The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will utilize the last lecture of this course by bringing together, to some extent, the Mysteries as I have outlined them as belonging to this or the other region of the earth; and I shall attempt to show you the nature of the Mysteries at any rate from one point of view, in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the 10th to the 15th centuries.

I do not speak of this epoch of time because it is particularly complete in itself, but because it can to a certain extent be useful in showing what form the human soul-strivings took in the most civilized parts of the earth at that time. The spiritual striving of that period is often described as the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but one must search behind it, not for the charlatan element which is so often met with in literature, without one's being aware of this fact—one does not always realize what an element of charlatanism is at work in these things—but we must look behind, and direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, in Central Europe, Western and Southern Europe. We must realize clearly that the figure of Faust as described by Goethe, with all his deep soul-striving, with all his earnest efforts, is really simply a later figure, no longer anything like as deep in soul as many an investigator to be found in the medieval laboratories, figures of whom nothing reaches us by way of history, but who laboured between the 14th and 15th centuries. I mentioned in the last lecture that in the investigators of this epoch a tragic note predominates. The peculiar trait is the feeling which existed in those investigators that they must strive after the highest, the highest which is creatively active in man; yet not only could they not reach this highest, but from a certain point of view their striving after the highest is even doubtful.

I have said that we do not find theoretical, easily obtained knowledge among these scientists in their alchemical laboratories between the 14th and 15th centuries, but something which is deeply connected with the whole man, with the longing for knowledge which came from their inner feeling, a cognition acquired with heart and feeling.

Now what was the origin of this? This can be best explained to you if I try to make you understand the tragic scepticism of the medieval investigators, by once again turning our attention to the form taken by human cognition on earth in very ancient days.

The most ancient form of human knowledge, which was so closely connected with the life of the individual human being, was not of such a nature that man looked up to the planets and saw the mathematical grandeur and mathematical movements, which can be calculated and observed today; at that time each planet, as all else spread out in the heavens, was a living being, and not only a living being but it possessed a soul. Indeed it was not only an ensouled being but a being permeated by spirit. Man constantly spoke then of the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies, for he knew that just as there exists a blood relationship between the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner relationship, between the members of a planetary system. There was a parallelism between the human element and what revealed itself outside in the cosmos.

I should like to depict one aspect of what was perceived and known by man in the very oldest Mysteries, when he looked up to the sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries which were so arranged that there was a specially prepared kind of skylight, so that at certain definite times of the day the sun could be seen through a diminished light. Thus you must imagine that the most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple was that in the roof, in which a skylight was inserted and the window filled with some kind of material—not glass in our modern sense—but a material through which one saw the orb of the sun in a dim twilight at a certain definite time of the day. The pupil had been prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right feeling, the right mood of soul. He had to make, his feeling so receptive, so inwardly perceptive that when, so to speak, he exposed his soul through his eye to the sun orb it made an impression on him which he could really bring to his consciousness.

Now, of course, many people today look up at the sun through smoked glass, but they are not prepared in their feeling to receive this impression which the sun makes as a special impression. But the pupil in these ancient Mysteries received this impression of the darkened solar orb after long exercises had been undergone, and this impression was then a quite definite one. A man who, as a pupil of the Initiates of the Mysteries, was able to have this impression could truly never forget it.

With this impression the pupil also gained something which, from that time on, gave him more understanding for certain things around him than he formerly had. The attempt was made, after the pupil had been prepared through the majestic and magnificent impression of the sun to permit the especial quality of the substance gold to work upon him; and through this preparation, through this sun-preparation, the pupil was led to a deep understanding of the quality of gold.

When one looks into these things, it is really painful to experience the triviality of our modern consciousness which we find in so many historical works in which we are told the reason why this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the sun or attributed the same symbol to gold and to the sun. Man no longer knows what was known by this means in these olden times, and which really was evoked by means of these many exercises and through preparation. I mean that this direction of the vision inward into the dimmed direct light of the sun, prepared the pupil to understand the substance gold on the earth.

How then did he understand this? After he had undergone this preparation, his attention awoke to the fact that gold is not affected by that which, for the organism, constitutes the breath of life, i.e., oxygen, and to which most of the other metals are so thoroughly receptive. Oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that from which man really has his life, made a deep impression on the pupil of the ancient Mysteries. Thus he received the impression that gold cannot directly approach life. Now the sun too cannot directly approach life; and it is well that neither gold nor the sun can directly approach life. Then the pupil was gradually led to the fact that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, with the breath of life, that therefore when in a certain dose it is introduced into the human organism it has a quite special effect on the organism of man. Gold has a quite special relation with the human organism when, as we have said, it is introduced into it in the correct dose. It has no relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body; but gold has a direct relation to what lies in human thought, in human thinking.

