The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Previous studies in the Anthroposophical Society here in Prague will have made it clear to you that the evolution of mankind is governed by the spirit—or perhaps it is better to say, by spiritual Beings—and that human souls, themselves filled with spirit, carry over their achievements from one epoch to another, including, of course, whatever burden of guilt they have accumulated in a particular epoch. All these things enable us to gaze deeply into the life of the Cosmos both from the physical aspect and from the aspect of soul and spirit, and only in this way is it possible for us to understand our real nature and being. For without yielding to pride we must acknowledge that in our own human nature we are united with the spiritual fount of the Cosmos and that we can understand our own being and constitution only through a spiritual understanding of the Cosmos.

Now since the Christmas Foundation Meeting it is not only a matter of conducting the affairs of Anthroposophy within the Anthroposophical Society; the conduct of these affairs must in itself be Anthroposophy. And this must also come to expression in the re casting of Anthroposophical work. In these lectures, therefore, I have not been afraid to lead our study from exoteric into more esoteric domains, and in this respect I want to add something to-day to what has already been said—something that provides concrete evidence of how the human soul passes over from one epoch into another. The general principle applies equally to individuals, and through an understanding of the karma of personalities known to us all, light can be shed upon our own karma. To-day, therefore, we will continue our study of karma in more concrete detail.

In the course of these lectures I have mentioned the name of an individual who is a remarkable example of how a certain visionary quality can reveal itself in one who is preeminently a man of will. I have mentioned the name of Garibaldi, the hero of the cause of freedom in Italy, and I have also spoken of certain of his outstanding characteristics. Everything about him gives expression to will, to impulses of will. What a tremendous power of will was in evidence when as a young man during the twenties and early thirties of the 19th century he set out again and again, quite voluntarily, on perilous voyages through the Adriatic, and after having been taken prisoner several times was always able, through his strength and courage, to escape. What a tremendous power of will was at work when, having seen that for the time being there was no field for his activity in Europe, he went over to South America where he became one of the most intrepid fighters in the cause of freedom there. I have spoken, too, of how in the circumstances of his betrothal and marriage he disregarded the usual customs and determined his own life as he saw fit. Then, on his return to Europe, he became the one to whom, in reality, modern Italy owes everything.

When the question was put to me one day: “What could have been the karmic connections of this personality?” two aspects came into consideration. For the finding of karmic connections is by no means a simple but a very complicated task. I have said already that one must often start from details which although clearly in evidence seem to be of minor importance and be led by them to the principles according to which the facts of the one earthly life are carried over into the later life.

The case of Garibaldi is strange in that although at heart and in sentiment he was a republican, through and through a republican, he laid the whole force of his will into the task of consolidating the Italian monarchy under Victor Emanuel. Simply by studying the biography of Garibaldi one can perceive a fundamental contradiction between this inner trend of feeling and his actual deeds. One perceives, too, that he felt a bond with men like Mazzini and Cavour, with whose ideas and convictions he was manifestly at variance and whose trend of thought differed so radically from his own. Then there is the striking fact that Garibaldi was born, in the year 1807, quite near to the birthplaces of the other three: the later King Victor Emanuel, Cavour the statesman, and Mazzini the philosopher. Their birthplaces were really in close proximity. And then one is led to investigate the connection between the karma of such personalities.

The other aspect—a very far reaching one—is the following. In studying Spiritual Science we must always have in our minds that in olden times there were Initiates, seers, men of vision in the widest sense. And the question may be asked: Since these wise men of times gone by must reincarnate, where are they working now, in the modern age? Where are they, these great personalities who worked as Initiates in the past?—They have indeed come again but it must be remembered that when a human being is born in a particular epoch he is obliged to use the body provided by that epoch. The bodies of olden days were more pliant, more flexible, yielding more readily to the spirit; and in earthly existence man must use the body to transform into earthly shape and earthly activity what was imbued into him before he came down to the Earth. Faced with conditions that are so full of riddles, we must remember—and no criticism is here implied—that for centuries now the effect of the whole of education upon the human organism has been such that what was once alive in an Initiate simply cannot come to expression. Much has to remain concealed in the deep substrata of existence. And for this reason, many Initiates of bygone days appear again as personalities who with the concepts and notions prevailing to-day cannot be recognised as former Initiates because they are obliged to use the body which their epoch provides.

Garibaldi is just such an example. If we go far back into the past, we find deep and profound Mysteries, great Initiates, in ancient Ireland. But the Irish Mysteries survived right on into the Christian era. Even to-day there is still much living spirituality in Ireland—not of an abstract, conceptual kind, but alive, spiritually potent. Chaotic as conditions in that country appear to-day, there is in Ireland much real spiritual life. But it is only the very last vestige of what once existed. In Hibernia, in Ireland, there were deep and penetrating Mysteries whose influences still made their way across to Europe in the early centuries of the spread of Christianity. And there one finds an Initiate whose path in the 8th to 9th centuries after the founding of Christianity led him from Ireland to the region corresponding approximately to modern Alsace. Under the stormy conditions then prevailing, this Initiate achieved much for the cause of true Christianity, for which, if the truth be told, Boniface accomplished very little. To this Initiate came three pupils from different quarters of the world—three pupils who entrusted themselves to him. These three pupils came to him—one from far away, another from nearer at hand. But in the Irish Mysteries there was an inviolable decree that an Initiate to whom pupils had entrusted themselves must not abandon them in the later incarnation but must accomplish in earthly life something that will hold them to him, something that establishes a bond between him and these pupils. The Initiate of whom I am speaking was born again as Joseph Garibaldi, with that visionary quality of will which in olden times had been able to express itself in a quite different form from that possible in a body belonging to the 19th century. Garibaldi received only a very inferior education, quite unlike the education that was typical of the 19th century. The three others I have named were the pupils who in the past had come to him from different parts of the world. But the impulse working from the one incarnation over into the other was far deeper and more potent than external principles of action. In comparison with the link stretching across the incarnations between man and man, it is a triviality to contend: I am a Republican, you are a Monarchist. In these things one must realise how greatly earthly Maya, the great illusion, the semblance of being, deviates from the spiritual reality which is in truth the motive power behind the phenomena of existence. And so in spite of the radical difference in sentiment and conviction, Garibaldi could not abandon, for example, Victor Emanuel. Sentiment and conviction in connection with earthly matters and not with human beings belong to the epoch, not to the individuality who passes from one earthly life to another.

I want to give another example, one with which I came into close personal contact. I had a geometry teacher¹ who was of enormous help to me. My autobiography will have indicated to you that geometry is one of the subjects to which I owe most because of the impulses it quickened in me. This geometry teacher himself played a very valuable part in my life. The fact that he was an excellent constructor might well have led to my great affection for him because I myself loved geometrical construction and because he expressed everything with genuine independence of mind and also with all the exclusiveness belonging to geometrical thinking. His mind was focused so exclusively upon geometry that in the real sense of the word he was no mathematician; he was a geometrician and nothing else. In this sphere he was brilliant but it could not be said that he was deeply versed in mathematics. He lived at a time when all descriptive geometry—his special subject—underwent changes. Characteristically, however, he kept to the old forms. But something else about him provided a far more revealing clue for occult investigation: he had what is called a club foot. Now the strange thing is that the force—not, of course, the physical substance—the force which a man has in his feet in one incarnation, the character of his tread, how his feet lead him into wrong-doing or well doing—this force is metamorphosed. Whatever is connected with the feet may live itself out in a subsequent incarnation in the head organisation; whereas what we now bear in our head may come to expression, in the later incarnation, in the organisation of the legs. Metamorphosis takes a peculiar form here. One who is conversant with these things can discern from the style and manner of a man's gait, how he treads with his toes and heels, what quality of thinking characterised him in an earlier incarnation. And one who observes the qualities of a man's thinking—whether his thoughts are quick, fleeting, cursory, or deliberate and cautious—will be able to picture how he actually walked in a previous incarnation.

In the earlier incarnation, a man whose thoughts are fleeting and cursory walked with short, rapid steps, as though tapping over the ground, whereas the gait of a man who thinks cautiously and with deliberation was firm and steady in the earlier life. It is just these apparently minor characteristics that lead further when one is looking for the deeper, spiritual connections and not those of an external, abstract kind. And so when time and time again I called up the picture of this greatly loved teacher, I was guided to his earlier incarnation. With this picture another associated itself—also of a man with a club foot: Lord Byron.² The two men were there before me in this inner picture. And the karma of my teacher, as well as the peculiarity of which I have told you, led me to the discovery that in the 10th or 11th century, both these souls had lived in their earlier incarnations far over in the East of Europe where they came one day under the influence of a legend, a prophecy. This legend was to the effect that the Palladium, which in a certain magical way helped to sustain the power of Rome, had been brought to that city from ancient Troy, and hidden. When the Emperor Constantine conceived the wish to carry Roman culture to Constantinople he caused the Palladium to be transported with the greatest pomp and pageantry to Constantinople and hidden under a pillar, the details of which gave expression to his overweening pride. For he ordered an ancient statue of Apollo to be set at the top of this pillar, but altered in such a way as to be a portrait of himself. He caused wood to be brought from the Cross on which Christ had been crucified and shaped into a kind of crown which was then placed on the head of this statue. It was the occasion for indulging in veritable orgies of pride!

The legend went on to prophesy that the Palladium would be transferred from Constantinople to the North and that the power embodied in it would be vested eventually in a Slavonic Empire. This prophecy came to the knowledge of the two men of whom I have been speaking and they resolved to go to Constantinople and to carry off the Palladium to Russia. They did not succeed. But in one of them especially—in Byron—the urge remained, and was then transformed in the later life into the impulse to espouse the cause of freedom in Greece. This impulse led Byron, in the 19th century, to the very region, broadly speaking, where he had searched for the Palladium in an earlier incarnation.

It is a question, you see, of finding the threads which lead back into earlier ages. On another occasion my attention fell on a personality who lived about the 9th century in the north east of France as France is to-day, and who during the first part of his life was the owner of extensive landed estates. He was, for those times, a wealthy man, and being of a warlike nature he engaged in many rather quixotic military adventures not on a large but on a small scale. When he had reached a certain age, this personality gathered around him people who then accompanied him on a campaign which ended in disaster and brought bitter disillusionment in its train. Without having achieved anything at all, he was obliged to return home. But meanwhile—as was a common practice in those days—another had taken possession of his house, land and people during his absence. On his arrival he found that his own estates were in other hands strange as the story is, it actually happened so and he was obliged thereafter to serve in his own manor as a kind of helot or serf. Many a meeting took place there with people of the neighbourhood, usually by night, and in a rather uncultured, rough and ready way, ideas were elaborated for seizing power—although beyond the fact that such ideas were worked out, nothing could possibly come of them. These ideas for rebelling against the overlords—almost as in the days of Rome—were the subject of much heated and fervid dialectic. Our interest may well be roused by this personality who had been ousted from estates, possessions and authority but who with an inflexible will stirred up the whole district, particularly against the one who had usurped the property. The personality of whom I am speaking was born again in the 19th century, when inwardly, in mind and soul, he became the kind of character one would expect from the circumstances of the earlier incarnation: he became Karl Marx³ the socialist leader. Just think what a light is shed upon world history when one can study it in this way, when one can actually follow the souls passing from one epoch into the other, observing how what these souls bear within them is carried over from epoch to epoch. History and the evolution of mankind are seen in this way in their real and concrete setting.

In Dornach recently I was able to call attention to another connection of karma, one which caused me repeatedly during the War, and especially at the end of the War, to warn people against allowing themselves to be blinded by a certain outstanding figure of modern times. In the Helsingfors⁴ lectures of 1913 I had already spoken of the very limited abilities of the person in question. This was because the connection between Muawiyah,⁵ a follower of Mohammed in the 7th century, and Woodrow Wilson, was clear to me. All the fatalism which characterised the personality of Muawiyah, came out in the otherwise inexplicable fatalism of Woodrow Wilson—in his case, fatalism of will. And if anyone wants to find corroboration, to discover the origin of the well known Fourteen Points, he has only to turn to the Koran. Such are the connections. These things must be kept absolutely free from sympathy or antipathy; it is not a question of criticism but only of the purest objectivity. But this very objectivity leads from one point in history at which a soul has appeared, to another such point. When humanity outsteps in some degree the still surviving heritage of materialism, people will be willing to listen to such things and observe for themselves. And then they will feel quite differently about their place in modern civilisation because they will be able to see it not in a dead but in a living setting. That is the important point. The whole process of historical development will be imbued with life. And if man is to get beyond the blind alley in which he is now standing in his civilisation, he needs the living spirit and not the dead spirit of abstract concepts and ideas.

In their study of history, people will probably be very reluctant to approach the spiritual in the way indicated in my public lecture here a few days ago, but nevertheless they will ultimately be obliged to do so. For ordinary historical study which has only documentary evidence to go upon is full of insoluble enigmas. Things of which the origins cannot be explained are forever cropping up. Why is it so? It is because the origins are not understood, they have been completely obscured. When such things are investigated, a great deal in history becomes living reality. But it also becomes apparent that men themselves have done a great deal to garble and falsify history in important respects.

It will certainly seem strange and perplexing when in connection with a relatively near past, the spiritual investigator is forced to assert that a wonderful work of art has been wiped out of existence by the hostility of a certain stream of spiritual life. In the early centuries of Christendom there was extant in the more southerly regions of European civilisation a literary work of art setting forth the nature of advancing culture immediately after Christianity had taken root in the evolution of humanity in Europe. This work of art—it was an epic drama, a dramatic epos—narrated how since the recent revelation of Christianity man cannot draw near to the true Being of Christ unless he undergoes a definite preparation similar to that given in the Mysteries.

In order to understand the real import of this, the following must be clear to us. To His intimate disciples Christ had made it abundantly clear that He, as a Sun Being, a Cosmic Being, had come down into the one born in the East as Jesus, in the thirtieth year of his life. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a Moon religion. What was the nature of the Jahve, the Jehovah religion, and of the Being Jahve himself? In looking upwards to Jahve, men were gazing, in reality, at the human ‘I,' the ‘I' that is directly dependent upon the physical human configuration that is born with us. But what is born with us, what has taken shape and developed inasmuch as in the mother's body we were moulded into a vessel for the human ‘I' this is dependent upon the Moon forces. Jahve is a Moon God. And in lifting their eyes to Jahve, men said to themselves: Jahve is the Regent of the Moon Beings, from whom proceed those forces which bear man into his physical existence on Earth.—But if Moon forces alone were at work, man would never be able to transcend what is laid into him in the life that belongs to the Earth. This he can no longer do of himself, but in earlier times it was different. If we go back into prehistoric ages we find something very remarkable, something that to the modern mind sounds extremely strange. We find that in the thirtieth year of life, human beings experienced a complete transformation of soul. This was the case in the great majority of people belonging to a certain class. Strange as it sounds to modern ears, it was really the case in an age of which the Vedas are mere echoes. There were men in ancient India to whom the following might happen.—When another man whom they had seen a few years previously came up to them, he might find that although they saw him, they did not recognise who he was; they had forgotten everything that had happened to them during the previous thirty-years, they had forgotten it all—even their own identity. And there was an actual institution—we should call it, as we call every such institution to-day, an official department or board of authorities—to which such a person must apply in order to be informed who he was and where he had been born. Only when, in the Mysteries, these people had been given the necessary training were they able to remember their lives up to the age of thirty. They were men who at a later time, were called the ‘twice born,' who owed the first period of their existence to the Moon forces, the second to the forces of the Sun.

The metamorphosis which in ancient times came about in so radical a way in the course of earthly life, the ‘being born a second time,' was ascribed to the Sun—and rightly so, for the Sun forces have to do with what a human being is able, by dint of his own free will, to make of himself. But as the evolution of humanity progressed, this gradually ceased to be part of the process of development; man no longer brought down into the physical realm any consciousness of having gazed into the cosmic worlds. Julian the Apostate wished to revive the knowledge of these things and had to pay for the attempt with his death. But through the power enshrined in His words, Christ wished to bring to men through morality, through a deepening of the moral and religious life, what nature does not bring. It was Christ Who taught: “When you learn to feel as I feel, when instead of turning your eyes to the Sun you behold what is alive in me—who was the very last to receive the Sun Word in the thirtieth year—then you will find the way to the essence of the Sun once again!” The teachers in the Mysteries during the early period of Christianity knew with certainty that the development of the intellect, of intellectuality, was then beginning; intellectuality does indeed bring man freedom but deprives him of the ancient clairvoyance which leads him into the cosmic spirituality. Therefore these wise men of the old Christian Mysteries instituted teaching which was then set forth in that epic drama of which I spoke. It was the narration of the experiences of a pupil in the Christian Mysteries, who by the sacrifice of intellect at a certain point in his youth was to be led to true Christianity when the realisation had dawned in him that Christ is a Sun Being Who came to dwell in Jesus of Nazareth from his thirtieth year onwards.

This epic was a moving and impressive narration of how a human being seeking the inmost truth of Christianity makes the sacrifice of intellect in early years—that is to say, he vows to the higher Spiritual Powers that intellectuality shall not be his mainstay but that he will so deepen his inner life that he may come to know Christianity not as mere history or tradition but in its cosmic reality and setting, seeing in Christ the Bearer of the spirituality of the Sun. A scene of dramatic grandeur and impressive content was presented by this transformation in a human being by the sacrifice of intellectuality. A human being who, to begin with, received Christianity merely according to the letter of the Gospels—as was customary later on—became one who learned to behold the cosmic realities and Christ's living connection with the Cosmos. The awakening of clairvoyant vision of Christianity as cosmic reality—such was the content of that ancient epic drama. The Catholic Church took care to ensure that every trace of this epic should be exterminated. Nothing has remained—the Catholic Church has had power enough for that. It is only by accident that a transcript has been preserved of which, too, nothing would be known, had it not been from the hand of a personage living at the Court of Charles the Bald—from the hand of Scotus Erigena.

