our inside. During the Saturn and Sun periods, our human countenance, that is now turned towards the outer world, was really turned towards our inner being. Of course, this was only the case during the early stages of development; but even during a part of the Moon period, during the Moon existence, the foundation of the inner organs which we now possess was still formed from outside. Since that time, we have really been turned inside out, like an overcoat that can be turned. We should bear in mind that many super-sensible facts are connected with our physical body; its whole structure is super-sensible; the super-sensible world has formed it, and when we look upon the physical body as a whole, it merely shows us its external aspect,

If we now come to the etheric body, we shall find that it is neither visible nor accessible to the physical-sensory contemplation. But when the human being passes through the portal of death, it becomes all the more important. The time through which the human being now passes, the first days after his death, are particularly important as far as the etheric body is concerned. But we must learn to think differently, even in regard to the physical body, if we wish to grasp in the right way all that we encounter after our passage through the portal of death.

You already know (for you can observe this even in the physical world) that when we pass through the portal of death, we lay aside our physical body, as we generally say. We lay aside our physical body. Through decomposition or cremation (the only difference between these two processes lies in the length of time that they take up) the physical body is handed over to the elements of the earth. Now we might think that the physical body simply ceases to exist for those who have passed through the portal of death. But this is not the case, in this meaning. For we can hand over to the earth only those parts of our physical body that come from the earth itself. We cannot, however, hand over to the earth that part of our physical body that comes from the ancient Moon existence, nor that part which comes from the ancient Sun existence, or from the ancient Saturn existence. For those parts that come from the ancient Saturn existence, from the Sun existence, from the Moon existence, and even from a great portion of the Earth existence, are super-sensible forces. These super-sensible forces contained in our physical body, of which only the external part is accessible to our sensory contemplation, as explained just now,—where do these super-sensible forces go to, after we have passed through the portal of death? As stated, we hand over to the earth, we return to the earth, only that part of our physical body, of that most wonderful structure which exists in the world, to begin with, as a form,—we return to the earth only what the earth itself has given to the physical body. And where is the other part, when we have passed through the portal of death? The other part withdraws from the one that sinks down into the earth, as it were, through the process of decomposition or cremation; the other part is taken up by the whole universe.

If you now think of everything you can at all imagine in the environment of the earth, including the planets and the fixed stars, if you imagine this in the most spiritual form, this spiritually conceived idea would give you the place where the spiritual part of our physical body abides after death. Only a portion of this spiritual part, a portion contained in the element of heat, separates and remains with the earth. But every other spiritual part of our physical body is borne out into the spaces of the universe, into the whole cosmos.

Where do we go to, when we abandon our physical body? Where do we dive down? Through our death, we dive down with lightning speed into that which forms our physical body, from out [of] all the super-sensible forces. Imagine that all the constructive forces that have worked upon your physical body, ever since the time of Saturn, were to stretch themselves into infinity, in order to prepare the place in which you live between death and a new birth. Between birth and death, all this is drawn together, I might say, within the space enclosed by your skin; it is merely drawn together.

When we are outside our physical body, we experience something that is of utmost importance for the whole subsequent life between death and a new birth. I have often mentioned this. This experience is of opposite character to the corresponding experience during our life here, upon the physical plane. During our life upon the physical plane, we cannot look back as far as the hour of our birth; we cannot look back upon it with the aid of our ordinary cognitive power. There is not one person who can remember his own birth, nor look back upon it. The only thing we know, is that we were born; in the first place, because we have been told so by others, and in the second place, because all the other human beings that came to the earth after us, were also born, so that we infer from this that we too, were born. But we cannot pass through the real experience of our own birth.

Exactly the opposite is the case with the corresponding experience after death. Whereas, during our physical life, the immediate contemplation of our birth can never rise up before our soul, the moment of death stands before our soul throughout our life between death and a new birth, if we only look upon it spiritually. We must realise that we then look upon the moment of death from the other side. Here, on earth, death has a terrifying aspect only because we look upon it as a kind of dissolution, as an end. But when we look back upon the moment of death from the other side, from the spiritual side, then death continually appears to us as a victory of the spirit, as the spirit that is extricating itself from the physical. It then appears as the greatest, most beautiful and significant event. Moreover, this experience kindles that which constitutes our Ego-consciousness after death. Throughout the time between death and a new birth, we have an Ego-consciousness that not only resembles but far exceeds that which we have here, during our physical life. We would not have this Ego-consciousness, if we could not look back incessantly, if we would not always see—but from the other side, from the spiritual side—that moment in which our spiritual part extricated itself from the physical. We know that we are an Ego only because we know that we have died, that our spiritual has freed itself from our physical part. When we cannot contemplate the moment of death, beyond the portal of death, then our Ego-consciousness after death is in the same case as our physical Ego-consciousness here upon the earth, when we are asleep. Just as we know nothing of our physical Ego-consciousness when we are asleep, so we know nothing concerning ourselves after death, if we do not constantly have before us the moment of death. It stands before us as one of the most beautiful and loftiest moments.

You see, even in this case we must set about thinking in an entirely different way of the spiritual world, than of the sensory-physical world. If we indolently remain by the thoughts which we have in connection with the physical-sensory world, it will be impossible for us to grasp the spiritual in any way more precisely. For the most important thing after death is that the moment of death is viewed from the other side. This kindles our Ego-consciousness on the other side. Here, in the physical world, we have, as it were, one side of Ego-consciousness; after death, we have the other side of Ego-consciousness. I explained just now where we should look for the super-sensible part of our physical body after death. We should seek this physical body in the shape of a relation of forces, of an organism of forces, as a cosmos of forces, within the whole world. This physical essence prepares the place through which we must pass between death and a new birth.

Within our physical body, which is so small in comparison to the whole world, our skin really encloses a microcosm, something that is, in reality, a whole world. Trivially speaking, I might say that this world is merely rolled together and that afterwards it unrolls again and fills out the universe, with the exception of one tiny space, that always remains empty.

Between death and a new birth, we really exist everywhere in the world; we live in it with that part which, here on earth, lies at the foundation of our physical body in the form of super-sensible forces. We are everywhere, except in that one place. This remains empty. It is the space enclosed by our skin, the space which we take up in the physical world. This remains empty.

Yet we constantly look upon this empty space. That is to say, we look upon our own self, from outside; we look into a concavity. This remains empty. It remains empty to such an extent that a fundamental feeling rises up in connection with it. Namely, we do not contemplate things in an abstract manner, we do not simply stare at them, but our contemplation is connected with a powerful inner life-experience, with a mighty experience. It is connected with the fact that when we contemplate this emptiness, a feeling rises up in us, a feeling that accompanies us throughout our life between death and a new birth and constitutes a great deal of what we generally designate as our life beyond. It is the feeling, that there is something in the world which must again and again be filled out by us. And then we acquire the feeling: “I exist in the world for a definite purpose, which I, alone, can fulfil.” Thus we learn to know our place within the world. We feel that we are building stones, without which the world could not exist. This is what arises through the contemplation of that empty space. When we gaze at it, we are overcome by a feeling telling us that we stand within the world as something that forms part of it.

All this is connected with the further development of our physical body. The more elementary forms of description only enable us to explain schematically as it were, a reality of the spiritual world that really requires to be explained in the form of images. In order to rise gradually to those concepts which penetrate more deeply into the reality of the spiritual world, we must first have those images.

We know that our next experience is a kind of retrospective memory, that lasts for days. But this retrospective memory is inappropriately designated (but nevertheless with a certain right) as a retrospective memory, for we have before us now, for a few days, something that resembles a tableau, or a panorama, woven out of all we have experienced during our past life. It does not, however, rise up in the same way in which an ordinary memory rises up in our physical body. You see, the memories that live in our physical body are of such a kind that we draw them out of our memory. Memory is a force that is connected with our physical body. Our recollections rise up in the form of thoughts; through the power of memory, we draw them out successively, within the stream of time. But the retrospective memory after death is of such a kind that everything that occurred during our earthly life, now surrounds us simultaneously, as if it were a panorama. Our life-experiences now rise up in the form of imaginations. We can only say that we now live, for whole days, within our experiences. What we experienced just before death, and what we experienced during our childhood, stands before us simultaneously, in powerful pictures. A panorama of our life, a life-picture stands before us and it reveals, simultaneously, in a woof woven out of the ether, what normally occurs successively, within the stream of time. Everything that we now see before us, lives in the ether.

We feel, above all, that we are now surrounded by something that is alive. Everything within it lives and weaves. And then we experience that it resounds spiritually, that it shines forth spiritually and gives warmth spiritually.

We know that this life-tableau disappears after a few days. What makes it cease and what is the essence of this life-tableau?

If we study the true essence of this life-tableau, we must really say: Everything that we have experienced during our life, is woven into it. How did we experience these things?—In the form of thoughts, connected with our experiences. Everything that we experienced in the form of thoughts and concepts is contained in this picture of our life.

In order to grasp this concretely, let us now say: During our earthly life, we lived together with another human being, we spoke with him and in speaking with him, his thoughts communicated with our thoughts. We received love from him, we allowed his soul to influence us and experienced all this inwardly. In this manner, we shared the experiences of the person we lived with. He lived and we lived, and through him we experienced something. What we experienced through him, now appears to us woven into this etheric life-tableau. It is the same thing that constitutes our memories. Think, for instance, of the moment, ten or twenty years ago, when you first met him and experienced something through him. Imagine that this memory now rises up before you, but that you do not remember it in the same way in which you would remember things during your ordinary life. The ordinary memories are grey and faded, but now you remember things in such a way that they rise up within you as LIVING memories; you see your friend standing before you in exactly the same way in which he stood before you during the real experience.

Here, on earth, we are often very dreamy and what we experience upon the physical plane in a living and hearty manner, becomes dulled and loses its vitality. But when we pass through the portal of death, when our experiences rise up before us in the life-tableau, they are no longer dull and lifeless, but exist there, in the original freshness and vitality which they possessed when we passed through them, during our earthly life. In this form they become inwoven with our life-tableau; in this form we experience them after death, for whole days.

In regard to the physical world, we have the impression that our physical body falls away from us when we die; in a similar way we now have the impression that also our etheric body falls away from us after a certain number of days, but it does not fall away from us in the same way in which our physical body falls away, for it becomes inwoven with the whole universe, with the whole world. It lives in the world and stamps its impressions upon the whole world, while we are experiencing our life-tableau. What we thus have before us in the form of a life-tableau, has now been handed over to the external world: it lives in our surroundings and has been taken over by the world.

During those days, we have an important and impressive experience in this connection. For, after death, our experiences do not merely resemble the memories which we have during our earthly life, but they are in every way substance for new experiences. Even the manner in which we grasp our Ego, through the fact that we constantly look back upon our death, is a new experience, for our earthly senses do not enable us to experience anything similar. This can only be grasped through the knowledge of initiation. But even what we experience during the days in which we are surrounded by this life-tableau, by this etheric life that frees itself from us and becomes inwoven with the universe, even what we experience in this manner, is impressive and lofty, it is an overwhelming and powerful experience for the human soul.

You see, during our physical life on earth, we face the world: we face the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdom. It enables us to experience what our senses are able to experience, what our intellect, that is bound to the brain, obtains through the sense-experiences, what are our feelings, that are connected with our vascular system, experience: we experience all these things, here on earth.

But in reality, and from a loftier standpoint, we human beings are extremely great dunces (excuse this expression!), gigantic dunces between birth and death. In regard to the wisdom of the great world, we are fearfully stupid if we believe that here on earth, when we experience something in the manner described and bear it along in the form of memories, everything is finished; we are fearfully stupid if we think that our experiences are finished, when we take them up in this manner, as human beings. For while we experience things, while we form concepts and feelings rise up in our experiences, the whole world of the Hierarchies is active within this process through which we acquire our experiences; the Hierarchies live and weave in it.

When we face a human being and, look into his eyes, then the Spirits of the Hierarchies, the Hierarchies themselves, the work of the Hierarchies, live in our gaze and in what is sent towards us through the gaze of the other human being. Our experience merely shows us the external aspect of things, for, in reality, the Gods work within our experiences. We think, that we only live for our own sake; yet the Gods work out something through our experiences; they obtain from them something that they can weave into the world. We form ideas, we have feeling experiences; the Gods take them up and communicate them to their world. And when we die, we know that the purpose of our life is to give the Gods the opportunity to spin out of our life this woof coming from our etheric body and to hand it over to the whole universe. The Gods gave us the chance to live, in order that they might spin out something for themselves, thus enriching the world.

This is an overwhelming thought. Every one of our strides is the external expression of an event connected with the Gods; it forms part of that woof which the Gods use for their plan of the world and which they leave to us only until we pass through the portal of death. After our death, they take it away from us and incorporate with the universe these, our human destinies. Our human destinies are, at the same time, the deeds of Gods, and the form in which they appear to us human beings is merely their outward aspect. This is the significant, important and essential fact which we should bear in mind.

What we acquire inwardly, during our earthly life, through the fact that we can think and have feelings, whom does this belong to, after our death? Whom does it now belong to? After our death, it belongs to the universe. We look back upon our death, and in the same way we now look back with that part which remains to us, namely, with our astral body and our Ego, upon that which has become inwoven with the universe, with the world. During our earthly life, we bear within us what thus becomes inwoven with the universe after our death; we bear it within us, as our etheric body. But now it is spun up and becomes inwoven with the world. And we now look upon it, we contemplate it. After our death, we look upon it in the same way in which we experienced it inwardly, here on earth. It now lives in the world outside. Just as here on earth we see stars, mountains, rivers, so after our death, we see, in addition to what our physical body has become with lightning speed, also that part of our own experiences which has become inwoven with the universe. That part of our own experiences which now incorporates with the whole world-structure, is reflected in those members which we still possess, in our astral body and in our Ego; it is reflected in the same way in which the external world is reflected, here on earth, in our physical organs and through our physical being.

While this is reflected in us, we acquire something that we cannot acquire during our earthly life, something that we shall only acquire later on, during the Jupiter period, in the form of a more external, physical impression. Now we acquire it spiritually, through the fact that our etheric being, outside makes an impression upon us. The impression which is thus made upon us, is, to begin with, a spiritual one; it is made in the form of images; in its image-character it is, however, the prototype of what we shall one day possess upon Jupiter: namely, the Spirit-Self.

A Spirit-Self is therefore born to us, through the fact that our etheric part becomes inwoven with the universe; this Spirit-Self comes to birth spiritually, not in the form in which we shall have it later on, upon Jupiter.

The etheric body has now detached itself, so that we now have the astral body, the Ego and the Spirit-Self.

The astral body and the Ego therefore remain to us from our earthly life.

You already know that our astral body, in the earthly form in which it was subjected to us, remains with as for a long time after death. The astral body remains with us, because it is permeated with all those things that only pertain to the earthly-human life, and because it cannot immediately expel this. We now pass through a time during which we can only cast off little by little what has become of our astral body as a result of our earthly life.

You see, here on earth, we can only experience, in regard to the astral body, one half at the most of everything through which we pass. We really experience only half of what takes place in every one of our experiences. Let us take an example: Imagine—this applies, both to good and to evil thoughts and actions—but let us take as an example an evil action: Imagine that you say something bad to another person and that your words hurt him. When we say something unkind, we only experience that part which concerns us personally; we only experience the feelings that prompted us to say those evil words: This is the soul-impression which we gather when we say bad and unkind things. But the other person to whom we addressed our unkind words, has an entirely different impression; he has, as it were, the other half of the impression and feels hurt. The second half of the impression lives in him. What we ourselves experience during our physical life on earth is one thing, and what the other person experiences is another thing.

Now imagine the following: After our death, when we pass retrogradely through our life, we must once more live through everything that other people, outside, have experienced through us. As we go backwards through our life, we experience the effects of our thoughts and actions. Between death and a new birth, we therefore pass through our life by going through it retrogradely. And when we have gone back as far as our birth, we are ripe for the moment when also that part of our astral body may be cast off, which is permeated with earthly things. It abandons us, and a new state of-existence begins for us when we have cast off our astral body.

The astral body always kept us connected, I might say, with the earth; it maintained this connection in all our experiences. When we pass through our astral body—not in a dreamy condition, but by living through our earthly experiences backwards—we are still connected with our earthly life; we still stand within our earthly existence. Now that we have cast off—but this is not the right expression; it is, however, impossible to use another one—now that we have cast off our astral body, we are quite free of all that pertains to the earth, and we live in the real spiritual world.

A new experience now sets in. This casting-off of the astral body is, again, merely one aspect of the whole experience; the other aspect is an entirely different one. When we have passed through our earthly experiences and no longer have our astral body, we feel, as it were, inwardly filled and permeated with—we cannot say with material—but with Spirit; then we really feel that we are in the spiritual world and the spiritual world rises up within us. In former times, it rose up before us in the outer world when we contemplated the universe and saw our own etheric body inwoven with the universe. But now it rises up within us; we now experience it inwardly. And our Ego rises up within us, as a prototype of what we shall possess physically only upon Venus; our Ego rises up as a prototype of the Life-Spirit.

We now consist of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Ego.

Just as here on earth, we live in a rather dreamy state from our birth until that moment of our childhood in which we acquire self-consciousness, which is the earliest moment of life that we can recall, so we now lead a form of life that is fully conscious, indeed more conscious and higher than our earthly life. However, we experience a purely spiritual life, only when we have detached ourselves from our astral body, from our astral life, retaining only that part of our astral which permeates us inwardly. Consequently, we are, from that time onwards, Spirits among Spirits.

Now another important and essential experience rises up. During our life in the physical world, we carry on our work, do this or that thing and [have] experiences in connection with all these things. (We just spoke of this). Our experiences are, however, not limited to the physical world; simultaneously and in connection with them, we also experience something else. Although the expression which I shall now use for these simultaneous experiences is just an ordinary, more general expression, let me nevertheless use this word: while we experience these things, we grow tired, we get used up. This is constantly the case: we grow tired. Although our weariness is eliminated for our next state of consciousness through the fact that we sleep, or rather, through the fact that we rest during our sleep, this elimination, or adjustment, is nevertheless only a partial one, for we know, of course, that during our life we gradually become used up, we grow older, and our strength gradually dwindles. Consequently, we also grow tired in a wider sense. When we grow older, we know that we cannot adjust everything by sleeping. Thus we wear out our strength, we grow tired, during our life on earth.

Indeed, we are now able to view this problem from another aspect. After our preceding explanation, we can now advance this problem in a different way; we can ask: Why do the Gods allow us to grow weary? The fact that here on earth we get tired and wear out our strength, gives us something that is really most significant for our whole life. Let us, however, grasp the idea that we get tired, in a wider sense than the usual one. Let us place it clearly before our soul.

You will grasp it best of all if you imagine it in the following way: Ask any one of those present: Do you know anything concerning the interior of your head?—Probably only a person who is suffering from headache would answer that at the present moment he does know something concerning the interior of his head. He alone would feel what the inside of his head is like; all the others would not feel it.

We can feel our organs only when they are not quite in order; we are then to some extent aware of their existence through our feelings. As a rule, we only have a more general feeling of our physical body, and this feeling increases when anything is out of order. But when we only have this general feeling, we know very little concerning the interior of our body. Those who suffer from bad headaches know a little more concerning the inside of their head than an anatomist, who is merely acquainted with the head's vessels. I explained this just now. In growing more and more tired, during the course of our life, we acquire an ever stronger feeling in regard to the body's interior, its spatial interior.

Consider the fact that the more weary we grow, the more the infirmities of life arise, for instance the infirmities of old age. Our life consists therein that we gradually begin to feel and to sense our physical body. We learn to sense this physical part of our being, because it becomes hardened within us and because it pushes itself, as it were, into our being. Just because it develops so slowly, we regard it, I might say, as an insignificant feeling. Its real significance could be gauged, if we could feel (excuse this trivial expression, but it conveys what I wish to say) in the pink of health, like an exuberantly healthy child, and immediately afterwards, for the sake of comparison, like an old man of 80 or 85, whose limbs have grown fragile. This would enable us to experience that feeling more strongly; simply because it develops so slowly and little by little, we do not notice the fact that we gradually spin ourselves into the feeling experience of our physical part, while we grow weary; we do not notice this feeling simply because it develops so slowly. Yet growing weary is a real process. At first, it does not exist at all, for a child is full of exuberant vitality. But later on, fatigue gradually begins to drown the vital forces, and then the process of getting tired breaks through. We have the possibility of growing weary, and during this process (even though it only gives us, let us say, a dim feeling of our body's inner structure), during this process, something takes place within us, something really takes place within us.