Just consider how far removed thinking lies from human life, especially in our modern age. A man can sit down like a piece of wood and think quite intellectually. He can think quite livingly in an intellectual way; but on the other hand he cannot by thinking bring about any change in his organism. Man's thinking has become more and more powerless; but thinking is set in motion by the ego-organization, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human organism can bring back power into thinking. It restores to thinking the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric body; thus thinking can be animated by gold.

That was one of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries; the secret of the connection of gold with the sun. The relationship between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the sun was perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries of which I have just spoken.

And in a similar way, the pupil of these ancient Mysteries was then led to experience the opposite pole of gold, the opposite effect. Gold is an impulse for the animation of human thinking, so that human thinking can work down as far as the etheric body. And what would be the opposite pole of that?

In regard to the human organism, in its several members, the ego-organization, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, we may say that through gold the ego-organization becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric body can then work further on the physical body; but gold brings it about that thoughts can actually be maintained in all their power in the etheric body.

What is the opposite pole of this? We have the opposite pole, the opposite working, and this effect is what is produced when the breath of life—oxygen—is attracted by something in man or in nature; then, just as gold is obstinate in the face of oxygen and repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and therefore has no influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but simply on the thought-world of the ego-organization, in the same way what exists in man as carbon has a direct relationship with oxygen.

We breathe out carbonic acid. We produce in ourselves carbon dioxide. We unite carbon with oxygen. The plants require carbon dioxide for their life; and this carbon possesses the opposite characteristic of gold.

Now, this substance of carbon played an enormous part in the ancient Mysteries. On the one hand, gold was referred to as being a quite special substance for the study of man, while, on the other hand, carbon was referred to in the ancient Mysteries in such a way that it was called the Stone of the Wise, the Philosopher's Stone. Gold and the Philosopher's Stone were very important things in olden times. Carbon was the Stone of the Wise.

Carbon appears on the earth in a number of different forms. A diamond is carbon, hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coke is carbon; anthracite is carbon. On the earth carbon appears before us in many diverse forms; but through those methods which were customary in the ancient Mysteries, men learnt to understand that there existed other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on the earth. And so another preparation was necessary for the Mystery pupils besides that of which I have spoken as the sun preparation. In addition to that there existed the moon preparation.

Now if we turn to these ancient Sun Mysteries, we find there in addition to what I have said above a kind of observatory wherein a man could open his soul and his physical vision to the moon forms. At certain definite times he did not merely behold the sun through a diminished light, but for a period of time lasting for weeks the pupil had to open his psychic vision, his soul-filled eye, to the different forms which the orb of the moon adopted by night. Thereby the pupil received a quite definite experience in his soul, an experience which led to knowledge. Just as the soul capable of exposing itself to the sun became endowed with the power of the sun, by so exposing it to the phases of the moon it became endowed with the power of the moon. He now learnt what metamorphoses the substance of carbon could undergo. On the earth carbon is either coal or graphite or diamond or anthracite; but on the moon that which we find here on the earth as diamond or anthracite or coal, is silver—and that was the secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon on the moon is silver. Carbon is the Philosopher's Stone, and on the moon it is silver.

What in the ancient Mysteries was so profoundly impressed on the pupil was the knowledge that any substance, however it looks externally, is only this in one place on the earth and at one definite time. None but an ignorant man was then unaware that carbon is only diamond, coal or anthracite on the earth; for what exists on the earth as diamond or graphite, that, on the moon, is silver. If we could at the present moment take a piece of our ordinary black coal and as it were carry it over into the moon, it would there immediately become a piece of silver.

