The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last lecture of Part 1, Rudolf Steiner described the creation of the world as a triple manifestation of the Logos, divine spirit poured into the world. For his audience at the time, this related to two of his books which had just appeared: Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (GA 7, published in 1901 and based on a series of lectures given in the winter of 1900/01; tr. K. E. Zimmer; Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980) and Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8, published in 1902 and based on a series of lectures given in the winter of 1901/02; tr. A. Welburn; Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1997).

In the first of these, great medieval mystics are given as examples to show how true insight into the world or God can only be gained through mystic, i.e. inner, experience. In the second book, we read how the way to achieve this was sought in the mysteries of antiquity. The mystic who was to be initiated, wanting to find his way to the divine, had to experience the cosmic drama of creation, with the Logos, the world soul, stretched on the world body in form of a cross. Then the Logos, which was poured out into the world, could have its resurrection in the soul, being born in the spirit in it. This became historical fact when at the beginning of our era the Logos became flesh in the human being called Jesus. He had to recapitulate the cosmic world process whilst existing in the flesh, be nailed to the cross and rise again from death. The Logos become man had to go through this as historical fact so that victory over death would hold true for the whole of humanity and not only chosen individuals. ‘Christianity as mystical fact is a stage in human evolution; and the events in the mysteries of old were a preparation for this mystical fact.’ (chapter on Christianity and pagan wisdom).

These two books, based on the mystic way of gaining insight and the logosophy of the ancient mysteries, established the foundations for a Christology based on the spiritual-scientific cosmology which Rudolf Steiner had started to present in 1903.

The audiences of that time were greatly interested in the Logos teaching of the ancient mysteries, for these had ranked highly in the Theosophical Society’s literature even before Rudolf Steiner.^* He soon found it necessary, however, to warn people against being too abstract in speaking of the Logos. Notes on a talk given in the Berlin Branch on 2 February 1904, unfortunately too inadequate for publication, include the following: ‘It is so tempting to speak of the first, second and third Logos in general terms. Beginners in particular are fond of talking of the Logos right away, wanting to discuss the whole world by establishing the missions of the three Logoi. That is not what we want, however.’ He went on to say that he felt it was important to show the mission of individual spirits in the evolution of the world. Something Rudolf Steiner would often emphasize was that spiritual investigation was not based on speculation but on genuine experiences in the spirit. Quite logically, we therefore read in a lecture given in Berlin on 18 December 1906 [in German] in GA 266/1: ‘No one can really have an idea of the three Logoi unless higher consciousness has awakened in them. We can however prepare the soul for right vision in the future by evoking the right images.’ ‘Right images’ undoubtedly mean images of the developmental stages for the Logos poured out in the world. From 1903 onwards they were presented more and more in real terms, and they were finally presented to the world in Occult Science in 1910.

• *. See H. P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, books by G. R. S. Mead and Annie Besant, especially Besant, A. The Ancient Wisdom. London: Theosophical Publishing House 1897.

1. First sonship of God, the first reflection of the essence, in thought, name and desire proclaiming nothing but the godhead itself, thus being nothing but solely the proclaimer of the All One.⁸¹ There is nothing yet of differentiation and individualization. At any point in this infinity, which is luminous to itself, all we can perceive is the One godhead. Cosmic awareness: The awareness of the All has this All for its knowledge.

2. Second sonship of God, the second reflection of the essence, penetrating everything with will to exist and letting the original spirit shine forth from the singular entities. This will to exist is uniform. It is the original spirit and not only is but wills itself. Willing itself as thought, for example, it wills itself as individual thought. The thought proclaims itself, but it proclaims itself as thought, as part of God.

   [It is as if the hand were to say of itself: I am the hand, but I am but part of the organism.]

   The All One proclaims itself in many different ways.

   The manifoldness of entities has the Universe as divine oneness for its conscious awareness.

3. Third sonship of God, the third reflection of the essence which penetrates everything with single will and keeps the original spirit hidden in the state of singularity. The will to exist is manifold. It is the original spirit, which not merely is and does not merely will itself, but wills every entity. The active will of the original spirit becomes perceptible in the individual entity, that is, the individual entity perceives the will intent as its own will intent.

   The groans of the created.

   Evolution as redemption through the uniform spirit floating above the manifoldness of the will.

   The spirit, that is the third son. The manifold entities have the manifold in their awareness.

1. In descending order there is first of all jiva, mahat and fohat. All Consciousness proclaims itself through all three elements.

   Fundamental judgement [All is All]

   The manifold arises through proclamation.

2. Descending further, the manifold proclaims the divine oneness in manifold ways.

   [I am All]

3. Descending further, each manifold thing proclaims itself.

   [I am I]

   Descending further, proclamation becomes objective reality

   [nature is I]

Sensory sensations and rational ideas are I
Here we come to our human being in the experience.

psyche manas prana

In ascending development of the soul, the originally pointwise I becomes manifold

[intuitions are I.]

verbal	sa - vitarka
wordless intuition	nir - vitarka

We are going through III

Ascending further, we close our individual awareness; this individual awareness (as subject), thus does not let singular awareness reign but, through its passivity, All awareness. It receives the intuitions directly as themselves. Now, in ascending evolution, they gradually show their own life, no longer as thought but as essence.

We are going through II

Ascending further, there is revealed in the manifoldness of intuitions the oneness of their reality.

We are approaching I.

• 81. The concept may be found in Basilidian Gnosis as early as the 2nd century A.D. See G.R.S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten [London: John W. Watkins 1900], also Rudolf Steiner's Christianity as a Mystical Fact, GA 8, tr. A. Welburn; hudson, Anthroposophical Press 1997.

The godhead reveals itself as: All Soul and All Life.

1. The All Soul penetrates All Life from above and gives universal matter its origin. Then the All Soul penetrates this universal matter once more, which leads to a denser degree of matter. This goes on down to the densest matter known to humanity, which is physical matter.
2. The polar opposite process is that All Life penetrates the All Soul; this gives rise to form, which in this original form makes up the manasic sphere. This kind of All Form may thus also be called All Spirit. If All Spirit descends into universal matter to fructify it, forms arise that are one degree lower, and so on, down to the forming of physical matter. Those are the transient forms.
3. When this forming has progressed through the three elemental worlds as far as the mineral world, All Life will descend to them, directly now, without first going through matter as in 1). This gives rise to the living forms of the plant world.
4. If this life in Form has advanced to a specific level, the All Soul pours in, making enlivened forms into ensouled forms. This gives rise to the animal world. All these forms are still transient, they become eternal when
5. the All Form penetrates the ensouled forms as All Spirit. The forms themselves become eternal. This is the case in the human world.

When All Form manifests, the individual form passes away completely

mineral

When All Life manifests, the individual form passes away with the genus:

plant

When All Soul manifests, the individual form passes away with the hereditary traits:

animal

When All Spirit manifests, the individual form finally no longer passes away:

human being

We may thus say that

• The human being has his spirit initially on the physical plane
• The animal its spirit initially on the astral plane
• The plant its spirit initially on the rupic manasic plane
• The mineral its spirit initially on the arupic manasic plane

When the spirit progresses to the budhi plane, we have the 3^rd elemental world.

When the spirit moves to the nirvana plane, we have the 2^nd elemental world.

and

If the spirit moves to the para nirvana plane, we have the 1^st elemental world

Finally the foundation for everything is the all-encompassing spirit on the mahapara nirvana plane.

Here the reflection of the 1st Logos is transformed into reality, i.e. the divine human being is born out of the threefold maya (life, soul, form), initially on the physical plane, then he becomes ensouled from within on the astral plane, that is, he makes the 2nd Logos into reality as well, and finally, on the manasic plane, the soul awakens to life, with the reflection of the 3rd Logos also transformed into reality.

Next comes the transition to a planetary godhead of the next order, which again becomes involved in three illusions (mayas)—life, soul, form, then to evolve all three of them.

The constitution of the world bases on trinity. In the system of human evolution, from the first beginning of human genesis to full development of this potential, we have to distinguish three states of consciousness as the first trinity.

The first of these states of consciousness is a more or less dim (sleep-like) state, for the ‘I’ is not yet born. At this level the human being was still part of an ‘I’ of a higher kind; he was clairvoyant, but was not able to consider the contents of his visions to be his own.

The second state of consciousness was brought about by the birth of the ‘I’. This higher state arose because clairvoyance was lost. Vision of an outside world began.

The third state of consciousness arises due to clairvoyance re-emerging in the ‘I’, with the human being becoming a clairvoyant in self-awareness.

In occult script, the first state of conscious awareness is indicated by ☉, i.e. consciousness shines out from the absolute = • flooding the world ◯ circle).

We then have to distinguish three sub-levels for each of the three states of consciousness, like this:

The first level of consciousness is wholly subjective, i.e. the human being takes in nothing from outside but only the things the godhead implants in him. This level of consciousness progresses through the 3 sub-levels shown above in the first epoch, and the sign for this is

The third level of consciousness is wholly objective, i.e. the human being will perceive the whole world to be divine:

The middle level therefore has the sign

The first level changes progressively into the second, as does the second into the third; as a result, sub-levels III and IV, and VI and VII overlap, giving us the following picture:

Thus the nine becomes seven.

These seven levels of consciousness are gone through as follows:

1* on Saturn
2* on Sun
3* on Moon
4* on Earth
5* on Jupiter
6* on Venus
7* on Vulcan

Humanity is currently in 4*. We can see that this was preceded by 3*, made up of two sub-levels, and that it will be followed by 5*, again a merging of two sub-levels. If we designate the pure Moon level of conscious awareness as III, and the pure Earth level as V, something lies between them which we must call the Mars level of conscious awareness. This is because the Earth had an encounter with Mars before it separated from Moon and Sun. A similar encounter came with Mercury; VI is the Mercury level of conscious awareness.