Our life in the physical world only shows us the outer aspect of deep, significant and lofty mysteries. The fact that this dim, insignificant feeling of growing weary accompanies us throughout our life, so that we are able to feel the inner structure of our body, is merely the outer aspect of something that becomes inwoven with us; it is wonderfully woven out of pure wisdom, a complete woof of pure wisdom.

While we thus grow weary during our life and begin to experience ourselves inwardly, a delicate knowledge becomes inwoven with us, a knowledge of the wonderful constitution of our organs, of our inner organs. Our heart grows tired, yet this weariness means that a knowledge of the heart's structure becomes inwoven with us, a knowledge of how the heart is built from out the universe. Our stomach gets tired—most of all, when we spoil it by eating too much—yet during this process that tires the stomach, an image of wisdom from out the cosmos is woven into us, and this image shows us how the stomach is built up.

The lofty, wonderful structure of our organism, of this great work of art, arises within us in the form of an image. But this image only comes to life when we cast off that part of our astral body which is bound to the earth. What now lives within us, what now fills us as LIFE-SPIRIT, is the wisdom connected with our own being, it is the wisdom connected with the wonderful structure of our inner being and this wisdom now lives in us.

Now begins a time in which we compare, as it were, what fills us in the form of Life-Spirit from out the wisdom of our inner being, with the etheric woof that has already been woven into the universe. Our task is now to compare how one thing fits in with the other, and we then build up, in the form of an image, our inner being; we give it the shape which it should have during our next incarnation.

This is how we begin, but little by little our life approaches the World-Midnight, which you will find described in one of the Mystery Plays, in “The Souls' Awakening”. Particularly after the World-Midnight, we are engaged in a work that consists therein that we now participate in the world's creative work; we call into life what we afterwards enjoy here, DURING OUR LIFE BETWEEN DEATH AND A NEW BIRTH, WE SHARE IN THE WORK, WE PARTICIPATE IN THE WEAVING OF THE GODS' IMAGES. We have the privilege of sharing in a divine task, in what the Gods aimed at, when they placed man into the world. We are allowed to prepare our next incarnation.

Of course, this is not only connected with processes that exclusively and egoistically concern our own being, for all manner of other processes take place as well. This may be evident particularly from the following:

If we gradually succeed in experiencing, in spiritual contemplation, this wonderful process—which is, above all, far higher than the one which takes place on earth, when summer and winter alternate, or when the sun rises and sets—and when all that takes place which occurs in the form of earthly work, then something occurs in the spiritual world finally leading to our earthly incarnation, to human existence. This is a lofty, heavenly process, which has not only an external significance, but a deep significance for the whole world.

We also encounter something else, when we contemplate this process. It may sound strange to say this, but you see, the higher mysteries at first necessarily appear strange in the light of a physical-Sensory contemplation. What rises up before our soul in connection with these mysteries must move us. The more it moves us, the better it is, for these things, the very nature of these things, should not approach our soul so that we remain dry and indifferent. They should not be taken up in such a way that we remain indifferent, dry and cool; but they should, instead, give us a soul-impression of the loftiness and greatness of the divine spiritual world.

We can say: If anybody would undertake to present spiritual science in such a dry way that it does not take hold of our WHOLE being, and so that we do not gain an impression of the loftiness and greatness of the divine-spiritual that pulses and weaves through the world—if, after all these descriptions, we would live on indifferently and dryly, then we would be born without heads, in accordance with the present conditions of the world and in spite of everything we know! We would be born without heads! The structure of our head is something that we are unable to build. In its whole structure, the human head is such a lofty image of the universe, that the human being would be unable to form it, even with the aid of that life-wisdom which is woven into him; he would be unable to prepare it for the next incarnation. All the divine Hierarchies must cooperate in this work. Your head, this slightly irregular and somewhat transformed sphere, is a real microcosm, a true image of the great world-sphere. Within it lives, within it is collected everything that exists outside, in the universe. All the forces that are active in the different Hierarchies cooperate in order to produce the head. And when we begin to shape our next incarnation, from out [of] the wisdom, which we collected during the process of growing weary, all the Hierarchies cooperate and influence this activity, in order to embody in us, as an image of the whole wisdom of the Gods, what afterwards becomes our head!

While all this occurs, our physical, hereditary stream is being prepared generations ahead, here upon the earth. Just as after our death we can only hand over to the earth what comes from the earth, so our parents and grand-parents only give us that part of our being which pertains to the earth. Our earthly part is merely our exterior, it is merely the external expression within this earthly part. Woven into it, is, in the first place, everything that we ourselves are able to weave in the manner described, and what all the Hierarchies of the Gods weave, before we gain a connection (through conception) with that which enwraps us and clothes us about, when we enter the physical plane.

I explained to you, that the more of this lofty knowledge we take up in our feelings, the better it will be for us. Just consider the fact: We use our head. In so far as we live in materialism, we generally have not the slightest idea that whole Hierarchies of Gods are at work in order to produce our head, in order to mould that which lies, spiritually, at the foundation of our head, so that we are able to live. If we grasp this, in the meaning of a spiritual-scientific knowledge, it will spontaneously be filled with feelings of gratitude and thankfulness towards the whole universe.

Consequently, what we acquire through spiritual science, should incessantly continue to increase and raise our feelings. In the sphere of spiritual science, our sentient life should more and more hold pace with our cognitive work. It is not good to remain behind with our feelings. Whenever we learn to know a new and higher portion of spiritual science, we should be able to unfold, I might say, more and more reverent feelings towards the world's mysteries, which finally lead to the mysteries of man. A true progress in spiritual science really lies in this purifying, spiritual, warmth of our feelings.

Let me mention one more thing because it completes all that we have contemplated in this lecture. Here, in the physical world, we gradually grow accustomed to life by having, to begin with, the dull consciousness of childhood. At first, we only recognise our mother and little by little we learn to know other people. As we grow accustomed to life in the physical world, we believe that we are constantly coming across new people. As far as our physical consciousness is concerned, this is, in fact, true. But when we pass through the portal of death, we have a real, true connection with all the souls that we encountered during our earthly life. They rise up again before our spiritual eye. The souls with whom we were connected during our earthly life and that crossed the portal of death before us, we find these souls, as it were. The word “to find” really applies to physical conditions, but we may use it here, to define that living way in which souls approach other souls. This “finding” of the souls that crossed the portal of death before us, should, however, be imagined in such a way that we approach them, as it were, in an opposite manner from the one in which we approach human beings, here on the physical plane.

On the physical plane we encounter human beings so that we first approach them physically, and then we gradually become acquainted with their inner being. Their inner being unfolds only when we penetrate into their inner life. Hence, what we experience inwardly in connection with a human being, is the result of that which develops from out [of] our own inner life. When we ourselves have crossed the portal of death and encounter the souls that have passed through the portal of death before us, we know to begin with: There is that particular soul. We can feel it, we know that it is there. Now we must, however, surrender our whole inner being to the first impression that arises, to the first most abstract impression. Here on earth we should allow other human beings to exercise their influence upon us; but in the spiritual world we must SURRENDER OUR INNER BEING and we must now build up the image, the imagination, ourselves. The imaginative element, what we can look upon, this we must gradually build up. You may have an idea of the soul's experiences after death if you imagine that you do not see it, but that you TAKE HOLD of it ... and as you gradually ENCOMPASS IT WITH YOUR GRASP, you, form an image: you build up an image for yourself. You must therefore build up in inner activity the image of the soul whom you encounter. You realise, as it were: “I am now facing a soul ... What soul is it? It is the soul ...”, and this knowledge rises out of your own soul ... “towards whom I had the feelings of a son towards his mother.” And you begin to feel: “I experience myself together with this soul”. Now you begin to build its spiritual form. You must be active within it, and then it develops into an image. Through the fact that you build this image together with the other soul, you are united with that dead person, even before you begin, to form its spiritual shape. In this manner you are united with everything with which you were united during your earthly life; that is to say, you now experience these things in their own world. You must discover them, by awakening within you the power of vision, so that you may look upon yourself, but this requires activity on your part.

It is not the same with souls that still dwell in their physical body, with souls that are still alive when we die. Even here on earth, we encounter them in the form of images. Thus we look down upon the earth, and do not need to build up their image, for they already face us as images. Of course, we may weave into these images something that can become spiritual warmth and nourishment for the dead, namely the image which we are able to form through our thoughts for the dead, through our lasting love and memory, or—we know this, as spiritual scientists—by reading something to them.

You see, all this extends the human gaze, so that it penetrates, really penetrates into the real world. If this rises up before our soul, we begin to realise how little we know of the spiritual world. This was not always the case. Only the completely materialistic people of modern times boast of the great extent of their knowledge. But we know that in the past the human beings were clairvoyant and that this ancient, atavistic clairvoyance was lost only because certain qualities had to be acquired, which disappeared in the midst of an existence connected with a materialistic world. If a real materialist, a thoroughly materialistic thinker, approaches us, he will, of course, say: “It is nonsense to speak of an ancient clairvoyance, or that people had a special knowledge in the past”. But if we would only open our physical eyes a little as we pass through the world, we would very soon discover the confutation of such an argument! It is not even so long ago, that people used to know more than they do at the present time.

You know, for we have often considered this matter—but let me mention it again at the conclusion of this lecture—that Lucifer and Ahriman have a share in our spiritual existence. We also know that in the Bible Lucifer is symbolized as a Serpent, as the Serpent on the Tree. The physical serpent, such as we see it to-day, and as modern painters always paint it when they depict the Paradise Scene, is not a real Lucifer; it is only his outer image, his physical image. The real Lucifer is a Being that remained behind during the Moon-stage of evolution. He cannot be seen upon the earth, among physical objects. If a painter wishes to paint Lucifer's real aspect he would have to paint him so that he can be grasped as an etheric form, through a kind of inner clairvoyant form of contemplation. He would then appear in the shape in which he works upon us; he would show that he is not connected with our head or with our organism in so far as these are exclusively formed by the earth, but that he is connected with the continuation of our head, with the spinal cord. A painter who knows something through spiritual science, would therefore paint Adam and Eve, the Tree, and on the Tree the Serpent, but this serpent would only be a symbol and it would have a human head. If we would come across such a painting to-day, we would assume that the painter has, of course, been able to paint this picture through spiritual science,

Probably such a painting may even be found here in Leipzig; but people do not go about with open eyes, they go through the world with bandaged eyes. In the Art Gallery of Hamburg there is a painting of the Middle Ages by, Master Bertram, setting forth the Paradise Scene. In that painting, the Serpent on the Tree is painted correctly, as described just now. That picture can be seen there. But other painters have also painted the Paradise Scene in that way. What may we gather from this? That in the Middle Ages, people still knew this, they knew it to the extent of being able to paint it. In other words: It is not so long ago, that human beings were pushed completely on to the physical plane.

The course of man's spiritual history, as related by materialistic thinkers, is, after all, nothing but an outer deception, because they think that man always had the aspect which he assumed in the course of the past few centuries, whereas it is not so long ago that he used to look into the spiritual world with the aid of his ancient clairvoyance. He had to abandon the spiritual world, because he was not free, and in order to acquire full freedom and his Ego-consciousness, it was necessary that he should leave the spiritual world. Now he must once more find his way into the spiritual world.

Spiritual science therefore prepares something very important and essential: namely, that we may once more penetrate livingly into the spiritual world. Again and again let us conjure up in our soul the necessity of feeling that this small number of men that is now living in the very midst of a materialistic world and is led through its Karma to the possibility of grasping mankind's most important task for the future, that this small number of men is called upon to fulfil important, most important tasks, through its soul-life. We should realise without any pride, we should realise modestly and humbly the great difference between a soul that is gradually finding its way into the spiritual world, and all the people outside, who have not the slightest idea of this, who are, above all, NOT WILLING to have any idea of it. This fact should not merely arouse in us discouraging and painful feelings, but produce feelings that incite us to continue our work with increasing energy and to work faithfully within the stream of spiritual science, to which we were led through our Karma.

When we were together last, I also mentioned that when a human being passes through the portal of death before having lived through the whole of his life, then that part which is given to him in the form of an etheric body has not been used up completely. When a human being passes through the portal of death in his youth, then his etheric body might still have worked for years upon his physical body. But these forces do not go lost; they are still there. I also mentioned that in the present time, through the fact that every day and every hour death so numerously approaches mankind, many, many etheric bodies that might still have worked for a long time upon their physical body, here on the physical plane, are handed over to the spiritual-etheric world and hover in it. The forces that might, for decades, have provided for the physical body, become spiritual forces, that cooperate in the spiritual development of humanity. Thus a time will come, when these forces that constitute these etheric bodies, can be used for the spiritual progress of humanity; but this time will only come, if here on earth there will be human souls who are able to understand this.

When the terrible events of the present shall have passed over the earth and there will be peace once more, then the souls of those who are still living on the earth in human bodies, will have the possibility of grasping something of the fact that all those who have gone into the spiritual world before their time have their etheric bodies in that world and that they can ray their forces into the earth. It will be necessary that this fact be grasped by these souls. These souls can then cooperate in that spiritual progress which is rendered possible particularly through the many deaths of self-sacrifice.

Imagine what it would mean if spiritual science were to disappear, and if no one were to have any comprehension for all that is being prepared in the spiritual world through these deaths of self-sacrifice! Imagine what this would mean! In that case, all those forces would become the property of Beings who would use them for other purposes than those for which they should be used, in accordance with the plan and resolution of the Gods who follow the right course of development.

This is an admonishment that also comes from the events of our time, an admonishment to the effect that we should stand fully within all that which constitutes the spiritual world. For even these events of our time have their spiritual aspect. What they reveal outwardly, in the form of blood, death and sacrifices, is the external expression of an inner spiritual course of events, which should, however, be grasped in the right spirit.

Of this I wish to remind you again and again, with the words that conclude our present considerations:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlassener,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten,
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht,
Lenken Seelen Geist-bewusst,
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(TRANSLATION)

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the sufferings of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall grow out a spiritual fruit,
If souls lead, in Spirit-consciousness,
Their heart and mind into the Spirit-realm.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science

We live in grievous, destiny-burdened days. Only few souls wait with full confidence what these destiny-burdened days will bring to us earth people. Above all, the significance of that what expresses itself by the events of these days, does not speak with full strength in the souls. Some human souls attempt to experience the impulses more and more that spiritual science demands to be implanted into the cultural development. They should know being connected with their deepest feeling with that which, on one side, takes place around us so tremendously and, on the other side, so painfully.

Something takes place that is matchless not only according to the way but also according to the degree within the conscious history of human development, that is deeply intervening and drastic in the whole life of the earth's development. One needs to imagine only what it means—and this is the case today with every human being of the European and also of many parts of the other earth population—to be in the centre of the course of such significant events. We have to feel that this is just a time which is not only suitable but also demands that the soul frees itself from merely living within the own self, and should attempt to experience the common fate of humankind. The human being can learn a lot in our present if he knows how to combine in the right way with the stream of the events. He frees himself from a lot of pettiness and egoism if he is able to do this. Such great events take place that almost anybody caring for himself ignores the destinies of the other human beings.

In particular the population of Central Europe—which immense questions has it to put to itself about matters that it can learn basically only now! The human being of Central Europe can perceive how he is misunderstood, actually, how he is hated. And these misunderstandings, this hatred did not only erupt since the outbreak of the war, they have become perceptible since the outbreak of the war. Hence, the outbreak of the war and the course of the war can be even as it were that what draws attention of the Central European souls to that how they must feel isolated in a certain way more or less compared with the feeling of those people who stand on all sides around this Central European population really not with understanding emotions. If anybody could arouse deeper interests in the big events of life in the souls dedicating themselves to spiritual science—this would be so desirable, especially now—events that lead the soul from the ken of its ego to the large horizon of humankind! Then one were able to deepen the look, the whole attitude of the souls who recognise the encompassing forces, because they have taken up spiritual science in themselves, and release them from the interest in the narrow forces that deal only with the individual human being! If one hears the world talking today, in particular the world which is around us Central Europeans, if one reads which peculiar things there are written about the impulses which should have led to this war, then one has the feeling that humankind has lost the obligation to judge from larger viewpoints in our materialistic time, has lost so much that you may have the impression, as if people had generally learnt nothing, but for them history only began on the 25th July, 1914.¹

It is as if people know nothing about that what has taken place in the interplay of forces of the earth population and what has led from this interplay of forces to the grievous involvements which caught fire from the flame of war, finally, and flared up. One talks hardly of the fact that one calls the encirclement by the previous English king who united the European powers round Central Europe, so that from this union of human forces around us, finally, nothing else could originate than that what has happened. One does not want to go further back as some years, at most decades and make conceptions how this has come what is now so destiny-burdened and painful around us.

But the matters lie still much deeper. If one speaks of encirclement, one must say: what has taken place in the encirclement of the Central European powers in the last time, that is the last stage, the last step of an encirclement of Central Europe, which began long, long ago, in the year 860 A. D. At that time, when those human beings drove from the north of Europe who stood as Normans before Paris, a part of the strength, which should work in Europe, drove in the west of Europe into the Romance current which had flooded the west of Europe from the south. We have a current of human forces which pours forth from Rome via Italy and Sicily over Spain and through present-day France. The Norman population, which drives down from the north and stands before Paris in 860, was flooded and wrapped up by that which had come as a Romance current of olden times. That what is powerful in this current is due to the fact that the Norman population was wrapped up in it. What has originated, however, as something strange to the Central European culture in the West, is due to the Romance current. This Romance current did not stop in present-day France, but it proved to be powerful enough because of its dogmatically rationalistic kind, its tendency to the materialistic way of thinking to flood not only France but also the Anglo-Saxon countries. This happened when the Normans conquered Britain and brought with them that what they had taken up from the Romance current. Also the Romance element is in the British element which thereby faces the Central European being, actually, without understanding. The Norman element penetrated by the Romance element continued its train via the Greek coasts down to Constantinople. So that we see a current of Norman-Romance culture driving down from the European north to the west, encircling Central Europe like in a snake-form, stretching its tentacles as it were to Constantinople.

We see the other train going down from the north to the east and penetrating the Slavic element. The first Norman trains were called “Ros” by the Finnish population which was widely propagated at that time in present-day Russia. “Ros” is the origin of this name. We see these northern people getting in the Slavic element, getting to Kiev and Constantinople at the same time. The circle is closed! On one side, the Norman forces drive down from the north to the west, becoming Romance, on the other side, to the east, becoming Slavic, and they meet from the east and from the west in Constantinople. In Central Europe that is enclosed like in a cultural basin what remained of the original Teutonic element, fertilised by the old Celtic element, which is working then in the most different nuances in the population, as German, as Dutch, as Scandinavian populations. Thus we recognise how old this encirclement is.

Now in this Central Europe an intimate culture prepares itself, a culture which was never able to run like the culture had to run in the West or the culture in the East, but which had to run quite differently. If we compare the cultural development in Central Europe with that of the West, so we must say, in the West a culture developed—and this can be seen from the smallest and from the biggest feature of this culture—whose basic character is to be pursued from the British islands over France, Spain, to Sicily, to Italy and to Constantinople. There certain dogmatism developed as a characteristic of the culture, rationalism, a longing for dressing everything one gets in knowledge in plain rationalistic formulae. There developed a desire to see things as reason and sensuousness must see them. There developed the desire to simplify everything. Let us take a case which is obvious to us as supporters of spiritual science namely the arrangement of our human soul in three members: sentient soul, intellectual soul or mind-soul, and consciousness-soul. The human soul can be understood in reality only if one knows that it consists of these three members. Just as little as the light can be understood without recognising the colour nuances in their origin from the light, and without knowing that it is made up of the different colour nuances which we see in the rainbow, on one side the red yellow rays, on the other side the blue, green, violet ones, and if one cannot study the light as a physicist. Just as little somebody can study the human soul what is infinitely more important. For everybody should be a human being and everybody should know the soul. He, who does not feel in his soul that this soul lives in three members: sentient soul, intellectual soul or mind-soul, consciousness-soul, throws everything in the soul in a mess. We see the modern university psychologists getting everything of the soul in a mess, as well as somebody gets the colour nuances of the light simply in a mess. And they imagine themselves particularly learnt in their immense arrogance, in their scientific arrogance throwing everything together in the soul-life, while one can only really recognise the soul if one is able to know this threefolding of the soul actually.