A perception of this radical metamorphosis was what the pupil obtained in these ancient times. Now that is not to be found at the basis of that fraudulent alchemy which is spoken of today, but it does lie at the basis of the true ancient alchemy. And this ancient alchemy could not be acquired as we obtain our intellectual knowledge today. Today we observe or think about things, but alchemy could not be attained in that way. Today man directs his telescope to a certain star, he gets parallelisms and such like things. He calculates and calculates; or he may study a certain substance and place the spectrum on it, and so on; yet everything which can be learnt in this way is, after all, infinitely abstract, compared with what could in olden times be learnt of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this real Astrology, could only be learnt, as I explained in the last lecture, by a real living intercourse with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. The knowledge then attained was knowledge through which man could speak in his soul, in his spirit, with the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Now what gold is for the human organism is connected with the secret of the sun; and through the fact that the pupil exposed in the manner described his own soul to the sun Being, he thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the sun themselves, and they it was who told him of the properties of gold. In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the moon.

Now the pupil learnt to know these Intelligences of the moon as those great Teachers who existed on the earth in very ancient times, and who taught the primeval wisdom on the earth. They were the same Teachers who today, I would say, send down their forces, their impulses to the earth from the moon. They withdrew at a definite time from the earth to the moon, and there as it were they founded a colony on the moon, at the time when the moon separated from the earth.

Thus with this second-secret, the secret of carbon-silver, those Intelligences have to do who once lived on the earth and today constitute the moon Intelligences. Such was the knowledge, the cognition acquired by the pupil in ancient times.

I will bring forward a further instance. Just as the pupil could receive impressions from the sun or from the moon, so by means of a still further preparation of his soul he could also receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets thus obtained in ancient times was that which related to Venus. Venus is today studied through the telescope, and is regarded as being like other stars, like other planets. The human body is studied by investigating first part of the liver and then part of the brain, analyzing them only according to their cellular structures (for although the liver and the brain are radically different substances, they are investigated today as though they were both alike.) So a student now directs his telescope towards Mercury, Venus and Mars, and so on, and thinks that they are all substances of a like nature. But in these ancient times it was known that if a man looked with his eyes at the moon or the sun, he saw something which still had a relation with the physical earth, with the earthly, the watery, the fiery; while if he extended his observation to the moon in a spiritual way, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his observation to Venus, he came to a spiritual world, a purely astral world. What we see as the physical Venus is in a sense simply the external sign for something which lives and works in the astral light. The physical light of Venus is something quite different from the sunlight, for instance; for physical sunlight still has a relationship with what can live on the earth as the light which belongs to the earth, but as regards the light from Venus, it is childish to think that it is simply reflected sunlight, for the light from Venus shines out from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed his soul nature to this light he learnt to know what Intelligences were connected with Venus.

Now these are Intelligences who, I might say, live in continual opposition to the Intelligences of the sun; and a great part, a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences of the sun. It was then said, with a certain justice, that there was a continual conflict between the Venus Intelligences and the sun Intelligences. There existed a starting-point for such a conflict when the Venus Intelligences first began to combat the Intelligences of the sun. Then there followed intensifications; and through this conflict there came about catastrophes and crises. In that interval which lay between an opposition and a catastrophe or crisis, occurred, as it were, a section of that great conflict which really takes place in the spiritual world, but which only appears in its external symbol in the astrological and astronomical relationship between Venus and the sun. That which then took place occurred in successive phases. Now, no one can understand what lives on the earth as inner impulses of history if he does not know of this conflict between Venus and the sun; because what takes place here on the earth as conflicts and battles, what occurs here in the course of the evolution of civilization, is simply an earthly picture, an earthly copy, of this Venus-solar conflict.

This was well known in the ancient Mysteries. Such knowledge existed then because there was a relation between human beings on the earth and these spiritual beings, these Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Then came that epoch of which I have spoken to you, the epoch from the 10th to the 15th century after Christ. The medieval investigators, in their alchemical laboratories, were no longer able, as humanity evolved, to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They could only get as far as the spirits of nature; and while these alchemical investigators made certain alchemical experiments—of which I gave an instance in the last lecture of the particular transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid—while these medieval investigators made numerous experiments of this kind which should reveal to them the working and weaving in the processes and things of nature, they could only do so when they had prepared themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I have spoken: having done this, however, then through their experiments, the spirits of nature could speak to them. Let us realize clearly the situation in which such an investigator found himself.

Such an investigator stood in his laboratory. He said: “Here I have in my laboratory substances, retorts, kilns. I make various experiments. When I direct my questionings to Nature through my experiments, there enter my laboratory quite visibly the nature spirits with their revelations.”