Those who realise the import of these things will not think it so strange when spiritual investigation urges one to speak of this epic story of a man who by vowing to sacrifice intellectuality was transformed in such a way that the heavens were opened to him. But in the form of tradition many a fragment from that ancient epic has survived, in substance largely unchanged, but no longer understood—above all its great setting and its imagery were no longer understood. The content of this work of poetic art became the subject of numerous paintings. These paintings too were exterminated and only traditions survived. Fragments of these traditions were known in a circle to which Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante, belonged. From this teacher Dante heard something of the traditions—not of course in precision of detail, but in aftermath—and in his Divine Comedy echoes from that old epic still live on. But the work existed, as truly and as surely as the Divine Comedy itself exists.

Recorded history, you see, does not tally with the realities and a great deal of what was exterminated by enemies will have to be discovered again through spiritual investigation. For it was all to the interests of a certain side to root out every indication that Christ comes from the Cosmos. The birth of Christ which actually took place in Jesus' thirtieth year has been confounded with the physical birth. What then became a Christian doctrine could never have been established had the epic drama of which I have spoken not been exterminated. The time will come when spiritual investigation will have to play a part if human civilisation is to make real progress.

You know the devastating effect of illnesses of the kind which befell someone I once knew well. He held a post of considerable authority but one day he left his home and family, went to the railway station and took a ticket for a far distant place, having suddenly forgotten everything about his life hitherto—his intellect was in order but his memory was completely clouded. When he arrived at his first destination he took another ticket, travelling in this way through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Galicia, and finally, when his memory came back to him, he found himself in an asylum for the homeless in Berlin.

It is in truth the ruin of the whole Ego when a man forgets what he has lived through and experienced. It would also mean the ruin of the Ego of civilisation, the Ego of European humanity, were men to forget completely the things that were part of their historical experience, those things which have been rooted out. Spiritual Science alone can bring back the power of remembrance.

But even to men who, comparatively speaking, are kindly disposed, Spiritual Science still seems strange and foreign. One cannot read without a certain irony what a man, who is in other respects so promising, says about me as the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Great Secret, Maurice Maeterlinck⁶ seems unable to deny that the introductions to my books contain much that is reasonable. He is struck by this. But then he finds things which leave him in a state of bewilderment and of which he can make absolutely nothing.—We might vary slightly one of Lichtenberg's remarks, by saying: “When books and an individual come into collision and there is a hollow sound, this need not be the fault of the books!” But just think of it—Maurice Maeterlinck is certainly a high light in our modern culture and yet he writes the following—I quote almost word for word: ‘In the introductions to his books, in the first chapters, Steiner invariably shows himself possessed of a thoughtful, logical and cultured mind, and then, in the later chapters he seems to have gone crazy' (See note, p109). What are we to deduce from this? First chapter—thoughtful, logical, cultured; last chapter—crazy. Then another book comes out. ‘Again, to begin with, thoughtful, logical, cultured; and finally—crazy!' And so it goes on. As I have written quite a number of books I must be pretty expert at this sort of thing! According to Maurice Maeterlinck a kind of juggling must go on in my books But the idea that this happens voluntarily ... such a case has yet to be found in the lunatic asylums!

The books of writers who think one crazy are really more bewildering still The very irony with which one is bound to accept many things to-day shows how difficult it still is for men of the present age to understand genuine spiritual investigation Nevertheless such investigation will have to come. And in order that we shall not have been found wanting in the strength to bring about this deepening of the spiritual life, the Christmas Foundation Meeting was held as a beacon for the further development of the Anthroposophical Society in the direction I have indicated. The Christmas Foundation Meeting was intended, first and foremost, to inaugurate in the Anthroposophical Movement an epoch when concrete facts of the spiritual life are fearlessly set forth—as has been the case to-day and in the preceding lectures. For if the spirit needed by mankind is to find entrance, a stronger impetus is required than that which has prevailed hitherto.

It has been for me a source of real gladness that in the lectures here, given either to the public or to a smaller circle, the opportunity has been afforded me to lead a little further into the depths of spiritual life. And with this inner gladness let me express my heartfelt thanks for the cordial words addressed to me by Professor Hauffen at the beginning of this evening's session. I thank you for your welcome and for the way in which your souls have responded during my presence here. And you may rest assured that Professor Hauffen's words will remain with me as a wellspring of the thoughts which I shall constantly send you and which will be with you alike when you achieve your aims and when you are working here. Even when we are separated from one another in space we are, as Anthroposophists, together in our hearts, and this should be known and remembered. For many years I have been privileged to speak in Prague of different aspects of the spiritual life and it has always been a source of satisfaction to me. Particularly is it so on this occasion, because the demands made upon your hearts and souls have been relatively new, because this time you have had to receive with an even greater open mindedness what I had to say to you in discharging a spiritual commission. When I say ‘spiritual commission,' let us take these words to imply that in the spirit we remain together. The aim before us will be achieved if friends work together with all their hearts, if, above all, they remain united in Anthroposophical thinking, feeling and willing.

Together with my thanks, please take this as a cordial farewell—betokening no separation but rather the establishment of a spiritual communion. This feeling of communion should flow through every word that is spoken among us. Everything that is said among us should serve to unite us more and more closely. In this sense let me assure you with all my heart that my thoughts will be with you, seeking to find among you one of those places where true Anthroposophical will and the Anthroposophical stream of spiritual life are able to work. And so we will go our ways, but in the body only, remaining spiritually and in our hearts together.

• 1. Gregory VII, Pope from 1053 to 1085.
• 2. Lord Byron, 1788–1824.
• 3. Karl Marx, 1818–1883.
• 4. Helsingfors lecture course: 'The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad-Gita.' 9 lectures, May/June, 1913.
• 5. Muawiyah, Caliph in Syria from 661 to 680. Founded the dynasty of the Omayyads.
• 6. Maurice Maeterlinck on Rudolf Steiner. See Le Grand Secret, p. 253 (Bibliothèque Charpentier, Paris, 1921). The words referred to are as follows: ‘Steiner ... nous décrit les transformations successives des entités qui deviendront des hommes, et il le fait avec tant d'assurance qu'on se demande, après l'avoir suivi avec intérêt à travers des préliminaires qui dénotent un esprit très pondéré, très logique et très vaste, s'il devient subitement fou ou si l'on a affaire à un mystificateur ou à un véritable voyant. ...’

My dear Friends! The Anthroposophical Society having been founded in a new form during the recent Christmas Conference in Dornach, the teachings given in various groups of the former Anthroposophical Society are now intended to flow into what has since become the actual School of Spiritual Science. The school is intended to become a kind of center for the whole of the anthroposophical movement which is at work within the Anthroposophical Society. This School of Spiritual Science, due to the interrelationships of its most essential working groups, will certainly have its central point at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and efforts will be made naturally to seek and find ever-better formats not only within the Goetheanum, but also in extension for the friends of the anthroposophical movement all over the world who only occasionally can show up in person in Dornach. What I have to say to you during this lesson, as well as in the next esoteric lesson, must be considered to have been spoken to you, my dear friends, within the School of Spiritual Science. I want to begin, however, by mentioning a few matters concerning the constitution of the school.

Those who decide to become members of this School, after having been members of the Anthroposophical Society for two years, enter into an obliga¬tion, in the spiritual sense. When issuing a membership card for the School of Spiritual Science, the leadership of the school will always endeavor to ascertain whether the person in question is capable of taking on a spiritual obligation of this kind.

When a person becomes a member of the Anthroposophical Society, that person rightly expects to become acquainted with and to experience Anthroposophy. In a certain way they will get to know Anthroposophy. This is the very thing that has been made possible by the Christmas Foundation Conference at Dornach, for there is to be complete openness in this matter, and no particular obligations whatever will devolve upon members of the Anthroposophical Society.

Whoever enters the School of Spiritual Science as a member, however, must from then on keep in mind that the central aspect of this School of Spiritual Science is to be the source of anthroposophical life now and for some time in the future. Anthroposophical life is founded certainly on what for all times has been known as secret inner knowing or secret science. But the word secret was never intended to describe all kinds of goings on in secret circles that must not be made known to the world. Specifically, it was meant to describe what belongs not to the external surrounding world, not to what is outside the human body, but rather this use of the word secret has really always been used to explain that the content expressed in esoteric schools has its source and origin in the deeply hidden inner being of man himself. Therefore, in contradistinction, it has been called secret instead of public. Secret certainly has the meaning of the actuality of inner knowing, and it is counted as secret since it is the actuality of inner knowing in one’s profound depths, in a person’s secret inner being, which comes to the fore as revelation. What basically comes from one’s deepest inner nature loses its proper significance, its proper appreciation, indeed its proper proprietary nature, when it is profaned, when it is in some fashion bandied about in public. What always happens on the broad stage of public disclosure, you can be sure, is that these things will not be taken up with the necessary sincerity, with the necessary dignity.

It is, indeed, the first requirement laid upon those who approach esoteric schooling that they bring to it the deepest, the very deepest seriousness. This is how the School of Spiritual Science must be taken up, and this is why it requires its members to be truly genuine representatives of the anthroposophical world movement in every situation of their lives. This is the case to such an extent that the leadership of the school is obliged to exclude a member if in its opinion that member is not a representative in the right way.

This is not intended to be a tyrannical regulation, my dear friends. It is merely a regulation that arises out of the principle that freedom must be met with freedom. If the leadership of the school is to administer it in the proper manner it must be allowed to stipulate with whom it wishes to conduct the affairs and carry the content of the school. That is why it is necessary to emphasize the seriousness with which those approaching the school must truly grasp Anthroposophy as a world movement.

The school has been divided into Sections in order to meet the needs of those coming towards it, under the present circumstances of civilization, with the intention of carrying on their spiritual life within it. The teaching that I shall give during this session and the next should be seen as coming within the scope of the General Anthroposophical Section which, as well as the Education Section, I myself shall lead.

The School of Spiritual Science will then also have a section for the spoken arts with music and eurythmy which will be led by Frau Dr. Steiner, a section for medicine under the leadership of Frau Dr. Ita Wegman, and a section for the sculptural arts under the leadership of Miss Maryon. Further there will be a section for something to which scarcely any attention is paid these days, to the detriment of our whole civilization, and that is the section for the fine arts under the leadership of Herr Albert Steffen. There will also be a section for astronomy and everything connected with it under the leadership of Fraulein Dr. Vreede, and also a section for the natural sciences under the leadership of Dr. Wachsmuth.

Something else has also been established recently in response to a need, something about which little can be said as yet because it has been plunged into ferment, a fermenting element which the school intends to ensure will link itself in all honesty with the intentions of the Goetheanum. This is the section for promoting the spiritual life of young people, the section for the universal striving of today's youth, which is a part of the historical process. When observed objectively, it is perfectly clear that something new is coming into being here, although at present young people can only talk very unclearly about what it is they actually mean. To bring into clear consciousness what is for the moment still only expressed in all kinds of indeterminate feelings and the sense of something lacking, to gain a clear view of all this will be the aim of the section that I may call the section for the wisdom of youth.

In this way the School of Spiritual Science seeks to bring esoteric life to each individual as something that is an extension of today's external culture. It is something for which the world has the profoundest longing, without actually realizing that what it is seeking is the very thing that is to live in the esoteric life of our School of Spiritual Science.

We have absolutely no intention of imitating ordinary universities in any way by doing what they do in a somewhat different form. This was attempted during the period when various opinions, over which I exercised no influence, were given a free rein. It has been tried in Dornach, but from the beginning I regarded it as not being quite the correct way to go about things. Nevertheless, there is an obligation in this realm not to hinder whatever might want to break through into the light of day. But now that there has been a trial run, and people have realized that the goal cannot be reached along this route, there is no longer any need for our school in Dornach to give the impression that it wants to compete with what goes on at ordinary universities. Now our school can aim to give to humanity the very thing that ordinary education is unable to achieve; it can now become some¬thing for which human beings cannot help having the most profound longing.

This is how the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach intends to be the real esoteric center for what ought to live in the anthroposophical movement.

When I say that this school must be regarded with utmost seriousness, I immediately have to add that this very statement itself can never be taken seriously enough. So I want it to lead the way as we set out with our considerations. Those who regard the esoteric life flowing through this school merely as something that flows alongside their own life cannot be its members in the right and proper sense. Only those can be proper members of this school who are filled with truth in such a way that their life becomes intimately bound up with this spiritual life so that their whole life cannot but become intimately bound up with the esoteric teaching that flows to them from this school.

My dear friends, your assessment of this school will not be correct if you regard it as a product of arbitrary human intention. This school has been instituted by the spiritual world. It came into being through listening to what the spiritual powers who guide the world consider to be the right thing for human beings in our time.

So rather than regarding our school as a human institution, let us see in it an institution that has arisen totally out of the will of those spiritual beings who are close to the earth and who work for the welfare of mankind.

If you accept it as the earthly image of a spiritual institution you will be looking at it in the right way. Your feeling for it will be right if you take every word that is spoken within this school as being spoken by someone who is responsible to none but the spiritual powers who guide the anthroposophical movement. This school is an understanding between those spiritual powers whose authority is appropriate for the phase of evolution mankind has reached today and those human beings who seek to become members of the school.

It could be said, my dear friends, that you come face to face with the spiritual world when you become a member of this school. The more profoundly and intensely you grasp this, the more you will carry in you what the school must be, which is alone what gives it its true meaning. Those who know that the spirit itself speaks through this school will surely achieve the seriousness necessary for following with deep earnestness all that is carried on within the school.

What today we can only do in Dornach within this school will gradually be sent by suitable means to all those who have become members of the school, but meanwhile, we cannot take the fifth step after the third, but only after the fourth. As time goes on, step-by-step, intimate contact will be established between all the members, wherever they may be, and what flows through the school in Dornach.

As a beginning, my dear friends, let us turn to the very first thing that comes to meet someone who seriously sets out on the path to real inner awareness. Real inner awareness, my dear friends! We must be quite clear about the fact that the external world with which we are faced contains within it the task we have to fulfill during our physical life on earth between birth and death. We would be misunderstanding ourselves and also the gods entirely if we were to believe that we ought to bear contempt towards what comes to meet us as a task during our journey on earth between birth and death. Human beings must enter fully into the activity and work of the physical world. But what do they find there? They find beauty, magnitude, and majesty in all the wonderful formations of the mineral kingdom that also form the grounds we need in order to be capable of fulfilling our tasks on earth. They find majesty in the plant kingdom; they find what they need in the animal kingdom; and they find what is closest to them in the kingdom of physical human beings. They find all the things in the kingdoms of nature raised to a higher plane when they lift up their eyes to the clouds, to the blue sky or out to the stars, to the sun and the moon. Not to recognize beauty, magnitude, and majesty in all these things would cause human beings to stray from their true path in life.

To enter into the esoteric does not mean a repudiation of the beauty, greatness, and majesty of all that presents itself to us in life. But however far we enter into the mineral kingdom with all its wonderfully formed crystal shapes, however far we enter into the plant kingdom with all its sparkling colors from which the sunlight shines towards us out of nature, however far we go in contemplating the enchantment conjured up out of the depths of nature in the lively kingdom of the animals, and however much we marvel at the way the secrets of the world all meet in the physical human shape and form, nevertheless, all that we experience in the depths of our inner being we do not find in these realms of form and color, nor do we find it in these kingdoms of the world in all their sparkling, bubbling life. In the end the human being stands in this world and says, “I sense the magnitude, the beauty, and the majesty of all the forms taking shape and the colors unfolding out there, but whatever it is that I myself am must have its origin in another world.”

When the human being feels the beauty, magnitude, and majesty of the physical-sensory world and feels that he cannot find there the best of what he himself is, then he will be drawn more and more toward that place, where specifically all esoteric insight must come from. He will be drawn toward that abyss, only on the other side of which lies what a person can have of his ancient stand, his ancient source, his ancient wellspring.¹ He will be drawn to that abyss, where he certainly must gaze on the boundary between the sensory world and the spiritual world; he will be drawn to that abyss, to what is meant for him as a bridge for crossing over into a wholly other world, to the exit point, to the threshold of inner awareness, and only to where the spiritual world lies.

Moreover, specifically what I have to impart to you my dear friends, are the communications of the gestalt that in the esoteric has always been identified as the Guardian of the Threshold. There stands this exalted gestalt, a being, you will learn, from whom entry is obtained, a being that certainly is not less real than a physical person upon the earth, but who far surpasses the reality of the physical human being on earth.

But whoever initially merely in grappling with and feeling into the esoteric, with human nature unencumbered by prejudice, allows the communications to come forth, such a person must then feel how this Guardian of the Threshold stands there, exhorting, admonishing concerning what the seeker after actual inner awareness should experience, when he really does step into the actuality of inner awareness.

Why does the Guardian of the Threshold stand there? He stands there because true awareness can only be achieved when we approach rightfully and well-prepared, with a fully internalized open-minded demeanor and a true striving for the actuality of inner awareness. There is nothing theoretical about truly striving for actually awareness. A true striving for actually knowing is only achieved if the soul raises itself above everything offered by the sense-perceptible world.