The sentient soul also is at first that what realises, as it were, the desires, the more feeling impulses, more that in the current earth existence what we can call the more sensuous aspect of the human being. Nevertheless, this sentient soul contains the eternal driving forces of the human nature in its deeper parts at the same time. These forces go through birth and death. The intellectual soul or mind-soul contains half the temporal and half the eternal. The consciousness-soul, as it is now, directs the human being preferably to the temporal. Hence, it is clear that the nation, who develops its folk-soul by means of the consciousness-soul, the British people, after a very nice remark of Goethe, has nothing of that what is meditative reflection, but it is directed to the practical, to the external competition. Perhaps, it is not bad at all to remember such matters, because those who have taken part in the German cultural life were not blind for them, but they expressed themselves always very clearly about that. Thus Goethe said to Eckermann²—it is long ago, but you can see that great Germans have seen the matters always in the true light—when once the conversation turned to the philosophers Hegel, Fichte, Kant and some others: yes, yes, while the Germans struggle to solve the deepest philosophical problems, the English are directed mainly to the practical aspects and only to them. They lack any sense of reflection. And even if they—so said Goethe—make declamations about morality mainly consisting of the liberation of slaves, one has to ask: which is “the real object?”—At another occasion, Goethe wrote³ that a remark of Walter Scott expresses more than many books. For even Walter Scott admitted once that it was more important than the liberation of nations, even if the English had taken part in the battles against Napoleon, “to see a British object before themselves.” A German philologist succeeded—and what does the diligence of German philologists not manage—in finding the passage in nine thick volumes of Napoleon's biography by Walter Scott to which Goethe has alluded at that time. Indeed, there you find, admitted by Walter Scott, that the Britons took part in the battles against Napoleon, however, they desired to attain a British advantage. He himself expresses it “to secure the British object.”—It is a remark of the Englishman himself, one only had to search for it. These matters are interesting to extend your ken somewhat today.

You have to know, I said, that the human soul consists of these three members, properly speaking that the human self works by these three soul nuances like the light by the different colour nuances, mainly in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. Then one will find out that the human being, while he has these three soul nuances, can and must assign each of these soul nuances to a great ideal in the course of human progress. Each of these ideals corresponds to a soul nuance not to the whole soul. Only if people can be induced by spiritual science to assign the corresponding ideals to the single soul members, will the real ideal of human welfare and of the harmonious living together of human beings on earth come into being.

Because the human being has to aim at another ideal for his sentient soul, for that which he realises as it were in the physical plane, at another soul ideal for that what he realises in the intellectual soul or mind-soul, and again another ideal in his consciousness-soul. He improves a soul member through one of these ideals; the other soul members are improved through the others. If one develops the soul member in particular through brotherliness of the human beings on earth, one has to develop the other one through freedom, the third through equality. Each of these three ideals refers to a soul member. In the west of Europe everything got muddled, and it was simplified by the rationalists, by that rationalism, which wants to have everything in plain formulae, in plain dogmas, which wants to have everything clearly to mind. The whole human soul was taken by this dogmatism simply as one, and one spoke of liberty, fraternity, equality. We see that there is a fundamental attitude of rationalising civilisation in the West. We could verify that in details. For example, just highly educated French can mock that I used five-footed iambi in my mystery dramas⁴ but no rhymes. The French mind cannot understand that the internal driving force of the language does not need the rhyme at this level. The French mind strives for systematisation, for that what forms an external framework, and it says: one cannot make verses without rhyme.

However, this also applies to the exterior life, to everything. In the West, one wants to arrange, to systematise, and to nicely tin everything. Think only what a dreadful matter it was, when in the beginning of our spiritual-scientific striving many of our friends were still influenced by the English theosophical direction. In every branch you could find all possible systems written down on maps, boards et cetera, on top, nicely arranged: atma, buddhi, manas, then all possible matters in detail which one systematises and tins that way. Imagine how one has bent under the yoke of this dogmatism and how difficult it was to set the methods of internal development to their place, which we must have in Central Europe, that one thing ensues from the other, that concepts advance in the internal experience. One does not need systematising, these mnemonic aids which wrap up everything in certain formulae. Which hard work was it to show that one matter merges into another, that you have to arrange matters sequentially and lively. I could expand this account to all branches of life; however, we would have to stay together for days.

We find that in the West as one part of the current which encircled Central Europe. If we go to the East, then we must say: there we deal with a longing which just presents the opposite, with the longing to let disappear everything still in a fog of lacks of clarity in a primitive, elementary mysticism, in something that does not stand to express itself directly in clear ideas and clear words. We really have two snakes—the symbol is absolutely appropriate,—one of them extends from the north to southeast, the other from the north to southwest, and both meet in Constantinople. In the centre that is enclosed what we can call the intimate Central European spiritual current, where the head can never be separated from the heart, thinking from feeling, if it appears in its original quality.

One does not completely notice that in our spiritual science even today, because one has to strive, even if not for a conceptual system, but for concepts of development. One does not yet notice that everything that is aimed at is not only a beholding with the head. However, the heart and the whole soul is combined with everything, always the heart is flowed through, while the head, for example, describes the transitions from Saturn to the Sun, from the Sun to the Moon, from the Moon to the earth et cetera. Everywhere the heart takes part in the portrayal; and one can be touched there in the deepest that one ascends with all heart-feeling to the top heights and dives in the deepest depths and can ascend again. One does not notice this even today that that what is described only apparently in concepts one has to put one's heart and soul in it at the same time if it should correspond to the Central European cultural life. This intimate element of the Central European culture is capable of the spiritual not without ideal, not to think the ideal any more without the spiritual. Recognising the spirit and combining it intimately with the soul characterises the Central European being most intensely. Hence, this Central European being can use that what descends to the deepest depths of the sensory view and the sensory sensation to become the symbol for the loftiest. It is deeply typical that Goethe, after he had let go through his mind the life of the typical human being, the life of Faust, closed his poem with the words:

Alles Vergängliche
All that is transitory

Ist nur ein Gleichnis
Is only a symbol;

and the last words are:

Das Ewig-Weibliche
The eternal feminine draws

Zieht uns hinan
Us up to higher levels.

A cosmic mystery is expressed through a sensory picture, and just in this sensory picture the intimate character of the Central European culture expresses itself. We find this wonderfully intimate character, for example, so nicely expressed and at the same time rising spiritually to the loftiest just with Novalis. If you look for translations of this last sentence: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan,” in particular the French translations, then you will see what has become of this sentence. Some French did explain it not so nicely, but they do not count if it concerns the understanding of Faust.

The Central European being aims at the intimacy of spiritual life most eminently, and this is that what is enclosed by the Midgard Snake in the East and the West. So far we have to go to combine completely in our feeling with that what happens, actually. Then we gain objectivity just from this Central European being to stand in front of the present great events with the really supranational human impulses, and not to judge out of the same impulses which are applied by the East and the West. Then we understand why the Central European population is misunderstood that way, is hated by those who surround them. Of course, we have to look at the mission of Central Europe for the whole humankind with all humility. We are not allowed to be arrogant, but we must also protect the free look for what is to be done in Central Europe.

The Central European population has always gone through the rejuvenating force of its folk-soul. It arrived at the summit in the ideals of Lessing, Schelling, Hegel, and Grimm. However, everything that already lived there lived more in a striving for idealism. Now this must gain more life, more concrete life. The profound ideas of German idealism have to get contents from spirituality, by which they are raised only from mere ideas to living beings of the spiritual world. Then we can familiarise ourselves in this spiritual world. The significance of the Central European task has now to inspire German hearts, and also the consciousness of what is to be defended in all directions, to the sides where the Midgard Snake firmly closes the circle. It is our task in particular because we are on the ground of spiritual science to look at the present events in such a higher sense. We cannot take the most internal impulse of our spiritual science seriously enough if we do not familiarise ourselves with such an impersonal view of the spiritual-scientific striving if we do not feel how this spiritual-scientific striving is connected in every individual human being with the whole Central European striving as it must be united with the whole substantiality of this Central European striving. We have to realise that something of what we have in mind exists only in the germ, however, that the Central European culture has the vocation to let unfold the germs to blossoms and fruits.

I give you an example. When the human being tries to further himself by means of meditation and concentration, by the intimate work on the development of his soul, then all soul forces take on another form than they have in the everyday life. Then the soul forces become as it were something different. If the human being works really busily on his development, by concentration of thought and other exercises as I described them in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, the human being begins to understand vividly, I would like to say to grasp vividly that he does no longer think at the moment, when he approaches the real spiritual world, as he has to think in the everyday life. In the everyday life, you think that the thoughts start living in you. If you face the sensory world, you know: that is me, and I have the thoughts. You connect one thought with the other and you thereby make a judgment, you combine the thoughts and let them separate. In my writing which is entitled The Threshold of the Spiritual World, I have compared somebody developing thoughts to one putting his head into a world of living beings.

The thoughts start internally prickling and creeping, they become, if I may say so, living beings, and we are no longer those who connect one thought to the other. One thought goes to the other, and frees itself from the other, the life of thoughts starts coming to life. Only when the thoughts start as it were becoming shells and containers which contract in a small room and extend then again largely, bag-like, then the beings of the higher hierarchies are able to slip into our thoughts, then only! So our own way of life, the whole thinking changes when we settle in the spiritual world. Then you start perceiving that on the other planets other beings live not human beings like on the earth. These other beings of the other planets, they penetrate as it were our living thinking, and we do no longer think about the beings of the other worlds and world spheres, but they live in us, they live combined with our selves. Thinking has become a different soul-force; it has developed from the point on which it stood to another soul-force, to that force which surpasses us and becomes identical with that world, the spiritual world.

Here we have an example of that what humankind has to conceive if it should develop the condition in which it now lives to a higher one for the earth future. This must really become common knowledge that such thinking is possible, and that only by such a thinking the human being can get to know the spiritual world. Not every human being has to become a spiritual researcher, just as little as everybody needs to become a chemist who wants to understand the achievements of chemistry. However, even if there can be few spiritual researchers, everybody can see the truth of that using unbiased thinking and understand what the spiritual researcher says. But it must become clear that there are unnoticed soul forces in the human being during life which when the human being goes through the gate of death become the same forces as an initiate has. When the human being goes through the gate of death, thinking becomes another soul-force: it intervenes in the being. It is as if antennas were perpetually put out, and the human being experiences the higher worlds which are in these antennas.

There was a witty man setting the tone in the 19th century, who contributed to the foundation of the materialistic world view: Ludwig Feuerbach.⁵ He wrote a book Thoughts on Death and Immortality, and it is interesting to read the following in a passage of this book. Feuerbach says there for instance: the summit human being is able to reach is his thoughts. He cannot develop higher soul forces than thinking. If he could develop higher soul forces than thinking, some effects and actions of the inhabitants of the star worlds would be able to penetrate his head instead of thoughts.—This seems so absurd to Ludwig Feuerbach that he regards everybody as mentally ill who speaks of such a thing at all. Imagine how interesting this is that a person—who just becomes a materialist because he rejects higher soul forces—gets on that the soul-force is that which represents the higher development of thinking. He even describes it, but he has such a dreadful fear of this development that just because it would have to be that way, as he suspects, he declares this soul-force a matter of impossibility, a fantasy.

The spiritual development in the 19th century comes so near to that what must be aimed at, but it is so far away at the same time because it is pushed, as it were, from the inside to that what should be aimed at, but cannot penetrate the depths, because it must regard it as absurd, because it is afraid of it really, fears it quite terrifically. As soon as it only touches what should come there, it is afraid. The Central European cultural life has to come back to itself, then we will attain that this Central European cultural life just develops and overcomes this fear. That has become too strong what wants to suppress this Central European spiritual light.

Some examples may also be mentioned. Hegel, the German philosopher, raised his voice in vain against the overestimation of Newton. If you today hear any physicist speaking—you can read up that what I say in many popular works,—then you will hear: Newton set the tone in the doctrine of gravitation, a doctrine through which the universe has only become explicable.—Hegel said: what has Newton done then, actually?—He dressed that in mathematical formulae what Kepler, the German astronomer, had expressed. Because nothing is included in Newton's works what Kepler did not already say. Kepler worked out of that view with which the whole soul works not only the head. However, Newton brought the whole in a system and thereby all kinds of mistakes came into being, for example, the doctrine of a remote effect of the sun which is not useful for the judgment of planetary motion. With Newton it is real that way, as if the sun had physical arms, and stretches these arms and attracts the planets.—However, the German philosopher warned in vain that the Central European culture would be flooded by the British culture in this field.

Another example: Goethe founded a theory of colours which originated completely from the Central European thinking and which you only understand if you recognise the connections of the physical with the spiritual a little bit. The world did not accept the Goethean theory of colours, but the Newtonian theory of colours.—Goethe founded a teaching of evolution. The world did not understand it, but it only accepted what Darwinism gave as a theory of evolution, as a theory of development in a popular-materialistic way. You may say: the Central European human being who is encircled by the Midgard Snake has to call in mind his forces. It concerns not to bend under that what rationalism and empiricism brought in.

You see the gigantic task; you see the significance of the ideal. One does not notice that at all because it still passes, I would like to say, in the current of phenomena if one asserts the Central European being. I do not know how many people noticed the following. When for reasons which were also mentioned yesterday in the public lecture⁶ our spiritual-scientific movement had to free itself from the specifically British direction of the Theosophical Society and when long ago as it were that happened beforehand in the spiritual realm what takes place now during the war—and preceded for good reasons,—I have discussed and explained the whole matter in those days on symptoms. There are brainless people who want to judge about what our spiritual-scientific movement is and have often said: well, also this Central European spiritual-scientific movement has gone out from that which it has got from the British theosophical movement.

I say the following not because of personal reasons, but because it characterises the situation, the whole nerve of the matter in a symptom, I would like to remind you of the fact that I held talks in Berlin which were printed then in my writing Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Spiritual Life, before I had any external interrelation with the British theosophical movement. In this writing nobody will find anything of western influence, but there everything is developed purely out of the Central European cultural life, from the spiritual, mystic movement of Master Eckhart up to Angelus Silesius. When I came to London the first time, I met one of the pundits of the theosophical society in those days, Mr. Mead.⁷ He had read the book which was immediately translated in many chapters into the English, and said that the whole theosophy would be contained in this book.—So far as people admitted that they could go along with us, so far we could unite with the whole object, of course; but nothing else was done.

What matters is that we reflect on our tasks of the Central European spiritual culture and that we never deviate from them. The one or the other sent the medals, certificates and the like back to the English. That is, nevertheless, less important. The important thing will be first to send back Newtonianism, the English coloured Darwinism, that means to release the Central European cultural life from it. Something is to be learnt from the way how—free of other influence—the Central European cultural life has made itself noticeable just as spiritual science. But you have to call to mind the essential part once and to stand firmly on this ground. It is very peculiar how mysteriously matters work.

Imagine the following case: Ernst Haeckel has taken care basically through his whole life to direct the German world view to the British thinking. The British thinking, the British empiricism flows into Ernst Haeckel's writings completely. He now rails against England the most. These are processes which take place in the subconscious of the soul of the Central European; these are also matters which are tightly connected in such a soul with karma. Consider please what it means that Haeckel places himself before the world and says, he himself has accomplished the first great action of the great researcher Huxley, while he stamped the sentence of the similarity of the human bone and the animal bone; that he, Haeckel, then has pointed to the big change in the view of the origin of the human being, and that he accepted nothing in the evolution theory but what came from the West.—Then one sees that he is urged now to rail against that what has constituted his whole intellectual life. It is the most tragic event of the present for such a soul which can be only thought. It is spiritual dynamite, because it bursts, actually, all supporting pillars on which such a soul stands.

Thus you can, actually, look into the depths of the present dreadful events. Only if you really consider the matters that way, are you able to consider them beyond a narrow horizon under which they are often considered today. You will be able to learn a lot—and this will be the nicest, at the same time the most humiliating and the loftiest teaching. For this teaching the prevailing active world spirit determined the Central European human being who is now embraced by the Midgard Snake, enclosed like in a fortress, surrounded by enemies everywhere. If the events become a symbol of the deepest world weaving and world being, then only we release ourselves from a selfish view of the present grievous, destiny-burdened events. Then we feel only that we must make ourselves worthy of that what, for instance, Fichte also spoke about in a time in which Germany experienced destiny-burdened days in his Addresses to the German Nation. There he wanted to speak, as he expresses it himself, “for Germans par excellence, of Germans par excellence,” and he spoke like one had to speak of the German par excellence to the German par excellence in those days. But like in those days Fichte spoke of the German mission, of the German range of tasks, we have today to experience the seriousness as the sunrise of the Central European consciousness within the containment by hating enemies. Indeed, a word which is found at the end of Fichte's addresses may be transformed: the spiritual world view must flow into the souls for the sake of humankind's welfare. The world spirit is looking at those who live in Central Europe that they become a mouthpiece for that what he has to say and bring to humankind in continuous revelation.

Without arrogance, without national egoism one can look at that which the sons of Germany and Central Europe have to defend with body, blood and soul generally. However, one has also to realise that. Then only from the immense sacrifices, which must be brought from the sufferings, must that result what serves the welfare of humankind. We stand at a significant threshold. One may characterise this threshold in the human development that one says: in future the abyss must be bridged between the physical and the spiritual worlds, between the physically living and the spiritually living human beings, between the earthly and that what lies beyond the earthly death. A time must come to us as it were when not only the souls are alive to us which walk about in physical bodies, but when we feel being integrated to that bigger world to which also the souls belong living between death and new birth disembodied in our world. The view of the human being has to turn beyond that which sensory-physical eyes are only able to see. Indeed, we are standing at the threshold of this new experience, of this new consciousness. What I said to you of the widening of the consciousness, of the ascending development of the consciousness, this must become a familiar view. The Central European culture prepares itself to make this a familiar view; it really prepares itself for that.

I have shown you how the best heads of the 19th century are afraid even today to get into their consciousness what the soul has in its depths; only its earthly soul forces cannot yet turn the attention to it. That thinking exists, into which the supersensible forces and supersensible beings extend, and this thinking also opens straight away after the human being has gone through the gate of death. The materialists are afraid of admitting that the human consciousness can be extended that really the barrier between the physical and the spiritual experience can fall, between that what lies on this side of death and beyond death. Because they are afraid, they reject it as something fantastic, dream-like, nay as mentally ill. However, one will recognise that the human being when he has gone through the gate of death develops only the forces which he also has now already between birth and death. Only they work in such depths that he does not behold them. They cause processes in him which are done, indeed, in him, but escape his attention in the everyday life. With the forces of thinking, feeling and willing, about which the human being knows, he cannot master the physical-earthly life. If the human being could only think, feel and will, as well as now he is able to do it, he would be never able to develop his body, for example, plastically that the brain matched its dispositions. Formative forces had to intervene there. However, they already belong to that what the soul does no longer perceive in the physical experience what belongs to a more encompassing consciousness than to the segment of consciousness which we have in the everyday life.

When the human being goes through the gate of death, he has not a lack of consciousness, but then he lives at first in a consciousness which is much richer and fuller of contents than the consciousness here in the physical life. Because from a more encompassing consciousness the body cuts out a piece and shows everything that can be shown only in a mirror. However, what is in the body and the human being bears through the gate of death that has an encompassing consciousness in itself. When the human being has gone through the gate of death, he is in this encompassing consciousness. He then does not have not enough, but on the contrary too much, too rich a consciousness. About that I have spoken in my Vienna cycle⁸ at Easter 1914. The human being has a richer consciousness after death. When the often described retrospect, caused by the etheric body, is over, he enters into a kind of sleeping state for a while. However, this is not a real sleeping state, but a state which is caused by the fact that the human being is in a richer consciousness than here on earth. As our eyes are blinded by overabundant light, the human being is blinded by the superabundance of consciousness, and he only must learn to orientate himself. The apparent sleep only consists in the fact that the human being orientates himself in this superabundance of consciousness that he then is able to lessen the superabundance of consciousness to that level he can already endure according to the results of his life. This is the essential part. We do not have not enough, but too much a consciousness, and we are awake when we have lessened our sense of direction to the level we can endure. It is reducing the superabundance of consciousness to the endurable level what takes place after death. You must get such matters clear in your mind by the details of the Vienna cycle.⁹

I want to illustrate that today only with the help of two obvious examples. I could state many such examples, because many of our friends have gone through the gate of death recently and also before. But as a result of characteristic circumstances, just by the fact that it concerns the last deaths, these considerations are more obvious. I would like to take the starting point from such examples to speak to you of that which makes our hearts bleed because it has happened in our own middle out of the circle of our spiritual-scientific movement.