This occurred as late as the 15th century, that the nature spirits appeared to the Rosicrucian investigator who was rightly prepared. This really occurred! But he knew from external knowledge that in olden times it had been possible to reach out not merely to the nature spirits, but to the higher Cosmic Intelligences, to those Intelligences who spoke of the Gold-secret in connection with the sun, of the Silver-secret and the Carbon-secret in connection with the moon, of the historically important Venus-secret, etc. True, this medieval alchemist knew all this from information imparted by tradition. But that was not the important thing. He who has been under the influence of the spiritual world, to him historical documents are not so terribly important as they are to modern materialistic times. One is always so astonished to find how infinitely important it is for many people when something like the Dinosaurus is found in the Desert of Gobi as recently. That is an important find, but these are only broken fragments, whereas we may really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos in a spiritual way. Historical documents were therefore certainly not such as deeply to affect these medieval investigators; but in another way the medieval alchemist acquired the knowledge that it had formerly been possible to attain this cosmic cognition, but that now they could only reach the Spirits of Nature, the spirits behind the elements, when certain observations of nature were made, or certain experiments performed—i.e., when these investigators approached the sphere of the Spirits of Nature, then certain Spirits of Nature came around them and told the investigators that there formerly existed human beings who stood in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. It was a deep piercing pain to the investigators when the Spirits of Nature spoke to him of a former age in which man himself was able to come into connection with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. So these investigators had to say: “These Spirits of Nature tell of a still earlier age, now vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and experiences.” Thus this gift of the medieval alchemist of access to the Spirits of Nature was really of a dubious nature. While on the one hand they could come to the Spirits of Nature, to the spirits of the air, water and fire, and could approach them in all their living reality, on the other hand there were some amongst these spirits who told the investigators, and this information crushed them, how at one time humanity not only stood in connection with the Spirits of Nature, but with the living Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Spirits of Nature still stood in connection, but with whom man could no longer get into touch. That was the feeling of these medieval alchemists and it often came to expression in a much grander, much more tragic way even than we find in Goethe's Faust, beautiful and mighty though that is.

That utterance which Faust addressed to the moon, the silver shining light of the moon in which he seeks to bathe, this Faust utterance would have been made in a much more intense manner by the investigators of the Middle Ages when the Spirits of Nature came to them and told them about the secrets of carbon, the secrets of silver, that secret which again is closely connected with man. What was it then that man experienced in ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold is connected with the sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and carbon work in man, and how other metals related to the other planets work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the very circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and working through his head, and at the same time he felt this as allied to a picture of the whole earth. He really experienced that when he felt the blood streaming up through his head. And there, in that sphere where the head is not enclosed by the bones, where it opens itself downwards towards the breast, man felt a copy in miniature of what ascends from the earth in the atmosphere. Thus in that which man learnt from the cosmos outside he recognized that which he transmuted in his own organism, he could follow the planet in its passage through the various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of Mephistopheles' lines in Goethe's Faust, which are written in such a penetrating way: “Blood is a very special fluid;” because in its various metamorphoses our blood really reflects those metamorphoses which are so magnificent—the change from carbon to silver. All this lives in man's blood.

So the medieval investigators experienced this loss of the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own humanity. In reality it is but a faint reflection of this which we find in Goethe's Faust, when he opens, as it were, the Book of the Macrocosmos, seeking the Cosmic Intelligences; and shuts it again because he cannot approach them. He can only get as far as the Spirit of the Earth. That is simply a faint echo of what we find in so terribly tragic a way amongst the best of these medieval investigators, whose names have not come down to us. The greatest of these medieval investigators underwent this experience when they heard from the Spirits of Nature, whose sphere they entered through their alchemical investigations, that there once existed a connection between man and the Cosmic Intelligences.

Now all this is very deeply connected with what still had to develop in ancient Greece when the necessary need arose for what we have studied in these lectures as the Mysteries of Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be weakened down into the philosophy of Aristotle, and which then played such an enormous part in the Middle Ages, while below the surface what we know as Aristotelianism worked so strongly right on into the 15th century, but in a tragic manner, as I tried to describe to you in a fragmentary way.

Behind the Macedonian epoch, was a Mystery which extended even as far as Greece. The significant details of this will be given to you in the, coming historical lectures; but with reference to this Mystery, which saw so deeply into the secrets of the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic Intelligences, we have a Mystery which descended from the Cosmic Intelligences to the Spirits of Nature. Then man's vision had to be closed to these Cosmic Intelligences, and simply directed towards the Spirits of Nature. That was the crisis which was accomplished at the time of Alexander and Aristotle. We can still see in Aristotelianism how the abstractions of Aristotle are based upon the ancient Mysteries.