Take the sum of the levels of conscious awareness which the human being has so far gone through. There are V of them up to the Earth level of consciousness. Hence the sign:

It is complete in itself because the human being would harden within himself if Mercury consciousness did not come as well. If he did not entrust himself to the divine guide (Mercury) at this level, his evolution would come to a dead end.

Each of the 7 states of consciousness has to go through seven states of life. This means the following:

This means 7 times 7 states of life within the whole of human evolution:

7 X 7 = 49

We now have to consider that in the early states of conscious awareness the principle which was the human seed, was not yet able to unfold a life of its own. The life remaining from earlier evolutions would still be there, slowly ebbing away to be replaced by purely human life. This may be shown as follows:

This is the point where pre-human life was wholly overcome and purely human life became the life of human evolution.

There is thus a point in human evolution where within the whole planetary system, this system’s⁸² own life took the place of everything that had come from an earlier system. In history, this point is the coming of

the Christ.

It is in this respect the mid-point in human evolution.

The states of life go through states of form; each of the 49 states of life has to go through seven states of form, so that for the whole of evolution we have

49 x 7 = 343 levels = 7 x 7 x 7.

The states of form also are not humanity’s own to begin with. They have been taken over from an earlier system. Everything relating to form states which thus came from an earlier system is referred to as macrocosm.

The form states which the human being creates himself make up the microcosm. We can only speak of a microcosm when the human spirit actively creates form, where before the divine spirit (cosmic spirit) created form.

The transition is the world soul—the divine spirit which slowly individualizes itself.

In Christian esoteric terms the states of consciousness are called

In theosophy one speaks of

The general overview of evolution is thus as follows, if we also consider that

the 1^st Logos manifests in the human being as atman,
the 2^nd Logos manifests in the human being as budhi,
the 3^rd Logos manifests in the human being as manas.

When 666 = 6 X 6 x 6 = 216 of these 343 = 7 x 7 X 7 will have passed, that is, after 5 planets (Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter), in Venus, when 5 states of life will have passed in this, i.e. in the 6th state of life in Venus and in the 6th form state of this 6th state of life, then everything that came from Earth evolution that cannot come to perfection will have been cleared away; the number 666 = 216 is therefore the critical number of evolution (Revelation).⁸³

A critical state (though of a lesser degree than at the point in time mentioned) will also occur on other occasions when the evolutional situation is 666, e.g. in the 6th root-race of the 6th planet, counting Mars and Mercury as well, so that the following cycle arises:

1) Saturn
2) Sun
3) Moon
4) Mars
5) Earth
6) Mercury—this influence will thus be a major one even in the next 6th sub-race.

Humanity will thus definitely reach a critical point in its evolution at that time.

• 82. See the lectures given in Berlin on 17 June 1909 [in German] in Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde GA 107; Dornach on 24 September 1921 in Cosmosophy I, GA 207, tr. A. Wulsin, New York: Anthroposophic Press 1985; the essay on the reality of the earth in the macrocosm (January 1925) in Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, GA 26, tr. G. & M. Adams, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973. Also Berlin, 18 December 1906 [in German] in Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden GA 266/1.
• 83. See the lectures The Apocalypse of St John (Revelation) GA 104, tr. J. Collis, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977; Reading the Pictures of the Apocalypse (Revelation) GA 104a, tr. J. H. Hindes, Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1991; and [in German] Vortraege und Kurse ueber christlich-religioeses Wirken V: Apokalypse und Priesterwirken GA 346.

When one hears a Madonna or a goddess speaking from the stage today, one can hardly believe one's ears. Not the slightest attempt is made to free language from the triviality of everyday life; nor is there the slightest attempt to use language to soar to a higher sphere. Every path to the spirit is barred to the stage of today; nowhere does access open to these strange, closed worlds; not even the most modest. One does not even strive to let something of the background from which unearthly figures emerge show through in the language. Real spirituality is a lost concept. A washerwoman at her trough could speak just as these Madonnas do, who are placed on pedestals in many miracle plays – devoid of all divine-spiritual content. Language is so uncultivated, so rough and prosaic, that it hurts, it offends. This is not meant to be disparaging in any way about the way the washerwoman speaks; it is justified in her case. Her difficult profession makes it necessary for her voice to become rough and hard, and her struggle with the material world must make her coarse if she does not have a counterweight in anthroposophy or religion. But the Madonna in the heavenly realms does not need to pursue such a hard physical occupation there. She should still have some atmosphere about her when she stands on the stage pedestal; some radiance, some transparency, some spirituality should resonate in her voice. The speakers should know how to make a voice sound detached and floating from afar. The figure that is presented to us is a symbol of something that reaches up to heaven and brings us its gifts from there, radiating light and spherical tones into us.

And then - the heavenly hosts! Have you ever heard them speak on stage or behind the scenes? Goethe's archangel, for example, and “the Lord”?.. Any couch potato could speak like that and any business traveler. Dry, sober, business-like, very matter-of-fact... But spiritual backgrounds, spheres of spheres, aeon steps... they are missing. “The sun sounds in the brotherly spheres of the ancient way of singing...” there is not much left of that.

But that is what must be sought, striven for, conquered today. Step by step one must feel, hear and sense one's way to it - constantly struggling and never being satisfied - until one breaks through intellectualistic boundaries, clears obstacles of matter out of the way, overcomes narrowness and finds oneself outside, liberated and redeemed. Those who are happy “to find earthworms” do not go beyond themselves, do not discover that they are also an “air man” who dominates the physical man and can use him without being chained to him. He does not find the healing power of the word, the momentum, the luminosity that allows him to grasp the core of his being and carry him over to where he came from. On the wings of the word, he can again seek out the paths that he senses when he places himself back in the word's original powers. I, living breath, center of divinity... that is where the word can lead him back.

And let us look around us in the realms of denser spirituality, which poetry wants to open up to us, in the world of the elements, for example. What keys are given to us today through art, this child of the gods, to open up those realms to us? None at all. Reason and temperament should suffice for everything. One blunders along without having an inkling of the wise mastery of the means of art through the knowledge of our human organization, of the laws that are revelations of divine-creative artistic power, of which man and the earth are the representatives for us. Should we not at last seek to trace the paths the gods have used to create works of art in their own image, and then breathe life into them? Let us enter these paths with our groping consciousness, softly at first and reverently, and let us begin to trace the living breath that gives us the reason for our existence, here as there. When we penetrate into the word - into its essence, we enter these paths. Could there be a more glorious task?

But one must begin with spelling, with the basic elements: the sounds. Not with the pressing forces of our one-sided personality. I saw Shakespeare's “Tempest” on a large stage in Germany. There was no sense of the spirituality of the elements. There was a lot of noise, temper and shouting. The Caliban scenes were extended and exaggerated in a realistic way, far beyond the limits that Shakespeare assigned to them. And Ariel? There was no airiness or lightness of being. A heavy, strong, robust voice, a stocky figure, lots of jumping and shouting. The heaviness of the squat little body was not alleviated by those jumps; the shaggy, disheveled head was the opposite of radiant. Ariel! Is there not a lightness in this word, a radiance, a flying, ringing, floating, airy bliss? Soon after, I saw the same actress as Salome in Hebbel's “Herod and Mariamne.” Then I realized that she had talent because her physique supported her in this role. The dark, heavy voice, the hard, lurking look, the stocky figure, heavily inclined towards the earth – she became the most interesting figure in Hebbel's colorfully heavy play, this ominous Salome-Herodias, while Mariamne was too consciously cool, powerfully intelligent and feminist. Maccabees? Oh no, she is very northern German in character.

When will the actors find the way out of their one-sided minds to the sources that open up the epochs, the races, the elements and the spiritual world to them? They will wither away if they do not find these ways. Nerves driven to the extreme snap, consumption is not interesting for long and in any case not productive; when it becomes fashionable and a mannerism, it is repulsive. There are already more and more voices saying that theater will have to abdicate before film.

I once saw a performance of Iphigenia. It was an event for me; it had something fateful about it, because it could not go on like this; this had been taken to the extreme and had to break. It had to break where the driving forces behind these excesses are and the counterforces are called upon. I do not want to talk so much about Iphigenia herself; she was just terribly boring and banal and expressed the blasé and dull emptiness of the hollowed-out salon lady, who has nothing else to do but walk up and down in her park and be bothered by the one boring suitor. I do not want to dwell on the boxer figure of this admirer either, although with his drooping, naked, muscular arms and his bare bull's neck, he wanted to say, as it were: “Now take my measurements, you won't find a more capable guy...” I also don't remember that anything else would have been said from his words, in any case nothing royal. But Orestes! This Orestes!

It was clear that only one thought had inspired him: to be different from all Orestes that had existed before – and to excel in the trivial. Because – isn't it true that when you're a tramp, you just happen to have copper-red skin, a wild, unkempt shock of hair that's an indefinable color of dust, and a hoarse and flat and tinny voice... Orest is also possessed, and you construct from the intellect what it's like to be possessed: the thoughts are tearing - aren't they - the nerves are aching, you are nervous, you don't want to be touched; everything is disgusting... Such a sophisticated realistic mental image is as true from the inside out as a billiard ball would be if it spoke; from the outside, it looks like a neglected tramp, the kind you might meet on some country road in Russia... But wait, such a thought could have an inspiring effect: Tauris Krim - Russia - obsessed tramps... that provides analogies. Today, one hardly takes a much broader view. In contrast, Tantalus, the Greek hero... that is outdated, has been done too often. And iambic pentameter, the metrical measure... the noble cadence of language... long outdated.

We were told how Maximilian Harden's journalistic cartographies had begun with the editor of the Monday edition of the “Berliner Tageblatt” having a number of young people as his employees, to whom he said: “You do nothing all week but sit in the coffee houses and read all the newspapers you can get hold of, and then you have to write me an article for Monday that is different from anything you have read on the same subject.” — It is said that this best describes Maximilian Harden.