Those who approach this actuality of knowing too soon, unprepared and without the proper demeanor, will not achieve it in the right manner. They will harm both themselves and the world. A true striving for actual knowing is present to a high degree in those who seek a real path into the spiritual world, such as that which will gradually be opened up by the three classes of the School of Spiritual Science. This is also the case, though more on the level of the soul, for those who merely want to receive information about the spiritual world. There must be at least a glimmer of what the initiate experiences on meeting the Guardian of the Threshold.

It is about this experience that we will now speak. Those who receive these impartations and allow them to work on their souls with fitting earnestness will find, by again and again going over and practicing what they hear, by inwardly experiencing what they hear, the path that in reality leads them across this threshold and into the spiritual world. So now, my dear friends, let us bring before our souls what it is that the voice of the earnest Guardian of the Threshold makes us aware of, if we would jump over from the semblance of knowledge on this side of the world to the true inner knowing on the other side.

There he stands with his admonishing gaze. There he speaks about the world of the senses’ beauty and grandeur and sublimity. There he also speaks about the person not being able to find in this beautiful, this grand, this majestic world what he recognizes as his fullest worth, his unique individuality. There this Guardian of the Threshold draws our attention across over the abyss looming to the left and to the right of the Threshold, there he draws our attention across into another realm, into the realm of spirit. There however deepest darkness rules initially. The person must acquire the notion that what there bestirs itself in him only as deepest darkness through the impressions of the sensory world, that there lies the ancient wellspring, the ancient source, and the ancient stance of his own intrinsic essence.

The Guardian of the Threshold says something like this, translated from the spirit language he speaks, when a person approaches his earnest countenance:

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness;
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence, the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit;
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

And from darknesses clarifies itself
(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),

The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.
And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word:
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

My dear friends, after the Guardian of the Threshold has drawn the seeker's attention to the tremendous contrast that exists between what our eyes can see in the realm of the senses before we encounter the Guardian, and what we can surmise from the dark recesses that lie on the other side of the threshold, in which the source and origin of our own being can be sought, he then allows the seeker to glimpse what awaits him when he makes himself capable of living within the light that must first brighten up and clarify itself out of the darknesses from that side of the abyss.

Then a second word resounds from the Guardian of the Threshold, which I will write down and bring with me next time. This second word now indicates what the seeker must expect when he has crossed the threshold and formed within his own inner being, now lit up, an organ with which he can leave the darkness and approach what the Guardian of the Threshold says at this moment:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

The Guardian draws attention to the wide expanse of existence-awareness where being is experienced in light, and to another expanse of existence-awareness, where in time's onward march, the powers of creation hold sway from epoch to epoch. Then attention is drawn to the depths of the intrinsically human heart-sensitivity, where the whole world is revealed as though in a mirror. By drawing attention to these three worlds, the world of space, the world of time, and the world of the heart's depths, there can resound from the world shaping powers the eternal admonishing word of existence-awareness, “O man, know yourself!”²

After this the person must be shown his inner nature. But the inner nature of a person is not only within the person’s inner nature; the human inner nature in all the world. What we carry in our inner nature directly comes forth and takes shape in the external world ether. Oh, the most secret thoughts, most secrete feelings and desires and stirrings of will, they come forth at the same time in the world ether and take on fully-formed shapes, so that in the external world we see in the shapes, in fully-formed creatures, just what we most certainly are.

Also added to the observation of what we really are, there resounds then the voice of the Guardian of the Threshold, making clear to us in this manner who we are. Why is the abyss really there, this abyss that stretches between the sensory world and the spirit world? The abyss is there that out of it rise those forces of our inner nature that will not allow us to cross over the threshold. Such forces are there in our inner nature. They would stop us, hold us back, not allow us to come to true inner awareness across the Threshold. Such forces are there in our thinking; such forces are there in our feeling; such forces are there in our willing.

When we merely have an inkling of them, they are formless.³ When we observe them, behold them, these hindering and hemming-in powers in our thinking, feeling, and willing that register themselves in the world-ether, then they appear as malformed animals. And certainly, nobody knows himself who cannot observe them in this significant form as malformed animals, which the person out of his own inner nature draws out and sees as hinderances, impediments for transitioning across the Threshold. The moment eventually must come in life, in which the person places before his eyes the images that live as hindering powers in his thinking, feeling, and willing. We must not allow ourselves to give in to any illusions about this. In ordinary consciousness one is not normally aware of what a person is, and one does not take seriously what a person is. In picture-form, in truthful-form the Guardian of the Threshold brings this to the person’s awareness.

These are the words with which he clarifies how the forms are, how they come to be engraved in the etheric through the counter-striving forms in our willing, feeling, and thinking. A person must someday shudder before these forms that he inscribes in the world ether, and then he will begin to feel just what he has to overcome in order to penetrate to true inner awareness.

The Guardian of the Threshold speaks, clarifying the nature of the beasts that rise up as forms in human thinking, feeling, and willing:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin;
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
In your fire of knowing it must be tamed.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

Only when a person in a shudder has beheld the images of the counter-striving powers in thinking, only then by beholding these negatives within, only then will a person acquire the strength to enter the true field of inner awareness. If a person does not have the will to observe in himself in the images of the three beasts, living there as the fear of knowing, as hatred of knowing, and as doubts about knowing, such a person will not come to inwardly knowing himself. He will not come to inwardly knowing the world, whoever hesitates there, shuddering in this manner to gaze upon himself.

So come into being by impressing once again the threefold beasts placed before you, before your souls, my brothers and sisters, as the Guardian speaks in clarification:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin;
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
In your fire of knowing it must be tamed.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

How the person gets these wings, how the person finds the strength to subdue these three, will be the content of the next lesson, on Saturday at five o'clock.

When these words in such a descriptive-solemn way have been presented to the person concerning his awareness of himself, when they have rung forth, then once again will attention be drawn, as in a perspective, to what stands there expectantly, in order to fulfill the word, “O Man, know yourself!” The first part, however, can only be completed by observing the beast’s three forms, which is the additional content of the next lesson.

Then, once again, the Guardian of the Threshold calls out:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

• 1. seinen Urstand, Ursprung, Urquell
• 2. O, du Mensch, erkenne dich selbst. This is in the second person singular familiar, spoken as to a close and dearly-loved family member. Mensch here translates as adult individual responsible human being. The word Mann is a perfectly good German word, but is not used here.
• 3. hindernden und hemmenden

My dear Friends! The day before yesterday we considered the first part of what we can call the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. I said that this encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold must be taken with much more than ordinary seriousness. One should be clear about this, for unless a person develops the feelings and empathic findings that accompany the impartations, then most certainly the person cannot achieve the reality of inner awareness. A certain sort of inner awareness certainly can also be held by a person without these unsettling experiences of personal self-knowledge which the passage into the spiritual world is able to give. That which is obtained without this inward unsettling experience, however, is not true inner knowing. Everything we can learn through our senses, and even what we can achieve with ordinary thinking, can at most yield knowledge of things that lie outside the human being; it yields nothing about the human being as such. This is because by his very nature the human being is supersensible. Whatever we can perceive of the human being with our senses, well, that is no more than his outer appearance. Whenever you encounter a human being, my dear friends, you should have the feeling that what you are seeing is no more than a picture of the true being of the person. In actual fact the true being of a person is something extraordinarily comprehensive, and we only gain an impression of what this true human being is once we try to reach some clarity about a number of things that appear simple.

Consider only the fact, my dear brothers and sisters, that certain manifestations of illness in the human being have to be counteracted with what we call poison. This simple, ordinary fact is actually a tremendous puzzle. Why must poison be administered to human beings so that they can be cured of certain illnesses? What is poison? Ask the fascinating shiny black berry of the deadly nightshade, ask the belladonna, such a striking creature, what it actually is, my dear friends!

Looking at the wide variety of many-colored plants that we can use as food without harm, we realize that they are the plants that thrive in ordinary sunlight, with the spirit that lives in sunlight. For just as we have a body that is spirit-infused, just so is all that is physical spirit-infused by sunlight. However, plants that do us no harm when we eat them absorb only the etheric forces. The moment a plant begins to absorb the astral forces that normally hover like a mist above the plants, it becomes poisonous. Belladonna sucks astral forces into its shiny black berries and is therefore poisonous. What does this mean? When we eat belladonna, we take in something that is astral. We bear within us astral nature anyway, since we possess an astral body, so we have within us something that constantly produces poison. And our ego produces even more poison than our astral body.

We can now go on to say that our physical and our etheric body bear within them the processes of building-up. However, if these were the only forces active within us, we would remain permanently unconscious. If the budding, sprouting processes were to gain the upper hand, we would remain unconscious, for we owe our consciousness to the fact that our astral body and our ego-organization carry out breaking-down processes within us. A space for the spirit is created in us by the way the physical and etheric processes are broken down by our astral body and our ego. There would be no spirit in us if breaking-down forces were not constantly at work. When the astral body and the ego are too weak to do the breaking-down sufficiently strongly, excessive growth arises in the physical and etheric bodies. When the astral body and the ego are too weak, we sometimes have to support them by administering poisons from outside, poisons that can break down what the astral body and ego cannot.

What does the physician do in certain cases? He says that in the sick person the spiritual element is too weak. The ego and the astral body are not carrying out the process of breaking-down sufficiently strongly. The physician asks for help from outside so that more breaking-down can take place. He seeks out plants that are more spiritual than others, for poisonous plants are toxic simply because they are more spiritual than others. This alone goes to show what great mysteries lie hidden in human existence and in the human being's relationship with the natural world. Only by approaching the spirit can we bring these mysteries to light.

From what I have said so far you will sense that there is something almost uncanny about getting to know the true mysteries of the spirit, for we discover something that is creative in the spiritual world and yet destructive in the physical world. We cannot grasp the spirit in all its reality until we seek it where it expresses itself through breaking-down, through destruction in the physical world. The moment we approach the threshold to the spiritual world we find ourselves power¬fully confronted by the forces of destruction. Anyone who would prefer not to become familiar with the forces of breaking-down, the forces of destruction, cannot in reality enter the spiritual world.

My dear brothers and sisters, when we look at the physical human being here on the earth, we find that the physical organism, quite by itself, forms a totality, and it is because of this that thinking, feeling, and willing also form a totality. You cannot think without there being a certain amount of willing present. Merely unfolding a thought involves some willing. You cannot will without also thinking. You cannot feel without some thinking. In ordinary consciousness thinking, feeling, and willing are intermingled. When we say we are thinking, it merely means that we are thinking most strongly, while our feeling remains more in the subconscious and our willing entirely so. When we say we are feeling, it means that we are feeling most strongly while thinking and willing are reduced. Every stirring of soul in the human being always involves thinking, feeling, and willing together.

By being bound together like this, each of these three, thinking, feeling, and willing, is weaker than when standing alone. Our thinking is weakened rather than strengthened by willing. Our willing is weakened rather than strengthened by thinking. Our feeling is weakened rather than strengthened by thinking.

Were we to think without any willing for the merest moment within our physical body, were the power of thinking, as it lives in the widths of the world, to fill us for the merest moment without being accompanied by the forces of feeling and willing, in this moment we as physical people would be totally paralyzed. Were we also just for a moment as physical people merely feeling, without it being accompanied by thinking and willing, because feeling is to some extent tremendously lively, we would be knotted up, we would have extreme bouts of cramping. Were we also just for a moment as physical people merely willing, without it being accompanied by thinking, we would be consumed by fiery fevers.

Before we descended through birth, taking on physical-sensory existence in the womb, before that we as people were so constructed that thinking, feeling, and willing each stood separately, each by itself. There, however, our surrounding was the spiritual world. There we could endure this separation. If we would become at all familiar with the actuality of inner knowing, we must develop an intuitive understanding about the experience of being outside the physical world, outside an earthly body, our being split apart in regard to thinking, feeling, and willing.

There is a great meaningful moment when someone steps across the threshold of the spiritual world and meets the souls of deceased people. In this moment, he must be sufficiently prepared, that coming forth from the very depths of his inner being in his heart he says the words, “These are the truly living!” A person says it when really stepping into the spiritual world, “These are the truly living!” For what lives in them above all else is their thinking.

Yes, this thinking begins to live, when we step through the portal of death. Yes, this thinking also lived before we descended into earthly life. There thinking lived! And we behold thinking correctly in physical living on earth only when we say to ourselves, “I have taken clearly to mind, that before me is a corpse.” A corpse without soul, as such, cannot be. It can only be the remnant of a living person. A corpse cannot arise out of itself. In spite of being physically embodied, it does not have any natural physical possibility of intrinsic existence, but rather hearkens back to the living that preceded it.

By unfolding my thinking in myself, I can think just how one thinks as an earthly person, namely as a sort of corpse. All earthly thinking is a corpse, a corpse of the thinking that was so very much alive before we descended into our earth-bound existence. Our physical body is the coffin into which our thinking was laid when we descended into the physical-sensory world.

Without losing the ability for tucking¹ into earthly life, without losing one’s connection to earthly life, to that end a person must be able to say honestly and sincerely, “As a physical, earthly human being you yourself are a coffin for your thinking, for when you descended from the supersensible world to the world of the senses, in this moment thinking died and is now the corpse of living thinking that dwelt in you before you descended to earth-existence.”

Our will also does not live. It will only live when we have passed through the portal of death. Willing is a seed. Thinking is a corpse. Willing is an embryo of what rises up in us when we stride through the portal of death.

What I have just said must be clear to one who delves in the esoteric. If it is, he will have an inkling of the way in which the whole of the person’s soul life will be transformed when he truly does enter into the world of actual inner knowing. He can only enter if he subdues the three beasts I spoke about last time, the beasts that are brought to light in the set of meditation-phrases I gave you. I will present these meditation-phrases to you at the end of the lesson, as I didn't write them on the blackboard last time, and you can all copy them. Just now, however, we will look back upon ourselves in how our willing, our feeling, and our thinking appear in picture-form in imagination, which allows these three beasts to appear when our inner life meets and manifests itself in the world outside, a world with which we are most certainly always inwardly conjoined.

Therefore, any person who now steps forth along the esoteric path must become clear, that when he stands at the beginning, he must make at least a rudimentary attempt to separate thinking, feeling, and willing from one another. Otherwise, the person simply cannot come to the actuality of inner knowing. And the proper protection, which can come into being for a person in the danger of thinking, feeling, and willing disconnected from one another, that specific protection will be granted to a person when he takes up honorably what Anthroposophy has to offer.

Anthroposophy forms thoughts so that the person can become strong for supersensible awareness. Also, just in coming upon supersensible-world communications, if a person even starts to consider them, the person must be strong. Thinking is strong just because we have to exert ourselves in thinking about understanding the supersensible world.

What is the position of those who do not want to reach out to the supersensible world, of those who do not want to know anything about anthroposophical spiritual science? They are in the position of their brain being unable to keep up with their etheric body. The moment such people fill themselves with thoughts that have been presented in Anthroposophy, their etheric body runs out of the head, out of the brain. All that remains is only what the physical organism can think. From a higher point of view one can only pity those who cannot reach out to an anthroposophical understanding of the world.

On the other hand, my dear brothers and sisters, it is certainly so, that however much thinking, feeling, and willing become independent in the currents of anthroposophical awareness, that this in turn also links a person properly with the forces of the world. Therefore, it naturally follows that the person so orients his soul forces, so that with his thinking, with his feeling, and with his willing he finds the way that must be walked, by means of which thinking, feeling, and willing can enter into the spiritual world in the right way.

A further admonition, appended to those that were given in the last lesson, therefore a further admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold deals with how we should position thinking, feeling and willing, so that we can step into the spiritual world in the right way. We must ourselves be clear about the nature of thinking, feeling, and willing in order to understand what the Guardian of the Threshold is saying.

The Guardian of the Threshold will first show how corpse-like our souls are, namely the shimmering-sheen, the semblance-image¹⁷¹ all thinking is that we develop in customary awareness in the physical body. A semblance of the world is this thinking, just as a corpse is the semblance of living, no longer living itself. Within this thinking that we have in customary life in the physical body, within this thinking is not our true self. It manifests itself there just as minimally as does the truly living manifest itself in a corpse. As soon as we have the courage, however, really to say to ourselves, “Yes, thinking that is developed from morning to evening in physical living, this thinking is mere semblance, I will become familiar with it as semblance, I will dive down beneath this appearance.” Then will we become ever clearer and clearer, that the physical body gives us a sort of thinking that is only dead semblance. The etheric body alone begins to give us the sort of thinking that goes out beyond appearance.

Whoever correctly feels that earth-bound thinking is mere semblance, only the corpse of what before being earth-bound is spirited-soulfulness, that person feels himself, by and by, only as ether-being.

Then bit by bit we become aware that in us is the spirit, the spirit that in ordinary awareness hides itself. We can, however, in no other way approach this spirit, unless in the same moment in which the appearance of thinking leaves us, in which the thinking so to say dies off in us, unless in this blink of an eye we begin to honor what now emerges in us as spirited ether-being, as ether-body.

Yes, my dear brothers and sisters, when we look at the plants, the stones, the animals, or even the physical human being, none of this withdraws from us, even if we remain sober and dispassionate and are unable to admire² nature properly. That ceases when a person crosses over into the spiritual world, for then the etheric immediately withdraws itself if a person is unable to admire it, to honor it. In the blink of an eye, when I can say to myself that thinking is mere appearance, when I have the will to dive down into this semblance, just then I must begin to admire, to really honor this ether-being.