I must say here that anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret, and then reads the observations of Aristotle—even those few observations which have come down to posterity, for the most important writings of Aristotle have not come down to us—anyone who reads these writings, the observations of Aristotle relating to the secret of the moon, will realize the connection of those olden times. Now these are the things which are to be illuminated more in detail in the Christmas lectures which I want to give concerning the historical development of humanity from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have seen how the old knowledge that was once acquired by means of instinctive clairvoyance gradually faded into a kind of evening twilight. It is difficult to find any trace of that old wisdom in modern times, particularly after the eighteenth century, for what I have told you is really true, namely that in recent times what has persisted—or rather, to put it more correctly, what has only recently made its appearance, is the external observation of Nature, Logic, the sequence of abstract thoughts. But neither with external observation of Nature nor with the mere sequence of abstract logical thoughts can a bridge be built for man whereby he may attain to reality. Much of the ancient wisdom has nevertheless maintained a sort of existence in traditional form and may be found even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. And in order that we may orientate ourselves rightly to the important subjects with which we shall have to deal, I should like today to speak further about some of the ideas that were still to be found in the first half of the nineteenth century and are really survivals of the ancient wisdom.

I relate these things to you in order that you may see how in a time that does not lie so very far back, the whole manner of thinking was nevertheless entirely different from what it is today. As I said before, it is exceedingly difficult to arrive at these things, for it is single individuals—living all alone, or having around them at the most a small circle of pupils—who carried on the ancient wisdom, preserving it in secret, often without themselves understanding its wonderfully deep foundation. A similar picture has really to be made of the conditions as they were in still earlier times, for it is quite certain that the two characters who are familiar to you under the names of Faust and Paracelsus encountered in the course of their wanderings such lonely individuals—cave-dwellers of the soul we may call them—and learned a great deal from them; learned from them what they themselves afterwards developed and elaborated through an inner faculty of their own, a faculty that was in their cases, too, of a rather instinctive nature.

What I am now going to relate to you was however much later, it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Once more we find a small group—call it a school if you will—a lonely school of Central Europe. There, in this little circle, was to be found a deep and penetrating teaching concerning Man. A long time ago, on a spiritual path, I became aware that at a certain place in Central Europe there existed such a small company of men who had knowledge. As I have said, I learned to know of it on a spiritual path; I was not able at that time to make observations in the physical world, since I was not then in the physical world, but in a spiritual way it became known to me that a little company of this kind existed.

I should, however, not speak of what was taught within this little company, had not the essence of what was hidden in it subsequently again disclosed itself to research made independently through Spiritual Science; I should not speak of it, had I not myself, so to speak, found the things anew. For it is just in the refinding that one obtains the right orientation to the wisdom that has survived from olden times, and that is truly overpowering in its greatness. From this little company of which I speak, a tradition goes right back in history, back through the whole of the Middle Ages into the times of antiquity that I described to you in the lectures given at the Christmas Meeting, the times, that is to say, of Aristotle. The tradition does not, however, come directly from Greece; it comes from Asia, by way of what was brought over to Asia from Macedonia by Alexander.

Within this little company is known and taught in all exactness a deep and penetrating teaching concerning Man, in respect especially of two human faculties. We may see there a spiritual scientist—he may truly be so called—who is a fully developed Master, instructing his pupils. The symbols by which he teaches them consist in certain geometrical forms, let us say for example a form such as this—(Two intersecting triangles)—and at the points are generally to be found some words in Hebrew. It was impossible to find any direct connection with such symbols, one could do nothing with them directly. And the pupils of this master knew through the instructions they received that what, for example, Eliphas Levi gives later on, is in reality nothing more than a talking around the subject, for the pupils were at that time still able to learn how the true meaning of such symbols is only arrived at when these symbols are rediscovered in the nature and being of the human organisation itself.

We find in particular one symbol that played a great part for this little company of men. You get the symbol when you draw apart this “Solomon's Key,” so that the one triangle comes down and the other is raised up. The symbol thus obtained played, as I said, a significant part even as late as the nineteenth century, within this little community or school.