Recently we have lost a dear friend (Sibyl Colazza) from the physical plane, and it was my task to speak words for the deceased at the cremation. There it turned out to me automatically by the impulses of the spiritual world, in such a case speaking clearly enough, as a necessity to characterise the qualities of this friendly soul. We stood—it was in Zurich—before the cremation of a dear member of our spiritual-scientific movement. Because her death occurred on a Wednesday evening and the cremation took place in the early Monday morning, it is comprehensible that the retrospect of the etheric body had already stopped. Actually, without having wanted it, I was induced by the spiritual world to begin and close the obituary with words which should characterise the internal being of this soul. This internal being of the friend deceased in the middle of life was real that I had to delve in this being and to create it spiritually by identification with this being. That means to let the thinking dive in the soul of the dead and that what wove in the soul of the dead let flow into the own thoughts. Then I got the possibility to say as it were in view of this soul how the soul was in life and how it is still now after death. It has turned out by itself to dress that in the following words. I had to say the subsequent words at the beginning and at the end of the cremation:

You walked among us.
Your being's gentle spirit
Spoke through the quiet power of your eyes—
Ensouled, alive, peace
Flowed in waves,
With your glance
To things and people
Bearing your inner weaving;
And your voice ensouled this being—
Your voice that eloquently,
More in the kind of words
Than in the words themselves,
Revealed what worked hidden
Within your beautiful soul;
Yet your sacrificial love
Unveiled itself completely
To sympathetic people without words—
This being, who, from noble, quiet beauty,
Heralded the sensitive awareness
Of worlds-and-souls creation.

The being of this soul appeared to me that way during the days before the cremation, when I identified myself with it, after the retrospect of the etheric body was over. The soul was not yet able to orientate itself in the superabundance of consciousness. It was sleeping as it were when the body was about to be cremated. The above-mentioned words were spoken in the beginning and at the end of the cremation. Then it happened that the flame—that what looks like the flame, but it is not—grasped the body, and while the body was grasped from that what looks like the flame what is, however, only the ascending warmth and heat, the soul became awake for a moment. Now I could notice that the soul looked back at the whole scene which had taken place among the human beings who were at the cremation. And the soul looked particularly back at that what had been spoken, then again it sank back into the superabundance of consciousness, you may say: in the unconsciousness. A moment later, one could perceive when such a looking back was there again. Then such moments last longer and longer, until finally the soul can orientate itself entirely in the superabundance of consciousness.

But one can recognise something significant from that. I could notice that the words spoken at the cremation lighted up the retrospect, because the words have come from the soul itself which had something awakening in them. From that you can learn that it is most important after death to overlook your own experience. You have to begin as it were with self-knowledge after death. Here in the life on earth you can miss self-knowledge, you can miss it so thoroughly that is true what a not average person, also a not average man of letters, but a famous professor of philosophy, Dr. Ernst Mach¹⁰—not Ferdinand Maack, I would not mention him—admits in his Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, a very famous work: as a young man I crossed a street and saw a person suddenly in a mirror who met me. I thought: what an unpleasant, disgusting face. I was surprised when I discovered that I had seen my own face in the profile.—He had seen his own face which he knew so little that he could make this judgment. The same professor tells how it has happened to him later when he was already a famous professor of philosophy that he got in a bus after a long trip, surely exhausted, there a man also got in from the other side—there was a big mirror opposite,—and he confesses his thoughts quite sincerely, while he says that he thought: what a disagreeable and down-and-out schoolmaster gets in there?—Again he recognised himself, and he adds: so I recognised the type better than the individual.—This is a nice example of how little the human being already knows himself by his external figure in life if he is not a flirtatious lady who often looks in the mirror.—But much less the human being knows the qualities of his soul. He passes those even more. He can become a famous philosopher of the present without self-knowledge. But the human being needs this self-knowledge when he has passed through the gate of death.

The human being must look back just at the point of his development from which he has gone through death, and he must recognise himself there. As little the human being, who stands in the physical life and looks back with the usual forces of life is able to see his own birth, as little this stands before the usual soul-forces—there is no one which can look back with the usual soul-forces at the physical birth,—in the same way it is necessary that the moment of death is permanently there at which one looks back. Death stands always before the soul's eyes as the last significant event. This death, seen from the other side, seen from beyond, is something different than that from the physical side. It is the most beautiful experience which can be seen from the other side, from the side of the life between death and new birth. Death appears as the glorious picture of the everlasting victory of the spiritual over the physical. Because death appears as such a picture, it wakes up the highest forces of the human nature permanently when this human nature lives in the spirituality between death and new birth. That is why the soul looking back or striving for looking back must look at itself at first. Just in these cases which we have gone through recently it was clear in which way the impulse originated to characterise this soul. The so-called living human being works together with the so-called dead that way. More and more such a relation will come from the so-called living to the so-called dead.

We experienced another case in the last time, that of our dear friend Fritz Mitscher. Even if Fritz Mitscher is less known to the local friends, nevertheless, he worked by his talks among many other anthroposophists, by that what he performed wonderfully from friend to friend by the way he familiarised himself with the anthroposophical life. His character has just to be regarded as exemplary, because he whose soul forces were directed to go through a learnt education was keen to take up and collect everything in himself according to his disposition of scholarship, to embrace it intimately in his soul-life, to insert it then in his spiritual-scientific world view. We need this kind of work, in particular, while we want to carry the spiritual-scientific ideals into future in a beneficial way. We need human beings, who try to penetrate the education of our time with understanding to immerse it in the stream of spiritual education; who offer that as it were as a sacrifice. Also there—and I speak only of matters that resulted from karma with necessity—karma caused that I had to speak at the cremation. Out of internal necessity it turned out that I had to characterise the being of our dear friend again in the beginning and at the end of the funeral speech. I had to characterise this being:

A hope, filling us with happiness:
You entered the field
Where, through the power of soul being,
Earth's spirit blossoms
Reveal themselves to investigation.

Your longing was bound from the beginning
To pure truth-loving being;
To create out of spirit-light
Was the earnest life goal
For which you strove without rest.

You nurtured your beautiful gifts
To tread with steady steps
Bright paths of spirit-knowledge
As truth's true servant

You trained your spirit-organs
That, with courage and persistence,
On both sides of the path
Repelled error for you
And made a space for truth for you.

For you, to form your Self
For the revelation of pure light
So the soul's sun-power
Might shine mightily within you
Was your life's concern and joy.

Other cares, other joys
Barely touched your soul,
For knowledge seemed to you to be
The light that gives existence meaning,
Seemed to you life' s true value.

A hope, filling us with happiness:
You entered the field
Where, through the power of soul being,
Earth's spirit blossoms
Reveal themselves to investigation.

A loss that pains us deeply,
You disappeared from the field
Where the Spirit's earthly kernels
In the womb of soul being
Ripened your senses for the spheres.

Feel how we lovingly gaze
Into the heights that now
Call you to other works.
Give to the friends left behind
Your power from spirit-realms,

Hear our souls' entreaties
Sent to you in confidence and trust:
For our earthly work here we need
Strong forces from spirit-lands,
For which we thank dead friends.

A hope, filling us with happiness,
A loss that pains us deeply:
Allow us to hope, that you, far-near,
Un-lost, light our life
As a soul-star in spirit-realm.

In the following night the soul which was not yet able to orientate itself returned of own accord something like an answer what is connected with the verses, which were directed to its being at the cremation. Such words like those are spoken that the own soul writes them down really without being able to add a lot. The words are written down while the soul oriented itself to the other soul, out of the other soul. It was unclear to me at all that two stanzas are built in a quite particular way, until I heard the words from the friend's soul who had gone through the gate of death:

For me, to form my Self
For the revelation of pure light
So the soul's sun-power
Might shine mightily within me
Was my life's concern and joy.

Other cares, other joys
Barely touched my soul,
For knowledge seemed to me to be
The light that gives existence meaning,
Seemed to my life's true value.

I could only know now, why these stanzas are built that way; I spoke them exactly the same:

For you, to form your Self
For the revelation of pure light
So the soul's sun-power
Might shine mightily within you
Was your life's concern and joy.

However, any “you” came back as “I,” any “your” came back as “my;” thus they returned transformed, expressed by the soul about its own being.

This is an example in which way the correspondence takes place, in which way the mutual relation already exists between the world here and the world there in the time after death. It is connected with the meaning of our spiritual-scientific movement that this consciousness penetrates the human souls. Spiritual science will give humankind the consciousness that the world of those who live between death and a new birth also becomes a world in which we know ourselves connected with them. Thus the world extends from the narrow area of reality in which the human being lives provisionally. However, this is connected intimately with that what should be in Central Europe. Somebody who has well listened finds just in the words directed to Fritz Mitscher's soul what is deeply connected with this meaning of our spiritual-scientific movement, because the words are spoken from a deep internal necessity:

Hear our souls' entreaties
Sent to you in confidence and trust:
For our earthly work here we need
Strong forces from spirit-lands,
For which we thank dead friends.

Sometimes one may doubt, even if not in reality but concerning the interim period, whether the souls, which are embodied in the flesh here on earth, do really enough for the welfare of humans and earth what must necessarily be made concerning the spiritual comprehension of the world. However, somebody who is engaged completely in the spiritual-scientific movement may also not despair. For he knows that the forces of those who ascended into the spiritual worlds are effective in the current, in which we stand in this incarnation. In their previous lives those souls felt stronger here because they had taken up spiritual science in themselves. It is as if one communicates with a friend's soul who has gone through the gate of death if one says to him what one owes to the friend's force for the spiritual movement, if one is able to communicate as it were with the soul to remain united with its forces. We have it always among us, so that it always works on among us. We take up not only ideas, concepts and mental pictures in our spiritual science, that does not only concern, but we create a spiritual movement here on earth to which we really bring in the spiritual forces.

It suggests itself to us just at this moment, out of the sensations which perhaps inspire our local friends to turn the thoughts to the soul of somebody who has always dedicated his forces to this branch. We want to feel united also with him and his forces, after he has gone through the gate of death; therefore, we get up from our seats. The Leipzig friends know of which friendly soul I am speaking, and they have certainly turned their thoughts to this soul with moved hearts.

It was my responsibility to bring these ideas home to you today, while we were allowed to be together. These words were inspired through the consciousness that the grievous and destiny-burdened days in which we live must be replaced again with such which will pass in peace on earth in which the forces of peace will work. But a lot will be transformed, nay, must absolutely be transformed by that what happens now in the earthly life of humankind. We who bear witness to spiritual science must particularly keep in mind how much it depends on the fact that must take place on the ground—for which so much blood flows for which so often now souls go through the gate of death on which so many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters are mourning—what can be done by those whose souls can be illumined through the forward-looking thoughts of spiritual science.

Those thoughts which come from the consciousness of the living relationship of the human soul with the spiritual world have to ascend from the earth into the spiritual heights. Souls now enter these spiritual worlds, and there will be spiritual forces which are produced just by our destiny-burdened days. Imagine how many people go through the gate of death in the prime of their lives in this time. Imagine that the etheric bodies of these human beings who go between their twentieth and thirtieth years, between their thirtieth and fortieth years through the gate of death are etheric bodies which could have supplied the bodies still for decades here in the physical life. These etheric bodies are separated from the physical bodies; however, they keep the forces still in themselves to work here for the physical world. These forces keep on existing in the spiritual worlds, separated from the unused etheric bodies of the souls which went through the gate of death. The bright spirituality of the unspent etheric bodies of the heroic fighters turns to the spiritual welfare and progress of humankind. However, that what flows down there has to meet the thoughts coming from the souls which—aware of spirit—they can have by spiritual science. Hence, we are allowed to summarise the thoughts of which we made ourselves aware today in some words showing the interrelation of the consciousness based on spiritual-scientific ideas with the present events. They express how for the next peacetime the room has to be filled with thoughts which have ascended from souls to the spiritual worlds, from souls which experienced spiritual science. Then that can flourish and yield fruit in the right sense what is gained with so big sacrifices, with blood and death in our time, if souls are found, aware of spirit, which turn their senses to the realm of spirits. That is why we are allowed to say taking into account the grievous and destiny-burdened days today:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

• 1. Serbia refuses the ultimatum of Austria-Hungary
• 2. conversation with Eckermann, 1st September 1829
• 3. letter to Zelter, 20th February 1828
• 4. cf. the lecture On the Mystery Dramas “The Portal of Initiation” and “The Soul's Probation” 19th December 1911, Steiner's Collected Works volume 127
• 5. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872): the censorship confiscated his writing Thoughts on Death and Immortality (Nuremberg, 1830)
• 6. The Bearing Force of the German Spirit. Lecture of the same title in Berlin, 25th February 1915, in Steiner's Collected Works volume 185
• 7. George M. S. Mead: last private secretary of H. P. Blavatsky. He left the Theosophical Society later.
• 8. Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth, eight lectures (Vienna, 1914), Steiner's Collected Works volume 153
• 9. Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth, eight lectures (Vienna, 1914), Steiner's Collected Works volume 153
• 10. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher

My dear friends! We turn first again to the protecting spirits of those who are standing outside as a result of current events:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,

may your wings bring
the love of our souls
to the earthly people who trust in your protection;
so that, united with your power,
our request may shine helpfully
on the souls that it seeks with love.

And turning to the protecting spirits of those who have already passed through the portals of death:

Spirits of their souls, watchers ever-active,

Your wings may bear
Our souls' imploring love
To the Sphere-men you guard.
That, united with your power,
our request may shine forth helpingly
to the souls it seeks in love.

And the Spirit whom we seek to approach through our spiritual science, the Spirit who has gone to earth's salvation and to human freedom and progress through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties.

My dear friends, it would not be in the spirit of the spiritual science movement if the thoughts of the spiritual scientist in our difficult times did not turn again and again to that which goes through the world in our time as a test for humanity, as a difficult fate for humanity. And in the sense of our spiritual science, it must be so, above all, to turn our thoughts inquiringly to many a riddle that already exists in the broader context of what we call the present. For as soon as we ask about the causes that could bring such a difficult fate upon humanity, we are confronted, so to speak, with one mystery after another. And we may now try, from our point of view and with our impulses, to penetrate a little deeper into that which is at work in the present in the wider world. Since I am here so rarely, my task today may be not to speak in the external sense of current events. But it can certainly be my task to point out some things that, deepened by your own reflection, by your own recurring reflection, can solve many a question that today every feeling human heart, every feeling human soul, will want to solve. Things are indeed deeper than those who are unable to sharpen their vision through spiritual-scientific contemplation are often able to recognize. One can see, as one might say, in the most individual events what is actually happening in our time, something that is deeply, deeply incisive. It is just that this deeply incisive is not always seen, not always felt in the appropriate way. One would be a poor spiritual scientist if one believed that one could deepen one's own thinking and feeling and knowing by turning one's gaze away from that which so deeply affects people today and preferring to focus on all manner of more remote matters, at least in thought. As for the most isolated events, I said, today one can feel at every turn what time we actually live in within our immediate present.

Many of you will remember that I have often mentioned the name Herman Grimm among other contemporary figures in the broader sense in the course of the lectures, which have been given for over fifteen years now. Herman Grimm certainly did not stand on the standpoint of spiritual science; but he stood within a world-conception that he had won for himself and that was truly from the source of the spiritual development of the nineteenth century. And it was always interesting to hear, in particular, but also to read when Herman Grimm expressed himself on this or that question, which he then always considered in the sense of a person from the end of the nineteenth century.

I must say that when I mentioned the name Herman Grimm in this or that context within our spiritual-scientific considerations during the course of the twentieth century up to 1914, it was as if he were standing beside me. One always had the need, when considering such personalities who seemed particularly valuable for the development of the spiritual life of the present, to quietly ask oneself the question: How would such a personality have reacted to this or that event that has occurred since his death? Herman Grimm died at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of course, such a question is hypothetical. If we turn our gaze up to the souls of such people who have passed through the portal of death, something different comes out than if we ask ourselves the hypothetical question: How would a person, if still embodied in the body, express themselves about this or that that is going on in the world? Anyone who is interested in world events will, I believe, naturally want to feel the same way about their contemporaries; and if they have been personally close to these contemporaries, they will try to feel with them even beyond death. I said: It seemed to me as if Herman Grimm were standing beside me when I spoke of him up until 1914. That has changed since the difficult events befell us. Since then, it has seemed almost absurd to me to ask the question the way I used to. One would be tempted to say that such a personality, with whom one has still lived and who basically lived with one, even after he had departed from the physical plane, such a personality seems to one today, despite the fact that only three years have passed since 1914, like a mythical personality; like a personality who belongs to a distant history. Almost as if one were studying a personality from the Middle Ages, whom one could not ask, in the sense that I just indicated, how he would speak about the events of the present if he were still embodied in the body. It is really as if we had experienced a relatively short period of time being stretched out long.

It is almost as if one can hardly grasp it when one says: In this short time, we have lived through something like centuries, really like centuries. And what came before that has stormily entered the realm of history, even if we have also experienced it. And we can talk about the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as if we were talking about events from centuries ago. Much of what we have lived with has become mythical, so deeply incisive were the events of the last three years. And now, however, we find that in many respects what I have said is true, that we can fully accept the complete truth of what has just been said; but on the other hand, we find that not many people, really not many people today, have fully realized what has certainly taken place in their subconscious, what they have experienced in their subconscious. And there is hardly anything better suited than our immediate present to make clear – excuse the harsh expression, but it has to be used – to make clear how much people actually oversleep, really oversleep, what is going on around them, happening. Just as we, when we sleep in some room, have no capacity to absorb what is otherwise going on in the room while we sleep, so many people show a certain drowsiness towards what is going on around them. And this is particularly evident when something so powerful, so great, so incisive is taking place.

The words have been spoken: there has never been such an event in the course of human development. But there is another thing, to feel this in all its depth and strength, not to oversleep it. On such an occasion, we must feel, my dear friends, what I have often said before you and what I would always like to emphasize again: the living nature of spiritual science. This spiritual science would be worth nothing if it were limited to making it quite clear to us, let us say, that the human being consists of four limbs, that there is karma, that there are incarnations, and so on, and we were to absorb these things into our minds as we absorb other things into our minds. Of course we need these things, they are fundamentals. But anyone who grasps them in the same way as other insights into the external world has not grasped the living source of spiritual science, which wants to become a living source of direct life at the same time; which should give us the opportunity to understand and grasp life around us in a fully alert state, to snatch us from sleepiness.

If you want to grasp spiritual science in a way that is full of life, my dear friends, the first thing you need to do is to realize the problematic, the doubtful nature of what is often called self-knowledge. For many people, self-knowledge is often nothing more than a kind of self-incubation, a kind of looking into their inner selves, through which they feel a certain mental voluptuousness, and also serve a certain mental voluptuousness when, in this so-called self-knowledge, they reproach themselves for this or that.

Self-knowledge in the sense in which spiritual science imparts it and in which it is already necessary today and will become ever more necessary in a rapidly maturing future: above all, self-knowledge must be clear to itself that the human being is organized in such a way that, precisely when it comes to recognizing himself, he is almost always inclined to confuse cause and effect. However simple it may appear, what I am about to say is something of immense importance and of far-reaching significance for life.