If something similar was the driving motive for that Orest actor, then one would have an explanation for his bizarre and inartistic idea, otherwise not. Although his novelty consisted only in taking to the extreme what had already been achieved in naturalistic intellectualism and in applying a realistically nervous obsession with reduction to a pinnacle of German intellectual achievement. The noblest, most flawless, most perfect creation of German literary art: Goethe's “Iphigenia” in its Roman version, this work was trampled, quite ruthlessly and brutally; and anyone who felt sympathy for such a thing felt trampled along with it. One emerged from such a performance laden with responsibility; for here it was a matter of saving the highest spiritual values.

Around this time, our destiny shaper left us, and he also showed art the new paths to healing. He spanned the shimmering arc over the abyss of modern spiritlessness to the beyond; he built and formed and ignited and sprayed, leaving his work to us in a thousand and one precious stones. In full awareness of our responsibility, we now gather together these gems of his spiritual heritage.

They will continue to bless and ennoble people for thousands of years, and today they will serve us like the magic key that opens closed doors, revives the dead, heals the sick, atones for evil - if we are of good will. All these scattered gems can become a magic key – even if they are still as fragmented as they appear to our eyes in these highly inadequate transcripts of three magnificent lectures. For seven years they have been there, unexcavated for a larger public, because the shortcomings of the transcript were too obvious. And yet there is still so much of the richness left that a rebirth of the theater is possible on this soil.

Every spoken word must be taken in its full value and in its context, and a basis for understanding must be created through the will to gain an overall knowledge of the human and divine world. Rudolf Steiner calls the guidelines he has given us here. He has opened up worlds for us with them.

These lectures can be signposts to those subtler areas of art to which access has been lost today, buried by materialism. The intimacies of the soul life, secrets of the human organization in their connections with the secrets of the cosmos, form the basis for these reflections, which seek to be nothing more than starting points for further penetration through constant work and inner experience. They are only outlined here because of the limited space available; but they are intended to inspire and awaken and can call forth the artist's powers to independent life. They were given as part of a whole complex of lectures that had one goal: to lead out of the destructive forces of our time into new light and to recovery! This was Rudolf Steiner's deed, and even if hostile forces might think that with the paralysis of his public activity, with the burning of the Goetheanum, with his physical death, the work of his life has been stopped or even destroyed, they are mistaken, because the future-saving seeds are there and are working everywhere, even if the outer form breaks.

Preparing and building this future required tireless work, the strength of a superhuman and the sealing through sacrifice. In the midst of a restless working life, one of the highlights of Rudolf Steiner's work was the opening of the Goetheanum as a School of Spiritual Science. It was a time of upheaval and social turmoil, of economic collapse. Even though the artistic works were not all completed, the building could be handed over to its purpose, the work to its goals. For three years, the building served this work: the renewal of humanity in the spirit. Then it burnt down on New Year's Eve. The dignity of the celebration was given to the act of destruction; the greatness of the annual cycle to the historical event. Thus the building was sealed into the cosmos and the course of time when it was snatched from earthly activity.

These lectures form part of the university courses, which could not be absent from the opening ceremony, because they were more than an integral part. For Steiner, the word was the basis of all that is happening. The word was the starting point and center and goal of all becoming and all unsealing. But Rudolf Steiner did not use big words only veiled in mystery; he led to them through recognition and through grasping. What he opened up became perception, became conscious comprehension and action. One was allowed to climb the first rungs of the ladder under his guidance. Then he handed us over to freedom. His word in us was to become daring and deed.

Art was never absent from the events that originated with Rudolf Steiner. We were to approach it with insight, to bring it to fruition with reverence, and to remember its origin. It was an essential component of cosmic worship; it originated in the threefold logos; at the altars of truth, beauty and strength, it served and sacrificed. It has preserved its divine connection for the longest time, through the rationalist ages. In the age of triviality, its divine childhood sank into the physical; the victory of mechanics tore it away from its spiritual sources and chained it to the machine.

It must be redeemed again. The aim of the House of Language – as Rudolf Steiner called the Goetheanum – was to lead art, science and religion out of the separation into which they had fallen and back to their original unity. In the spiritual deepening and mutual fertilization of art, science and religion, Rudolf Steiner saw a remedy that could effectively intervene in the social life of humanity, so that barbarism could be avoided and, instead of the already scientifically proven twilight of European culture arising out of need, misery and error, a new dawn could arise.

The deeply moving words in which he expresses this aspiration clearly show the important role he ascribes to spiritualized art in the reconstruction of higher human culture, and should therefore appear in this book together with the lectures on the arts of oratory.

The house that served these purposes, offering a warm welcome to every guest in free openness, no longer stands. In its place rises a castle-like building made of the austere material of our time, concrete. His creator, who has since passed away, breathed life into it; this ennobles it and gives it its significance. The mystery plays, Rudolf Steiner's dramatic creations, are to be performed there. These place the human being back into his spiritual-cosmic context, make him a citizen of the world, and explain his present personality from his previous earthly lives. Through these dramas, humanity will be able to learn to recognize itself, to experience itself and to renew itself. There, above all, eurythmy is to be cultivated, that art which Rudolf Steiner placed as a new art in the series of the older arts that preceded it, the outer visible moving form of language, which imperatively and compellingly demands the renewal of the art of language, of the artistically spoken word. Rudolf Steiner called for an orchestral interaction between the spoken word and the eurythmic gesture, and this had to be achieved in practice. When what we were doing met his requirements, he gave us an understanding of what we were doing, shone a light into the secrets of the art of speech and poetry, and thus released us from the unbearable.

We are under no illusion that the world will yet show much understanding for this endeavor. We would even understand if some honest seekers were to throw this book aside in the first instance, in desperation and despair. A transformation of consciousness is necessary to tread this path, and one has indeed wanted to keep art away from the penetration of consciousness. Only a consciousness that sees, hears and wills leads us today to true artistic experience and snatches poetic language from the abstract intellectualization and mechanization to which it has already fallen.

If we have become accustomed to accepting what is offered in this direction from the stage, we have no idea what can be suffered when the noblest works of poetry are presented to us in such a mutilated, mistreated, and desecrated state, as happens all too often today.

It is as if the gods were turning away in anger from what we have done with their gifts. They have given us everything, withholding nothing; works have been created of incredible height and purity and formal perfection; the German language has become a tool of the subtlest power and suppleness, to grasp the vastness and depth of being and to unlock the inner being... It is still versatile and pliable and capable of growing beyond itself, thus carrying humanity forward... But those who lead it to this destiny, purposefully and unwaveringly, will be stoned.

Those who trivialize and sensationalize it, on the other hand, are considered masters.

The possibilities of the German language in the contouring and transcendence of its conceptual formulations are matched in another way by the plasticity and permeability of its phonetic elements. It is not musical in the usual sense, not on the surface – you you have to have an inner ear for it – but it has so many shades, lights, veils, brightenings and flashes that with its help you can repeatedly push through the boundaries of meaning: from the other side, from over there, it sounds through its umlauts, its diphthongs, whispers in the consonant connections, sounds in the flowing swings of its sentence structure. One has no inkling of the artistic experience that language can be until one has learned to listen from within, until the spiritual and intellectual resonance has been transformed into the formation of the 'sound, into the flight of movement.

Today's world is a realization of the intellectual; it does not go beyond the mechanical-mathematical; it does not find the way into the imaginative, into the formation of legends. One no longer manages to form images because one has become an intellectual abstraction. It is much easier to think cleverly than to create picturesquely, because the intellectual emanates from the personal, and artistic creation requires much more selflessness. It submerges into the object instead of imagining it, letting itself be carried away by it instead of holding on to it. We lose our real connection with the world, we deprive people of the immortal by living in intellectualism. Pictorial design not only works on the intellectual, but on the whole person; it goes into much deeper layers of the soul life than conceptual thinking. By trying to speak in pictures, what is atomized by studying the subject matter is synthesized again. It is moved up into the sphere of the imagination, where it is vividly dissolved and musically inspired. In this way it approaches what is eternal in the soul, what stands behind the intellectual. Through speech inspired by the imagination, we lead people to the substantial content of the word, to the supersensible, to the creative word that streams out of the supersensible. Immortal soul life is awakened when we speak from the image, from the artistic; immortal soul life is conquered when we work from the intellectual.

It is not a matter of
observing the temporary,
but the eternal that
lives in man must be observed more and more.

—Marie Steiner

Preliminary Remarks:

The “seminar” — the term was coined by Dr. Steiner — came about because she was unable to come up to the daily lessons in the hall of the Rudolf Steiner-Halde for some time due to a broken arm, and therefore convened a group of about twelve to fourteen personalities — some of them members of her Dornach acting group, but some of them also those who were already active in the field of language in various cities - to work with them through the text examples for the book “Rudolf Steiner: The Art of Recitation and Declamation,” which she was just publishing at the time, with a view to teaching them later. This course, so lively and sparkling, also had a very intimate, personal character due to the limited number of participants. We were all beginners, only a short time, about a year and a half, their students.

The following notes were intended for colleagues and friends who were unable to attend the sessions, in order to give them at least a small impression of this work. These notes are all about corrections to what we have attempted, which were given to us in the moment of activity – pointing the way forward.

—Gertrud Redlich

Some notes on the LANGUAGE EXERCISES with a view to later teaching:

Articulation exercises

The breath stream should only be mentioned in a later lesson. Try to speak at the front of the lips, to articulate well, so that you bring the language forward. The two main mistakes that occur are palatal and head sounds.

That he lied to you and must not praise it
Don't take nuns in never-ending mills.

Take the I out with the consonants. N and M guide the I sound out well. Feel the directions. Envelop the I with N and M. These consonants resonate and take the I with them.

Learn to listen!

Redlich ratsam
Rüstet rühmlich
Riesig rächend
Ruhig rollend
Reuige Rosse

only articulate. First, pay attention to the consonants so that they lead out the vowels. Then you can tell the students to live more in the vowel, to feel it, to experience the sounds, to be in the sounds.