The Master then made the members of his little circle of pupils take up a certain attitude with their bodies. They had to assume such a position that the body itself as it were inscribed this symbol. He made them stand with their legs far apart, and their arms stretched out above. Then by lengthening the lines of the arms downwards, and the lines of the legs upwards, these four lines came to view in the human organism itself. A line was then drawn to unite the feet, and another line to unite the hands above. These two joining lines were felt as lines of force; the pupil became conscious that they do really exist. It became clear to him that currents pass, like electro-magnetic currents, from the left fingertips to the right fingertips, and again from the left foot to the right foot. So that in actual fact the human organism itself writes into space these two intersecting triangles.

The next step was for the pupil to learn to feel what lies in the words: “Light streams upwards, Weight bears downwards.” The pupil had to experience this in deep meditation, standing in the attitude I have described. Thereby he gradually came to the point where the teacher was able to say to him: “Now you are about to experience something that was practised over and over again in the ancient Mysteries.” And the pupil attained then in very truth to this further experience, namely that he experienced and felt the very marrow within his bones.

You will be able to obtain some feeling for these things if you will bring what I am saying into connection with something I said to you only yesterday. I told you then, in another connection, that if men continue only to think so abstractly as has become the custom in the course of time, then this living in abstract thoughts remains something external; man as it were externalises himself. It is the exact opposite that occurs when, in this way, a consciousness of the bones from inside is attained.

But now there is something else that will help you to come to an understanding of the matter. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is yet true that such a book as my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be grasped by mere Logic, it must be understood by the whole human being. And in point of fact you will not understand what is said in that book concerning Thinking, unless you know that in reality man experiences Thought by means of the inner knowledge and feeling of his skeleton. A man does not really think with the brain, he thinks with his skeleton, when he thinks in sharply defined thoughts. And when thought becomes concrete, as is the case in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, then it passes over into the whole human being.

But now the pupils of this Master went further still; they learned to feel the inside, the inner nature, of the bones. Therewith they were able to experience a last example of what was practised in manifold ways in the ancient Mystery Schools, they learned to experience symbols by making their own organism into these symbols; for only so can symbols be really and truly experienced. Explanation and interpretation of symbols is really nonsense; so too is all theorising about symbols. The true attitude to symbols is to make them and actually experience them. It is the same as with fables and legends and fairy tales.—These should never be received merely abstractly, one must identify oneself with them. There is always something in man whereby he can enter into all the figures of the fairy tale, whereby he can make himself one with the fairy tale. And so it is with these true symbols of olden times, which come originally from spiritual knowledge; I have expressed it by writing these words in your own language.

In modern times there is little sense if Hebrew words are written, words that are no longer fully understood; for then the man who reads them is not inwardly quickened to life, he has not an inward experience of the symbol, rather he is cramped by it. It is as though his bones were broken. And that is what really happens—spiritually of course—when one studies seriously such writings as those of Eliphas Levi.

Thus, then, did these pupils learn to experience the inside of their bones. But, my dear friends, when you begin to experience the inside of the bones, you are really no longer in your body. If you hold something in your finger a few inches in front of your nose, the object you are holding is not in you; just as little is what you experience within your bones really in you. You go inwards, it is true, but nevertheless you go out of yourself. And this going out of oneself, this going to the Gods, this going into the spiritual world, is what the pupils of that lonely school learned to grasp and understand. For they learned to know the lines which from the side of the Gods were drawn into the world, the lines that were drawn by the Gods to establish and found the world. They found in one direction, namely through Man, the path to the Gods.

And then the teacher put into words what the pupil was experiencing.—He expressed it in a sentence that will naturally appear ludicrous and paradoxical to many people today but that holds nevertheless, as You will be able to recognise, a deep truth:—

Behold the man of bone,
And thou beholdest Death.
Look within the bones
And thou beholdest the Awakener—

Now in the time of which we are speaking, not very much could be attained on this path; something however could be attained. Something of the teaching concerning the evolution of the Earth through different metamorphoses became clear to the pupils. Through being able to place themselves into the Spirit-being of Man, they learned to look back into Atlantean times and even farther. As a matter of fact very many things that were not in those times written down or printed but were related by word of mouth concerning the evolution of the Earth, had their origin in a knowledge and insight that came about in this way.

Such was one of the teachings given in this school.