Let us take a simple case. We begin to treat a person whom we have perhaps been indifferent to, or who may even have been a friend, in a hostile and unfriendly manner, and do all kinds of things against him. What do we usually do when we are dealing with something that involves us to some extent? Well, what we usually do – just ask yourself – is say: Yes, I have to do this or that against this person because he is like this or that. He has done this or that, and it is simply the right thing to do this or that. Of course, such talk may be right in many cases, but in most cases it is not right at all for someone who knows life in its roots. Rather, in most cases it is the case that the person who begins to hate another has has gone through a certain development; not an esoteric development, but he has lived, has lived something out; and what he has lived through has brought it to the point that at a certain moment he felt an inner, subconscious necessity that discharges itself into an impulse of hatred. He must hate, it is as necessary for him as it is to eat when he is hungry. In the course of the development of the soul, it comes about that this soul only feels well when it hates; that it would become ill if it did not hate, and so on. This hatred is the real reason why we are hostile towards others. Of course it is not always so, but in a great many cases it is so; and one does not know life if one does not consider such cases. One wants to be self-sufficient when acting out this hatred, and one seeks out the object of hatred. The object will be found, because after all, something can be found in every person that makes it possible to hate them, to be hostile towards them.

But then we mask this hatred by surrounding it with the veil of justification. We deceive ourselves because we cannot admit to ourselves: You are lying now, you just have to hate. Isn't it, it's not easy to admit that. Because brooding over everything does not want to go so far as to say to oneself: I now have to hate for a while to not burst; so I live out this hatred.

Of course, it can be the same with love. Because love can also occur at a certain moment in life, and then, of course, one finds a lovable object to which one attributes all good qualities – perhaps it also has these qualities. But one must realize that especially in these matters, cause and effect are often confused in an outstanding way, and that what a person consciously says to himself actually consists only of him taking a kind of emotional opiate to numb himself to what actually lives in his soul.

It is remarkable what people can achieve in this area. I met a gentleman who wanted to do a certain job, but always explained that he did not want to do the job at all, that he only felt it was his mission to do the job. He would much rather do the opposite job. That is what he talked himself into believing. In reality, it was quite different. He felt totally incapable of doing the opposite work. He only believed that he could achieve something in this field. But, no, that was not a noble motivation. Especially when you want to talk to people about a mission, you will find them much more willing to make sacrifices if you say: I hate the work, but I feel that it is my mission. These are all soul opiates to disguise the impulses present in the soul – not only from others, but also from oneself.

Yes, the human soul is complicated, and above all, deep. And you can descend into deep, deep shafts, and you will still only partially understand it. From this you will understand, my dear friends, that so-called self-poreering can only be a very one-sided path to what can be called self-knowledge. In reality, self-knowledge can only be gained if one is able to measure one's own self against the great development of humanity, to enter into a relationship with the great development of humanity.

Now let us take such a building block for self-knowledge for a person of the present day, taken from a somewhat larger context. We have often spoken from the most diverse points of view about the post-Atlantic period, in the fifth epoch of which we are placed. Today we want to supplement what has been discussed from a different point of view, because it is precisely through such an addition, through such a consideration, that some foundations can be provided on which to build those thoughts that at least to some extent convey an understanding of the present, the present that is immediately around us. However, when one looks at the development of humanity, one makes a serious mistake almost without exception today. Today, people have certain ideas about what goes on in the human soul when the human soul thinks, feels and wills and so on. Man has the tacit assumption that what takes place in this human soul in thinking, feeling and willing has always taken place in the times that can be remembered and established through spiritual science, beyond the historical. But it is not so. Even in the soul of the Middle Ages, it looks quite different than in the soul of the Greek age. Our time is particularly suited to pointing out such things, because a waking soul today looks quite different than it did in 1913. But a soul of the Middle Ages was not created like a present-day soul, or even a Roman or Greek soul, or going back even further. Well, today we go no further back than the time of the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe.

You know, the first period, which begins after the catastrophe is over, is the time of the primeval Indian period; that time, of which no historical documents report. Everything that is reported belongs to a much later time. But we have often characterized this primeval Indian time. If we direct our research-oriented, spiritual scientific gaze to this time, we find that the whole of life, and in particular the life in which the human being lives with his soul in the social environment, was quite different during this primeval Indian time than what we can actually imagine today. Today, when we think about human development, we think the way we have to think when we look at a person around us. We see that a person develops in a particular way during childhood, that development stops at a certain age, and then a certain stationary state occurs. We all know that in childhood, the human being is very dependent on the physical in terms of soul and spirit. The various stages of physical development are also expressed in the soul and spirit. And vice versa: the soul and spirit are connected to the physical, to structural changes in the nervous system, to changes in the muscular system, in the metabolic system, and so on. But then there comes a certain age when we say to ourselves, in today's world: now we are adult human beings; so adult human beings, in fact, that no one can dispute our right to have a say in parliaments, to have as much say as the elderly. This is also evident in other areas, that in our time people have truly come to realize: they have become adults. It is not the case for everyone, the present are always excluded; but for many people today, if you expect them to read this or that at a certain age, they say: Oh, that belongs to school age; you read that at school; you have it inside you now.

All this is based on the fact that from a certain point in time, the spiritual-soul becomes independent of the physical-bodily. At this point, the physical-bodily comes to a certain conclusion. The soul-spiritual continues, and for most people it continues in such a way that they remain stationary, that they most decidedly reject further development.

This was different in the period we have to call the primeval Indian. In terms of their soul and spiritual life, people remained dependent on the physical and bodily well into their fifties. Just think what such a person went through. He went through the whole ascending life of childhood and youth, where one grows, thrives and blossoms and experiences the spiritual and soul life in this sense. Then he went through the middle of life in his thirties until the age of 35. Then one begins to develop in reverse. One begins to mineralize, to sclerotize. But today we no longer go along with this in our soul and spirit. Everything that today the child only feels as instinctive dependence of the soul-spiritual on the physical-bodily, thus only feels as a human being in the ascending, blossoming, thriving, growing , but also at the point of culmination; and then he felt again how the body sinks into itself, how the physical body recedes. He felt that the physical body recedes, something we do not sense today: the physical body no longer provides the foundation for the soul and spirit, it collapses into itself. But as the physical body declined, he perceived the spiritual life, especially in a dreamy or sleeping state. Just as the ascending and flourishing life connects one to matter, so the declining life frees one from matter. The soul feels more and more akin to the spiritual life. And that reached its peak between the ages of 48 and 56. In the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe, human beings were thus capable of development up to the age of 56. Then up to the ages of 55, 54, 53, and so on. And when the first cultural epoch, the primeval Indian one, had passed, human beings were still capable of development up to the age of 48. Therefore, the whole social life was different. It was the case that people in those days looked up to those who had reached their fifties; they knew that they had a special connection with the spiritual world.

The fact that the elderly were in contact with the spiritual world was simply a result of evolution. And the whole of social feeling, the whole of social life, was influenced by this. However, this was also connected with the fact that, in those days, the environment of the human being, the earthly environment of the human being, was different, so to speak. This earthly environment of man was such in those days that the spirits of the three nearest hierarchies - the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - worked through the immediate elements. And the best, the noblest spirits of these three higher hierarchies worked through the elements, water, air, warmth, which man absorbed. It is particularly important to note that what we call the spirit of the age, that is, the essence of the hierarchy of the archai, worked directly through the elements in those days. One can say: in air and warmth, with the climate, man inhaled spirituality. And he inhaled this spirituality purely as spirituality in the most perfect way between the 48th and 56th year of life in the epoch referred to.

And then came the time that we call the proto-Persian period. During this time, people only remained capable of development in the manner indicated initially until the 48th year, then until the 47th, until the 46th and so on until the 42nd year, when the proto-Persian period had expired. So by that time, people had already come so far in their development that by the 48th year they no longer got anything for their development from the 48th year. If someone wanted to remain capable of development, he had to shape the soul in a way that was capable of development, independently of what the environment had to offer. But at least during this original Persian period, one remained capable of development until the 42nd year. And this was connected with the fact that although the archai, the spirits of time, had withdrawn more from the immediate elemental forces of the earth, the spirits of the people, the archangeloi, as they are called, still worked strongly through the elements, and these were the best spiritual beings of the spiritual hierarchies. Therefore, in a certain sense, what was the national context over the earth in the ancient Persian period was regulated according to spiritual laws. For that which regulated the relationships between the individual nations depended on spiritual laws. It may be more or less comprehensible to us, but that is not the point; in a certain sense, they were divine spiritual laws.

The spirits of the higher hierarchies withdrew even further during the third post-Atlantic period. And we find in this time that actually the human being, who at the beginning remained capable of development until the age of 42, now at the end of the third post-Atlantic period remains capable of development only until the age of 35. We find that during this time people still had a living relationship with the being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi that belonged to them. The individual people still knew very well: they have a spirit being with them, they are in contact with the spirit being. To speak of the fact that there is no spiritual world would have been nonsense for the time, because every single person knew that he was related to a being from the hierarchy of the angeloi. This is therefore the epoch in which people are capable of development until the end of the thirties.

Now the fourth post-Atlantean period began. During this time, the general age of humanity declined again. We know that the third period begins with the year 747 BC, before the Mystery of Golgotha, and ends with the year 1413 AD, after the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the time when the spirits of the higher hierarchies, who had worked directly through the elements and their forces in the earth, had withdrawn from direct human observation and human experience. The Greeks and Romans remained capable of development only into their thirties, into the middle of life. This is certainly connected with the whole view of life of the Greeks and Romans, which I have already touched on. On the one hand, we are entering an age in which every human being is still so close to those ancient times when people had a connection to the spiritual world because they were able to develop into old age. This is why the Greeks — and this must be know today if you want to judge the Greeks - the Greeks felt that when they moved their hands, when they grew, when they thought, when they ate and drank, they were glowing with a soul; that there is soul in everything that is in them. To doubt that there is something spiritual in everything that is physically lived out would have been inconceivable to the Greeks. But if a Greek or a Roman wanted to know more about the spiritual world, they had to seek this knowledge through the mysteries. There, indeed, one could still acquire the ability to see into the spiritual world, but it is quite interesting to consider those Greeks who rose to the heights of spiritual development but were not initiated into the mysteries, such as Aristotle. He was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was a thinker of this Greek period. He was able to think what only a Greek could think, but he did so in the sharpest way. That is to say, it was clear to him that the human being as a physical being had to be connected to a soul and spirit. But now Aristotle said to himself: If I take away one arm of a human being, he is no longer a whole human being. If I take away two arms, even less. But if I take away the whole body, as happens at death, then he is certainly no longer a whole human being. Therefore, for Aristotle, the human soul, when it has passed through the gate of death, is no longer “a whole human being”. For Aristotle, a whole human being is, of course, made up of body and soul. In a sense, the soul is only an incomplete human being when it has passed through the gate of death. Aristotle defended the immortality of the soul philosophically, but for him it is only what it was for Homer, who said: “Better a beggar in the underworld than a king in the realm of shadows.” A king in the realm of shadows is a soul among incomplete human souls.

So it had come about, on the one hand, that human ideas, powers of perception, unfertilized powers of perception, as a result of humanity having regressed in its age to the 28th year, could no longer comprehend or could only comprehend that everything physical is filled with soul, but that the soul is not complete when it is separated from the body. But anyone who makes an effort to understand Aristotle will find that this is the correct interpretation, which could easily be proved philosophically. On the other hand, however, we see that in those days, real full humanity, what man actually is in his deepest being, can only be known through initiation into the mysteries.

While the Greeks underwent a development – which is very interesting, as Aristotle showed up to the Stoics – in which they sought to know what human knowledge can know, Roman development went other ways. With the establishment of the Imperium Romanum, after the Roman Republic, the Roman emperors wanted to be full human beings. Through the power of the physical plan, they were able to force themselves to undergo initiation. And so we have the peculiar phenomenon that on the one hand we have Aristotle, who only made it to such a concept of immortality as I have described, and on the other hand we have the peculiar phenomenon that, without sufficient preparation, purely because they had the power, the Roman emperors were able to force the initiation upon themselves. Thus not only was Augustus an initiate who knew from the mysteries what a secret there is about man; but we also have to count Caligula among the initiates. For it is a truth and not a fairy tale that Caligula, through his initiation into the mysteries, was able to realize that which is expressed figuratively, but is correctly and truly expressed by what history relates – that he was able to commune with the spirits of the moon at night and from there draw inspiration. It is true that Caligula did not merely engage in dramatic posturing, but because he knew the significance of things, he sometimes had himself worshiped as Jupiter, as Bacchus, as Apollo, or as some other god, because he believed in the identity of man with the god.

Commodus, who was not only an initiate, but also an initiator, killed [gap in the transcript]

We finally have the initiate Nero. And, as incredible as it may sound, it must be said today what actually prevailed in the Imperium romanum – in this Imperium romanum, which has transmitted its developmental impulses through a thousand and one channels through the Middle Ages and into our time. Even today, when we think legally, we are still thinking in the sense of this Imperium Romanum, and we think in many other areas in the sense of this Imperium Romanum. On the one hand, these Caesars had certainly come to a view from which they could say how man is connected to the spiritual world. On the other hand, however, they had come to despise what was the world of the physical plane. What Nero did was largely based on misanthropy. Caligula already had this misanthropy. When, for example, an innocent man had been condemned at a court hearing, he said: What does it matter; he will be as guilty as the guilty man; and the judge will be no less guilty than the condemned man. And Nero was convinced – and this is important to know – that there can be nothing good about man, about the physical man here on earth; that everything that lives in the physical man is unchaste; that everything is permeated by physical drives.

If you want to fully understand the soul configuration of Nero, then you have to say: Nero is actually the first psychoanalyst, but - a psychoanalyst of greatness; compared to him, the “Freuderl” is actually just a - well, a “Neroerl”. But there is a relationship. Such relationships run through history without people seeing them, they are very much asleep. And this relationship can have an effect.

Now, 747 BC marks the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantic age. At that time, humanity lived to be 35 years old. A little later, it only lived to be 34 years old, and even later, 33 years old. This means that humanity reached this level of development at the moment when our era begins.

We can therefore say that in the post-Atlantean period, people began with an age of 56 years; up to the 56th year, the human being remained capable of development. Then, in the course of the second, third and fourth periods, the age of human development went down to 33 years. And what happened when the age of human development had gone down to 33 years? What happened? In the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ developed up to the age of 33. That is to say, He grew contrary to the age of humanity.

Consider, my dear friends, what this means! We can follow how people in ancient times had their development up to old age. And when the decline had occurred by the age of 33, the Christ Jesus being developed among them, so to speak, ran counter to the development of humanity, up to the age of 33. When one comes to this matter in a spiritually scientific way, something happens to the human soul. Then the moment arrives when one is confronted with the miracle, the mystery of humanity, in the greatest emotion: the sacrifice of Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha coincides with the descent of the age of humanity. This is as powerful as anything that can confront you today among the mysteries of humanity. It is something great and powerful that is revealed here from the history of humanity. And truly, spiritual science is, as you can see from this, not intended to somehow suppress those feelings and perceptions that a person can have in the face of the greatness and violence and miraculous effectiveness of the world. Because the further we progress in spiritual science, the better we understand the divine-spiritual forces that prevail in human development. We feel that we are only at the beginning of our understanding of Christ; that times will come when this understanding of Christ will reveal itself quite differently than it can be the case today. But it must develop quite differently. After all, we now live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and the human being remains capable of development only up to the age of 27. After 1413, when the fifth post-Atlantic period began, people were capable of development until the 28th year. Today, until the 27th year. This means that, through what nature itself provides, we no longer remain capable of development even into the middle of our lives.

From this, however, you can see, my dear friends, how spiritual science truly does not arise from an arbitrary idea, from an arbitrary impulse for agitation. If natural science does not provide what makes human beings capable of development, then human beings must seek in their souls the development that is no longer given to them by nature. He must seek ways into the spiritual world by the soul turning to itself. And however strange and grotesque it may sound, it is true: if you do not seek to stimulate the innermost soul impulse that nature no longer gives us, then you will not live longer than 27 years, even if you live to be a hundred. We are now at that stage in human development where we cannot grow older than 27 years. This winter, in which I have come to a preliminary conclusion on many of the research questions that have occupied me for more than thirty years, has really kept me very much alive to what is actually connected with this realization, which comes from a completely different angle. Many phenomena of the present have made me wonder: yes, where does it all come from? Why is it that in our time we are experiencing precisely what could be called such a terrible unreality of thought and ideals?

This is what should be particularly noticeable to those people who are not asleep, that people are unable to immerse themselves in reality with their ideas and ideals. Of course, they have beautiful ideas, have beautiful ideals, but these ideas and ideals cannot be immersed in reality. They are not strong enough to grasp reality. Therefore they remain beautiful ideas and ideals, which people lick their lips over when they express them, but which have no driving force because they do not submerge into reality. We can see this most in everyday life. What is it when it is said today: “The most capable man must stand in the right place in the future.” We hear that today from all rooftops. It is a beautiful idea; certainly. But what is this beautiful idea worth when it is precisely the “nephew” who is the “most capable.” It is truly not a matter of having beautiful ideas, but of applying these beautiful ideas in reality; of developing a state of mind that is capable of immersing itself in life.

However, if everything that is unable to be realized in life were to be eliminated, then the whole science of states and nations could be eliminated. For all these things are abstract ideas, are unreal ideas. That is why some personalities are so enigmatic.

My dear friends, I am not saying what I am about to say out of chauvinistic sentiment. It has been hard enough for me to arrive at such realizations. I say it because I believe I possess the knowledge. If I look for a typical person – in order to avoid being offended by close personalities, let us take a somewhat more distant one – there is a personality in whom one can clearly see from everything it says world, that, however old he is, he is in reality no older than 27 years, and therefore expresses ideas that go beyond the whole earth today, but which are unrealistic. And this personality, who is so truly a type of our time that she cannot get older than 27 years because she rejects the idea of developing forces from within that nature itself provides, is the President of the United States of North America, Woodrow Wilson. I need only point out that I characterized Woodrow Wilson in the Helsingfors cycle before the war, so that one need not have the impression that I am doing so now under the impression of the present circumstances. But only because of this do the outbursts of Woodrow Wilson's ideas appear so unreal, so mere words, to those who know reality, because it is as I have discussed it. That is why it could happen that this man, who holds one of the most powerful positions of the present day, could publish a peace manifesto and thereby not achieve peace, but only war in his own country; because his ideas are not only unrealistic, but in many respects even opposed to reality.

But he is the representative of our time. That is what our time is like. And our time is fundamentally incapable of understanding reality. Anyone who expresses realistic ideas is understood in the same way as those who express abstract, unrealistic ideas. A spiritual-scientific education must first be created to create an understanding of reality.

As you can see, there is a way to get to know our time. But you have to start from a broad point of view. For someone who has a sense of reality, it is the most incredible thing that people today achieve in terms of ideas and ideals. These ideas are beautiful, wonderful, and Eucken's ideas are even more beautiful. They satisfy people very much. But Eucken is a philosopher who, although he is an old man, is no older than 27 years old, hence this peculiar jumble of beautiful ideas that seem beautiful to people. You see, you have to see through the periods that follow one another in history, in their true form, in their immediate reality. The Greeks still knew: the soul pervades the body. In the fifth epoch, this is known less and less, unless it is acquired through the soul, through a spiritual impulse that one seeks within oneself from within, because the body no longer gives this impulse to the soul by itself.

Now there is a beautiful search, my dear friends, a beautiful search for the human being who has become, as it were, dispirited, but now consciously, not unconsciously, as it was with the Persian, with the Egyptian - there was beautiful endeavor to lead the dead man in his soul back up into the spiritual world; now consciously, because the body no longer connects to the spiritual, now to connect with the soul to the spiritual. The path has been started and it leads directly into spiritual science. But it must be walked. This path is still little understood today. It is a sign, a deeply significant sign, how it was begun through Lessing, Herder, through Schiller and Goethe and those who were with them, to reconnect the dispirited human being to the spiritual world. And Schiller is greater as the writer of the Aesthetic Letters than as a poet. For in these Aesthetic Letters, Schiller seeks the way back for the human soul to the spiritual. He seeks it in a modern way, as modern man must seek it. Thus, through his “Letters on Aesthetic Education,” Schiller is one of the greatest educators of modern times, but he is also the least appreciated in this field of all – and so is Herder; [and also] Lessing, who is the first to point out the “education of the human race” in broad lines. Then Goethe, in his Imaginationen, linking all this in his “Fairytale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily. It is therefore not a coincidence but an inner necessity that our Mystery Plays should take up the first Mystery Drama from this fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. This is where what is in store for humanity in the near future begins: that it will have to seek to re-establish contact with the spiritual world through inner impulses, but now consciously through the free, independent soul. But these things are difficult to understand today. It is difficult to create an understanding for them.