Knead air dough

Ostentatiously extols
Baths brünstig
Rumblingly cute
Bieder tinkering
Powder patzend
Bergig brüstend

Breathing exercises

Fulfillment comes
Through hope
Through yearning
Through wanting
Wanting blows
In the weaving
It blows in the quivering
It weaves quivering
It weaves bindingly
In the finding
It winds finding
announcing

This exercise can be very helpful for those who are short of breath; it must sound full. The breathing technique is the opposite of that of a singer, who directs their breath. Here you have to learn to exhaust it all at once. This is how you achieve fullness and roundness.

Breathing exercises teach us to speak musically. You have to be objective when doing the exercises, not bring in anything balladic, pathetic or lyrical, but speak soberly and prosaically but phonetically. Do not take pitches that have an emotional effect. Pictorial imagery is not absolutely necessary here.

In the immeasurable vastness,
In the endless times,
In the depths of the human soul,
In the revelation of the world:
Search for the great riddle's solution.

Use the first four lines, especially N, well. Experience the horizontal in “in the times”, the vertical in “in the depths”, a large wave downwards, a large O in “world revelation”.

The message in the last line is figurative.

The flowing of the breath must take you along, shading “Human Soul Depths” a little deeper, tone and breath down. The language needs urgency, one Flin involving the other, a loving laying into the vowels.

You need strong breathing for this exercise, you learn to speak with the inhalation and shape it. “Search” to shed some light. Challenge, seriously! First lines – Flinausgehen in den Kosmos.

Fluency exercises

Lalle Lieder lieblich
Lipplicher Laffe
Lappiger lumpiger
Laichiger Lurch

Experience the waves that the L makes, this is how it brings out the sound. Develop joy in things. The exercise is effervescent and, in affect, says something pictorial – affective-humorous.

You have to learn the fluency exercises by purring them, they are meant to make the speech tools pliable.

Speak on the lips, start at the front, purr lightly!

The articulation exercises are intended to make you aware of the speech tools. The voice should be based solely on the sound.

Whistle cleverly
Horses priestly
Plows nurturing
Peaching peaches

Whistling cleverly from bowls
Slipping priestly horses
Bouncing nursing plows
Peaching peaches knotting

Whistling cleverly out of bowls
Hatching horse-drawn horses
Hopping over plows
Tying up peaches

Heretics now tell tales pitifully
Ultimately slightly skeptical

Heretics now snitch pitifully
Ultimately suddenly slightly skeptical

Also on the lips and slightly.

Sling snake quickly
Wound away finds

Winding snake snake
Quickly snake snake away

Very light, at the front.

Contrary to force, though
Two-purpose zwickers too little
Twenty dwarves
The sinewy crabs
safely seeking feasting
That smacking Schmachter
snugly quickly
purring flicks

To a Russian-speaking participant: Roll the R less. The German must be able to adjust the R according to the neighboring consonants. Bring it forward!

Only never regret
Greedily grinning
Knots snapping
Pledges knotting

You should use these exercises to feel in which region you are speaking.

Once again, breathing exercises :

It is very important that one also creates good consonant connections in which the sound (vowel) can live. One gradually learns to feel one's breathing without being held back by the imagination. To do this, it is good to practice some words in reverse:

wollen - nellow, eva - ave, etc.

In “Fulfillment,” learn to let go of the breath, to let yourself fall with the breath into the words.

We must gradually achieve penetration of consciousness.

Breathing exercises serve to make us aware of the breathing current.

Articulation exercises to make us aware of the speech tools.

The “immeasurables” also involve directing the breath. The words are steered like boats over the waves, gradually swelling to the fourth line.

When you tell your students about breathing, you may say that you are not committed to any particular method. You learn to practice your breathing with the sounds themselves; your breathing is directed by itself when the sounds are spoken well.

You learn to hold your breath with the five vowels in a sustained stream of breath: A-E-I-O-U.

Send upwards
longing desire
Send forwards
thoughtful striving
Send backwards
conscientious reflection.

Learn to swim with your breath and listen to the sounds. You should start modulating as soon as you send. Feel what consonant connections do to each vowel, for example: n-d in send.

Take three pitches!

Do not hold the things on a string, feel the sounds and resonate with them. The stream of movement must take you with it. There is an essence in these things.

This essence must take you with it, not we must hold it close to our hearts.

Weigh your volition clearly,
direct your feeling aright,
make your thinking rigid:
rigid thinking upholds,
right feeling maintains,
clear volition follows
the deed.

When speaking the last line, lead away from the musical and into movement.

Set your feeling aright: soul-line.

Steal your thinking: rigidly, rhythmically! The sounds themselves set the voice; one has only to yield to them. The voice sets itself according to the sounds. What precedes and follows always colors the things.

One should gradually develop a sense for the difference between artistic lines and intellectual and emotional speech. One must learn to go through to the end with the ego and not always stop intellectually.

When portraying voices from the beyond, for example angels or Madonnas and so on, one would have to learn to stop before it all comes into the imagination. Sentimentality stops right away and is self-indulgent, and therefore not spiritually true. Movement makes it true.

Clear volition follows: look artistically, not want yourself!

You find yourself:
Searching in world distances,
Striving for world heights,
Fighting in world depths.

First line from the conscious will. The breathing person continues through all incarnations, he is more spiritual than the feeling person.

The base nose ate flour
Lawn mass scratched bare

The A long and strong into it. The exercise is actually intended to counter nasal speech, but it can also be used as an A exercise.

Storm-word rumbles around gate and tower
Newt-worm drills through gate and tower
Stupidly, worm-newt rages through gate and tower

This precedes the exercise. It is also very suitable for speaking in the breathing stream. Nuance! The first line is not dramatic, but very dark in the speech stream, like the wind that bypasses. Newt-worm drills: not mentally, not dramatically. Loud. Movement – breath.

Rages foolishly: very dark, dull and bumpy.

At the O, the hard palate must make a bulge.

These three lines are all tuned to U, only differing in movement; the U must be superimposed on the O.

There must always be an increase at the end (newt-worm, worm-newt).

An egg is whitish, whitish is an egg
Lead is new in the litter, new in the litter is lead
The maiden is bluish, bluish is maidenly.

is good practice for squeezed lute. Simple and concrete and out.

Hot, radiant, spiky
strands support tight
nets, useful as
strict paws, strict
folded

a strong articulation exercise! Good for sagging soft palate. The alternation of plosives with L and R sprinkled in between tightens the soft palate. The vowels go into the consonants and are defeated by them.

For pointed and sharp voices:

Walle Welle willig
Leise lispeln lumpige Lurche lustig

Gently flow with L, feel the wave motion, L and W bring out.

Is a stumbling star
Master of mystical stages
Always stand firm on the road
Of earnest endeavor
Standing still and stern
Before the steps of constant endeavor
In a constant mood.

Bring the sound forward, without any inner compassion. Go into the consonant connections and bend them nicely. The exercise is good for those who stutter.

White brightness shines into the black darkness
The black darkness seizes the feeling soul
The feeling soul longs for the white brightness
The white brightness is the willing soul drive
The willing soul drive finds the white brightness
In the white brightness, the longing soul weaves

to learn nuance! You have to keep returning to the repetitive rhythm, letting the breath flow like a wind and using the imagination for nuances; also learning to take breaks every now and then. Movement, movement – don't get stuck in the singing!

How do you explain the hexameter to your students? It is the primal meter. The human organism itself solves the riddle that is given in the meter. You can trace the meter back to the human organism, breath and pulse. There are four pulses in one breath.

Practice the first lines of Goethe's “Achilleis”.

The mighty blaze flared up once more
, reaching for the sky, and the walls of Iios appeared
red through the dark night; the towering forest
's immense structure, collapsing, aroused
mighty glow at last. Then Hector's bones descended, and the ashes of the noblest Trojan lay on the ground.

There are two breaths and two times four pulses (three dactyls and one caesura) in each hexameter. Example: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath...”

The relation of the pulse to the breath is the basis for the influence of higher beings through blood and breathing.

We will now try to understand the DIFFERENCES BETWEEN RECITATION AND DECLAMATION by practicing the two “Iphigenias”.

From “Iphigenia”
(Weimar version):

Come out, you shadows, ever-moving treetops of the sacred grove, as if into the sanctuary of the goddess I serve, I step with ever-new awe, and my soul does not get accustomed to being here!

(Roman version):

Come out, you shadows, ever-moving treetops
Of the old, sacred, densely leafy grove,
As in the goddess's silent sanctuary,
I still enter with a shuddering feeling,
As if I were entering it for the first time,
And my spirit does not get used to it here.

The “Roman Iphigenia” lives in the symmetry of the metric; in the “German Iphigenia,” I have to vault, point, and intensify from the inner, tonal will element, which vaults and points at the end of the sentence (clamare). Here it is an approach to the oppressive.

Try to understand and develop artistic lines. The content of the two Iphigenias is the same, the artistic line is different.

In the German: high and low tones, strong life in the exhalation, expelling the breath. In the Roman, a musical conducting and use of inhalation. It must not come to the performance, the image is intercepted on the way to the performance, one breathes in the air that flows in by itself.

In order for it to become declamation, the will must be held back and not allowed to flow into the outside world. In order for it to become recitation, the imagination must be held back, remaining in musical enjoyment.

Inhalation is used to speak to everything spiritual, for example, Rudolf Steiner's weekly sayings.

The benefit lies in the musical practice, not in the enjoyment of one's own personality. In this way everything becomes more real, nobler and truer. We gradually learn to illuminate all regions with our consciousness. In the flowing breath, the sculpture dissolves musically.

Two poems are practised, one recited, the other declaimed.

Goethe: “Charon” - recitative (text see p. 31)
“Olympos” - declamatory (text see p. 30)

Before that, some language exercises: Hitzige strahlige / Walle, Welle / Ist strauchelnder / Weiße Helligkeit (for texts, see pp. 169-70).