To this end the Guardian of the Threshold speaks the words for self-awareness: [The lines were written on the blackboard.]

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

This is the earnest admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold in regard to our attitude toward thinking. We must pause at the words honor and guiding beings [These two words were underlined.], as thinking, recognizing itself as mere appearance, must feel itself admiring, honoring. And the person feels, finds with empathy, what he then lives into, experiences as his ether-being, as something that leads outward from the earth into the reaches of the cosmos. Only then does a person know, as we depart from the physical, my dear friends, going over to the finer etheric, leaving the robust, forceful, solid physicality we are accustomed to, only then does a person know how to find the passageway to the finer, more intimate etheric. We must, if we would lead these thoughts over beyond their dead grave-like physical existence, over to where they are finer than in physical existence, over to where they themselves are alive, then we must choose a cadence for such a mantra, a cadence that is trochaic, that begins each line with emphasis, with accent.

We must be clear about something, my dear friends, that what we embody in words the spirit merely descends into, rests, and reverberates initially at the Threshold. The word in our modern civilization has already become so physical, that it is like a corpse. Only when we feel the words embedded in rhythm, just as human being’s stuff of blood and air circulates in rhythm, then we begin to feel the word carrying us over into the spiritual world. Just as we literally feel blood circulating spirit in us, if we make such a strength-filled mantric maxim come alive in us, then we feel its rhythm, and feel carried by its rhythm into the spiritual world, just as we feel our life borne by, carried in the rhythm of our blood.

The admonition about thinking which the Guardian of the Threshold speaks to human beings must be trochaic.

[The word “trochaic” was written beside the first verse of the mantra; the trochaic rhythm was marked at the beginning of all seven lines with a macron and a breve and the verse was spoken with the corresponding emphasis.]

Lōok ŭpon your web of thoughts:
Wōrld ŏf semblance you experience,
Sēlf-ăwareness hides from you;
Plūnge bĕneath dissemblance:
Ēthĕr being whirls in you;
Sēlf-ăwareness, it should honor
Yōur ŏwn spirit’s guiding beings.

Felt this with empathy, again and again allowing the soul to be stirred into activity, forgetting all remnants of earthly life, living only in the words and rhythm, this carries ordinary human thinking up out of the physical world and into the etheric world. Used in addition to all the other meditations you have, my dear brothers and sisters, such a maxim, if you make use of it every now and then, as often as you would, is just what can carry you out of thinking into the spiritual world.

Moving on from a person’s thinking to feeling, the matter is quite different. Thinking is pure semblance, a real corpse, dead. It did live before we descended into the physical world. With feeling it is somewhat different, for we regard feelings just as we regard dreaming, for feelings are no more intensive than dreams. The feeling person dreams, but in dreaming something of real existence certainly lives, there semblance and substance mingle, just as in our approach to feelings.

But we also feel that we certainly do not want to plunge beneath this existence that begins in us with feeling. We like the appearance of thinking, which lives in the physical world, ever present. In this manner we never come to true existence, true reality. We must have the courage to dive down below what appears as existence. We must have the courage to place ourselves fully within feeling, into the inmost parts of our soul, and then, through the semblance in which we have become used to living in our thinking, through this semblance, something of reality will begin to emerge. Then we become aware of world forces surfacing in us that otherwise are around us in the world.

At first, we are told to honor, when we want to ascend from the semblance of thinking to its true reality. Now we are to begin being sensitive in feeling, we are to begin directly being considerate in feeling, for in doing this we come upon the living powers of existence within ourselves.

This is the second, which as an instruction for feeling the Guardian of the Threshold places before us:

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

This is the second admonition, the admonition concerning the guidance of feelings, the second coming from the earnest Guardian. [The second stanza was now written on the blackboard.]

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well

Inherent in soul the powers of life.

And if we should go on finding through feeling the passageway out of semblance to substance, then we must go beyond the etheric into the astral. Then we must exert a steady force, as if climbing a mountain that becomes ever steeper. To do this we must point to the simple content of the words in which the progressive force of rhythm unfolds. It must be iambic, entrained in the warning words of the Guardian concerning the experience of feelings. And it is iambic. [Iambic was written beside the second stanza of the mantra and indicated at the beginning of all seven lines with breves and macrons, while the verse was spoken with corresponding emphasis.]

Ĕmbrāce your stream of feelings:
Whĕre sēmblance and substance mingle,
Ăwāre self leans toward semblance;
Sŏ plūnge beneath dissemblance:
Ănd wōrld soul forces are in you;
Ăwāre self should consider well
Ĭnhērent in soul the powers of life.

In this manner should we feel the rhythm, in this manner making the content of the words come alive within us, plunging properly down into feeling and striding properly along the pathway into the spiritual world. For the simple meaning of the words cannot yet do this by itself. We must bring our whole soul nature to a true perception, to a sensing, to a feeling of the rhythm in the mantric maxim.

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

Still deeper we plunge down out of the apparent sensory shine into real substance, into the world’s true reality, when we descend into willing.

At this point, so that we can move along the right pathway, we must be able to hear the Guardian’s word that he speaks at the Threshold in admonition. The will is the strongest force in human soul life, even here on earth. But we cannot feel it because we only experience willing, so to speak, only as if sleeping. We are awake, really awake only in thinking. We are dreaming in feeling. We are sleeping in willing.

We must ever and again think over, how first we fasten onto a decisi0n and then have it in thoughts, and then we see it again as a completed act. What lies in between, the crossing over in willing, is for customary awareness just as unknown to us as what we experience in spirit between falling asleep and awakening. Just as feeling is submerged in dreams, just so is willing submerged in sleep. But in this willing we put to sleep true existence, the genuine reality of existence. Just as we must increasingly learn to draw up from the depths of sleep whatever we experience there, so must we learn to draw up from the depths of the will what we experience in it.

That is the third admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, the admonition concerning the will, that we should find the right ways into the spiritual world. Then, when we can really heed this admonition, we become filled with what is spiritual existence in ourselves.

Yes, my dear brothers and sisters, we experience that we have blood in us, that we have satisfaction through eating, that we have semblance of thoughts, that we have dream-like feelings. But in our ordinary awareness we do not experience how spirit streams through us, just as our blood does. When we heed what the Guardian speaks to us as the third admonition, then we can become aware in us of willing, then we can experience how the spirit in us rules. In lifting up a hand or an arm, I have willed. What has happened? Substance has been burned in me. A lively process of burning has drawn to a conclusion in the act of willing. This normally remains unknown. Each time, when through our own body a determination of willing is occurring, a lively process of burning is there. The chemist and physicist even say a burning process. But just as minimally as the human body is a mineral, but rather living and thoroughly beset by spirit, this is no ordinary fire in the human body, but rather living spirit-infused fire. This is no fire such as one sees in an ordinary candle; what is in the person is no combining of carbon with oxygen. Just as the person is ensouled, so are all the processes of nature in him ensouled. Whoever speaks of processes within a person from the standpoint of external processes of nature, such a one talks without knowing the truth of the matter, for no process of external nature settles down inside the person. Something quite else sets to work in the person. Within the skin of a person is no nature. Within the skin of a person is the metamorphosis of nature, the completed spiritualization of nature. Nothing remains in us as it is externally in nature. We could not live for the single blink of an eye if anything of the sort remained as it is externally in nature.

In order to present willing to ourselves, we must grasp a picture. We must use a picture so that a lively imagination illustrating willing will come alive in us. Therefore, place walking in your mind’s eye. Walking is normally quite unremarkable in living. The greatest mysteries actually take place as a person is taking a single step. Now concentrate on this, as one walks, the arms are stirred into moving and fire sprays forth out of the person.

A person will find, if focusing his attention in a lively way on how he flames, he will find the connection to what he as a willing being is in truth. He will become acquainted with himself, if he has the courage to focus in preparation on this imagination, with himself as a fiery flaming willing being. Then we will have grasped the creative might of the world, going beyond our individual existence within the skin, expanding ourselves to world-selves, which we as human beings are, and feeling ourselves in union with the whole world as willing-beings.³ But we have to learn to stay there, becoming willing’s flaming within the world’s fire, fire within fire.

About this the Guardian of the Threshold speaks concerning our willing. And he speaks of the thrust of the will, as the will thrusts us into the full actual reality.

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

These are the words, inwardly and thoroughly felt, that will guide our willing properly in entering the spiritual world. [The third verse was now written on the blackboard.]

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

We have to develop honor in ascending from thinking to its reality. We have to develop soul consideration in ascending through to feeling from semblance to existence. Here [in the first stanza] in the next-to-last line there is “honor”. For feeling there is “consider well”. Here [in the third stanza] we similarly now have “grasp”. [The words consider well and grasp were underlined.] Grasping, therefore already close to existence, within existence, appears here in the third stanza for willing.

There is a similar progression that we are made aware of: guiding beings for thinking, powers of life for feeling, world-maker-might for willing. That is the progression. [The words powers of life and world-maker-might were underlined.]

But as I said fire in fire, reality that that is in all, in the reality of this all itself, that is what the Guardian of the Threshold informs us about. We must stand within this more firmly than we did when we descended in thinking from the rough robust semblance through to more intimate reality, where it was trochaic rhythm, macron then breve, stressed then unstressed. In feeling we have to ascend, as if climbing a hill, where it is iambic rhythm, breve then macron, unstressed then stressed. Here in willing we must stand within it differently. There it will be spondaic, macron then another macron, stressed and stressed. [The word spondaic was written beside the third verse of the mantra; the spondaic rhythm was marked at the beginning of all seven lines with two macrons, while the verse was spoken with the corresponding emphasis.]

Lēt reīgn in you the thrust of will:
Īt clīmbs from all apparent being
Wīth aūtonomous existence well-equipped;
Tūrn tō this throughout your life:
Fīlled īt is with world-spirit-might;
Yoūr aūtonomous existence, it should grasp
Wōrld-māker-might into spirit-I.

The stark emphasis on the two first syllables in each line we should feel rhythmically. We should win steadfastness as the Guardian directs to us the third admonition.

And so, my dear brothers and sisters, we should become aware how this word of the Guardian guides us specifically to actual inner knowing. While this Guardian-word has initially made us aware how we have thinking, feeling and willing in us in the images of the three beasts, the Guardian of the Threshold guides us further, about how we can strengthen this thinking, how we can strengthen this feeling, how we can strengthen this willing, so that they grow, rise, and cross over⁴ the animality, get beyond⁵ these three beasts, so that the soul grows wings, as depicted in the prior session’s mantra, in order to cross over into the spiritual world.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

But the Guardian in due course gives us in the last mantra, which I then pass on,⁶ the instruction about what we should do to become stronger, so that we grow wings to awareness.

Take it up, my dear brothers and sisters, take into your meditation what is given in these three mantras. This is what the classes should lead to, these classes that have been established since the Christmas Conference, that the esoteric might flow⁷ through the anthroposophical movement. Take up into your meditation these admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold. It is not I who speak them; I speak them for the Guardian of the Threshold, who through these words will speak to all of you.⁸ For this school is an institution of spiritual life itself.

Therefore, let us take up these words as those of the Guardian himself. Then they will be for us strengthening and invigorating words, coming to us after the harrowing effect of the last lesson, concerning which in looking ahead they step forth now in strengthening of the soul. A person must first be knocked down and away from what he grasps in the sensory world, in order to remain stout and strong in the spiritual world, in order to gain wings, to be carried across the abyss, which leads into the brilliance which streams out of the abyss, out of the darkness, out of which our humanity is born.

To this end the Guardian speaks the words, in order to lift us up in turn out of this harrowing:

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

And as the Guardian spoke this word, he comes himself, infusing rhythm again and again on those words, to teach us in perspective about what we should attain, about what beckons us from the spiritual world across the Threshold.

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:
There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

• 1. tüchtig
• 171. Scheingebilde
• 2. verehren, which is stronger than just ehren or bewundern (to honor), but in English to honor is sufficient.
• 3. Wollende
• 4. hinüberwachsen
• 5. hinauskommen
• 6. This seems to be in the conjunctive tense, das ich dann übergeben werde.
• 7. fließe, which again is in the conjunctive tense, it might, can, may, ought to, could, should flow.
• 8. Euch is the second person pleural, no longer capitalized since the 1996 spelling reform except in formal situations, as here.

When, out of that existence which is called the pre-earthly, the human being first grows through the germinal state into the physical-earthly life, we then see how in his physical existence the spiritual nature, which is at first hidden, begins to assert itself Out of the physical body; how the child sleeps, as it were, into the physical-earthly world. We see that the life of the child in its relation with the surrounding world is still a kind of dreaming; that it only gradually awakes. Threefold, however, do we find is that which the child manifests at especially conspicuous points in the stages of this awaking. Indeed, something of this threefoldness is observed with that intimate joy, that devoted love, with which one who is in the full sense a human being always observes a child. But the full significance of this threefoldness really becomes clear to one only when it is possible through spiritual science to observe the spiritual life in the physical-corporeal existence. This threefoldness is the learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to think. You know that the human being passes through this threefoldness in an age like the springtime of life. Such is this meaningful order of occurrence. We shall soon see why it must be this meaningful succession. It can, as a matter of fact, be different, but the succession according to nature is just this.

Learning to walk is something which, in an utterly one-sided manner, points to a series of things that the child achieves at the same time. The child enters into the world in such a way that it is in a state of equilibrium utterly unlike that in which it later moves about in the world. There is associated with this at the same time the right use of the arms and the right placing of the human organism in a posture suitable for man in his relation with the world, in the capacity for movement in relation with the world suitable for the human being, in the capacity for movement suited to the human being in the earthly existence. This is what the child must first learn. Out of what the human being acquires in the mobility of his organism there proceeds what adapts him to the equilibrium of the solid, the fluid, the gaseous. In all of this lies the basis for something else. While the human being is undertaking all this activity—learning to walk, learning balance, learning to use the arms and hands and fingers—these movements, which take place in his entire system, are working upward into the system which is the basis for human speech. This tenses the muscles, causes the blood to flow, exercises an influence upon the etheric body, works over into those physical, etheric, astral organs of breathing, proceeds further exerting a certain plastic activity in the brain. One might say that it passes beyond into those organs which, out of the inner human being, bring about speaking through imitation of the surroundings. Language is the transposition of movement and transposition of balance. One who can bring reality into cognition through beholding the actuality of the soul-spiritual sees how dexterity—not the achieved, but the striving that the child must exercise in order to gain the dexterity practiced by the hand in grasping—works onward into the melodious element of language. What is rhythm in language comes to expression in the manner in which the feet are set down in the movement of walking. It is of much significance to observe whether the child, in learning to walk, steps on the heel, the ball of the foot, or the toes. Out of speech there grows what darts forth out of the human being as childish thinking. Walking, speaking, thinking,—all of this evolves out of that dim, dreamy state of consciousness. When the human being is born, and is not yet able to do these things, the force is none the less within the child in the last after-effects of its presence in the pre-earthly existence. Spiritual science can show us how this exists in the pre-earthly life. The earliest sounds of language are not such as manifest thinking, but proceed out of bodily comfort or discomfort.

How did walking, speaking, thinking appear in the pre-earthly life? Thinking, as it flows out of the child,—one who observes the manifestation of this thinking, as he traces it backward, finds that it disappears in an indefinite darkness. It emerges again in the very last period before the earthly birth. There one sees the human spirit-soul being in spiritual intercourse with that host of Beings described in my Occult Science as Angels. This is an intercourse which may be described by saying that thoughts are not being conceived and expressed abstractly, but that a living stream of thought is flowing here and there from one Being to another: there is living intercourse with the Angels. Out of what has flowed into the human soul in the form of a force, there develops something which is slept through, as it were, during the germinal life but later becomes manifest as the force of thinking, conceiving. This we possess in order to enter rightly into intercourse with human beings. Just think what we should be if we were not thinking beings, what we should be as human beings together! All that we are as human beings together results from the fact that we are thinking beings. Here on this earth we mutually understand one another in the relation of man to man by means of the thinking which we express in speech. This manner in which we understand one another here by means of thinking,—this we have acquired out of the pre-earthly intercourse with the Angels. This intercourse which we there practice with the Angels can be practiced also with other human beings who are there in the pre-earthly existence. This takes the form of direct speaking in thoughts. Loftier, however, is the intercourse with the hierarchy of the Angels, since this affords not only satisfaction for the soul but a force which reappears in the thinking that the child acquires in the third stage of his earthly life.

Let us consider now the second stage, that of language. This is not so completely bound up with the sense-nerve system as is thinking. Speaking is bound up with the breast system, man's rhythmic system, with that which comes to expression in breathing, in blood circulation. When that which there struggles out of the child, imitating in language the outer world, is traced back to the pre-earthly life, we find that these forces are acquired out of intercourse he is permitted to experience during the pre-earthly existence with the second hierarchy, that of the Archangels, those Beings who rule over peoples, Beings with this responsibility for the very reason that they have the relation with human beings which we have just described. These forces acquired by the human being in relation with the Archangels sink down into night and come again to manifestation in the forces of the earthly life of speech, by means of which we have mutual understanding with other human beings. Without language, what should we be as human beings in mutual association if we could not pour forth in the coarser vibration of the air, which manifest speech, the ether vibrations of thought? That our rhythmic system becomes the bearer of a denser manifestation,—this force we receive from the Hierarchy of the Archangels. And thus can we follow this process as we go back to the pre-earthly existence; we can say not only in abstract ways that man lives there among spiritual Beings, but can declare in an entirely specific manner what this or that class of Beings has bestowed upon us for the life on earth. We thank these spiritual Beings—that is, we place ourselves in a right relation with these Beings—when we say: For my thinking, I thank the Angels; for language, I thank the Archangels.