Oh, if you could go back to how our Anthroposophical Society and the Anthroposophical movement developed, you would see in several places: it should be pointed out. You will find a small booklet that contains lectures of mine from that time about Schiller's philosophical significance. And, as I said, you will find the link to Goethe's fairy tales in the Mystery Dramas. These things are more in touch with the times in which we live than the rehashing of intellectual achievements of earlier times that are no longer suitable for our time. And it was not a process of progress but of degeneration when, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Theosophical Society emerged and wanted to transplant oriental-Indian essence into Europe without realizing that with what arose in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and what must develop on their soil, something much more significant and greater has been created for modern humanity than can ever come from any earlier source.

I myself have to think back to some personally strange things. When the president of the Theosophical Society in Germany, about whom she now writes so “kindly”, made her first appearance in Hamburg, I asked her whether it was not actually the task of the newer times to tie in with the spiritual life that had been achieved by Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Herder and so on. At the time, she replied, based on the process of degeneration of the Theosophical Society: “These are all people whose ideas were more distant from actual spiritual life. You have to penetrate much more deeply.” And so, through that reality, that materialistic construct, which the Theosophical Society as a theosophical doctrine contains, was placed in the place of the truly spiritual, which, basically, as from the very beginning, we wanted and needed. Because, whether you imagine the etheric body as a more or less dense or thin haze, you imagine it as a certain haze and so on. And even with the astral body, and with everything else, one still speaks of atoms and the like.

So the first steps, but only the first steps, had to be linked to the world view that finds expression in the “Letters on Aesthetic Education” and in the “Fairytale”. Just feel the necessities of a spiritual movement.

We will come to the sixth cultural period. We can then expect that humanity will remain capable of development into the 21st, 20th, 19th, and so on down to the 14th year. So humanity will remain infantile if it does not undergo an inner development, which can only come through spiritual knowledge.

But there are still quite different phenomena connected with what has been said. The estrangement from reality to which I have drawn attention is connected with this twenty-seven year-old age. Men must consciously find their way back into reality, for full reality also contains spiritual reality. He who does not recognize the spiritual world thereby becomes a man hostile to reality. That is why our political economy, our political science, is an insubstantial abstraction that can never create anything, because it treats reality like someone who sees nothing in a horseshoe magnet except a thing with which to shoe a horse's hoof. He does not know that the iron contains magnetic forces. Today, humanity must consciously regain what it once had instinctively, what has been lost to it. And here we are at a very important point. Much that people once had instinctively must now be consciously acquired, and this includes a sense of truth.

The world is taking giant strides towards people losing their instinctive sense of truth and having to acquire a new, conscious sense of truth. Therefore, we encounter things at every turn that we can only understand if we are able to see the world through the prism of the preconditions we have described today. Sometimes people are well-meaning, not ill-intentioned. But then they cannot help but harbor unrealistic ideas; they are incapable of responding to ideas that are rooted in reality. I can give you a good example of this that appeared recently in an article in the magazine 'Die Furche'. There you can read a relatively benevolent article about the relationship between spiritual science and religion. All sorts of strange things are said. And at the end, something is said about which one would have to scratch one's head to find any way of justifying that such a thing could be said about a person who is not malevolent:

[Rudolf Steiner has deeply recognized the power of self-love, with which one also loves what one should feel as ugly; but he says nothing against the most anti-divine power of this self-love, with which it only wants to ascribe the redemption of its own self to itself again and again, instead of only out of Christ Jesus, who wants to bring about his redemption in us.

So think about that. Think about this sentence in the light of what I have been saying for years about the Christ impulse in relation to human development. It is possible for something like this to be put forward by a source that is not malevolent.

[Rudolf Steiner deeply understood the power of self-love, with which one also loves what one should perceive as ugly; but he says nothing against the most anti-divine force of this self-love, with which it only wants to ascribe the redemption of one's own self to itself again and again, instead of solely from Christ Jesus, who wants to bring about his redemption in us.

While [but precisely] spiritual science is the only thing today that, in the face of the materialistic world view and also in the face of Christianity, which has become anti-Christian, restores the Mystery of Golgotha in its full depth. But people today do not read such things, and they do not think to test these things for their truth content. Today, people do not have enthusiasm for the truth. Therefore, they do not admit that such things are completely equivalent to lies, because it is a lie. People do not want to call things by their right name. There is an estrangement from reality. And it is necessary, because it is a very widespread evil, that someone who does not want to face the world while asleep but rather wide-awake should confront such a phenomenon with the impulses of spiritual science and in full consciousness.

A magazine called “The Invisible Temple” appears. In it, under the direction of a certain Horneffer, it is preached that a higher moralization of humanity should take place. Now, I am convinced that many people turn to such things with emotion - but emotion is rarely true today - in good faith. Now, there is a sentence in the magazine that

[However different the monists and the theosophists are, and however eagerly they fight and despise each other, they are strangely similar in one respect: they monopolize the word “science” for themselves. What they themselves do is true, pure science; what other people do is sham and pseudo-science. This can be read in Haeckel and Rudolf Steiner.

Now I ask you if I have ever written anything like this: what I write and say is science; what others write is pseudo-science.

What is this if not a lie! The people who put something like this together, even those who know that it is a lie, do not approach things with the feeling that they are dealing with dishonesty.

But today we need a new sense of truth. We must call a spade a spade. Such a magazine lies, and it is not ashamed to lie. And it writes about human ennoblement and human moralization by people who can be shown to be lying.

Keen observation, a real attention to the actual truth, that is what belongs above all to the duties of those who want to understand the anthroposophical world view, as a world view, as a view of life; not an easy acceptance of the facts of the world, whether on the spiritual or physical plane. Today, a tremendous magnitude and strength of earnest must permeate the world where a true world view is concerned; an earnestness that cannot be compared to any earnestness of earlier times. But for this to happen, people must become aware of how lightly humanity treats the truth today.

I will give you only a few examples that may be close to us. Under such circumstances, it is truly no wonder that this spiritual science, just at the time when it seems to be opening up from one side, is having some impressions and influences on the currents of our time – that this spiritual science, on the other hand, is experiencing attack after attack, and indeed such attacks that really arise from the nature of our time.

I truly did not consider it worthwhile to go into the matter for as long as the Freimarke and others were scolding the things. But the time has come when opponents are being recruited from within the Anthroposophical Society itself, and not opponents who fight honestly, but opponents who spread untruth after untruth in order to drive spiritual science into a scandal. The slander and vilification that have come our way during this time cannot be described. Allow me, however, to draw attention to some of them here as well.

I know that there are members among us, members of the Anthroposophical Society, who say with a haughty air: one does not get involved in these things, one only gets into personal squabbling. But one should turn to those who are the cause of this personal squabbling, not to those who have to defend themselves. We have gone through bitter enough times in which we had to defend ourselves.

I do not want to be misunderstood, my dear friends. Opposition to spiritual science may occur as much in the world as is always possible. It only depends on how this opposition occurs. I still count some of the opposition as justified, even if this opposition is often strange in expression. I would just like to remind you that a man who has done an enormous amount for our cause in recent years, Ludwig Deinhard, only slowly came around and became a sincere friend, and that at the beginning, when I had to appear in Germany, he could not approve of it and was quite in agreement with those who publicly attacked me at the time. I did not respond to such attacks, although at the time, when I gave a lecture in Munich, the sentence was said: “The Berlin traveler for Theosophy has appeared again.” I still consider such things to be justified. One can have opinions, no matter how trivially they are expressed. Therefore, I do not want to be misunderstood. If an opponent appears honestly, or even dishonestly, but in a literary form, that is not what I mean today. What I want to talk about today is opposition, not out of the matter itself, but out of objective untruth. And in this respect, there have been some terrible developments in recent times. It must be said that it has never happened before that such things have been thrown at a matter as the one I have to represent.

Anyone who speaks to esoteric impulses knows that he must naturally create opponents for himself. Because that which must be spoken by the real spiritual science, that just causes opposition. And it is perhaps not too much to say that if you speak to 120 people, in all seriousness about the deepest things, among these 120 there are probably 70 possible opponents; 70 possible enemies. That is the case. You must not be under any illusions about that.

And it is not a question of whether such opponents arise or not, but of whether they are decent or not. And certainly much in this area emerges from what I have characterized today. But we are experiencing the strangest things. And so please allow me to make a few brief remarks about this, because I simply have to take action against these attacks that are coming from within society, from members of society – who have now left, admittedly. I have to say a few words to you about this.

All in all, it has to be said: today is the time to raise the question: Can the Anthroposophical Society continue in this way if I am to give lectures in it – or not? The Anthroposophical Society is truly something other than anthroposophy or spiritual science. Spiritual science would not have the opposition that it currently has, which is currently coming from the fact that, firstly, people are relying on dishonesty and because other people, who are outside, are using this dishonesty. It is too inconvenient for these latter people to study spiritual science in order to attack it. It is much easier to drive spiritual science into a scandal. To attack it, one would first have to study it. It is easier this way, but what do we experience?

Above all, a positive, active judgment must develop in the Anthroposophical Society if it is to continue to exist as such. After all, spiritual science could very well continue without the Society. You could have three or four friends in every city who could arrange everything needed for lectures; you don't need an Anthroposophical Society for that. So we must not confuse anthroposophy with the Anthroposophical Society. I said that a more active judgment is needed. We have to recognize that things are possible in our Society that are actually only possible within it. We first had to found the Society for these things to become possible. I want to recall an older matter. But a new one is not out of place in telling this story.

A certain Mr. Grasshoff joined our society. He attended lectures in all cities for a while, was present everywhere. You may, of course, ask why the man was accepted. Yes, you see, there is no way to reject people under certain conditions when they are brought in; you would have to anticipate the future. Do you think that a Grasshoff would come in and I would say: We cannot accept you. – Yes, why not? – Well, because in the future you will be a swine against society!

You can't say that if something is only going to happen in the future but has not yet happened. So you have to let such people into society, that goes without saying.

This Mr. Grasshoff listened to all the lectures he could possibly hear; he borrowed all the notes taken by the members. He copied everything down. After a while he went back to America, where he had come from, and wrote a nice book. In this book, he put together everything he had heard in the various lectures, what he had found in the books, and what he had written from the unpublished lectures. But he did not say that. He wrote a preface to the book. There he says: I heard this and that from Dr. Steiner, but then I was not finished. But I was then given the task of going to a master, of course a master in the Transylvanian Alps, and there this master told me the deeper things that I still lacked. So this “deeper” and this “higher” all comes from this “master”. As I said, everything in this book is copied from my lectures and from books and notes of other members.

Now, the book was published in America. But what happened? The book, titled “Rosicrucian World Conception,” was published in America.

One could still say: Well, that's American, you couldn't expect much different over there. But then a book publisher was found here in Germany, run by a certain Dr. Hugo Vollrath. He was inclined to translate this book into German and to publish it in individual lesson letters. And a preface was written to the effect that some of the content had already come to light in Germany, but that it first had to be cleansed in the pure air of California, in America. Such a disgraceful piece is actually not possible in literary life outside. I even told this story in public lectures. It is a disgrace that should have become known everywhere if it had been understood with the necessary power of judgment. I would like to go and collect how many people know about it. But that is why things can always repeat themselves.

That is why it could happen that a member, a long-standing member, who of course could not be expelled for the same reason that Mr. Grasshoff - who appeared under the name A. M. Heindel - could not be expelled, could write a book called “Who Was Christ?” In this book, he did not go to the same lengths as Mr. Grasshoff, but he did compile all kinds of cycles under the motto that knowledge should not be kept secret but belongs to the times. The person from whom he copied this motto took it very badly because the person who wrote it meant it quite differently. But then he hinted: Dr. Steiner did indeed point out some of these things, but it is necessary to elaborate on all of them. — You can imagine, my dear friends, that this book had to be rejected by the Anthroposophical-Philosophical Publishing House in Berlin. Thereupon the man became an opponent.

So, a long-standing member, a member who has even done a lot for the Anthroposophical Society, a member who for a long time has appeared to be a quiet member, becomes an opponent because a brochure is rejected by the publisher. That is the real reason for the antagonism. That is the reason. Of course, one sometimes says, it is not quite true, post hoc, but one does not go far wrong with such things if one uses the expression. In any case, Seiling has not only become an opponent, but an enemy, after his brochure had to be rejected by the publisher. He did, however, admit to someone that he had suffered a great deal from me in recent years and therefore had to write some things from his soul. Yes, but I also had some strange experiences with this gentleman. You know that the gentleman speaks a very Berlin dialect and had no idea about recitation. He took a few lessons and was also very useful because he could use the dialect as a Berliner. But then the story got into his head. Then he appeared in Dornach: Now I, an old fellow, want to show you what reciting is. I even showed my nephew, I want to show you what I achieve before the world as a reciter. It is understandable that someone like this, who has a great deal of vanity, suffers when one cannot say 'yes' to such things as a matter of course. But with all the ridiculous contradictions that he has put together, this man could not have lured a dog out of the oven, because anyone can check them. That is not the point, but the point is that these contradictions had to be covered up with a lot of untrue stuff. And this untrue stuff, he concocts it out of “conversations”. He is one of those people who have been coming for years with requests for private conversations, for interviews. He now distorts what happened in these conversations, and what he cites is all objectively untrue. Objectively untrue! For example, that I had told someone – which he cites – that I had not agreed to the publishing house accepting another brochure that had appeared before. But Dr. Steiner had wanted this brochure from him in her publishing house, so I had given in. Now he talks about private conversations like that. If these private conversations can be misused like that, then it is a fatal thing.

The gentleman presents himself in a very strange light. He knows very well how things are in Dornach. He knows that the others caused a scandal there, but now he writes in the “Psychical Studies” that our marriage has led to scandals. — [But:] We were quite innocent of the scandal, the others caused it. This is a clever way of deliberately dragging things into scandal if that is what you want. You just have to look at things in the right way. And what do we experience next?

A man in a city in central Germany wrote to the present Dr. Steiner years ago, saying that he had reached a turning point in his soul and did not know what to do. Should he get involved in a business or should he help his soul in some other way? Dr. Steiner wrote to him that we could not deal with such things. Then he reappeared as a member of the Theosophical Society in Berlin. There he had initially surprised the members, despite having no idea of recitation, by pouring out Schiller's “Kassandra” over the eardrums [of those present] in a – well, let's say in a “surprising” way. The man did not aspire to become an artist, as he claimed, but: to be an artist. I was later told by a reliable source that he was now pursuing the strategy of marrying his way into our society, but he did not succeed. Then he turned to Munich. There, everything that could be done for him was done. He imagined that he had to paint. He couldn't paint, nor did he have any talent for it. But, you know, some talent, at least the small talents, only show up after some time. They got him a teacher, but you can't turn him into a genius in the blink of an eye. If he had wanted to become something, they would have accommodated that. But he wanted to be a painter, to be a genius, not just become one. That's a terrible crime, isn't it? In short, the man also became an enemy one day, and for some time now he has been engaged in some strange writing. His name is Erich Bamler.

Yes, it is extremely difficult to take this writing seriously. For example, one of the points mentioned is that I advised the man to do a deep occult exercise. The exercise: He should see everything in his environment as good and necessary. You only have to look it up in Schopenhauer's works to find this sentence. There you will find that Schopenhauer considers this behavior to be very beneficial for mental and spiritual health. Yes, as a result of this sentence, the man now claims to have developed blue bumps on his legs and other things that have given him a bad occult development. Things are so stupid, so terribly stupid, that you can only make something of them if you use defamatory things to smear the other person and use them as clothing. And today, of course, there are enough people who do this. It is even possible that university professors do not content themselves with a factual reply, but also dress it up in real madness. But today there are editors who do not go into spiritual science. They have no idea about it. But they do go into the things that are reported to them. And what is reported?

A few days ago I received a letter. A gentleman wrote to me saying that he had been to one of my lectures in a town in North Germany and that at this lecture he had, as he assured me, heard with his own ears that I had pointed out that the Christ would repeatedly appear on Earth and that I had made it clear that I myself was laying claim to this incarnation. Imagine that, my dear friends! And the man not only says that he himself has heard this, but he can also produce witnesses who have also heard it. Such things are happening today. Can it be incomprehensible that there are editors like those who come into question here in this case, who let themselves be told these things, especially when they are brought by members who have surrendered to the cultivated lack of judgment in society. But this is only the beginning, it will continue. Spiritual science truly has no fear of refutations, so I never think that there should be no opposition.

It has been said that a commission should be set up to examine the matter and put it right. I see this as foolishness. Hundreds and thousands of opposing writings may appear; there can be no opposition, if it is honest, that spiritual science has to fear. Spiritual science can stand up to scientific scrutiny. But that is not what this is about. Instead, it is about driving people into meanness, about defamation, about throwing dirt at them, as has never been seen before. It could reach such heights that a long-standing member writes fabricated things, fabricated follies from beginning to end, things that are completely untrue. These are accepted by the editorial team. This can happen today.

So a member writes to the editorial team: I have had to deal with anthroposophical matters, and I have come to the view that something similar should happen to me as the Lazarus miracle that Christ performed and that Dr. Steiner described. Dr. Steiner sent me chocolate, and I have to assume that this chocolate was sent to me to perform the Lazarus miracle on me.

Now, this madness can be said and also printed today, and the editor writes as a note under these follies: “Where such occult exercises are done, even healthy people can go insane.” Yes, such things happen. I do not care about the real side issues. Whether such people are to be regarded as mentally ill is not an issue here. That is important, of course, but here it is a matter of dealing with pure inventions, with inventions of the most disgraceful kind. These are the things with which one is supposed to present spiritual science today. And do not think that it is based on a superficial judgment when I say: It is necessary that the judgment in the Anthroposophical Society be strengthened. The silliness that is now appearing again, with this article about chocolate and the miracle of Lazarus, that the reincarnation of Christ has been spoken of and that I myself am being pointed to – do not believe that it is without connection to these follies, that I actually had to emphasize very early on, again and again: There is only one incarnation of Christ. Such things have already been done in abundance in society.

So it has become necessary, my dear friends, for me to take two measures. They certainly hurt me as much as they may hurt some of you. But they are absolutely necessary. As things stand now, there is no other way.

From now on, all private conversations that have been held so far must stop, because the worst objective distortions arise from a number of these private conversations. I have indeed been quietly pointing this out for years. So perhaps a fact will come to light. It is not so much about this measure itself, but rather that by taking this measure, our members are being made aware that it is necessary to take these things seriously. You see, these things are all carried out. What members carry out of the Society is the most outrageous. And outside, everyone tells you: Yes, this is a society in which everything is based on authority. In blind faith, everyone follows this Dr. Steiner! And in reality it is like this: there is perhaps no other society in which a person like me, who is active in it, finds that everything happens differently than they think it should. Because in this society, in reality, everything that happens is always against my will; in the details, and also in some big questions. How countless things develop under the type: someone wants to go to a lecture cycle; it is necessary to excuse it to someone; what does he say? Dr. Steiner sent me. - What is the point of all this sending? Well, the person in question comes and says: Should I travel to the cycle? - That is of course none of my business, because it can only be voluntary. So I say: That's none of my business, it's up to you. - Then the person asks: Do you have any objections? — Of course I have no objections, because such things are done of one's own free will. - But if my answer is passed on to a second or third person, then it is: I should travel, Dr. Steiner said so.

I am far from any kind of mischief of sectarianism. But there is a lot of sectarianism in the Anthroposophical Society. Of course, this is less prominent here, but the Society must be treated as a unit. Therefore, these things must also be said here.

I made a trip to [Stettin]. As I arrived, a strange group marched in through one of the station doors. They were all ladies, but they looked like cardinals. Of course, they were all wearing stoles, as we call them. Then they had these strange caps on. Well, in Munich something like that might be acceptable; there you just say: they are crazy; you are used to it there. In Berlin it is less so. But when the ladies arrived in [Helsingfors], all hell broke loose. The [Helsingfors] ladies had to sit separately so that it would not be noticed that they belonged together. You see, such outward appearances are only a symbol of inward sectarianism.