“Olympos” is shaped entirely from the folk-like, the epic, which pushes everything out of the will, bloodily, toweringly increasing. Pauses! Magnificent images that are thrown down, rough, angular, hard like jagged mountains. Will and contempt. The bird of prey must be characterized, it eats the carcass soundlessly, only in the breath. Start at the soft palate and arch, making the hard palate flatter.

“Charon” is recitative-like, metrical. This is where antiquity comes in, with composed, digested images; the other poem lives in the midst of modern events.

In “Charon” it is more the rhythmic, the musical, the mood and the painting, not high and low tones, but not always the same tempo, otherwise you get no nuances. Not soulful, defensive movements in metrical uniformity and dark shading.

“Heidenröslein” (Goethe); “Erlkönigs Tochter” (Herder) (see pages 28/29 for texts).

“Heidenröslein”: shape the words in the air, but don't stick to the words. It's movement and image. See the image clearly. The little dialog is somewhat dramatic; this is where the declamatory element of will comes in. It's like a folk song, especially in the refrain.

“Erlkönigs Tochter”: it is epic with a strong dramatic impact. One must carve out the dramatic element and the mood. The treatment is recitative-like with a strong dramatic impact. It becomes dramatic when some character takes on a life of its own. But if you let yourself be carried away by your personal temperament, you have lost your style. Don't lose the rhythm that ennobles the whole. Rhythm contains the most diverse movements. The drama seduces, it is tempting to remain stylistically correct. A mysterious mood of fairy tales and legends prevails throughout the poem, so you have to let the vowels slip into the consonants. The poem contains many possibilities for differentiation. Configure it so that you drop the insignificant and change the tempo. Take breaks to create atmosphere. These people – mother, bride – have intuitions that you can shape in the pauses.

A reciter must be proficient in all subjects and must be able to differentiate. Do not work the vowels so strongly; then they are more transparent. Let them slip into the consonants. The mother's pain is to be shaped out of the region of the will, detached from the personal. This is a matter of breathing and technique. Learn to live in the sounds, not so connected with the content. It is a ghostly event, and this gives the color. You have to make it interesting, uncovering backgrounds. Make the diphthongs transparent for the mother, then the spiritual can shine through and the whole thing becomes nobler.

When the vowels are pierced, the spiritual always enters.

LANGUAGE

As the greatest miracle that the mind accomplished,
I praise language, which, otherwise lost
In deepest solitude, was born of itself,
Because it alone made the others possible.

Yes, when I consider its reason and purpose,
Then only language has conjured up the heavy curse
To which, chosen to be a dull individual,
He would have succumbed before he even woke.

For if the unsearchable One and All,

Friedrich Hebbel

With this sonnet we must be calm, not conceptual, but flexible and musically plastic. Speak with inhalation, then there is abundance, and make small pauses. Artistically shape the pauses at the right place, do not inhale unmotivated.

A mood of being saturated with enthusiasm through experience and volition. The poem is very strict; the down inflections indicate maturity. Flebbel is superb.

One must always have the poet's basic mood in the poems.

TO THE AERials

All-eternal and infinite ether!
Through the narrowest, as through the widest, it flows!
Excluded from no ring of existence!
Still wafted by every breath of life!

The only representative of the unexplored!
Its first and most worthy offspring!
The only one in deepest tranquility enveloped!
Opposite you, I too become a supplicant!

My roaming eye, that would embrace you so gladly,
Closes in awe before you, ere it fails,
For the gaze comprehends nothing but its own limitations.

So also my spirit before God, for it recognized
That it, embraced, never expands so much
to entwine itself around the All-embracing One again.

Friedrich Hebbel

One must feel the waves of the ether. A sonnet does not tolerate declamation.

From Rudolf Steiner's “Mysteries Dramas” (“The Portal of Initiation”, seventh scene):

PHILIA:
I will fulfill myself
With the clearest light
From the world's widths,
I will breathe in myself
Invigorating sound
From the ether's depths,
So that you, beloved sister,
Can succeed in your work.

ASTRID:
I will interweave
Radiant light
With dimming darkness,
I will condense
The sound of life.
It shall resound glisteningly,
It shall resound glitteringly,
So that you, beloved sister,
can direct the soul's rays.

LUNA:
I will warm soul substance
And will harden life ether.
They shall condense,
They shall feel each other,
And being within themselves,
Shall sustain each other,
So that you, beloved sister, Can give the searching human soul Certainty of knowledge.

PHILIA:
I will beseech the spirits of the world, That the light of their being Enchant the soul's sense,And the sound of their words Make the spirit's ear glad; So that the one to be awakened May rise On paths of the soul To the heights of heaven.

ASTRID:
I will direct the currents of love,
Warming the world,
To the heart
Of the initiate;
So that he can bring
Heaven's kindness
To earthly activity,
And a spirit of devotion
To the children of men.

LUNA:
I will beg of elemental forces
Courage and strength,
And place them in the seeker's heart;
In the depths of his heart;
So that trust
In one's own self
Can accompany him through life.
He shall feel safe
In himself then.
He shall pluck from moments
the ripe fruits
and draw seeds from them
for eternities.

Regarding this scene with the soul forces:

Here we have completely musically resolved plastic. The words must resound out in the cosmos. One must catch the inhalation, otherwise the otherworldly will not come out. Without this breathing treatment, one cannot resolve musically. With full breath, with too much breath, one cannot do spiritually resolved. It depends on the dosage, one must divide the doses. One should also glide over the auxiliary verbs. Nuances of major!

Luna – Prime Minister, Maria – Supreme Queen.

Truth is always connected with being there with the I the whole time and always going along with things. Truth is always simple. This is achieved by tapering the sounds, not thickening them.

The first thing in artistic speech formation is: learn to yawn! The other: keep the style!

Two sonnets by Novalis (see texts on pages 32/33)

These two sonnets are very recitative-like and very transparent, very calm and – very difficult!

We will start by working on the form, everything else will follow later – for example, the feeling. Our task now is to work on style and form.

Novalis is absolutely a man of the I. You have to feel from the beginning that there is a lofty I behind it. The I-nature can eternally get into everything. Major! In the beginning, it is better to be somewhat forceful, vary the word gestures – and live in the imagination. Maturity, relationship to the supersensible.

Novalis must be spoken in the same way as one who stands in the concrete experience of the spiritual world. The word gestures must grab you immediately.

Consonance. Operate with what comes to your mouth anyway.

If you have to breathe in again, don't drop the word before it, but hold it up. Zändende I-moments in the entries, making the vowels transparent, always being poetic.

Novalis is the embodiment of poetry, his inner gesture is: touching the hem of divinity.

No rising and falling intonation here! With Novalis, you should do the modulation consciously, the content merges into the line.

Hymn to Nature (Goethe) (lyrics see p. 127)

The words must sound hymn-like, therefore the declamation should be free of didactics. Here, everything is surprising. Project the resonance from the hard palate. Nature always has something iron-willed about it. The speech must be consonantal, arising from the breath and sounds, not from the head and heart, in a strong, willful movement. Do not let it become a conversation. High and low tones, they are all beats of the pulse that surge into the breath.

The formation includes: embouchure, resonance line and soundboard. The soundboard is always out in the air, which is nice. Different tempi. Different ways of forming sounds: whether wavy, angular, sharp, and so on. There is more in the sounds than we know. There lie the creative powers, which then spurt out with all the diversity of nature. Our soul is not enough. Into the Gothic pointed arch with the throw. The will element must go through the limbs, you feel it in the arms and legs.

During declamation, inhalation flows up to the brain and then back to the spinal cord. There we have to stop the flow of breath with the will element, not letting it come to action. With this unexpressed will, I can operate in the breath stream. The idea must have been there before, it came with the inhalation into the brain and was dealt with there.

The stream of breathing comes back to the sphere of the will.

Model into the exhalation – but without personal dramatic feeling – into the sound, with pauses and not with strong sound. But always include the limb-man.

From “Die Nibelunge” by Wilhelm Jordan (lyrics see 5.116/17)

Movement is not rushing! Please a held step here, completely into the movement and depth. It does not need to echo; roll along epically in the flow, not always at an even tempo like a barrel organ. The listener must be introduced to the situation. The sound H chisels, works plastically. One must avoid chiseling with non-alliterating words, but one can therefore take them broadly. The song is somewhat more recitative-like with a dramatic impact, but not so strong that the epic is held up. Epic demands that one enter completely into it and completely digest the images. The conclusion is darkly musical, brazen and somewhat dying away.

St. Expeditus (Morgenstern) (lyrics see p. 33 ff.)

“Expeditus” is humorous poetry, not grotesque, and therefore without strong exaggeration. It is recitative, so not so much high and low tones! You could call it communicative conversation. You have to learn to distinguish whether the language flows more in terms of number and measure in the syllables, or with weight, heavy and light. But the images must stand out well within the flow. Please work the matter out very formally.

Goethe's youth poems should also be treated similarly, with esprit, with spirit! Emphasize something, that is, make the syllables stand out a little. The mind from the brain has a little fun with it. Humor peeks into all the pots and takes things out. Therefore, you have to penetrate into every matter. Speak very close to the teeth, as soon as it becomes satirical. A quiet legend and fairy tale mood, not too fast, not echoing and well shaded and pointed, let the vowels slip into the consonants, so that it becomes somewhat unreal and flowing. Design good pauses and stay in the poetic, not conceptual, just a little head, but with the application of all artistic means. Very graceful! Artistically surround with subordinate clauses and slide them in gracefully.

German doesn't just come naturally to the lips.

In the grotesque, you can add a bulge to the end of the sound to make it thicker; it's the exact opposite of spiritual speaking.

THE BOUQUET

Old Bohemian

A light breeze blows
from the royal forests;
There the girl runs,
There she runs to the stream,
draws the water in
bucketfuls.