Let us go back now to the first thing that the child learns: to walk, learning a balanced posture. There is more connected with this than is usually thought. Connected with it is the bringing about by the ego of a specific physical process which changes man from a creeping to a walking being. It is the ego that erects the human being; the astral body that is at work within the feeling for speech in the erect being; the etheric body that permeates all of this with the force of thinking. But all of these work into the physical body. When we consider the animal, which has its back parallel with the surface of the earth, its action, its walking, its behavior—everything that proceeds out of the astral—is utterly unlike these things in man, who is a being with volition acting out of his upright, vertical nature. What comes about in man, taking place in the ego, astral body, etheric body,—all of this is in the physical body a sort of combustion process. Here is a point where our physical science, if it was desirous of fulfilling itself, would be able to discover its union with Anthroposophy. It must be said that the combustion processes in man are altogether different from those in the animal. When the flame of the organic being works horizontally, it destroys what comes out of conscience; there cannot work into this what is derived from the moral out of conscience. The fact that, in the case of the human being, these processes are streamed through by the conscience is due to the fact that the flame of volition in man is perpendicular to the earth. Within this striking in of the moral, of the nature of conscience, the child places himself just as into the external posture of balance. Together with the learning to walk, there darts into man the moral human nature—indeed, the religious permeation of the nature of man. These are truly lofty forces which are there at work when the child passes over from the creeping to the walking movement. These forces, if we follow them back through the darkness of the child's consciousness, lead us to a still loftier association of man with the Beings whom we call the Primal Forces, the Archai. Everything through which the human being has passed in the pre-earthly life is here reactivated. If to the prayer-like formula, for my thinking I thank the Angels, for language I thank the Archangels, we wish to attach a third unit, we must say: For my being placed within the earthly existence according to physical and moral forces, I thank the Archai—who have been endowed with this power by still loftier Beings.

And now we can answer the question for ourselves: How is it that the human being, who possessed a brilliant consciousness before birth, brings with him here a dull consciousness? Indeed, into this consciousness there dips down what we can combine under the concepts of walking capacity, speaking capacity, thinking capacity, which we have received into ourselves from the higher Hierarchies to be transformed by us. We see thus that what makes us human beings, that through which we are human beings among human beings, manifests our connection with the loftier divine-spiritual worlds. Into these divine-spiritual worlds we enter again and again in a certain way during our earthly existence. The truth is that we must say to ourselves: For the real nature of man, the state of sleep, out of which dreams come into play, is at least just as significant as the waking state. When man passes over from the waking state to the state of sleep, these three capacities that have been acquired in the manner described begin to grow silent: conceiving, speaking, action all grow silent. But we see then that, as thinking grows silent when we fall asleep, the human being, in the same degree in which thought disappears from his consciousness, comes near to the Angels, and, as his speaking capacity comes to an end, he approaches the Archangelic Beings. In the degree to which the human being has entered into complete stillness, he passes through the quieting of his activity into proximity with the Primal Beings, the Archai.

What is important, however, is that we should enter during the sleeping state in a worthy manner into proximity with these three hierarchies: that we come close to the Angels, Archangels, Archai in a worthy way during the state of sleep. Here is the point at which one would have to speak in a special manner to the human beings of the present time; for the manner in which we enter into proximity with the Angels depends very much upon the manner of one's thinking during the waking state. The manner in which man uses worthily his speaking forces determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archangels; the way in which man uses rightly his capacity for movement and his moral sense determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archai.

We are living in a time when the human being is no longer willing to have in his thinking anything extending beyond the physical world, when he desires to be stimulated by the external world. A pure, self-sustained thinking, such as I recommended more than thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom as the foundation for moral intuition,—such thinking, unfortunately, is sought but little at present and but little cultivated in children. But through such thinking, which Goethe and Schiller would still have called idealistic thinking,—through such thinking one breaks free from the mere waking world in earthly existence and retains something for the sleeping state. So much power do we possess for approaching the Angels during sleep as there is idealism in our thinking. And just as helpless are we for the steps we must take toward the Angels as materialism is at work in our thinking. In the same sense it is to be observed that those persons fall victims to Ahrimanic elemental spirits—to which then their thinking is forced to turn—who do not, through idealism developed during the waking state, find the forces for drawing near to the Angelic Beings. It is so very beautiful when the child has learned to think so directly, in a manner of which human beings no longer form any conception! The thinking of the child just after it has learned to think is filled with spirituality. It is wonderful to see how—up to the time when they have been nibbled at by materialism—children upon sleeping move immediately as if on wings toward their Angelic Being, how united they become during sleep with the Angelic Beings. Thus we may say that we seek during sleep—but only through idealism, through spiritualizing the realm of thoughts—those worlds out of which we have evolved in order to learn to think here as human beings together with human beings.

And when we consider language, idealism in one's disposition has the same significance for intercourse during sleep with the Archangels as idealism in thinking has for association with the Angels. The person who is able, when addressing his words to another person, to stream good will into these words, a good mood that passes over into the soul of the other person, which does not pass by the other person but penetrates into him with the interest that one may have for a human being,—that mood which may be called an idealistic mood of good will, it is this that, when astral body and ego have passed over into sleep, gives to language the melodious sound. This gives to astral body and ego, which also share in language, the capacity to come near to the Archangelic Beings, whereas it is the unsocial, egotistic attitude of mind which scatters these forces in the realm of the Ahrimanic elemental beings. Thus the human being, when he falls asleep, and has not used language in the right, idealistic manner, really dehumanizes himself.

Such is the situation likewise when our actions, our conduct is such as to be humanly friendly, but is also fully aware that the human being is not only that entity living in flesh, but in his inner nature is a spiritual being, for out of this awareness arises respect for the other person likewise as a spiritual being. It is out of action based upon this attitude that we gain for the sleeping state the power that brings us in the right manner close to the Archai, whereas, if we are not in a condition to perform humanly kind actions, if we are aware of our own nature only as bodily, the corresponding forces are then scattered in the realm of Ahrimanic elemental Beings: we alienate ourselves from the very nature of man.

Thus the human being brings three kinds of gifts out of the pre-earthly existence, but it is in this way that he connects these again in a threefold manner with his primordial form between sleeping and waking, while he remains unconscious, but returns again and again into proximity with these Beings. This, then, is just as we here on earth have to form our association with other human beings out of three sources: the source of thought, of speech, of action. Thus are we during sleep in a threefold relation with the spiritual world: with the Angels, with the Archangels, with the Primal Forces.

The nature of our link in association with these Beings is of determinative significance when we pass through the portal of death. For it is possible to know through spiritual vision that one is able to draw ever nearer to the Angels, the Archangels, the Beings of the Archai. But it is something which may become extremely bad for future human beings if they surrender themselves wholly to the Ahrimanic elemental Beings, if materialistic thinking, speaking, action become ever more habitual. Thanks to the spiritual world, however, human souls of the present time—at least as to most persons—have such an inheritance of a good mood in thinking, speaking and action that the materialism of the present time cannot degrade everything. Very materialistic persons do not possess out of the contemporary life on earth much that can render possible approach to the hierarchies, yet out of the life of the past there flows forth what brings them there. Yet humanity may very easily meet with a different reward if a spiritual conception of life is not acquired. The idealizing of thinking, speaking and action provides man with the possibility of creating in a certain way new connections with the three classes of divine-spiritual Beings—the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai—and this man needs for the time between death and a new birth. Otherwise, in a far future time, if he has not had a connection in the present time with the Angels, he must be born as a being crippled in thinking; if he has not entered into a union with the Archangels, as a man without language; if he has not had a connection with the Archai, as a being crippled in limbs and in moral impulses. It is within the power of mankind on earth, through materialism in civilization and culture, to drag the whole of earthly humanity down to ruin, or through spiritualizing to lift humanity to a loftier height, such as I described in my Occult Science as the Jupiter existence of the earthly beings.

It is simply true that Anthroposophy is not a theory: every word, every thought passes over into our whole spiritual human nature. We cannot do otherwise than to possess the thought: you are truly a crippled person if you do not possess the right relation with the Higher Beings. This gives us the right sense of responsibility in a moral relation with the spiritual world, and it is out of this that there comes about in man a right sense of responsibility in relation also with the physical world. Only thus does it arise. When you consider what thus occurs to the human being, how through idealism in his thinking he enters into proximity with the Angels, how through his words, through the idealistic attitude expressed in his speaking, he enters into proximity with the Archangels, how through the idealism embodied in his actions he draws near to the Archai—how during sleep he struggles upward to the three Hierarchies—you will then find intelligible what anthroposophical research discloses to us: that the constitution of human destiny is woven in this way. All of this we carry through the portal of death, and it later becomes conscious. After death we must form our thoughts in association with the Angels; it is through the disposition of mind we possess that we must acquire our concepts after death. The manner in which we take our place through language in the midst of mankind gives us the capacity, the power, to enter into association with the Archangels. Through the manner in which we use our limbs must we gain the possibility of possessing self-consciousness after death through association with the Archai. Thus do we enter livingly within and thus is that woven which develops into a clearer power of consciousness between death and a new birth.

If we now observe the child during the earliest years of life, we behold the preceding earthly existence in its after effects. We see not only into the preceding pre-earthly life, but also the preceding life on earth, and thus only does one gain a view for the entire life on earth. One observes the child, how it learns to walk, to use its arms; one observes whether it steps on the ball of the foot or on the heel. Not only does one notice how it directs its physical look, but how still earlier actions are carried out with delicacy, with tenderness, with a pitying heart, how this gives to the child in this life a firm tread, how an insecure, wavering step is the outcome of brutish, pitiless action in the previous life. Every step taken by the child, the striving for this or that forming of the tread, reveals to us how this forming is the outcome of the previous life on earth. We learn to recognize the physical as the image of what is living in the child as a moral impulse out of the previous life on earth. The most impressive thing that can be observed is the learning to walk. Human freedom comes about through the fact that man is born with his destiny as little interfered with as whether he has light or dark hair.

The primary measure of destiny is expressed in the learning to walk. In learning to speak, something else is really indicated. This also is in relation with the pre-earthly existence, but it is difficult to describe. Since it is difficult to characterize, I shall express this in popular language. When the human being passes through the portal of death, he has in a certain way formed his nature morally. Always during the sleeping state he has been weaving his own being, and what he has then woven he himself begins to see. What a person is, comes to manifestation in his learning to walk. When he has passed through the portal of death, he enters in the right manner into association with the Angels, Archangels, Archai, but something further is added to this which the person receives from the second group of the hierarchies. These stream into this person, as an additional, more impersonal karma, that which places him in his next life within a specific language, integrates him within a certain body of people. Individual destiny is connected with what the person is in relation with the Archai. Capacity for speaking we receive from the Archangels. But what language we learn,—this is received from far loftier Beings: the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes.

When we consider thinking, conceiving, this is in relation, as I have shown, with the Angels; these Beings can bestow upon man the gift of thinking. This capacity, however, man achieved first in the earth period of evolution; he did not possess it during the Moon period. In this way there comes about a development for the Angels themselves; they enter thus into relation with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. They have gained in this way the capacity for a direct association with the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, and these do not bestow a capacity which is to be shared only within a single human group, but one to be shared by the whole of humanity. Thinking is really something belonging in common to the whole of humanity. For this reason is logic identical over the whole earth. Walking, in which personal destiny is expressed, we receive from the Archai, out of their own forces. The capacity for speaking is received by the human being from the Archangels, but these are directed in this by the second group of the hierarchies. It is from the Angels that the human being receives the gift of thinking, but these bestow this upon man under the influence of the highest hierarchies.

Thus are things woven in the cosmic order, and man is understood only when he is clearly seen in this relation of being interwoven with the cosmic order. In this way one understands, not only the single person, but also the nature of a living or dying branch of language, a deficient or a perfect capacity for thinking. Man exists on earth in a certain dualistic relation. He sees entities and sees them in a certain dependency under natural laws. In relation with these, man comes to a consciousness of his own relation with the Godhead. Here on this earth there is no relation between the physical and the moral cosmic order. But, when we look back into the life before birth and that after death, we then enter into a world where these two realms are merged into one. Moreover, a human being cannot determine rightly what he himself is unless he is in a position to see truly into himself as a spiritual being. Man does not acquire a unitary world view unless he can see beyond birth and death, if he does not look into the higher worlds. In order to understand his entire, total being, man needs a consciousness permeated by knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

The constitution, the entire life, of the human soul we conceive much too simply as we human beings of the present time, of the nineteenth, twentieth century experience this. What we learn from external history is in great measure only outside occurrence, far less the history of the human soul itself. The changes which occur with the soul life of the human being are considered very little. Now, it must be borne in mind that earlier periods did not have the same occasion for giving attention to this history of the human soul life as does the present time. For the present time, which, when we consider it as a long historical epoch, began in the first third of the fifteenth century,—this present epoch presents man with very special responsibilities, such as he can discharge only by means of his consciousness, whereas earlier responsibilities could be discharged by means of certain instinct, even though an instinct humanly formed. We have heard in various ways and perhaps read in cycles, how in ancient times man possessed a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, but how the evolution of humanity has consisted in the loss of this instinctive clairvoyance, and that in its place has appeared the contemporary constitution of soul, which is intellectual in character and has developed primarily the human understanding. I do not say that for this reason the capacities of feeling and volition have not been active in the human being, but what constitutes the greatest thing in our contemporary civilization, what we experience at the present time more than anything else, this calls upon the understanding, upon the capacity for conception. But the present day human being has good reason for asking the question what significance an intellectual civilization possesses for the human soul. This question can be completely answered only if one gives a little attention to that reference to the pre-earthly human life to which attention was directed yesterday in a different connection.

As human beings of the present time, we experience concepts as something very abstract, as something that we do not experience in the same degree as that in which concepts were experienced in the time of the ancient instinctive clairvoyance by human beings. And if, from these abstract, intellectualistic concepts, we look at pre-earthly human existence, we find that something entirely different existed in place of what is today abstract thinking. Moreover, since we possessed no body, no organism, in the pre-earthly life, as we still possessed only the soul-spiritual nature, thoughts were something entirely different. Thoughts then still possessed a soul life. We then experienced a thought in such a way that we knew that thoughts are spread everywhere in the entire world, and we draw these out of the world into our own life of soul.

Today the view of the human being is that thoughts are something which he creates with his brain. This is just as clever as if a person taking a glass of water to himself should believe that the water comes out of his tongue, is not taken in from without. In reality, thoughts are something active, living, the working forces in the whole world, and we simply draw them out of the world. Our organic system is only the vessel into which we draw the thoughts by means of our ego. But the erroneous idea that we of ourselves create the thoughts, to this error one can surrender oneself only during the earthly life between birth and death. As long as we live in the pre-earthly existence, it is clear that the realm of thought completely fills everything in our surroundings just as air does during our existence between birth and death. We know that, so to speak, we breathe in thoughts and again breathe them out, that they are something active, productive. It is of the utmost importance that we become aware that the forces of thought are something quite different in the pre-earthly life and in the earthly existence. When we come upon a corpse somewhere in the world, we do not say to ourselves that this corpse could have been brought into its present form by any kind of forces which we call forces of nature. We know it is the residue of a living human being. The living human being must necessarily have been in existence there; a force of nature can never give to a corpse the form in which it exists. The corpse can be nothing else than the residue of a living human being.

What we are able to observe in regard to the life of thinking in the human being as we possess this in the earthly existence gives us a basis upon which to understand that the forces of thought we develop during the earthly life do not come into existence of themselves in our physical organism, but that they are the residue of living forces we possessed in the pre-earthly existence. With the same certainty with which one says that the corpse is the dead residue of a living person he can say also that abstract thinking such as we have at the present time is the dead residue of what we possessed during the pre-earthly existence in living thought.

The living thought dies as we are born—or as we are conceived—and what becomes effective in us as forces of thinking is the corpse of that living thinking which we possessed during the pre-earthly existence. We do not quite rightly understand the earthly thinking until we look upon it as the residue of the pre-earthly thinking, just as we look upon the corpse as the residue of a living person. This awareness of human thinking, which is the residue of a living thinking, must gradually more and more permeate humanity; only then will one look upon oneself in the right way as a human being; then will one look back in the right way to the pre-earthly existence as one looks back from the corpse, in which only the forces of nature are existent, to the living human being, in whom loftier forces are alive. But one considers this entire thing in the right light only when one knows that this thinking, as we possess it at the present time, tending only toward abstraction, we developed first since the fifteenth century. Naturally, it evolved in various ways in the various individual races and groups of human beings, but in general the situation has been such for civilized humanity that humanity has evolved to this dead thinking in the first third of the fifteenth century; that this thinking became ever more and more completely dead until a certain culmination of this condition of deadness came about exactly in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, if we look further back in the course of evolution, we find that in these ancient times the human souls, as they passed through conception and birth, brought over into the earthly existence something out of the pre-earthly life. The living nature of ancient myths, ancient popular legends, the ancient formative forces of the soul which are by no means the same as our present activity in phantasy, could not have developed if something had not streamed in from the living pre-earthly existence, if earthly thinking had already become entirely abstract. Indeed, it can be said in a certain sense that even at present there remains a final residue of pre-earthly thinking in the period of childhood, although this is lost in the course of life. But those human beings of a more ancient time were entirely different from contemporary human beings in their entire life of soul. Just imagine quite truly that we could experience at the present time this living thinking, could experience still such clairvoyance as the human soul possessed in ancient times, that you experienced imaginations, that these imaginations could affect you so powerfully that they would appear to you as revelations of divine-spiritual forces. You would never arrive at a consciousness of freedom. The true feeling of freedom developed for the first time in civilized humanity. The fact that man has been able to become free he owes to the circumstance that living thinking is not active at least in his waking state, but a dead thinking into which he injects whatever he wishes out of his free will. Man does not think as he thought at an earlier time; he himself begins to think. But beginning oneself to think means to inject human will into this thinking, and when man finds a dead thinking he can pour his free will into this thinking. Thus man had to advance to dead thinking in order to become a free being in the course of earthly evolution.