In short, it is therefore necessary that the first measure to be taken is to stop all private conversations from now on. Those who have an esoteric matter to bring forward must pass on a little time; I will try to create a substitute for these conversations. Everyone will find satisfaction in what they can receive esoterically, but the private conversations will have to be stopped. For it is precisely from these discussions that most of what is now coming to the world in such an enormous way originates. Therefore, the innocent must now suffer with the guilty. For this reason, let us turn to those who are to blame. For years I have been pointing out that this will come.

But one will not say the complete thing if one does not say a second measure. That is that I give everyone, as far as I am concerned, an absolute permission to tell the truth about everything that has ever been said or done in a private conversation, insofar as he himself wants it. Only in this way will it be possible to silence the incredible distortions and untruths, denigrations, and slanders that have now been spread throughout the world, if this second measure is taken. The one who will tell the one measure without the other will tell an untruth. The two belong together. They must be thought together and said together.

Therefore, firstly: All private conversations must be recorded. Secondly: I authorize everyone to pass on everything that has ever been said or done in private conversations, provided that they themselves want it.

My dear friends, spiritual science will simply have to be brought into the full light of the public, because our time cannot tolerate what is very often confused with esotericism, but which does not need to be confused at all. Esotericism can also be practiced when anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is brought into the full light of the public. It can do so because this spiritual science has nothing to fear. But it is not always to everyone's taste to be besmirched and to have to take a public stand against it, especially when the mud is being slung from places and by personalities one would prefer not to take a stand.

Please forgive me, my dear friends, for having to attach these remarks to our deliberations; I had to attach them to what I wanted to give you today as a striking characteristic of our time, which I believe will be of use to you if you want to observe with an alert eye of the soul what is going on around us and has been going on around us in the last three years.

What has happened in the last three years is truly so that what happened before seems to us to lie in a mythical past. But it is precisely when one observes the times and takes spiritual science in the fullest sense seriously that one does not consider 'personal bickering' and 'personal matters' to be what I have been forced to link to these arguments before.

When you undergo a spiritual development, you get to know the spiritual life. But there it is always, this spiritual life. For the ordinary human mind, it is much too fine and unfamiliar compared to the external world, and man cannot go beyond the familiar.

This spiritual world is the area where man lives between death and the new birth. With those souls with whom one had no connection at all here in life, no relationships can be established from here after death. The moral and intellectual life continues over there. In ordinary life, one cannot achieve such a strong ability to get in touch with that area.

Here, in the physical world, we hear what someone else says. If the disembodied soul wants to connect with another person here, it is the other way around. The disembodied soul tells us what we ask it. What comes from us, the dead person tells us, what comes from the “dead resounds in us. It is very easy to say this, but it is so difficult to fulfill, because it is usually overlooked that the messages come from us, which we think we are receiving from there. The moments of falling asleep and waking up are the most favorable for the usual communication between this world and the spiritual one. The spiritually developed person can, of course, also use other [moments].

If you want to come together with a [deceased] soul at the moment of falling asleep, then it is good to summarize what you feel for the dead person in a question to the dead person, just as you would have done when he was still alive, as far as possible in the same way as you were accustomed to during his lifetime. This can have an effect in dreams. It can lead to illusions; it is not the dead person who speaks, but what we have thought, felt and wished during the day in relation to the dead person. This comes back to us from the dead person in a dream. It is right at the moment of waking up, when something comes from the dead person into one's own soul and this comes up again during the day. During sleep, what we have thought of the dead during the day comes up; during the waking hours, what has come to us from the dead during falling asleep and waking up.

Spiritual science does nothing other than grasp with the mind's eye what is in the spiritual world. Much more plays out of the spiritual world – including the one in which the dead are – into our world than we know.

For a long time, not enough attention has been paid to what changes in the different periods. What we have experienced during life between death and a new birth lives in us. What we bring with us from the spiritual world is woven into the inherited physical body - into the blood, the nervous system, the muscles and so on. The soul that moves in with the birth is wise. We are actually tremendously wise; enchanted, we carry this wisdom within us. And we have to release what pulses as a wise being in our blood, nerve, muscle and respiratory systems. What soul mood is most suitable for this? The one that has been lost to people in recent centuries: faith in life. This is connected to a casualness in relation to religious life.

We now only really believe in our youth and young adulthood into our twenties; only up to that point can we get something out of the development of the body – up to around the age of twenty-seven. In ancient Greece, it was still possible up to the age of thirty, and so on.

But we have to replace the physical and bodily, which no longer has anything to offer, with the spiritual and soul. We must learn to believe in the whole of life. Even if I want to be able to experience something different at forty than at thirty, I have to imbue myself with the spirit that makes us capable of always experiencing something new. Not like today, of course, when twenty-year-olds are already saying, “From my point of view.” How can you have a point of view at twenty? A person must give himself impulses. Today it is the case that a person stops at the age of 27; he does not live further. That would be a person who, in terms of character, is rooted in our time, a self-made man, not a grammar school student, who already takes up traditions, not only

not only what comes from the time. Coming from a poor background, gifted with an active intellect, elected to parliament at the age of twenty-seven, and thus committed for life: that is Lloyd George, a true representative of our time.

We must rediscover our faith in the meaning of life. The different parts of the human body have different speeds, so to speak. What is in the head and what is in the trunk has different rates of development. The main organization develops relatively quickly and is completed by the twenties. The heart organism – let us call it that – develops throughout life. Our educational and social lives actually only serve the development of our minds. Our head would be ready to die at the age of 27. But there is also a spiritual side to this. If people only cared about developing their minds, humanity would soon become decrepit, physically too. It must become a principle of education that memories of youth appear like a paradise. The head that is ready to die at the age of 27 must always be able to draw new strength from what radiates from youth. Those who study spiritual science know that there are things they cannot know in their 30s or 40s, because only in their 50s can this or that enter into them. If we acquire a sense of the whole of life, then we will not be thrown back by the leap from the physical to the spiritual life, but will develop more quickly.

The leap from the physical to the spiritual life does not bring us back, but develops us faster. People today can demystify much more of the “wise” than was possible in an earlier time.

Only by starting from the point of view that Goethe can now tell us something completely different than in 1832, only by finding the strength to live with the Goethe of 1882, have I been able to achieve what is called Goethe research, which I have done.

One must set age higher, in the social higher than twenty-seven, where people are elected to parliament.

The dead should be allowed to speak. For example, Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”, what is said there about social issues, should be allowed to affect the soul of people who are socially active. We can always give something to the world after we die – let the dead be fruitful for the living. This is to be taken together with what was said at the beginning about the relationship to the dead.

Dessoir: “Philosophy of Freedom”, one of Dr. Steiner's “first works”; [in the second edition] a first work in the theosophical field - all the more wrong.

It is necessary to develop a sense for the concrete, a sense of truth; to feel pain at what is not true. Full participation, pictorial participation, has declined sharply today; that wants to get into the souls later than in the 28th year.

A speaker once said, after raising many questions: “Now I have presented you with a forest of question marks.” You just have to imagine that. You have to be careful not to slip up in your speech.

How a person expresses himself in his thoughts - the “how” of thoughts - from the way a person thinks, you can see how he stands in life. A Herman Grimm has won and fought for what he says. A Woodrow Wilson seems to be possessed by his point of view, by demons. Today it is not so much the content of what one says that matters, but the “how”, whether it is identical with the personality or whether the personality is possessed. Today it will matter less and less what the content of theories is, but rather how they are presented.

We must gain a sense of the whole of life and make it fruitful for the whole of life, including life after death, and how the hereafter is referred to here. Today, despite the catastrophic events taking place outside, life is being overslept a great deal. Many people today have not yet realized that since August 1914 we have had to think differently.

In the spring of 1914, Dr. Steiner said that there was a cancer in social life and so on. This cancer soon broke out. You have to rethink and learn to feel.

When physics and so forth speak of negative and positive and so forth today, that is quite correct, but what we say about Lucifer and Ahriman is just as correct. But there must be balance between the two poles. The Luciferic lives in the spiritual world as well as here, it lives in the selfish drives. This has long been taken into account in the social structure: medals, titles and so on. In our social structure, far too much has been attributed to the one-sided Luciferic. Now the Ahrimanic is rising. The public is at the mercy of what is printed. Now it is the case that people want to take the social structure into their own hands, so to speak, in an Ahrimanic way. Through aptitude tests, they want to find out whether a child has intellectual potential. Nothing but Ahrimanic forces are revealed by these tests, nothing of the soul itself. It would be terrible from a social point of view if the aptitude tests were to continue. The child is a mystery. Belief in the meaning of life could also have a positive effect on pedagogy, not what is achieved through aptitude tests and so on.

I wanted to make sure that what has happened in these four years would not be forgotten.

There would be no esotericism if the view that medieval soul investigators had and that is shared by modern psychologists were correct. Back then they said: Everything that goes on in the soul is intentional, that is, a particular intention underlies all soul processes; when I think, then my thinking has a particular content, I have to think something; when I feel, hope, imagine, will then I must feel, hope, imagine or will something. Medieval soul investigators expressed this much more clearly than modern psychologists, for our age is the age of fuzzy concepts. If this medieval view were correct no esoteric thinking would be possible, for an esoteric wants to remove this something from his soul also and make it completely empty, so that divine thinking can then stream into his soul. In a way this is also not produced by our exercises, for in them we concentrate on particular words, pictures, etc. that are given us by occult teachers. That is, on something that isn't taken from the sense world. Our soul becomes prepared to receive divine existence when it has matured through these exercises.

What's the purpose of this concentrated thinking? To divert us from the material thoughts that whiz around us and to get us to rest in a particular thought content. We must get to the point of ignoring a particular object of our thinking, of freeing ourselves completely from it and of developing the forces that are necessary for thinking. Medieval soul investigators knew that quite well, but they obeyed a rule that's still followed by many people and that's become a basic principle in all cognitional theory today. They said that it's very difficult to attain thinking, feeling and willing that is devoid of intentions, and that what's difficult is impossible for men. That's how all these ideas about limits to cognitional capacity came into philosophy.

Of course it isn't easy for an esoteric to remove all thinking, feeling and willing content from his soul during meditation and to only develop forces. He'll only attain this through steady, strenuous meditation. A meditator is really in the same position as a sleeping man, except that he keeps himself conscious.

For what happens in sleep? The astral body and ego leave the body, and the physical and etheric bodies remain lying on their resting place, but as I've often mentioned this is only correct to a certain extent. Just as the sun only sets for one part of the globe and arises anew for the other half, so only one part of the physical body rests. The sun of the astral body and ego begins to unfold its activity in the other part. For the astral body and ego are withdrawn from the nervous and blood systems, but they begin to work on the senses and glands during sleep. Many of you have gone to sleep in a room that's not very warm and have then felt cold on awaking. That's because the astral body and ego aren't in your blood and nervous system during sleep. It may seem strange, but senses are awake the most during sleep. For instance, while our eyes are closed at night the forces of the ego and astral body work into them. Whereas our eyes are really sleeping during the day when we're awake. A man wouldn't be able to use them if they weren't asleep. The fact is that the sun of the astral body and ego rises at night on the hemisphere of the sense and glandular systems. One who wakes up consciously in sleep can experience the light that works on eyes and the building up of senses that must stop in daytime so that a man can see. Such a man can see the image of an angel who's floating towards him when the lens expands and contracts again. If he could expand his gaze he would see an angel fighting with a demon, projected out of him. This imagination arises because in sleep the blood is taking care of the eyes. For generations of archangels and Gods have worked on the human eye. When one makes this clear to oneself one will also feel how irreverently physiologists are probing into what was created over a very long time by hierarchies of divine beings.

When a meditator looks at himself from outside he can have the feeling of a space that's filled with warmth only, like an oven. What lives in there is what weaves in a man's own soul life. We must feel the warmth ether that fills and surrounds the physical body. This takes a lot of attentiveness. Inexperienced esoterics won't notice this ether, they notice something quite different, namely, thoughts that storm in on them, often long forgotten images, feelings and worries press in on them. Then they come and complain. A more experienced esoteric can say: I congratulate you on the progress that you're making now.

This fits in with the word in John's Gospel, “And the light shone into the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not.” For this warmth that's in us is darkness. Light wants to press in from outside, but it can't, because there's a battle going on between two kinds of warmth. It's hard for a man to see that there are two kinds of warmth. Once when a thunder storm was approaching an old shepherd told me: Those are two weathers that are gathering against each other. Modern physicists speak abstractly of positive and negative electricity, but that's as far as it goes. The old shepherd still felt and knew out of the depths of his soul that when a thunderstorm comes up two powers are fighting each other, that a battle is taking place there.

A modern isn't aware of two kinds of warmth anymore. It's easier for him to imagine that there are two kinds of light: the inner luciferic light and the outer divine light that he sees coming towards him in meditation. But aside from man's warmth that's luciferic there's another warmth that can irradiate him from outside, but which he'll feel to be cold in meditation to begin with. In meditation it's a good sign to feel breathed on by cold, which is warmth in spiritual worlds. If we focus on this cold we feel our own warmth like a sphere around and in us. We seem to go through a fiery oven in which everything luciferic is burned, and yet this fire of divine wrath—which is really love—is felt to be cold that's breathing on us. Once one has become aware of this happening one tells oneself: Thank God that I'm punished and tortured and have to experience God's wrath that burns up the things in me that shouldn't be in me any more.

Then warmth that's initially felt to be cold comes to us from outside. and this comes with light—which is also from Lucifer, but from Lucifer's good side. Spirits in the good hierarchies use Lucifer to let this light radiate into us.

Thereby we can arrive at a soul life that's not intentional, at a spiritual world that's not just a continuation of the physical one, but a quite different one. The rose cross can be a symbol of this for us.

People often say: The rose cross remains a mere symbol for me. But that's their own fault. The feelings with which a man should permeate himself so that the red rose cross becomes a live force and not just a symbol were already indicated in Occult Science. We can also convert what was said today into a feeling: We're born from God. But since Lucifer mixed himself into creation the cross's wood must become burnt charcoal and black. In ... morimur. If we've died in Christ like this then the world forces, the forces of the seven red heavenly roses that radiate into us as light and warmth can approach us from outside from the seven planets.

What every esoteric is heartily interested in is success for his meditative efforts. Everyone is successful, even if he doesn't notice it. Budding esoterics often complain about pains. These pains are disorders that arise in the body because the physical and etheric bodies aren't in the right contact with each other. These pains were already there before, except that the man hadn't felt them since he was coarser and more robust. He feels them now as an esoteric since he's finer and more sensitive. An esoteric must learn to bear such pains. Of course one has to know whether or not the disease should be treated.

Why is it that one knows one's physical body so little? Because one lives in it and only perceives it with one's feelings. One sees with one's eyes and so one can't observe them. Once an esoteric gets to the point where he withdraws from the physical with his soul and spirit he'll be able to observe his physical body. We're helped to do this if we concentrate our thoughts on a point as much as possible and then immerse our self in this point and live in it for awhile. A strengthening of thought power occurs through such concentration and thereby one can gradually get to the point of observing one's physical body.

Then we must become familiar with our etheric body. This is more difficult, for the etheric body does not have a skin like the physical body—it's a fine tissue that sends out its streams everywhere into the outer world and it's imprinted by everything that goes on in the outer world, often without the man's knowledge. One learns to feel the etheric body by doing the second auxiliary exercise. It's outer impressions that ordinarily drive a man to act. He sees a flower on a meadow, and he stretches out a hand to pick it because it pleases him. But as esoterics we must get to the point of doing this or that out of an impulse that we give ourselves. Then one will see that it's the etheric body that induces the hand to move. One feels that one's etheric body awakens in this way. Through this awakening etheric body one gradually learns to experience oneself in an etheric world. Every time I grab something or bump into it this is really an attack on the outer world. A non-esoteric has no inkling of this for the Guardian of the Threshold protects him from this knowledge, but an esoteric makes his etheric body increasingly independent so that it experiences itself in the etheric world. His organs get finer and he gets the feeling that spaces aren't only filled with physical objects but by countless elemental beings who make themselves noticed through bumping, pricking and burning. One must make room for oneself everywhere in this elemental, etheric world by stretching out, withdrawing, pushing, striding forwards, etc., and such movements must occur with the full consciousness that one wants to make them out of one's own being. That's the second thing: initiative actions. One without an initiative will who can't make room for himself in the etheric world can do just as little there as one who wants to dance on a stage that has chairs standing all over it. The chairs must be removed first. That's what one learns in the spiritual realm through the second exercise. We must do just the opposite to become aware of our astral body. We must hold back desires that are living in the astral body, we must develop equanimity with respect to them. We must create absolute calm in us. Only then do we feel the outer astral world bumping into our inner astral world. Just as we bump into the etheric world by reaching into it by ourselves in our will, so we feel the outer astral world by remaining quiet in ourselves, by quieting all wishes and desires. Before the astral body gets to this point it stuns itself with a cry. We know that pain arises when the physical and etheric bodies aren't in the right contact with each other. The astral body feels this as pain. A small child cries when he feels pain. He tries to drown out the pain by crying. An adult might say “ouch.” If a man could let his pain stream completely into the sound's vibrations changes would arise in the etheric body's formation through sound oscillations so that he would become unconscious and feel no pain. But the good Gods made men weaker, and that's good, otherwise there would be no pain and also no articulated speech. An esoteric must get to the point where he can bear pain and everything else that's stimulated in him from outside with equanimity. Then he won't attack the outer world, but it'll attack him. Since he has developed complete calm the attacks only touch his physical and etheric bodies, and the astral body remains untouched. It becomes free and one can observe it. So I get to know my astral body through the equanimity exercise. Finally I must also get to know my ego. I can't feel my ego, because I'm living in it. That's why we must pour it out into the world. I become familiar with my ego through what we call positivity. If we look at a rotting dog's beautiful teeth like Christ Jesus did then we don't see the ugliness, but we dive down so far into everything that we arrive at the good. Thereby we get away from our ego and can observe it. The ego is love and will. Through the developed will we get to know the substance of all things that originate in the divine world. Through love we learn to experience the essence of things. Thus through will and love we press forward to cognition that's free of the personal ego. As a spiritual ego we learn to dive down into the being and substance of all things that come from the spiritual Father ground; that includes our own ego. Our ego looks at us from all created things. The pupil attains the swan stage when he can experience that. At the fifth stage we develop spirit self or manas. There we mustn't cling to what we previously saw, heard and learned. We must learn to ignore all of that, to receive what approaches us as if we were completely emptied of previous things. Manas can only be developed if one learns to feel that everything that we acquired through our own thinking is of little value in comparison with what we can acquire when we open ourselves to the thoughts that stream in out of the cosmos that was woven by the Gods. Everything that surrounds us arose from these thoughts of the Gods. We hadn't been able to find them through our previous thinking. The things concealed them for us. Now we get an inkling of the divine that's behind everything like a hidden riddle. We begin to see how few of these riddles we had fathomed. And we find that we really have to remove everything that we've learned so far from our soul, that we must approach everything quite open-mindedly, like a child—that the divine riddles that surround us are only given to the open-mindedness of the soul. The soul must become childlike to be able to press into the kingdoms of heaven. Then hidden wisdom or manas streams towards the childlike soul like a gift of grace from the spiritual world.

A man doesn't have to go further, since he makes contact with the spiritual world through these five stages. Through continual repetition of these five exercises a harmony of interaction between the various capacities that are to be attained through them must now be produced. This is brought about by the sixth exercise.

These exercises are of the very greatest importance. A soul can find its way into spiritual worlds through them. You'll find references to these five exercises everywhere in the books and lectures. And no esoteric class would have to take place if everyone read them attentively and awakened the forces of these exercises to life in his soul. They serve as a support for the specially given exercises.

An esoteric must be very attentive even to the smallest things. He must observe everything conscientiously in a quite different way than it's done in the physical world, as soon as he approaches spiritual worlds. For things in the spiritual realm are much more subtle and fine than in the physical one. That's why an esoteric must keep on doing these exercises and repeatedly rouse himself to new efforts and observations, for otherwise he can't get insights into the spiritual world. And an esoteric must especially be patient. Many people think that after they've exercised for a short time they should then get into the spiritual world, that all portals to it will be open to them. But just consider that a significant impulse or idea takes 19 years to be inwardly well grasped and understood. If an esoteric thinks that after some exercising he'll soon be mature enough for entry into spiritual worlds, then it's as if a child who'd just learned to speak would say: It's boring to have to wait for years until I become a man. I want to be a man right away.