Carefully, deliberately
She knows how to scoop.

On the river to the girl
A little bouquet floats,
A fragrant little bouquet
Of violets and roses.

If I, you lovely
little flower, knew who had planted you
in loose soil;
Truly! I would give him
a little golden ring.

If I, my darling
little bouquet, knew,
Who bound you with delicate
Baste;
Truly! I would give him
The needle from my hair.

If I, you lovely
little flower, knew who threw you into the cool
stream, I would truly give them my wreath from my head.

And so she pursues
The hastening little bouquet,
She hurries ahead of it,
Trying to catch it:
Then, alas! then she falls
Into the cool water.

J. W. Goethe

The poem is lyrical and has a short melodious theme. It is to be treated objectively. The girl herself is like a breeze. Rococo poems are entirely formal, whereas this Bohemian folk song can be somewhat more intimate. There are quiet echoes of melodies, but movement must dominate. Breeze-like mood. The music must not push the image and the sculpture into the background.

From “Kleine Mythen” by Albert Steflen

JUDGE AND REDEEMER

A man who had shed blood was seized by a waterfall in the night, whipped and dragged down into the abyss. Half-drowned, he snatched himself from the whirlpool. From that time forth, in all his doings and sufferings, he heard the voice of the terrible element. It dripped, trickled, splashed, poured, thundered, as if it wanted to proclaim something, but the tortured man did not know what.

After twenty-five years, the rushing became quieter.

One night he saw the murdered man by a stream, holding a reed in his hand and shouting, “I turn water into blood.

”How?” asked the murderer. ‘By the law,’ replied the murdered man. ‘Judge me,’ pleaded the murderer, ‘so that you may love me again as I love you.’

Then Christ appeared in the place of the judge.

Here we have prose: legendary, somewhat similar to a fairy tale, but the slipping in of vowels is even stronger here than in the fairy tale. There should be something like a veil over the words. One does not speak directly on the lips, but also not in the palate. It must be dream-like, objectively dream-like. In dreams, everything comes unexpectedly. Moonlight atmosphere. The inflections of each syllable downwards. It is imagination, therefore every image must appear despite the flow. Seize the words with the consonants, but dissolve the things as they come. Complete all movements. For the artistic creation, one must allow oneself to be completely gripped by the material, live through it completely and then move away from it. You should go through everything, even cry and sob if you want, but then stand aside and above it.

When you are dreaming, you do not speak from the heart, you cannot go completely into the heart, otherwise it becomes too real. You have to keep a little distance and, above all, enter the picture, completely into the picture. Learn to distinguish between strong emotion and passion.

The listener experiences more intensely when you leave the emotion to him, not overwhelm him with it. Art itself is in all areas of suggestion.

The last movement is quite simple, a light. Strict! Major! Because the judge appeared in place of the Christ.

The lectures that were added to this book at the last minute contain many valuable additions to what has already been said about the art of recitation and declamation. It rounds off what has been said so far into a whole. Even if some things have to be repeated because the same subject has been discussed in different places and the fundamentals and essential points of the same subject have been given, new insights are nevertheless opened up each time, which enable a deeper penetration and must not be missing in a work that wants to achieve something fundamental. Again and again, light is shed on the area whose reconquest is now made possible for us. Even if some of it seems like mere repetition, perhaps it is only this repetition that makes it possible to fully grasp the subject, since it is a matter of deeper, not merely intellectual, insights. Today it is easy to miss the point because we have the habit of grasping things only with our intellect and as quickly as possible. When it comes to insights that take hold of the whole person, we need more time than today's habit of rushing gives us. Through repetition, however, some things are imprinted more vividly and deeply without our noticing.

We are first presenting the lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave in Darmstadt in July 1921 at the invitation of the Anthroposophical University Federation. Then the one that was held during the West-East Congress in Vienna in June 1922, despite the fact that the transcript of that lecture unfortunately shows quite a few gaps. Some of the texts that were given earlier to illustrate what was said have now been replaced by others that serve the same purpose, in order to provide a greater number of examples. Finally, we include the lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave on the same topic during the artistic-pedagogical conference in Stuttgart at Easter 1923. It was particularly important to him to incorporate art as a fundamental force into education. He saw in it the salvation from the gradual killing of the soul and spirit in man. In words, he sensed the direct weaving of the divine creative powers themselves. For him, “artistically creating meant: rhythmizing, harmonizing, plasticizing that which is spiritual in the soul-physical functions.” From the sensually meaningful to the spiritually moving – this is the path that Rudolf Steiner showed us for the art of recitation and declamation.

[The first part of the text is missing.]

When the selfless stream in two cyclic outpourings returns to its starting point and matter dissolves again, nothing has happened except that it has been enriched as it returns to its origin. It is only by taking in and overcoming the selfish stream that the selfless stream will develop such powerfully vibrant strength that it will have to go beyond itself, that is, beyond the cosmic circle which is the first encounter of the two streams. Something new will be born as selflessness disintegrates, a new region, called forth from it: para nirvana, which is negative matter, for, in contrast to matter, which is held within the cosmic circle due to attraction, it spreads outside it. It helps to understand the process if you think of a pendulum swing. The pendulum, swinging forward, will immediately swing back again, and unless there are obstacles in its way it will swing so hard that it goes beyond its starting point, just as a cart rolling forward cannot stop suddenly but must continue to roll on for some distance.

Following this preparation and the evolution of matter in stages, the material constituents for the creation of planets would be produced, but planetary life could not yet arise. Thus the Logos could not remain in para nirvana; it had to go back, and on the way back created the mahapara nirvana region. From here, the Logos had to make a sacrifice and begin the cycle through matter again, so that other life might arise—apart from itself but out of itself.

All life in manifold forms has arisen from oneness, the one Logos. The manifoldness lies hidden within it, as yet unseparated, undifferentiated. As the Logos becomes recognizable, perceiving itself as self, it emerges from the absolute, from the state of no differentiation, and creates the non-self, its mirror image, the second Logos. It ensouls this mirror reflection and gives it life; it is its third aspect, the third Logos.

The first Logos, the undifferentiated, with life and form in oneness within it, would thus have to be seen as the Father. Time began with its existence; it separated off its mirror reflection, the form, the feminine, which it filled with its life—the second Logos; and this ensoulment gave rise to the third Logos as Son, enlivened form. Thus all religions thought of their god in threefold form—as father, mother and son. Thus Uranos and Gaia, maternal earth; Chronos, time, came from her womb as son; Osiris, Isis and Horus, and so on.

The sacrifice of the Logos is: The spirit descends into matter, ensouls its mirror reflection, and with this the world of living forms is given its existence, with all of them living separate existences and going through the cycle of evolution, to be at one with the Logos again as individual entities that have reached the highest level of development, with the Logos receiving the riches of experience through them. If it had not poured itself out to give life to all these forms, there would be no independent growth and development. All movement, all genesis, would have no life of its own; it would merely move and stir according to the god’s directions.

Just as a human being is interested only in what is unknown to him, in the individual aspect of the human being, whilst anything he is able to calculate and understand leaves him indifferent, so the Logos, too, can take delight only in life that develops independently, life that comes forth from it, for which it sacrifices and gives itself.

There began the process of the evolution of matter, in which the qualities of the essence are reflected and effective, until these mirror reflections begin their own activity as separate forms, gradually making matter more and more spiritual and ensouled, until it will again be one with the entity atman, budhi, manas ... [gap]

First of all the cosmic foundation was created when the two qualities—selfishness and selflessness of the first Logos—came together. Through the second stream in this, guided by harmony, atomistic essence was created. This enveloped itself in mother substance, which was already extant, and the creation of atoms ensued.⁸⁴ These atoms, with their outer shells of varying density, step by step created the matter which could then serve the second Logos, the mirror reflection of the first, as a medium to give its mirror reflection over to it. The second Logos then flowed into this matter, which on its first, nirvana level was so subtle in consistency that it could flow through it without hindrance and without being changed. It then entered into the budhi region; here it was stopped, and even though selflessness is so strong in this region that it does not seek to hold the Logos fast in its realm, it does lay claim to it for its whole cosmos. Here the Logos’ sacrifice began; the voice, the sound came forth from it: it wanted to enliven matter with its spirit, that its thoughts should exist as independent forms. This realm, where divine thought became sound and voice,⁸⁵ in the budhi sphere, was the divine realm of the Middle Ages. Enveloped in budhi, the Logos then flowed into the mental region, which consisted of the arupa and rupa levels; the world of divine thought poured in, with exemplary ideas surging and mingling. Here the exemplary idea was created of what later would be separate entity, still resting in the Logos in the budhi sphere. This arupa level of the mental sphere was Plato’s world of ideas, the world of medieval rationality. At the arupa level these ideas assumed their first configurations. As divine genii they began their separate existence, floating and interpenetrating still, being entities of a like kind. It was the medieval realm of heaven.

These spiritual entities then entered into the astral sphere; here, enveloped in denser matter, sensation awoke from touch; only now did they feel themselves to be separate entities, sensing the separation. It was the elemental world. Following descent to the ether sphere this sensation was pushed from the inside to the outside, it swelled up, expanded and grew because of the etheric vegetative power, and was then enclosed by physical matter and crystallized, for here the selfish principle was still seeking with all its power to be set limits. Sentience is thus shut up in the mineral world, with the divine ideas sleeping in sublime peace in the virginal rock. Stone—a frozen divine thought: ‘The stones are dumb. I have put the eternal creator word into them that it may lie hidden; virginal and bashfully they hold it enclosed within them.’⁸⁶ This is an ancient druid saying, a prayer. In medieval times, ether and physical world or mineral world were called microcosm or small world.