You see that, if we consider in the same way the evolution of the human soul life, it becomes clear to us that there is meaning in the formation of the whole human evolution on earth.

But we will now once more return to somewhat earlier times. That which occurred as a deadening, an abstracting, an intellectualizing of thinking in the first third of the fifteenth century had been in the course of preparation for a long time very gradually beforehand. Such things do not occur all at once but pass through a preparation, pass through a certain beginning finally to reach the highest point. Now it is clearly to be seen that the first beginning toward this abstract thinking occurred in the fourth Christian century. I mean that in the fourth Post-Christian century there began the first trace becoming dominant in human consciousness that man believed he creates his thoughts. This could not have been thought by a Greek. The Greek was altogether conscious still of a certain living quality of this thinking and was conscious that thoughts exist everywhere within things; that he simply draws them himself out of things. The opinion that man creates his thoughts came about through the fact that thoughts became ever more and more lifeless. And these lifeless thoughts, with which one can, so to speak, do whatever one will, made their appearance for the first time in the fourth Christian century. This proceeded gradually still further until, in the fifteenth century, the consciousness (which we still possess today) clearly took on its form.

But what resulted from this in the evolution of humanity? In the fourth Post-Christian century occurred the beginning of an intellectual, abstract thinking. This means, however, nothing else than that the Mystery of Golgotha, the appearance of Christ upon the earth, occurred during a time when the human soul was still filled with living thoughts. In this respect much has been lost to humanity in the matter of its consciousness. It is true that humanity has in this way achieved freedom, but very much, nevertheless, has been lost. When Christ appeared upon the earth he was received by a certain number of human beings who still possessed an inwardly living, active thinking, who still possessed in their thinking a residue of the pre-earthly existence. And these persons related themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha in a manner entirely different from that of the human beings of a later time. Just think for a moment, that till this period, human beings said to themselves—they did not clearly express this; everything was then enveloped in pictures, but the consciousness was there—I am now upon the earth; I have as an earthly human being my thinking; but this directs me backward through birth and conception into the pre-earthly existence, into a different world; it is out of this that I have descended. Man felt himself here as a projection of what he was in the pre-earthly existence. Human beings of that time knew quite clearly that with the earthly existence they were continuing an earlier, pre-earthly existence, even though in that time human beings saw into the pre-earthly existence as if through a glass, darkly. This consciousness, that man is a being descended from the heavens to the earth, disappeared in its essence during the fourth Post-Christian century.

From this point of view also was conceived the event of Golgotha. If mention was made to these persons by initiates—who were at that time still in existence, not possessed of such wisdom as were the initiates of the ancient mysteries, but still having at least a residue of the ancient mystery wisdom,—if mention was made by them of the Christ, their answer was that Jesus Christ had been at home previously in the same world in which we also were present before we descended to the earth; there He was also. That was His world; only He had never previously left that world. It is indeed a characteristic of earthly human beings that they had to descend to the earth since very early times; there they went away from the Christ in order to come down to the earth. If, then, mention was made in the ancient mysteries of the Christ—indeed, mention was constantly made of the Christ in the ancient mysteries, although He was not called by the name “Christ”—then thought had to be directed to the pre-earthly existence; it had to be said to human beings: If you wish to know something of the Christ, you must not hold fast to your earthly consciousness, but must look upward to the pre-earthly existence.

Indeed, we must introduce something from this pre-earthly existence in order to understand what I wish to bring out today. Standing here upon the earth as earthly human beings, we look up to the sun, we form conceptions of the sun, we even develop hypotheses regarding it: that this sun is a ball of gas or something similar. Indeed, from the earthly point of view it is inevitable that one forms such conceptions; but people believe that this could be the same from all possible points of view. Before we descended to the earth, then also we saw the sun, but out of cosmic spaces, from the other side, as it were. The sun was not then a physical object but a gathering of spiritual Beings, and the most significant among these Beings for humanity before the Mystery of Golgotha was the Christ. Thus one may also make the following statement: when in the pre-Christian time people were initiated into what later was transformed into the Mystery of Golgotha, it became clear to them that human beings beheld the sun in the pre-earthly existence and became aware of the Christ; that, when man then descended to the earth, he saw the sun from the other side, but the Christ was concealed from him: only through mystery wisdom could he be guided to the Christ. This was experienced in the first period of Christian evolution as the nature of Christianity: that the great Sun Spirit now no longer remained the Sun Spirit, but had left through the Mystery of Golgotha those regions through which the human being can pass only outside the physical body, and had come into the earthly existence; that He was the only divine-spiritual Being who had ever entered upon earthly existence. We meet—although only by means of spiritual research—with persons even in the first period of Christian evolution who felt very deeply in their inner being that Christ, came out of the sphere of spirits who did not need to pass through birth and death, for whom birth and death are only a metamorphosis, had descended and passed through birth and death. This descent of Christ to the earth was the entire essential feeling experienced during the first period in Christian evolution. This descent was far more important for human beings of that time than what followed after the descent. The fact that Christ wished to be in a community with human beings, that He desired to share in the two most significant experiences—birth and death—this was felt in circles of the initiates as the genuine religious impulse. This was possible only because man still possessed some degree of inner, living thinking; because until the fourth Christian century thinking had not yet been entirely paralysed, had not become entirely abstract, because it still filled the human being as does breathing at the present time in a physical relation. For this reason it was felt that Christ had carried out the human destiny of the descent, which the other spiritual-divine beings had not done for the reason that being born and dying are not characteristic of the gods, but only of human beings. This is the magnificent element in the belief of initiates in the first Christian centuries: that they felt Christ had really become a human being, had really taken upon himself human destiny; that He is the only one of the divine-spiritual beings who had shared this destiny with man.

Now, however, it is necessary that the truth become clear to the human soul that this soul of man, in the degree that it belongs to the world of pre-earthly existence, cannot really die. For this reason has come about what we associate with the resurrection of Christ: the victory of Christ over death, symbolizing the victory of every human soul over death. And the ancient idea, I should like to say, of the state of being unborn has blended with the new idea of resurrection which had previously existed but not with the same intensity. Since the Event of Golgotha has come about, this became in a way the expression for what is most important of all in the earthly evolution of man.

While thinking was still living, man felt not the least fear of death; this was not for him an extraordinary occurrence. This is something of the utmost importance in the history of human evolution, that death was viewed by man as something entirely different, something obvious, whereas, as man suffered the loss more and more of the consciousness of a pre-earthly existence, abstract thinking, with the physical body as its instrumentality, brought about more and more fear of death and the belief that death is something final. Ancient humanity had little need for the idea of resurrection, but rather that of the descent to the earth in common with the Christ. As, however, human beings have advanced further and further into abstract thinking, they needed more and more a view out of the earthly existence, a view in the direction of immortality. This outlook is bestowed upon humanity through viewing in the right way the fact of Christ's resurrection. This fact I have set forth in books, lectures, and cycles of lectures many times over. Both facts—the descent of Christ to birth and death and the fact of His resurrection, the fact of victory over death—until the fourth Christian century, this could be clear to humanity in its feeling nature, since living thinking was then still in existence. After the fourth Post-Christian century, as abstract thinking developed further and further, humanity became less and less capable of connecting thoughts with the content of the Mystery of Golgotha. It has actually been the destiny of humanity in its evolution that, during the period in which man achieved through abstract thinking his own freedom, the understanding of Christ Jesus, which had existed during the earliest Christian centuries, had to disappear. That is, because of the fact that those writings designated as the Gnostic, a term which has become almost contemptuous, have been almost utterly eliminated except for a few residues with which very little can be accomplished. What had been thought by those persons in the first centuries who still possessed some knowledge of living thinking was destroyed. This we know only through writings of their opponents. Just imagine what the situation would be if, through some kind of accident, all anthroposophical books and other writings should disappear, and that the nature of anthroposophy would have to be adjudged only on the basis of writings by its opponents. Just so much is known today by people who depend upon external documents regarding Gnosis. That most extraordinary understanding of Christ by Gnosis, enclosed within itself, was lost to humanity. Most of all did that awareness completely disappear that the Christ had something to do with the sun, and that He had descended to the earth and passed on Golgotha through a destiny common with that of humanity. All of these relationships, especially the feelings associated with such things, were lost to humanity. More and more there came about the abstract interpretations, the abstract thoughts.

One of those who struggled out of the character of that period toward an understanding of Christianity is to be seen in Augustine. In this Augustine we see a spirit who could no longer understand the ancient form of the conception of nature. You know that Augustine is said to have been a Manichean. Augustine narrates this himself. But all that lies back of these things can no longer be rightly seen through by means of external thinking. What Augustine called Manicheanism, what is called at present the teaching of Mani, is only the degenerate outcome of an ancient teaching which conceived the Spirit only as creative and knew no difference between matter and spirit. No spirit was existent that did not create and what it created was seen by the human being as matter. Just as little conception did these ancient times have of mere matter; on the contrary, spirit existed in everything. This was something that Augustine could not understand. What Gnosis understood, and what was no longer understood later; what our own period does not at all understand,—this is true: no matter exists of itself; this was known by the Manicheans and they beheld the descent of Christ in the light of this view. Augustine could no longer make anything out of this; the time had passed, the possibility of making anything out of it, because the documents had been destroyed and the ancient clairvoyance had been blotted out. Thus Augustine, after long intense superhuman struggle arrived at the decision that he could not of himself attain to truth, but must adjust himself to what the Catholic church prescribed as truth: to submit himself to the authority of the Catholic church. And this mood—consider it at first as a mood—remained, contained alive especially for the reason that thinking became ever more abstract. In reality it was only slowly and gradually that thinking was disabled.

And the Scholastics in their greatness—they really are great—still lived within a trace of knowledge that thinking on the earth was derived from a super-earthly thinking, that man lived within a heavenly thinking. Within this evolution however the possibility was gradually more and more completely lost to conceive the Event of Golgotha as something alive. It is actually true that the advanced theology of the nineteenth century, because it desired to be scientific in the modern sense, lost the Christ; that theology was happy to have at last instead “the simple man of Nazareth”. Christ was now “the loftiest human being on earth.” Of the Christ indwelling within Jesus no conception could any longer be formed.

Thus the evolution since the fourth Post-Christian century has consisted of a gradual loss of the connection of man with the Christ in that living form as it was conceived by many persons during the first centuries of Christianity. Thus it came about, moreover, that the content of the gospels was less and less understood. You see, the human beings who lived during the first centuries of Christianity would have considered it utterly astonishing to speak of contradictions in the gospels. It is as if some one was familiar with the picture of a human being taken from the front and that a photograph was brought to him taken in profile, and if he should say: “This cannot be a picture of the same person”—thus would it have appeared to persons of the first Christian centuries if one had spoken to them of contradictions in the Gospels. They knew very well that the four Gospels simply present a picture taken from four different points of view. The human being of the present time would say that these are exceptional presentations, that they are from all different sides. In the spiritual world everything is far richer; in the spiritual world photographs would have to be taken from various sides as one has four Gospels. More and more arrived the time in which nothing was known any longer in the ancient sense of the Event of Golgotha. But this Event of Golgotha is of such a nature as can be conceived only from a spiritual point of view. It is indeed interesting that the historians generally slip around the Event of Golgotha. We have now the historian Ranke, considered a distinguished writer of history, who declares actually that one does not mention this, just omits it. If one omits from history the most important thing of all, no history can come into existence. Even if a person has no connection with the spiritual world and thus cannot understand the Mystery of Golgotha, he would still have to admit its tremendous influence. But history is written at the present time without mention of the enormous influence of the Mystery of Golgotha. The capacity has ever more and more disappeared to view the Mystery of Golgotha in the right manner.

We can view the matter, however, from entirely different points of view; we can say to ourselves: in the course of evolution humanity arrived at the necessity of having Christ in its midst. Gradually more and more human beings lost the consciousness of their belonging to the pre-earthly existence. This was no longer in their view; finally human beings knew only that they existed after their birth on the earth. Then the Christ came to them, in order to make manifest to them through His descent that there is a pre-earthly existence; in order to bestow upon them an understanding of what no longer lived within their own consciousness. Since human beings no longer possessed this relation in their own consciousness they were to achieve a new connection through their relation to Christ, who had passed through the Event of Golgotha. The Christ had, in a sense, bestowed Himself upon humanity in that period during which the epoch was gradually to arise for humanity to ascend to freedom. As thinking now became more and more abstract there was no longer any possibility to view in thinking the Mystery of Golgotha. But the content of the New Testament history was so enrapturing, so appealing to the human heart, that even by reason of the purely external traditions that which could no longer be grasped by thought still continued to exist for a certain time.

If we survey the first period during which Christianity was spreading out, we see that traditions existed which, in the final analysis, were derived from the Gospels, that the child-like heart took possession more and more of the picture of the Palestine events; but we see at the same time how a cognitional experience of the Mystery of Golgotha was being lost. In the same degree in which dead thinking came about, there was overshadowed also the child-like memory of the Palestine time; human beings lost their connection with Christ Jesus and people were happy when the connection with the human being Jesus could still be maintained. And now we are within our own present time; here, in reality—although it is not yet observed—the consciousness of the connection with Christ Jesus has already disappeared. In tradition human beings still hold fast to the doctrines and have no living inner connection with Christ Jesus. One need only observe how external the festivals of the year have become. How external the Easter festival has become for human beings of the present time, whereas this Easter festival was such for human beings of an earlier time that men experienced in deepest inwardness what can be called memory of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ had given Himself to human beings in a time when humanity had to develop its consciousness of freedom. This had in a certain sense been developed. But this would become merely external if the relation with the Christ could not be found again. This cannot be found unless we begin to seek for a spiritual knowledge. Spiritual knowledge, as this is sought by anthroposophy, will find again the relation with the Christ. This relation can be found only spiritually. What occurred on Golgotha is not merely an event that has laid hold upon the physical, earthly history of humanity, but also a spiritual event. No one can understand the Event of Golgotha who does not understand it in the spirit. Anthroposophical spiritual science, therefore, is at the same time preparation for a new understanding of the Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha. Indeed, when we consider this fact, we are reminded of the deeply significant Gospel statement: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world”. And there certainly shines out from this expression that He was not there only when the Event of Golgotha occurred; that he remains with human beings as a spiritual being, who can be found in the spirit. We need not consider as spiritual, therefore, only what radiates out of the Gospels, but we know that Christ is with us, that when at present, provided with spiritual knowledge, we listen to what is manifest concerning Him out of the spiritual world, this is a manifestation of Christ. This is the manifestation of Christ just as much as what we gain when we look into the Gospels.

“I have many things still to say unto you but you could not bear them now”,—this is a reference to the time when Christ is again to be seen. And now this time approaches; it is already here. Humanity would lose the Christ if it were not possible again in a new way, in spiritual knowledge, to gain the Christ. In this way must much more become understandable to us which in an earlier time was connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, but has been lost because the spiritual understanding of it has been lost. How people struggle with the present intellectualism with the statement said to have been spoken by Christ that the Kingdom of God had come down to the earth, that an entirely new life was to begin. It is so immensely clever to say at the present time that everything on the earth has remained, after all, such as it was before. This is obviously clever, but the other question must be put in the spirit of this statement of Christ: is one really speaking in a truly Christian, spiritual understanding in supposing that any kind of external spiritual kingdom was to be set up? An external spiritual kingdom would be, of course, physical. This contradiction, you see, is not observed. But it is extremely conspicuous that people have become extraordinarily clever at the present time and still this cleverness cannot be justified even in its own realm.

I should like to call your attention to something very interesting, even though this really separates us from our actual theme. The Vienna geologist, Eduard Suess, a distinguished research scientist, says in his book The Countenance of the Earth that this countenance of the earth must have been entirely different, stones much more living than at present, that man is walking at the present time really upon a dead earth. The clods over which we walk belong to a dying world. Geology assumes that the earth was once far more living and has gradually passed over into the dead state. Suess says in regard to an entirely different area what Christ said concerning the spiritual life of the earth. If only this were true, that the earth will fall to pieces in a far distant future time when it will be reduced to dust in the cosmos, if what occurs to the human being did not occur to the earth—that the body becomes dust, but the spirit lives further—then all of us would be included in this turning into dust. With this earth we are beholding what leads over into the Jupiter existence; we look already toward a new earth.