Another thing that one has to learn in esoteric life is truthfulness. One who hasn't already learned it in physical life will have a lot of trouble in his ascent into the spiritual world since he must leave his logical thinking and everything that's connected with the intellect behind, and he's not corrected by facts in the spiritual world as he is here in the physical world. The good Gods wanted to educate man to be truthful when they placed him in the physical world, where every lie—that is, everything that doesn't correspond to the facts—is corrected by facts. The inclination for truthfulness can only be acquired in the physical world and not in the spiritual one. Finally an esoteric must try to habitually acquire a good memory. The etheric body is the preserver of memory, but without the physical body it wouldn't be able to preserve it very well. The nerves get an impression and this must be written into the physical body. The latter is as it were the recording apparatus for what a man wants to retain. And when he wants to remember something he penetrates the physical body with the etheric body to the place where what's supposed to be remembered is inscribed, the memory picture becomes alive and the man reads it from the physical body. Students repeat something they have to memorize until it has been inscribed. Then it may happen that when they for instance learn: “There stood a castle so high and grand” ... they press it forcibly into the physical body with the help of the sounds.

Such inscribing and reading must become habitual in the sense that it becomes an inner habit to permeate all of one's deeds with attentiveness and reflection.

One can't use the physical body as a memory organ for spiritual experiences; habitual activities must replace it. We must summon the nuance of feeling that belongs to this before our soul.

The content of what flows to a meditator when he makes himself empty after a meditation—also of the meditation's influence—is a matter of merit. A meditation will never be the same twice. What flows to us will depend upon our morality, love of truth, and on how we've lived since the last meditation. If we didn't remain entirely truthful or if we've let anger or aggravation arise in us, then nothing from the spiritual world can stream into us. We get what we deserve. If we trace these things attentively we'll always find the reason why we weren't graced with the spirit in some untruth, in some surging up of anger, or the like.

In recent discussions,¹ I pointed out that certain human functions appearing in early childhood are transformations of functions that man carries out in pre-earthly existence between death and a new birth. We see how, after birth, the child not fully adapted to the earth's gravity and equilibrium gradually develops to the point at which it becomes adjusted to this equilibrium, how it learns to stand and walk upright. The body's adaptation to the condition of equilibrium of earthly existence is something the human being acquires only after life on earth has begun. We know that the form of man's physical body is the result of a magnificent spiritual activity, which man, together with beings of the higher worlds, undertakes in the period between death and a new birth. What man forms in this way, however—that which becomes the spiritual seed, as it were, for his future physical earthly organism—does not yet contain the faculty of walking upright. That faculty is incorporated into the human being when he adapts himself after birth to the conditions of equilibrium and gravity of earthly existence.

In pre-earthly existence, orientation does not refer to walking and standing as it does here on earth. There, orientation refers to the relationship man has with angels and archangels and therefore to beings of the higher hierarchies. It is a relationship in which one finds oneself attracted more to one being, less to another; this is the state of equilibrium in the spiritual world. It is lost to a certain extent when man descends to earth. In the mother's womb, man is neither in the condition of equilibrium of his spiritual life nor yet in that of his earthly life. He has left the former and as yet has not entered the latter.

It is similar in the case of language; the language we speak here on earth is adjusted in every respect to earthly conditions, for this language is an expression of our earthly thoughts. These earthly thoughts contain earthly information and knowledge, and language is adapted to them during earthly existence. In pre-earthly existence, man has a language that does not actually emerge from within, that does not follow the exhalation. Instead, it follows spiritual inhalation, inspiration, something in pre-earthly existence that we can describe as corresponding to inhalation. It is a life within the Word of the universe, the universal language, from which all things are made.

As we descend to the earth, we lose this life within the universal language, and here we acquire the means that serve to express our thoughts, our earthly thoughts, and the human intellect, that is, the intellect among all human beings dwelling on earth. It is the same with the thoughts we have here as with the thinking. Thinking is adapted to earthly conditions. In pre-earthly existence we live within the weaving thoughts of the universe.

If we first focus on the mediating member of man, man's speaking, we can say that an essential part of the earth's culture and civilization lies in speaking. Through speaking, people come together here on earth; speaking is the bridge between two persons. Soul unites with soul. We feel that in speaking we have an essential aspect of life on earth; it is, after all, the earthly reflection of life in the Logos, in the Word of the universe. It is therefore particularly interesting to understand the connection between what man struggles to attain on earth as his language and the metamorphosis of this language found in pre-earthly life. The study of this relationship directs us to the inner organization of man, which stems from the elements of sound and tone. It is especially fitting that at this moment I can add the subject of man's expression through tone and word to the cosmological considerations we have been conducting for weeks. Today we have had the great pleasure of listening to a superb vocal recital here in our Goetheanum. As an expression of inner satisfaction over this gratifying artistic event, let me say something about the connection between man's life in that which corresponds to tone and sound in the spiritual.

If we observe the human organization as it is manifested on earth, it is a reflection of the spiritual through and through. Not only what man bears within himself but everything surrounding him in outer nature is a reflection of the spiritual. When man expresses himself in speech and song, he expresses his whole organization of body, soul and spirit as a revelation to the outside as well as to himself, to the inside. Man is completely contained, as it were, in what he reveals in sound and tone. How much he is contained within this is revealed when one goes into the details of what man is when he speaks or sings.

Let us begin by considering speech. In the course of humanity's historical evolution, speech has emerged from a primeval song element. The further we go back into prehistoric times, the more speech resembles recitation and finally singing. In very ancient times of man's earthly evolution, his sound and tone expressions were not differentiated into song and speech; instead, they were one. Man's primeval speech may be described as a primeval song. If we examine the present state of speech, which is already far removed from the pure singing element and has instead immersed itself in the prose element and the intellectual element, we have in speech essentially two elements: the elements of consonants and vowels. Everything brought out in speech is composed of the elements of consonants and vowels. The element of consonants is actually based on the delicate sculptural formation of our body [Körperplastik]. How we pronounce a B, a P, an L, or an M is based on something having a definite form in our body. In speaking of these forms, one is not always referring only to the apparatus of speech and song; they represent only the highest culmination. When a human being brings forth a tone or sound, his whole organism is actually involved, and what takes place in the song or speech organ is only the final culmination of what goes on within the entire human being. The form of the human organism could be considered in the following way. All consonants contained in a given language are always actually variations of twelve primeval consonants. In Finnish, for example, these twelve primeval consonants are preserved in a nearly pure state. Eleven are retained completely clearly; only the twelfth has become somewhat unclear. [Gap in transcript.] If the quality of these twelve primeval consonants is correctly comprehended, each one can be represented by a certain form. If they are combined, they in turn represent the complete sculptural form of the human organization. Not speaking symbolically at all, one can say that the human organism is expressed sculpturally through the twelve primeval consonants.

Actually, what is this human organization? Viewed from an artistic standpoint, it is really a musical instrument. Indeed, you can comprehend standard musical instruments, a violin or some other instrument, by looking at them fundamentally from the viewpoint of the consonants, by picturing how they are built, as it were, out of the consonants. When one speaks of consonants, one always feels something that is reminiscent of musical instruments, and the totality and harmony of all consonants represents the sculptural form of the human organism.

The vowel element is the soul playing on this musical instrument. When you observe the consonant and vowel element of speech, you actually discover a self-expression of the human being in each word and tone. Through the vowels, the soul of man plays on the “consonantism” of the human bodily instrument. If we examine the speech of modern-day civilization and culture, we notice that, to a large extent, the soul makes use of the brain, the head-nerve organism, when it utters vowels. This was not the case to such an extent in earlier times of human evolution. Let me sketch on the blackboard what takes place in the human head-nerve organism.

The red dotted lines indicate the head-nerve organism. They therefore represent the forces running along the nerve fibers of the head. This is a one-sided view of the whole matter, however. Another activity enters the one generated by the nerve fibers. This new activity is caused by our inhalation of air. Sketching it, we see that the air we inhale passes through the canal of the spinal cord, and the impact of the breathing process unites with the movements taking place along the nerve fibers. The stream of breath (yellow), which pushes upward through the spinal cord to the head, constantly encounters the nerve activity. Nerve activity and breathing activity are not isolated from each other. Instead, an interplay of both takes place in the head. Conditioned by everyday life, man has become prosaic, placing more value on the nerve forces, and he makes more use of his nervous system when he speaks. One could say that he “innergizes” [“innerviert,” makes inward] the instrument that forms the vowel streams in a consonantal direction. This was not the case in earlier epochs of human evolution. Man lived less in his nervous system; he dwelt more in the breathing system, and for this reason primeval speech was more like song. What man carries out in speech with the help of the “innergizing” of his nervous system he draws back into the stream of breathing when he sings today; he then consciously brings into activity this second stream (sketched in yellow), the stream of breathing. When vowel sounds are added to producing the tone, as in the case of singing, the element of breathing extends into the head and is directly activated from there; it no longer emerges from the breath. It is a return of prosaic speech into the poetic and artistic element of the rhythmic breathing process.

The poet still makes an effort to retain the rhythm of breathing in the way in which he formulates the language of his poems. A person who composes songs takes everything back into breathing, and therefore also into the head-breathing. When man shifts from speaking to singing, he undoes in a certain way what he had to undergo in adapting speech to earthly conditions. Indeed, song is an earthly means of recalling the experience of pre-earthly existence. We stand much closer to the spiritual world with our rhythmic system than with our thinking system. It is the thinking system that influences speech which has become prosaic.

When producing vowel sounds, we actually push what lives in the soul toward the body, which serves as the musical instrument only by adding the consonant element. Surely you can feel how a soul quality is alive in every vowel and how you can use the vowel element by itself. The consonants, on the other hand, tend to long continuously for the vowels. The sculptural instrument of the body is really dead unless the vowel or soul element touches it. Many details point to this: take, for instance, the word “mir” (“mine”; pronounced “meer” in high German), and look at how it is pronounced in some Central European dialects. When I was a little boy, I couldn't imagine that the word was spelled mir. I always spelled it mia, because in the r is contained the longing for the a.

If we see the human organism as the harmony of the consonants, everywhere we find it in the longing for vowels and therefore the soul element. Why is that? The human organism while here on earth must adapt its sculptural form to earthly conditions. Earthly equilibrium and the configuration of earthly forces determine its shape. Yet, it is really shaped out of the spiritual, and only through spiritual scientific research can one perceive what actually takes place. I shall try to make this clear for you with a diagram. The soul element (red), which expresses itself in vowels, pushes against the element of consonants (yellow). The element of consonants is shaped sculpturally according to earthly conditions.

If one ascends to the spiritual world in the way described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, one first acquires imagination, imaginative cognition. Meanwhile, one has lost the consonants, though the vowels still remain. In the imaginative world, one has left one's physical body behind along with the consonants, and one no longer has comprehension for them. If one wishes to describe what is in this higher world adequately in words, one can say that it consists entirely of vowels. Lacking the bodily instrument, one enters a tonal world colored in a variety of ways with vowels. Here, all the earth's consonants are dissolved in vowels. This is why you will find in languages that were closer to the primeval languages that the words for things of the super-sensible world were actually vowel-like. The Hebrew word “Jahve” for example, did not have the J and the V; it actually consisted only of vowels and was rhythmically half-sung. Using mostly vowels, the words naturally were sung.

In passing from imaginative cognition to cognition through inspiration—where the direct revelations of the spiritual are received—all the consonants that are here on earth become something completely different. The consonants are lost. (See lower yellow lines in sketch below.) In the spiritual perception that can be gained through inspiration, a new element begins to express itself, namely the spiritual counterparts of the consonants. (See upper yellow lines in sketch below.)

These spiritual counterparts of the consonants, however, do not live between the vowels but in them. In languages on earth the consonants and vowels live side by side. The consonants are lost with the ascent into the spiritual world. You live in a singing worlds of vowels. You yourself actually stop singing; it sings. The world itself becomes universal song. The soul-spirited substance of this vowel element is colored by the spiritual counterparts of the consonants that dwell within the vowels. Here on earth, for example, there is an a tone and a c-sharp tone in a certain octave. As soon as one ascends to the spiritual world, there is not just one a or one c-sharp of a certain scale; instead, there are untold numbers of them, not just of different pitch but of different inward quality. It is one thing if a being of the hierarchy of angels utters an a, another when an archangel or yet another hierarchical being says it. Outwardly it is always the same revelation, but inwardly the revelation is ensouled. We thus can say that here on earth we have our body (sketch on left, white) and a vowel tone (red) pushes against it. Beyond, in the spiritual world, we have the vowel tone (sketch on right, red), and the soul penetrates into it and lives in it so that the tone becomes the soul's body.

You are now within the universal music, the song of the universe; you are within the creative tone, the creative world. Picture the tone here on earth, even the tone that reveals itself as sound: on earth it lives in the air. The scientific concept, however, that the vibration of the air is the tone is a naïve concept indeed. Imagine that here is the ground and that someone stands on the ground. Surely the ground is not the person, but it must be there so that the person can stand on it; otherwise he could not be there. You would not want to comprehend man, however, by the ground he stands on. Likewise, tone needs air for support. Just as man stands on the firm ground, so—in a somewhat more complicated way—tone has its ground, its resistance, in the air. Air has no more significance for tone than the ground for the person who stands on it. Tone rushes toward air, and the air makes is possible for tone to “stand.” Tone itself, however, is something spiritual. Just as the human being is different from the earthly ground on which he stands, so tone differs from the air on which it rises. Naturally it rises in complicated ways in manifold ways.

On earth, we can speak and sing only by means of air, and in the air formations of the tone element we have an earthly reflection of a soul-spiritual element. This soul-spiritual element of tone belongs in reality to the super-sensible world, and what lives here in the air is basically the body of tone. It is not surprising, therefore, that one rediscovers tone in the spiritual world, where it is stripped of its earthly garment, the earthly consonants. The vowel element, the spiritual content of tone as such, is taken along when one ascends into the spiritual world, but now it becomes inwardly filled with soul. Instead of being outwardly formed by the element of consonants, the tone is inwardly filled with soul. This runs parallel to one's becoming gradually accustomed to the spiritual world.

Picture how man passes through the portal of death. Soon he leaves the consonants behind, but he experiences the vowels, especially the intonation of vowels, to a greater degree. He no longer feels that singing is produced by his larynx but that singing is all around him, and he lives in each tone. This is already the case the very first few days after man passes through the portal of death. He dwells, in fact, in a musical element, which is an element of speech at the same time. More and more of the spiritual world reveals itself in this musical element, which is becoming imbued with soul.

As I have explained to you, when man has passed through the portal of death, he passes at the same time from the earthly world into the world of the stars. Though it appears that I am speaking figuratively, this description is a reality. Imagine the earth, surrounding it the planets, and beyond them the fixed stars, which are traditionally pictured, for good reason, as the Zodiac.

From earth, man views the planets and fixed stars in their reflections; we therefore say that earthly man sees them from the front. The Old Testament expresses this in a different way. When man moves away from the earth after death, he gradually begins to see the planets as well as the fixed stars from behind, as if were. He no longer sees these points or surfaces of light that are seen from the earth; instead, he sees the corresponding spiritual beings. Everywhere he sees a world of spiritual beings. Where he looks back at Saturn, Sun, Moon, Aries, or Taurus, he sees from the other side spiritual beings. Actually, this seeing is also a hearing; and just as one can say that one sees Moon, Venus, Aries, or Taurus from the other side, from behind, so one can say that one hears the beings who have their dwelling places in these heavenly bodies resound into cosmic space.

Picture this whole structure—it sounds as if I speak figuratively, but it is not so, this is a reality; imagine yourself out there in the cosmos: the planetary world further away, the Zodiac with its twelve constellations nearer to you. From all these heavenly bodies it sings to you in speaking, speaks in singing, and your perception is actually a hearing of this speaking-singing, singing-speaking. When you look toward the constellation of Aries you have a soul-consonant impression. Perhaps you behold Saturn behind Aries: now you hear a soul-vowel. In this soul-vowel element, which radiates from Saturn into cosmic space, there lives the soul-spiritual consonant element of Aries or Taurus. You therefore have the planetary sphere that sings in vowels into cosmic space, and you have the fixed stars that ensoul this song of the planetary sphere with consonant elements. Vividly picture the more serene sphere of the fixed stars and behind it the wandering planets. As a wandering planet passes a constellation of fixed stars, not just one tone but a whole world of tones resounds, and another tone world sounds forth as the planet moves from Aries to Taurus. Each planet, however, causes a constellation to resound differently. You have in the fixed stars a wonderful cosmic instrument, and the players of this instrument of the Zodiac and fixed stars are the gods of the planets beyond.

We can truly say that, just as man's walk was shaped for earthly conditions out of cosmic, spiritual orientation, so his speech was shaped for earthly conditions. When man takes speech back into song, he moves closer to the realm of pre-earthly existence, from whence he was born into earthy conditions. It is human destiny that man must adapt himself to earthly conditions with birth. In art, however, man takes a step back, he brings the earthly affairs surrounding him to a halt; once again he approaches the soul-spiritual element from which he emerged out of pre-earthly existence.

We do not understand art if we do not sense in it the longing to experience the spiritual at least in the revelation of beautiful appearance. Our fantasy, which give rise to the artistic, is basically nothing but the pre-earthly force of clairvoyance. Just as on earth tone lives in the air, so what is actually spiritual in pre-earthly existence lives for the soul element in the earthly reflection of the spiritual. When man speaks, he makes use of his body: the consonant element in him becomes the sculptural form of the body; and the stream of breath, which does not pass into solid, sculptural form, is used by the soul to play on this bodily instrument.

We can, however, direct toward the divine what we are as earthly, speaking human beings in two ways. Take the consonantal human organism; loosen it, as it were, from the solid imprint, which it has received from the earthly forces of gravity or the chemical forces of nutrients; loosen what permeates the human being in a consonantal way! We may indeed put it like that. When a human lung is dissected, one finds chemical substances that may be examined chemically. That is not the lung, however. What is the lung? It is a consonant, spoken out of the cosmos, that has taken on form. Put the human heart on a dissecting-table; it consists of cells that can be examined in relation to their chemical substances. That is not the heart, however; the heart is another consonant uttered out of the cosmos. If one pictures in essence the twelve consonants as they are spoken out of the cosmos, one has the human body. This means that if one has the necessary clairvoyant imagination to observe the consonants in their relationships, the complete shape of the human body's sculptural form will arise. If one therefore extracts from the human being the consonants, the art of sculpture arises; if one extracts from the human being the breath, which the soul makes use of in order to play on the instrument in song, if one extracts the vowel element, the art of music, of song, arises.

From the consonant element extracted from the human being, the form arises, which we must shape sculpturally. From the vowel element extracted from the human being arises the musical, the song element, which we must sing. Man, as he stands before us, on earth, is really the result of two cosmic arts. From one direction derives a cosmic art of sculpturing, from the other comes a musical and song-like cosmic art. Two types of spiritual beings fuse their activities. One brings forth and shapes the instrument, the other plays on the instrument.

No wonder that in ancient times, when people were still aware of such things, the greatest artist was called Orpheus. He actually possessed such mastery over the soul element that not only was he able to use the already formed human body as an instrument, but with his tones he could even mold unformed matter into forms that corresponded to the tones.

You will understand that when one describes something like this one has to use words somewhat differently from what is customary in today's prosaic age; nevertheless, I did not mean all this figuratively or symbolically but in a very real sense. The matters are indeed as I described them, though the language often needs to be more flexible than it is in today's usage.

The subject of today's lecture was intended by me as a greeting to our two artists² who have delighted us with their fine talents. We shall attend tomorrow's concert, my dear friends, with an attitude to which will be added an anthroposophical mood of soul, something that should inform all our endeavors.

• 1. Refers to Rudolf Steiner's lectures, Man and the World of the Stars/the Spiritual Communion of Man, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY. 1982.
• 2. The two artists and the concert refer to the recital by the sisters Svardstrom in the Goetheanum at that time.