Streaming in, the Logos surrounded itself with progressively denser vestments until it learned to define its limits firmly in rock. Stones are dumb, however, unable to reveal the eternal creator word. The rigid physical shell had to be cast off again; it remained behind in its world, whilst the crystalline forms in their soft ether vestment were able to expand, growing from the inside, that is, able to live. For life was growth; stone became plant. Ascending further the Logos also shed this ether vestment and came to the sphere of astral sensation. Here, activity developed through interaction between touch and sensory perception; sentient animal existence configured itself in a living way out of sentience and active will. It then gradually developed its organs of perception, with the impetus from outside acting inwards as sensation. The types evolved. On transition into the mental realm this sentience perceived itself, and the human level was reached with self-awareness.

From the cosmic point of view the Logos would descend most deeply into matter on streaming into the mineral world and begin its ascent on casting off the first outer vestment. From the human, anthroposophocentric point of view, which the ancient druids held, among others, the spirit resting in the chaste rock would be a sublime level of existence. Untainted by selfish intent, the stone obeys only the law of causality. For human beings on the lower mental level of development, which is where we are now, the rock would be a symbol for higher development. Going through lower kamic passions and errors we would develop to an etheric plant existence, living and growing from inside in a selflessly self-evident way, later to live in our causal body, untouched by anything external, resting in ourselves, pure spirit, just as the crystallized spirit rests enclosed in the rock.

The second Logos as mover and quickener of matter, in which it is enclosed, has only come as far as the lower mental sphere. The sentient animal has in self-awareness reached the human level of existence. It is able to relate the outside world to its individual nature, perceiving itself. Thus far, nature led and guided the human being; here it leaves him alone and in freedom. The further development of the human being now depends solely on his will. He must make himself the vessel, shedding the outer vestment of the lower mental sphere, so that he may now receive the inflow of the first Logos, just as a seed opens and waits for the impregnation without which it will not be able to grow and bear fruit.

The first Logos is the eternal principle in the universe, the unalterable law according to which the heavenly bodies move in their orbits; it is the basis of all things. Individual forms are subject to annihilation and change. We perceive colours through our ability to see that may look different to a different ability to see. The solid external object, held together in its specific form by its parts, may vanish at a particular degree of heat. Its parts may dissolve, but the law according to which it came into existence will remain; it is eternal. Thus the whole universe moves according to eternal laws. The first Logos flows in it, spread abroad. The human being must rise to it with his will. He must develop the selfless lower inner sense organ (antahkarana) in himself. In pure contemplation he must perceive this eternal, unalterable law in all that is transitory, must learn to distinguish between anything that is transitory, having assumed a particular form, and the core of his being, must take what is seen into himself as thought and guard it. He thus gradually comes to know the unreal nature of the world of phenomena. Thought becoming real to him, he gradually ascends to the arupa level, living in the world of pure thought. Multiplicity dissolves for him, merging into oneness, he feels at one with the universe. He will then have risen so high that he is able to receive the inflowing first Logos directly, as intuition. It was not a single soul, however, which thus came to the single individual. No, it was the All Soul, the soul of Plato and others in which he had a part, coming to be at one with them in his thoughts. Step by step the higher human being evolved from the kamic one.

At the turning point where the human being was thus meant to ascend in freedom, using his will, he needed guidance. In the third race of the fourth round, in the Lemurian age, the sons of manas therefore descended, letting themselves be incarnated to serve as guides. The simple process of counting, of understanding number, initiated mental development, thus separating the thinking human being from the animal which was merely sentient.

• 84. See ref. 68.
• 85. See also the two esoteric lessons given in Berlin on 18 December 1906 and Hamburg on 11 February 1907 in Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden GA 266/1. These concepts were also used in early Christian Gnosis, see G. R. S. Mead, note 81.
• 86. The formula may be found in Rudolf Steiner’s Rosicrucian and Moorish ritual. See Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der erkenntniskultischen Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904–1914, GA 265.

Note: The notes on instruction given on the Logoi (last lecture in Part 1 and Part 2) did not cover the ‘creation out of nothing’ concept which is an essential part of it. The extracts from other lectures which follow are intended to make up for this.^*

From a lecture in Berlin on 30 October 1903⁹⁶

World evolution can be seen to be in three stages—conscious awareness, life and form. The different kinds of conscious awareness come to expression in the seven planets Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seven worlds of life are gone through on each planet, and each of these in turn through seven states of form.

Our physical Earth is such a form state, the fourth form state or globe in the fourth life world of the fourth planet or state of consciousness. Let us now think of the Earth as it is today and ask ourselves: What are we doing here? We take objects from the world around us, first of all from the mineral world, and make them into artefacts. We make combinations, creating a whole from separate things. This is creative work in form. Something new may also arise in another way, similar to the way in which stems, leaves and flowers arise from the root of a plant. The flower is not put together like a machine, where things are combined, but needs to grow from something which is already there, in a process which is part of life. Something new is created out of something which is already there.

With the third way of producing something, which is from the conscious mind, the process is such that we may say: Essentially there was nothing there, really—a nothing.

Let us go back to the very beginning of such a planetary evolution, the very beginning of Saturn evolution. What do we observe there? No physical planet existed as yet, not even in the most subtle arupa form, and the moment has not yet come when Saturn exists in its first beginnings. Nothing existed as yet of our planetary chain, but the whole fruit of the preceding planetary chain was there. It is rather like waking up in the morning, when we have not yet done anything, and all we have in mind is the memory of what we did the day before. Going back to the very beginning of Saturn evolution we thus have the memory of an earlier planetary chain, of what went before, in the spirits which were then manifesting.

Let us now go to the end of the planetary chain, to the time when the Vulcan stage will come to an end. In the course of the planetary chain, the potential, which was there to begin with has gradually emerged as creation. In the beginning, therefore, conscious awareness flowed out; out of the content of what had gone before, from memory, conscious awareness created something new. Something will thus be there at the end, which was not there at the beginning, and that is everything which has been learned. The potential, which was there at the beginning has flowed out into all kinds of things and entities. A new conscious awareness has arisen at the end, with new content—a new content of the conscious mind. It is something which has arisen from nothing, from lessons learned.

If we look at renewal in life, we have to say that there must be a seed to make it all possible. But the new content of conscious awareness at the end of a planetary evolution has truly arisen from nothing, from lessons learned. This needs no foundations, it creates something which arises out of nothing. We cannot say that when someone looks at someone else that he has taken something away from that other person when he afterwards keeps a memory of them. This memory has arisen from nothing. This is the third way of creation—out of nothing. The three ways of creation are thus the following.

Combining existing elements (form)

Letting new structures with new life content arise from existing foundations (life)

Creating from nothing (conscious awareness).

These are three definitions of spirits that give rise to a planetary chain, are at the back of a planetary chain. They are called the three Logoi. The third Logos produces by combining. When something else arises from a substance, something with new life, the second Logos is behind it. And whenever something arises from nothing, we have the first Logos. The first Logos is therefore also often called ‘something that lies hidden in the things themselves’, the second Logos ‘the substance dormant in the things which creates living things from living things’, and the third Logos ‘the one which combines all that is, putting the world together from those things’.

The three Logoi always move through and into one another in the world. The first Logos also learns of the inner wisdom and of the will. The creative activity of the first Logos is learning from experience, that is, gathering thoughts out of nothingness and then again creative work based on the thoughts which have come from nothingness. Creation out of nothing does not mean, however, that there would have been absolutely nothing there. It means that things were learned from experience in the course of evolution and that new things were created in the course of evolution, with something which exists melting away, as it were, and something new is created out of the experience.

Creation happens like this, to use an analogy: Someone looks at another person and remembers the image. If he had the creative gifts of the first Logos he would be able to say to himself: ‘Right, I’ve seen N and also know the idea of N in reverse. I can also produce a negative of him, with black where there’s white and vice versa.’ He has thus learned from the object and its negative and created something completely new. He might endow this with life. It would be a new structure which did not exist before. Let us now assume something does this with many people and those many people were to perish. The observer would then be able to create a new world on the basis of what he has learned.

If we study the world, we will always see the three Logoi interacting. Let us visualize the way the three Logoi work with reference to the human being in our planetary system. Let us think of a point at the beginning of Saturn evolution when nothing was as yet in existence. What happened there? Everything that had existed before was allowed to come out drop by drop, as it were. What arose there would have been the very first pouring out of matter from the sum of what had been learned from earlier experiences. Everything that had been taken in before was made to flow out in form of matter. This also included the matter from which humanity would later arise. Initially this matter existed merely as matter. The out-flowing had to be continually built up and brought together by combination. The combining of the matter which had flowed out was a new creation. It was initially the work of the third Logos; once matter had flowed out it was therefore the work of the third Logos.

What significance did this have for the human being? It meant that first of all, all the parts were brought together which would then make up his physical body. At the time, on Saturn, the human being was very much an automaton. If you had spoken a word into him he would have said it out again. Forms of entities were created. This is called ‘the work of the third Logos’. It continued into the Sun period of evolution when the human being also received his ether body, life. That was the work of the second Logos. Let us now continue on into the Earth period. There the human being himself was given conscious awareness, that is, the possibility of learning from experience out of nothing. That was the work of the first Logos. The Saturn human being received the principle which is form in him. The Sun human being received the principle which is life in him from the second Logos. The Earth human being received the principle that would develop into conscious awareness in him from the first Logos.

We need to get a clearer understanding of the concept of conscious awareness. For this, we need to get a complete idea of this concept on a specific plane. Human beings are conscious, but we need to know where his conscious awareness is. Today, human beings are conscious on the physical plane when we speak of waking consciousness. This might, however, also be on the astral plane. A creature which has its life on the physical plane and its conscious awareness on the astral plane is an animal.