With regard to the physical, this view of the turning of the earth into dust is true; with regard to the spirit-soul something different is valid. For the ancient initiates of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was quite clear that with the ancient civilization, the ancient mysteries, things had come to an end. The manner in which the ancient human beings had lived with their gods had come to an end; the manner in which they had lived with manifestations of nature had come to an end. But the gods bestow upon human beings the possibility of approaching a future in the spirit. What was acquired in ancient times as knowledge out of the earth belongs to the path; a new time must arrive in which the human being must bring about a kingdom by means of his own will, in which man shall give life again to a dead thinking by means of his own forces. This was a prophecy at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. This kingdom came about also in an external way, it is to be understood, to be accepted, only by human beings of the present time. At the present time we must feel that the Kingdom of Heaven of which Christ speaks must by seen by us upon the earth as the Christ works upon the earth. This must be the fulfilment upon the earth, and the fulfilment of this Kingdom of Heaven must be earnestly conceived precisely in our present time. We experience in all areas that the human being is beginning to confront the peril of being cut off from the spiritual world and from his own being if he does not find access to the spiritual world.

If we want to tread an occult-development path, we're given certain verses or formulas to help us, which have the power to develop our higher spiritual organs if we use them correctly. They were given to us by the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. (Thursday verse.)

If we want to immerse ourselves in the first lines of our morning exercise:

In pure rays of light
Gleams the Godhead of the world …

we'll gain nothing for our elevation into the spiritual world if we only let the literal meaning of these words work on us. For we should realize that we can't see the Godhead in physical sunrays—we must look for them in their sublime spirituality behind the sunbeams. The latter are only the only the outer clothing of the Godhead. We should create a picture out of the spirit for our meditation and not take one from the outer world for this.

To begin with, we must eliminate everything that reminds us of our outer surroundings from our thoughts; we must be able to forget all the big and small thing that motivate us in daily life; all outer impressions should be silent within us.

If we've prepared ourselves like this, we'll be immersing ourselves and our thoughts and feelings in these lines in the right way. After we've done these meditations for a longer or shorter time, we should then try to empty our soul of these thoughts also. Thereby, the soul gets into a quiet condition, and when the intellect is silenced, a human being's higher members are lifted out of his physical body and he enters the super-sensible world.

But a pupil hasn't yet attained everything thereby. For if he isn't in the right soul state and hasn't prepared himself a long time by working at his defects, that is, if he doesn't enter the spiritual world with the right humility and a correct knowledge of his bad qualities, then this spiritual will appear to him in the wrong light. One could compare this with a man who's accustomed to wearing red glasses indoors and who forget to take them off when he goes outside; then he would see things in a red light so that they're quite different from what they really are. Likewise, an occultist would be judging things in the super-sensible world wrongly if he saw them through the colored glasses of his personality. For instance, he wouldn't see the angels who stand one stage higher than man as the radiant beings that they are—they would appear before him in terrible animal forms or as other grotesque things. If he would meet Luciferic or Ahrimanic beings between the angel and human levels on the astral plane, they might seem to be shining, radiant angels, masters of wisdom or other dissembling, alluring figures to lead him astray, because he's still mastered by his pride and his own personality too much. An occultist must especially guard against this and be sure that he gets rid of his pride. For if we want to tread an occult path, we can only prepare ourselves with the greatest humility in our heart and through unlimited reverence for the divine.

There are other formulas that can lead to the development of higher organs and to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. The exercises can be done wrongly or can be misunderstood, so that we're led down a wrong path. For instance, if one would meditate: A part of the Godhead rests in me—with a certain egotistical feeling, one just cultivates pride in oneself, reinforces one's personality, and one would overlook the fact that part of Godliness can be found in every animal, plant and in all of God's creations. To be able to enter higher worlds, however, we must leave everything that's connected with personality behind in the physical world. We must especially acquire a subtle feeling for the truth. For if an occultist doesn't have this, he'll soon see that he has to take the consequences. An occultist must not excuse himself by saying that he thought that he was telling the truth. That doesn't suffice for an occultist, for he's responsible for each of his words, and he has to take the consequences for his untruthfulness even if he thought he was saying the truth.

It isn't easy to stick to the path in conventional life; things often have a dishonest tinge to them. How often one hears: I thought it was the truth. It's not easy to tread a spiritual path. A good method that anyone can use to arrive at greater clarity about his own personality is to look at sections of his life at least once a year, say on his birthday. Then we should ask ourselves: What good and bad deeds can I list for this period? Then if we examine ourselves seriously, we'll find that in most cases we let our good deeds be done out of an inner impulse, and that they didn't originate from our personality This inner impulse is our guardian angel who stimulates our good deeds. But we shouldn't rely on this completely and think: My guardian angel will give me the impulse—because that would be quite wrong. Our guardian angel would soon leave us, in a certain respect.

If we continue these exercises for a number of years, we'll find that nothing helps us to discover and get rid of our personality defects better than this statement of our account. Thereby we'll gradually prepare ourselves to tread the occult path in a productive way, as we free ourselves ever more from our personality and make ourselves empty in a certain respect, so that the Christ principle can enter us in the way that Paul says: Not I, but Christ I me. This filling of oneself with the Christ principle frees our personality from egoism and leads to the perception of the highest. The name “Christ” isn't really the name of the principle that is supposed to be expressed therewith; the divine power that one designates with this name has another name that should not be uttered. Therefore the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings didn't say this name when they said the following verse in their consecrated hours:

Ex Deo nascimur
In … morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

Goethe's “Faust” undoubtedly belongs to one of those works in world literature to which one can, decade after decade, return to and find within it ever again, something new. This ever fresh insight may bring about the belief that we can benefit fundamentally ever more from the work than had been obtained on a previous occasion. Maturing with age this experience is indeed possible involving other works of world literature—however, with Goethe's “Faust” one has the impression, that ever new experiences of life are needed, as are offered by approaching age, in order to fully absorb certain secrets and inner aspects found within these works.

Discoveries made by delving ever deeper into Goethe's “Faust,” within the work itself, prompting a decisive wish to turn to Goethe's biography, to explore his life ever anew, because through the observation of Goethe's “Faust” one realizes that these rightful insights will enlighten this work. An objection is only natural that such a reference of the poet to his work begs incompletion. One may say a work of art must be grasped, as it stands, independent of the personality of its creator. One can also put aside some more or less pedantic tendencies and through the observation of Goethe's relation to his work hold him to it, that out of such a flood of power something higher must appear, more significant than each impression and suchlike. These are the thoughts from which this theme of today's lecture has grown.

I wish to speak now about the personal relationship of Goethe to his “Faust,” not in the narrow personal sense but regarding the relationship of the spiritual character of Goethe to his “Faust.” One could easily come to the conclusion, that by studying these relationships of Goethe's personality to his “Faust”—what Goethe mentioned about himself, regarding his life, his striving, his manner and way, his attitude to knowledge and questions about art—that these details could be particularly useful. Yet as one enters deeper and deeper into Goethe's life, one notices this is actually not so. Here exactly lie difficulties within the observation regarding Goethe's spiritual character. On the other hand there is something which penetrates not only into peculiarities of Goethe, but within one's soul life itself. One goes along with the idea of being convinced, through Goethe's statements, as expressed in letters directed to one or other individual, that these are useless in relation to the consideration just mentioned. One discovers, on looking at the way Goethe considered himself, that one can't really get the key to exactly that which had depth in the most meaningful work of Goethe, in “Faust.” When clearly stated riddles need truthful answers out of Goethe's work, from observation of his life, about that which lived in his soul, which he expressed in his work and particularly in his “Faust,” one realises that there was something so huge, so all-encompassing and with expansive enlightenment that Goethe himself, in his personal consciousness, within his knowledge, couldn't grasp what really was working in his soul. If not so much misuse of the expression “unconscious—subconscious” has been used during the last decades, I wish to apply it to Goethe with the eminent sense that that which is found within Goethe's creation, streams so gradually into our soul, that it becomes larger than all which Goethe can utter about it prosaically.

Exactly that which I express now, applies in a particular degree to the relationship of Goethe to his “Faust.” I can't allow myself, due to a time constraint, to closely discuss Goethe's relationship within the folk tradition in which appears the “Puppet Show” and such-like. I wish to restrict myself to the discussion regarding the relationship of Goethe to his “Faust” itself.

Before all else, it is necessary to enter into Faust as boldly as possible. Precisely out of Faust himself the insight is revealed related to Goethe and his “Faust.” What is most admirably Goetheanistic within this which is revealed through a lengthy observation of Goethe within it? What is Goethean in “Faust”? When looking at Faust—we see from the Prologue a tendency which doesn't exist at first—starting with the Monologue: “Philosophy—I have digested ...” the contemplation of “Faust,” then one usually gets involved in the following: within this lives Goethe's attitude against outer knowledge, against the drive for external knowledge. One sees the larger reference within the opening which leads Faust towards despair in the power of his four faculties and so on; it is noticeable then, how Faust, doubtful in the power of all four faculties, gropes towards magic, and so forth. However, working at length with “Faust,” one doesn't get the feeling that already within this Monologue specific Goetheanistic ideas are presented. That begins at a specific point. In this rebellion against the four faculties, this grope towards magic, Goethe opposes the Faust-tradition; it was not in this which Goethe's soul, in essence, wanted to reveal himself through Faust. The part of Goethe's soul revealing itself for the first time in “Faust,” encounters an opposition, where Faust, after he opened the Nostradamus book and the sign of the macrocosm, turns away towards the other sign which brings him to conjuring up of the Earth Spirit. Here unfolds, as Goethe writes this scene in his “Faust,” that which lives in Goethe's soul in a quite unique form, the world riddle. What is this, however? Goethe allows his Faust to open up a book on magic, called the Book of Nostradamus, at the sign of the macrocosm—expressing the connection between humanity and the almighty world powers. The sign of the macrocosm expresses the world as three-fold; that the earthly and heavenly separations are threefold, and that within the threefold world stands the occult connection with the threefold human being of body soul and spirit.

Upon this relationship Goethe arrived momentarily in his life. It dawned on him in such a way, that he allowed Faust to strive towards the revelation, and through the images of these signs, find the connection between humanity and the entire world. During this time Goethe was not tempted to consider that something acquired in this manner from spiritual knowledge, was satisfactory. Deeply, decisively we heard Goethe's words as he turned away from the sign of the macrocosm: “What spectacle! But oh! Only a spectacle, no more!” Within this lies Goethe's entire withdrawal during the seventies of the 18^th century, from what was generally recognised as the connection of humanity with the entire world, the universe. Goethe believed he had reached clarity in the thought that everything within imagination—acquired through ideas—was nothing other than a mirror-image of reality. Thus Faust turned away from the symbol and its revelation to another sign, which directed him to reveal the Earth Spirit. Look closely now within the depths of Goethe to understand why he turned away from the macrocosm and towards the microcosm. Goethe already belonged to the world view of those who didn't in the ordinary sense relate to the history of specific knowledge, constructed from an accumulation of ideas about the laws of nature and of humanity. No, in fact Goethe didn't strive in this sense for knowledge, he strived for knowledge in so far as the result of this knowledge would empower the human soul, in order that each human being's striving in his becoming, may result in crystallization. Goethe also belonged to those in spirit who, to a certain sense, I might say, in order not to be misunderstood, harbour a particular nervousness, a fear for that which is taken up by the soul in the form of conceptual knowledge. By this is meant: whoever has really struggled once with conceptual knowledge, with an idea through which one in reality can penetrate into the world, would know how unsatisfactory the result can be, that one can't thus, through this idea, express everything which has been thus penetrated and which had been revealed in the depths. One wants to always, when one has acquired knowledge, say to oneself: yes, you have brought about this or that in your thoughts, you know however, what lives in the soul and is revealed from the depth of the soul world is only partly incorporated in these ideas. There is a worry that something had been lost along the way between life and this knowledge. One has a constricted feeling in this situation. Once a conceptual idea is taken up, there is the possibility to regain, later, through the spirit, that which had been lost. One must doubt, when one has once had an idea which was not fully expressed, to once again bring it into a lively representation. This worry lay in Goethe's soul. With this he was always occupied—with world riddles rather than expressing riddles in a pure and strong way and thereby giving a superficial elucidation and satisfaction. He had a shyness, a respect for knowledge. He said to himself: that which you entreat as knowledge to the human soul, can only be a spectacle, only a spectacle ... oh, only a spectacle!—thus Goethe turned away from that which the universe revealed to him, and allowed himself to turn to the sign which is not revealed by the universe but that which rises from the depths of the soul itself.

Thus Goethe allows Faust to doubt that within the immense universe he may perceive the manifestation of reality, and thus turns him to search for a revelation from the depths. Goethe's Faust encounters the Earth Spirit in such a form as it appears in the hidden depths of the human being, in the subsoil of the human soul as the case may be. Approaching the great All, we approach the spirit of revelation, and so we come to that which lives in the soul's depths, and arrive closer to spiritual revelation. In this moment however we discover the danger which accompanies every approach to knowledge. This danger within the striving human being's soul during earthly life is what Goethe now confronts and this he mystifies into his “Faust.” Before Goethe's Faust stands the direct revelation of his individual inner being. Faust has to turn away from it. That which lives in consciousness, which expresses itself clearly within Faust's soul, cannot grasp what lies in the depths of his very own being. For most of humanity, that which is unknown, that in us which we could lightly deny, scares Faust and he falls back, dazed. He has to turn away. “Not you? Who then? I, replica of the image of God! Not even you!” The Spirit responds: “You match the spirit you comprehend, not me!” Who then is this spirit Faust understands? Towards whom must Faust turn at this moment?

Right here is one of the dramatic moments in Goethe's “Faust.” One need relinquish all revelations of ideas which one usually seeks to interpret “Faust”; one needs to look at the drama, at the artistic elements themselves, at the presentation. Giving oneself over to this without comment, explanations or considerations, one steps into this place of a real mighty opposition. Who is his match? Here Wagner steps in. “You match the spirit ...”—which spirit? Wagner matches him. That is the dramatic knot. One is not allowed to see the traditional interpretation which is always given, where Faust is presented as the higher striving, spiritual idealist and Wagner hobbles in on the stage as insignificant, even gesturing a bit in Faust's manner. Wagner may be allowed to appear as Faust's mask, because it is self-knowledge which Goethe wants to represent: You are no more than what resides in Wagner's soul. Whoever explores the dialogue between the two, discovers a certain philistine air in Wagner; he has a locked personality, a character which has brought a conclusion to his striving. One only sees him once as unabashed, which happens in this scene when Faust meets Wagner and reveals that he doesn't go searching for rain worms and suchlike. In this scene, considered as dramatic, artistic and not philistine, self knowledge appears to Faust. What was it then ultimately, which Goethe made his Faust recoil from, and to what did he turn?

Goethe's soul stands in a time, when this scene was written, during the seventies, when a duality existed between—which I wish to phrase as—“world knowledge” and “self knowledge.” Faust turns away from world knowledge as he does from the sign of the macrocosm. Goethe didn't desire world knowledge. He believed everything can be found within self knowledge acquired through striving for a worthy existence. This is the route to self knowledge. In this Faust-Wagner scene we encounter in Goethe's striving something quite extraordinary, bringing self knowledge of human fulfilment into expression and to revelation. When both impulses, world knowledge and self-knowledge are considered, it must be pointed out that in both, specific human dangers are connected.

With world knowledge it is thus: trying to penetrate ever more into world knowledge, demanding human imaginative capabilities to penetrate ever more into what is offered in a spiritual sense perception, one arrives at a percept which can be called the “temptation of illusion.”

There exists for instance in human culture, and Goethe felt it, such diversity in world knowledge, that it offered, through the tangling of its laws, an illusion, (which the Indians term Maya) ever accompanying us in life, insofar as it forces itself into life and so places the personality in the wide world. We are, in our search for a relationship to things, subject to illusion. Only through this, that we strain with all our all power to protect our consciousness, disallowing it to be charmed, as Faust does after his oath with the Earth Spirit—only in this way can we work our way through illusion. It can appear to one with the deepest discernment in this form before the soul, as Goethe describes later, calling it the Mephistophelean force. Danger in this world knowledge exists in such a secretive way precisely so we don't notice it, in all our worldly thoughts and every experience, in simple indications of life, emotionally intertwined, that it finally does not originate within us. Closer observation shows that, that which is so emotionally inter-mixed does not come from within us, but from other forces. What the human being can conclude in the illusion of a Mephistophelean danger comes down to the so-called intermixing of instinct, of a kind of willing and of desire into this outer knowledge. We often believe we have objective knowledge, but we only have it when we admit to giving in to no illusion, that the aforementioned is mixed into outer knowledge.

When we, however, try to throw out all we have as knowledge, derived from feeling, willing, from passion, the remainder is what Goethe allows Faust to call: “A spectacle! Oh, only a spectacle!” No one needs to search for other ways to discover reality. What we are led to believe is suffused with illusion. As Faust stands before the sign which calls his soul to awaken to such a observation of the world, where everything connected to the will and passion is thrown out, he finds a mere spectacle, a show. This he doesn't want. He wants to dive into self knowledge. He believes the human being can be driven down to the core of the world. Here another danger threatens. While illusion acts as a threat towards world knowledge, due to us delving into the depths of the soul, so another threat finds us in as much as so-called knowledge leads us to wishes, feelings, affectations, towards world riddles, yet they do not allow separation from wishes and will.

It keeps pace with our constitution. We seek in us, through a false mysticism, the everlasting and only find the most recent with a vague mix of the everlasting within it. Acknowledging that, we know that every moment we dive into ourselves, we are confronted with a vision threatened by a void, appearing more as a facade than mere fantasy, which merely drives us into wasted error. Goethe was well known regarding these secrets of human existence, that we, when we don't constantly correct ourselves with common sense and dive into the mystical and encounter deep contemplation, we may get involved in visions. We don't need disease to be a visionary, we enter into a life which becomes a visionary life when it turns ill.