In the human being, conscious awareness is localized in the head. In the case of an animal, a tiger for example, conscious awareness is on the astral plane. It creates a focus for itself outside the head and from there it influences the tiger. When a tiger feels pain, the pain also goes across to the astral plane. The organ for this is in front of the head in a tiger, where human beings have their forehead. In human beings, the focus has become enclosed in the head and filled with the forebrain; conscious awareness has been captured by the brain and frontal skull and is therefore on the physical plane. In the tiger, and in all animals altogether, the focal point for consciousness lies in front of the head, in the astral; that is where it goes into the astral world. It is different again with plants. If we were able to trace their conscious awareness we would, going from above downwards, always come to the tip of the root. Following the line of growth we would then come to the centre of the earth. That is the point where all sensations of plants come together, where the conscious awareness of plants is absorbed. It is in direct connection with the mental world. The whole plant world has its conscious awareness in the mental sphere. Conscious awareness for the whole of the mineral world is in the highest spheres of the mental world, on the arupa plane. The conscious awareness of stones is such that if we wanted to find the focus we would find it to be like a kind of Sun atmosphere. When we work on the mineral world here on Earth, breaking stones, every single act connects in a specific way with this Sun atmosphere. We thus have a range of entities on the physical plane, but their conscious awareness is on different planes.

Lecture given in Stuttgart on 15 September 1907⁹⁷

Let us first of all investigate the meaning of involution and evolution. Let us consider a plant, a fully developed plant with root, leaves, stems, flower and fruit, in short with all the parts which a plant is able to have. That is the one thing. And then consider the tiny seed from which the plant may arise again. Looking at the seed we see just a small grain, but the whole plant is already inside it, wrapped up in it, as it were. Why is it in there? Because the seed grain was taken from the plant, and the plant has put all its powers into it. In occultism, distinction is therefore made between two processes. One is that the seed unrolls and develops into a whole plant—evolution; the other that the plant folds up, its structure creeping into the seed, as it were—involution. So if a life form which has many organs develops in such a way that nothing is visible any more of those organs, that they have shrunk together into the seed, this is called ‘involution’, and the going apart, unfolding is called an ‘evolution’. This duality alternates everywhere in life, but always only in the sphere of the manifest. You can see this not only in plants; it is like this also in the higher spheres of life.

You might, for instance, follow the evolution in your mind of European cultural life from Augustine to Calvin, beyond the Middle Ages. If you consider the cultural life of that time you will find a degree of mystic inwardness in Augustine himself. You cannot read his works, especially his Confessions, without getting a sense of the inwardness of this man’s life of feelings. If we then move on in time we come to the marvellous figure of John Scotus Erigena a monk who had originally come from Scotland and was therefore also called John the Scot and lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not do so well in the Church. Legend tells of the brothers torturing him to death with their pens. This should not be taken literally, however. It is true, however, that he was martyred. John wrote a magnificent book De Divisione Naturae (about the divisions of nature), which shows great profundity. Then we come to the mystics of the Pfaffengasse,⁹⁸ where this inwardness of feeling spread among large masses of people. These were not only the leading clerics but also the populace; people who worked in the fields or in a smithy—all were caught up in this inwardness of feeling which was a trait of that time. Moving on we come to Nicholas of Cusa who lived from 1401 to 1464. We can continue like this to the end of the Middle Ages; we will always find that depth of feeling, an inwardness that spread through all levels of society.

If we compare that period with the one which followed, beginning in the 16th century and continuing into our own time, we perceive a tremendous difference. To begin with, there was Copernicus who had a comprehensive thought which brought a renewal in cultural life; he made it so much part of human thinking that anyone who believes in something different today will be considered a fool. We come to Galileo, who discovered the laws that govern the swing of a pendulum on observing the movement of a lamp in a church. We can thus follow the course of time step by step, and would always find the complete opposite of the Middle Ages. Feeling grew less and less, the inwardness vanished; the rational mind, the intellect, emerged more and more, with people getting cleverer and more intelligent all the time.

We thus have two periods of time which were exact opposites in character. Spiritual science gives us the explanation for this. There is an occult law which says that it must be like this. The period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystic evolution and intellectual involution; since then we have been living in a period of intellectual evolution and mystic involution. What does this mean? From Augustine to the 16th century it was a time when mystic life unfolded in the outside world. Something else existed at the time that was only a seed—intellectual life. If was like a seed lying hidden in the soil of the mind which then gradually unfolded after the 16th century. Intellectual life was thus in involution at that time, just as a plant lies in its seed. Nothing can arise in the world that has not first been in such an involution. From the 16th century onwards, intellectual thinking has been in evolution, and mystic life has gone into the background; it is in involution. Now the time has come where this mystic life must emerge again. The theosophical movement must help it to unfold again, to go into evolution.

Involution and evolution are thus always alternating in life in the sphere of the manifest. However, if we stop at this we are only looking at the outside. To see the whole, there has to be a third principle which is behind those two. What is this third principle? Imagine you come up against a phenomenon in the outside world and reflect on it. You are there, the outside world is there, and your thoughts arise in you. Those thoughts were not there before. If you develop the idea of a rose, for example, it will only arise the moment you relate to the rose; you were there, the rose was there; and when the thought, the image of the rose arises in you, something entirely new comes up which has not been there before.

This also applies in other spheres of life. Think of Michelangelo at work. He hardly ever used models. Let us imagine, however, that he collected a group of models. Michelangelo was there, the models were there. But the image of the group in Michelangelo’s soul is something new; it is a completely new creation. This has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something completely new which arises in the relationship between an entity able to receive and an entity able to give. New creations like this always arise when essence relates to essence. They are a beginning. Remember how we considered the way thoughts are creative here yesterday, how they can ennoble the soul and will later even work on the forming of the body. Something which some entity thinks, the creation of a thought, an idea, will work on and continue to have an effect. It is a new creation and also a beginning, but it does have consequences. If you have good thoughts today, those thoughts will bear fruit into the far distant future, for your soul follows its own way in the world of the spirit. Your body will go back into the elements again, it will decompose. But even if everything out of which the thought has arisen vanishes, the thought will continue to work.

Let us take the example of Michelangelo again. His magnificent works have raised the hearts and minds of millions of people, but they will fall to dust one day. There will be generations that will no longer see any of his creations. What lived in Michelangelo’s soul before his images assumed physical form, something which was first of all a new creation in his soul—this will live on. It will remain and will emerge at later stages of evolution and take form. Do you know why we have clouds and stars today? Because there were entities in the long distant past which had the thought of clouds and stars. Everything arises from thought creations, and the thought is a new creation. Everything has arisen from thoughts, and the greatest things in the world have come from the thoughts of the godhead.

There you have the third principle. In the sphere of the manifest, things alternate between evolution and involution. But behind this, deeply hidden, lies the third principle, and this alone gives the fullness, a creation which is entirely new, having arisen from nothing.

Thus there have to be three things—creation out of nothing, and then, when this manifests and proceeds in time, it assumes the forms of the manifest: evolution and involution.

Lecture given in Berlin on 17 June 1909⁹⁹

In Christian esoteric language, creating out of the given is called ‘being creative in the spirit’, and creation out of given situations that are right, beautiful and full of virtue is called the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is beatitude for the human being when he succeeds in creating something which is right or true, beautiful and good out of nothing. For human beings to be able to create in the sense of this Holy Spirit, they had first to be given the foundation for this, as for all creation out of nothing. They were given this foundation when the Christ came into our evolution. When human beings on Earth became able to have living experience of the Christ event, they were also able to rise to being creative in the Holy Spirit. It is thus the Christ himself who creates the most eminent, most profound basis. If human beings come to be such that they stand firmly on the ground of the Christ experience, that the Christ experience is the vehicle into which they enter so that they may develop further, then the Christ sends the Holy Spirit to them, and they become able to create what is right, beautiful and good in terms of further evolution.

We see, therefore, how the Christ event came on Earth as a final conclusion, as it were, of what had been impressed in the human being through Saturn, Sun and Moon. It has given humanity the most sublime principle which will enable them to live into the prospect of the future and be more and more creative out of the given situations, out of something which is not in this place or in that one, but depends on how human beings relate to the realities that surround them, which is the Holy Spirit in the most comprehensive sense. This is yet again such an aspect of Christian esoteric thinking. This relates to the most profound thought we are able to have concerning all evolution, the thought of creation out of nothing.

Because of this no true theory of evolution can ever leave aside the thought of creation out of nothing. Let us assume there were only evolution and involution. This would be endless repetition, as we see it in plants. All there would be on Vulcan then would be what had its beginning on Saturn. But in addition to evolution and involution the thought of creation out of nothing came in the middle of our evolution. When Saturn, Sun and Moon had passed, the Christ came to the Earth as the element of great enrichment, so that there will be something that is wholly new on Vulcan, something which did not yet exist on Saturn. Someone who speaks only of evolution and involution, will speak of the process of evolution as though everything would just repeated itself, like a cycle. Such cycles can never truly explain world evolution, however. We need to add this creation out of nothing to evolution and involution, something which brings something new into the existing situations. This gives us true understanding of the world.

• *. New translations have been made of these excerpts for this volume, as the German editions have changed since the lectures were first translated into English.
• 96. In Foundations of Esotericism (see note 13).
• 97. In Occult Signs and Symbols, tr. S. Kurland; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1972.
• 98. In the Pfaffengasse—popular name given to the region on the left bank of the Rhine where ecclesiastical states were numerous—Chur, Constance, Basle, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Cologne.
• 99. In Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde GA 107 [in German].

(After 1918 esoteric classes were usually opened and closed with the following verse:

O man know yourself
Thus sounds the world-word
You hear it soul-strongly
You feel it spirit-powerfully
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-intimately?
Does it work through space-width's radiation
Into your senses' experience of existence?
Does it sound through the ages' wave-weaving
Into your life's developmental stream?
Is it you who creates
The word for yourself
In feeling of space, in experience of time
Feeling strange in a space that's devoid of soul
Because you lose thinking's power
In the stream of time-destruction.

Notes from memory of esoteric lessons given by Rudolf Steiner mostly in 1904–1914 and meditation texts and exercises he wrote down in Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, CW 266, vols. 1–3.