Thus these two elements which are found in life stand out in another way. Goethe didn't proclaim it. It stood before his soul, when we keep everything in mind, which appears as illusion in world knowledge. What does it come to when one considers these illusionary things in a philistine or pedantic manner? To what are we continuously led, away from reality? This illusion is linked with everything which we grasped during our quite normal development. Not continuously coming to terms with the danger of illusion in our soul-life, we may not be defeated by that underlying development which we allow in growing, sprouting, prospering not only during child development, but also in mature development. This however connects to that which, from the age of thirty five, indicates the descending human existence.

This backward directed development is connected to all which lives in our soul. We couldn't become wise or clever through life's experiences if we didn't develop from birth, that which during the descending development brings in an extraordinary existence. We actually live from forces which direct us towards death, not towards growth. We die from birth onwards, and at the moment of death everything is drawn together which worked through our entire life. It works in such a way that that which develops forwards carries that which withdraws, bringing our soul qualities to the fore. If the Mephistophelean, the life of illusions, weren't bedded into world knowledge, we couldn't develop as human beings; these descending forces couldn't live in us. Through this illusion, everything is connected to that which we bring as disturbances into the world, which leads some individuals to destruction and which is connected to the origins of our forces.

It's different with elements arising out of self-knowledge. As we descend into our inner soul, we certainly reach into the spiritual part of our being. We seize hold of ourselves in our personal kernel which connects to the kernel of the world where, in an unconscious way, we forcefully experience will forces and desires living within us. As a result we can develop a specific influence on those around us; we just tend not to study this properly. This disturbance influencing our contemporaries, those we are living with, causing impairment, originates in fact from the descending forces, out of which we could only have grown, if we had grasped them in a proper, spiritual manner. These forces are Luciferic. It is extraordinary that Goethe had within his feelings this duality, the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelean and the Luciferic. Originating within a western spiritual development and western tradition he did not manage to make a clear distinction between the Mephistophelean and the Luciferic. Out of this Goethe unfortunately created the single Mephistopheles. When commentators frequently emphasized that Mephistopheles was an actual character, Goethe continued to sense, subconsciously, that Mephistopheles had to be presented as a duality, as ahrimanic and luciferic. Therefore it is a given that, the moment Faust must turn away from the Earth Spirit, where he doesn't show himself mature in his knowledge, that which moves within his own soul, be it in the soul of man as a whole, Mephistopheles appears as Lucifer to Faust. This results in the merger linking our wishes, feelings and desires within our depths. This follows in other words in the totally wonderful, magnificent, vivid tragedy of Margaret. It also makes it possible for Faust to explore the connection between wishes and will; it results in the most part to that which we go through in the first part of Goethe's “Faust.” Here we experience everything which appears as a luciferic element. However, everything originates from what Goethe actually explored during the seventies and eighties as carrier of human knowledge: people didn't want to know anything about the relationship between themselves and the wider world. However, the feeling remained in him, prompting him to find a solution.

It is interesting that everything which turns towards the luciferic element, results in dissatisfaction. We can only reach satisfaction when we try to find the relationship with the luciferic on the one side and ahrimanic on the other side of the Mephistophelean, which rises from world knowledge. It is interesting that from the beginning of the combination of Mephistopheles with Faust, Goethe left this unresolved. He felt that there had to live a deeper level which flowed between Mephistopheles and Faust, which he however didn't know through his everyday consciousness. Later he wanted to bring it out in a disputing scene. That is the ahrimanic character which lived in Mephistopheles and came to expression when Mephistopheles installed himself and argued about world riddles. In this very discussion, actually, lives illusion. In this way Goethe wanted to introduce something which had brought out another element before his spiritual eye.

Now we observe something extraordinary in Goethe's personal development. He had treated Mephistopheles as an individual character, bringing Faust to a poetic expression. In 1790 he offered “Faust” as a fragment. Schiller stimulated him to continue and what is remarkable, is the manner in which Goethe declined. He saw himself as old, finished and done, couldn't go any further. What actually happened there? The personal relationship Goethe had to his “Faust” became something quite different.

This change can only be understood through insight into the world view Goethe had built for himself during the nineties. What did this knowledge of nature become? It was much spoken about; here and there even justice was done but really penetrating the moving target was hardly achieved. In essence, Goethe wanted to build a bridge, with the help of the knowledge of nature, between self knowledge and world knowledge. When one looks at Goethe's method of nature observation, one discovers that singular results and their discoveries are hardly the main issue. The manner and method, how thoughts unfold, is what matters. How was this? It was so, that Goethe searched for a complete different kind of comprehension and types of ideas to which we are accustomed. When we don't want to focus on this point, we will never understand Goethe's nature observation. Right into the colour teachings we can't understand Goethe, if we fail to focus on what Goethe wanted. He wanted to reach such concepts with his metaphysical teachings, which did not follow one imagination to another, from one idea to the next idea in an outer way, no, by contrast, he wanted us to dive into the reality itself in order for the idea to unfold itself in our soul life, which is actually sufficiently unselfish to share in world experience at the same time. He wanted, in this way, to reach, though his nature observation, what really lies behind reality; he wanted to join self knowledge and world knowledge. Goethe couldn't, because of that which scientifically confronted him, deepen a satisfactory nature observational method, according to him; he had to bring forth a world view from within his being; this he had to achieve honestly and only then the possibility would be given to connect self knowledge with world knowledge. Earlier he had believed that through self knowledge something could be accomplished. But only, diving so deeply down into self knowledge, that the depth of the world is understood in the same manner as we understand Goethe's nature ideas, then the bridge can be built, to find the illusionary element of the world.

So Goethe was stimulated by Schiller to take “Faust” up again.

Here self knowledge could come to its full right. However, now it was one-sided and had to be linked to world knowledge, to the macrocosm. Faust had to turn again to the sign of the macrocosm, from which he had turned away earlier. It had to be placed within the universe of good and evil forces. The forward and backward moving forces had to take up the striving of Faust from the fields of world knowledge. This was what came to him as a necessity. Mephistopheles had to accept the ahrimanic character. That is why Goethe developed his Mephistopheles more and more in this manner. That is why there's such a contradiction in this characterization. Goethe placed Faust in the universe through writing the Prologue in Heaven. The good and the evil forces are at war, and Faust stands in the middle of it.

Occult scientific development had not advanced to such a degree that Goethe could be clear about this. From his single Mephistopheles he could not have created two characters. In his sub-consciousness however, they lived. From this Goethe became ill during the nineties. This is what made Faust so difficult, so heavy. Frequently the second part of “Faust” is left unrecognised, while within this second part only allegory is looked for. When really searching for insight, the second part presents nothing more full of life, nothing more direct and more lively than all the characters! Why do they appear as allegorical? We, as single individuals, place ourselves in the world with our life's work and our individual ideas—we are urged to withdraw somewhat from this reality as an abstraction—but this is what we should surely learn from, in the present! We live in a present time, in which we should ponder the relationship of human beings who are so taken with reality, giving us the most fruitful illusions. Right within ideas, be it in social or political fields, lives abstractions, the allegorical. We live with them. It is the very manner in which the Mephistophelean element enters into our worldly experience in our own lives.

This is depicted vividly and with endless humour in the Emperor scene of the second part, where outer associations of reality with illusion are presented in a grandiose and humoristic way: stupidity and cleverness, as they appear side-by-side in life. In a wonderful, clear way they come to meet us. We then see how Faust, in the thorough way in which he has positioned himself in the world where illusionary elements exist and where they combine with stupidity, he finds it necessary to once again delve down into his own soul.

Now self knowledge is expressed in a yet higher sense. It links to the moment when Faust bows to the mothers with: “The mother! Mother! It sounds so wondrous!” Quite wonderful it sounds when we shift into our own depths, as Faust delves into himself. Now Goethe needs to give Mephistopheles, while he has two figures within him—Lucifer and Mephistopheles—a kind of minor role. In order to understand him fully, Faust sinks down into the worlds where Lucifer's power grips one in loneliness. That which he had experienced in the depth of soul, lived out in a dream, he goes through in such a way that we see: from it flows whatever he has brought up from the depths of his soul and out of self knowledge, and now self knowledge within world knowledge is transformed. There had to be something here regarding science, which links to self-awareness. That which we discover in the depths of our souls, numbs us, only allows us to dream, when we can't bring it out of our depths.

Had we had the chance in Goethe's time, or do we have an opportunity in our time, to develop such spiritual knowledge? What Faust took from the mothers, no, that wouldn't have made it. Human knowledge appeared to be an artificial product, understood like a mechanism. No Homunculus bulges forth out of lively reality. Now comes that towards which Goethe strives for within the entire depth of his soul. That which has grown out of world knowledge, must now unite itself with self knowledge. They had to become so blended together that they become one. This is what Goethe achieved: his wonderful knowledge of nature, biological and other metamorphosis-knowledge, brought together in a bond, equally including what Faust brought from the mothers on the one side, and on the other side, what could be given to him in his time as outer world knowledge.

Through this striving Goethe steered into the Greek era. His quest wasn't towards a one-sided spiritual abstraction or life abstraction—but to the consummation of the soul. This exact perfection, living in the Greek soul, cannot be restored, yet some vestige must have been left which can be won again, something similar to Hellenism which can be experienced again in later times. In Italy Goethe had experienced this in Greek art. He regarded the Greek artist as one who had solved nature's mysteries. As he observed the Greek civilization, perfection dawned on him. In his time they hadn't reached as far as solving the split between world knowledge and self knowledge. Faust had to, through that which incorporates an inner becoming within Hellenism, take up this power and use this to amalgamate self- and world knowledge. Now Goethe tried, towards the end of the second part of his “Faust,” to depict, as much as modern art allowed at that time, Faust as he appears amid all that had been brought from the mothers, towards that which the great universe revealed to humanity. Precisely from this basis, because he wasn't split within his consciousness in the depth of his soul, he had to—what he justifies in his way—adapt traditional form. He places Faust into the traditional form of the Christian church, in order to, after he had brought forth the deep elements in his soul derived from the mothers, direct him again towards that which he had turned away from in the beginning: the possible revelation in the sign of the macrocosm. We see Goethe at the close overcome what he as younger man had rejected: one-sided self knowledge. Faust is introduced into the universe, in the steams of the world-all, into secrets, where the ahrimanic world combines with the physical.

This is the great tableau at the closing of “Faust,” where Goethe strove to introduce Faust into the macrocosm. We can't understand Goethe's “Faust” when we fail to have this insight into the work which had accompanied Goethe during nearly sixty years of his life and had shared his own destiny, but in a higher form, as is usually meant. Goethe had as a younger man turned to mere self knowledge and refused to be bothered by world knowledge. His struggles with nature's manifestations and nature's powers expressed in his nature observation, led Faust into the wide world. At the end Faust stood there, saying: “A spectacle, oh, but not only a spectacle, but an element which man lives through and through into which every human life flows in all the streaming which courses through the macrocosm, through the universe!”—Faust turns back to that which the sign of the macrocosm had wanted to reveal to him.

It looks bad when we only quote “Faust” in one or the other facet. We have to admit, Goethe had conquered what he had mixed up in his youth. I don't believe that Goethe, due to a gradual contradiction in his advancing age, belittled that part of “Faust” which he created in his youth. Precisely as a result of this, he stands there largely because he is so honest in his personal relationship to “Faust” while he shows how he had struggled and strived to find the way, from self knowledge to world knowledge.

Whosoever participates in these steps, really penetrating into the single elements in which “Faust” lives, will judge him differently.

To descend into his own soul, Faust again turned to Bible translating. He didn't stick to the traditional translation: “In the beginning was the Word,” but tried: Sense, power, deed. “In the beginning was the deed!” Just this manner of translation invites Mephistopheles to enter; he is the diminutive of superficiality in which Faust, at this point of his development arrives at the trivial: “In the beginning was the Deed” from the deeper: “In the beginning was the Word.” However, through this, because Faust finds himself within all the illusions of world knowledge, through this he can overcome Mephistopheles. It is a great work in world literature which allows us to lay our eyes on a relationship so close to the bone.

“Faust” has become no lesser work of art. It is more accomplished through the fact that great power flowed into a single soul, a person of the highest ranks, who strives and struggles with the spiritual riddles of mankind. This I believe anyway, that in Goethe's “Faust” stands a work towards which mankind must return, repeatedly.

It made an extraordinary impression on me when I read a critique written in English, translated from a French work by a Spaniard, a harsh criticism, exercised on Goethe's “Faust” from the standpoint of taking everything within it as that which must be combated against within by central European people. I believe, that all man's weaknesses, all that which doesn't allow one to get along, wherever one is, be recognised, that in Goethe's “Faust” not only the central Europeans but the entire world has appeared in a work, containing specific meaning, which shouldn't only be given to mankind, but is continuously being sought by mankind. While Goethe's own search is so closely connected with the search in mankind, I also believe that Goethe, through his “Faust” has given mankind a most precious gift, because the greatest good is that towards which mankind should come, because when you really understand yourself, you have to search for this good, without end.

Author's note ¹ Prague, April 4, 1924

I would like to speak of a kind of education and teaching that strives to develop the whole human being, body, soul and spirit, in an equal way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical is formed out of the soul and spiritual during development. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws of this formation.

Anthroposophy leads to such knowledge of the human being. It does not look at the physical one-sidedly, as it happens in the scientific world view. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby looks at every age of the human being at the way in which the spirit works on the body of the human being and how the soul lives in the body.

In the face of such a view, clearly distinct epochs arise in the growing human being.

The first epoch runs from birth to the change of teeth, around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is not just a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is happening in the whole organism. Until then, the soul and spirit participate intensively in the formation of the body. During this period of human development, body, soul and spirit are still highly unified.

The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later is concentrated only in the sensory organization, still works in the whole human being at this time. The human being is therefore completely devoted to the activities of the environment, just like a sensory organ. In the most pronounced sense, he is an imitative being. His will reacts reflexively to everything that happens around him.

Therefore, the only way to educate a child at this age is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything they do. This must be taken in the broadest sense. There are imponderables at work between the child and their educator. The child is not only influenced by what it perceives with its external senses in its environment, but it also senses the attitudes, characters, and good and bad intentions of other people from their behavior. Therefore, as an educator, one should cultivate purity of life in the child's environment, right down to one's thoughts and feelings, so that the child can become what one is oneself.

But one should also be aware that one's behavior has an effect not only on the soul but also on the body. What the child absorbs and allows to flow reflexively into his will continues to vibrate in the organization of his body. A teacher with a violent temper can cause the child's physical organization to become brittle, so that in later life it is easily influenced by pathogenic influences. How one educates in this direction will become apparent in later life in the state of health of the person.

The anthroposophical art of education does not focus on the spiritual and soul aspects of education because it wants to develop only these, but because it knows that it can only develop the physical properly if it develops the spiritual, which works on the body, in the right way.

A complete metamorphosis takes place in the child when the teeth change. What was previously absorbed in the physical organization and working in it becomes an independent soul being and the physical is more left to its own forces.

Therefore, when dealing with the soul of the age at which the child is to be educated and taught in a scholastic way, one has to bear in mind that one is dealing with forces that were previously the malleable forces in the body. One only works in an educational and teaching way if one keeps this in mind. The child at this age does not yet absorb with an abstract mind; it wants to experience images, as it has worked with images up to this period of life. This is only achieved if the educator and teacher relate to the child in an artistic way through the soul. They cannot assume that the child already understands what they are communicating. He should work in such a way that the child is immersed in love in the images that he unfolds in an artistic way. He should be the self-evident authority for the child. The child cannot yet absorb what is true, good and beautiful because it understands it, but something must be true, good and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in front of the child.

Everything in teaching and education must be brought out in a pictorial way. All teaching must be artistically designed. You cannot start with reading and not with the letterforms, which in their present form are foreign to the inner experience of the human being. One must begin with a kind of painting drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that are similar to certain processes and things, like the signs in the pictographic writing of prehistoric peoples. First there must be a picture, which the child fixes from the things and processes of the world. Then one should proceed from the picture to the letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract sign writing.

Only when the child has progressed from painting to drawing to writing in this way should one move on to reading. This is because only one part of the human being is activated in this process: the ability to comprehend that is tied to the organization of the head. In painting, drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organization is also involved. This is how you educate the whole person, not just one side of the brain.

All education should be based on the same attitude until the second decisive point in the child's development. This lies in the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, not only a local part of the human organism undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. It is only at this point that the relationship between the human being and his environment unfolds, which is revealed in the more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point on should one count on the adolescent to grasp things intellectually and freely. Before that, everything should be presented in a pictorial form, and in grasping it, one should count on the child's love of pictures.

Such an education has the whole of human life in mind, not just childhood. It is quite a different matter to occupy the child in a pictorial way, so that what it has absorbed is only later understood, than to develop only the intellectual system one-sidedly at an early stage in so-called visual instruction, which is not true visual instruction because it has no artistic element. What is laid down in childhood only comes to expression in later life. A child who has gone through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become a person who can still be fresh and fit for life in old age; a child who is taught in a one-sided way to understand what is often thought to be appropriate for childhood will become a person who ages prematurely and is susceptible to disease-causing living conditions.

• 1. On April 4, 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Prague with this title. The author's note presented here is apparently a text written for press representatives to make it easier for them to report on the lecture. Rudolf Steiner prefaced it with the following note: “This is only an outline of what I will say; the spiritual researcher cannot actually do such things; in a lecture, he draws from the spirit, not from memory, and is therefore misled when his lecture is to be written down verbatim. Please excuse this.”