Another teaching is also very interesting. This teaching brought to light in a practical manner the higher position of Man in respect to the animals. Facts that we put to practical use in various ways and that are of great value to us, were known and understood even as late as the nineteenth century by men who based their knowledge on good old traditions of knowledge and insight. We are proud today that we have police-dogs who are able to track out all kinds of wrongdoing in life. This practical use had not been thought of in olden times. But the faculty of dogs, for example, in this direction was even better known than it is today. Man had insight to perceive around the human being, a very fine substance, finer than anything that can be seen or smelt or sensed in any way. And it was known that there is a fine fluid belonging also to the world as a whole. It was recognised as a special differentiation of warmth-currents, in union with all manner of other currents, which were looked upon as electro-magnetic; and the scent of the dog was connected with these currents of warmth and electro-magnetism. The pupils of that little school of which I have been telling you, had their attention drawn to the same kind of faculty in other animals too. It was shown to them how this sense for a fine fluid flowing through the world was present in a very great many animals. And then it was pointed out to them how that which in the case of the animal develops downwards in the direction of the coarse and material, develops in man upwards into a quality of soul. And now we come to something taught in this school that is of the very greatest interest. It was taught by reference to facts of external anatomy, but a deeply spiritual truth was indicated. It was said to the pupil: “Behold, Man is a Microcosm; he imitates in his organism what takes place in the great structure of the Universe.” Nor was Man regarded as a microcosm, as a little world, only in respect of the processes that go on within him. What shows itself plastically in man, in plastic forms and structures—this too was referred back to processes in the external world.

Thus, profound and solemn attention was given in this school to the passage of the Moon through First Quarter, Full Moon, Last Quarter, New Moon; they learned to watch how the Moon in this way goes through twenty-eight to thirty phases. They watched out in the Cosmos the passage of the Moon through her phases. They watched the Moon as she moves within her orbit. They saw how she describes her twenty-eight to thirty curves or turns and they understood how Man has in his spinal column these twenty-eight to thirty vertebrae and how the development of the spinal column in the embryo corresponds with the movements and forces of the Moon. They saw in the form and shape of the human spinal column the copy of the monthly movement of the Moon. And in the twenty-eight to thirty nerves that go out from the spinal column into the whole organism, they saw a copy of the streams that the Moon sends down continually upon the Earth, sending them down at the various stages of her path in the heavens. Actually and literally, in these continuations of the vertebrae they saw a reflection of the inpouring of the Moon-streams. In short, in what the human being bears within him in the nerves of the spinal marrow together with the spinal marrow itself, they saw something that unites him with the Cosmos, that brings him into living connection with the Cosmos.

All this that I have indicated to you was presented to the pupil. And he was then made to observe something else. It was said to him: “Look at the optic nerve: watch how it goes from the brain across into the eye. You will see that in the course of its passage into the eye it is divided into very fine threads. How many threads? The threads that go from the optic nerve into the inside of the eye are exactly as many in number as the nerves that go out from the spinal marrow; there are twenty-eight to thirty of them. So that we may say, a spinal marrow system in miniature goes from the brain through the optic nerve into the eye.”

Thus has Man—so said the teacher to his pupils—thus has man received this thirty-membered system of nerves and spinal marrow from the Gods, who in primeval antiquity formed and shaped his existence; but Man himself has fashioned, in his eye, in his sense-world-beholding eye, a copy of the same; there, in the front of the head-organism he has fashioned for himself a copy of what the Gods have made of him.

After this, the pupil's attention was directed to the following. The organisation of the spinal marrow stands, as we have seen, in connection with the Moon. But on the other hand, through the special relationship that the Moon has to the Sun, we have a year of twelve months; and from the human brain twelve nerves go out to the various parts of the organism, the twelve chief nerves of the brain. In this respect, Man, in his head organisation, is a microcosm, in respect, namely, of the relationship between Sun and Moon. In the whole form and figure of Man is expressed an imitation of the processes out yonder in the Cosmos.

Again, the pupil was taught to observe something more. He has seen how in the optic nerve, through the way the optic nerve is split up into thirty divisions, Man imitates the Moon system of the spine. And he has seen how twelve nerves go out from the brain. But now again, when the particular part of the brain that sends the olfactory nerve into the nose is examined the fact is disclosed that, there, in that little portion of the brain the whole big brain is imitated. Just as in the eye the system of nerves and spinal marrow is imitated, so in the organ of smell the whole brain is imitated, inasmuch as the olfactory nerve enters the nose in twelve divisions, in twelve strands. So that Man has an actual, miniature human being in front, here, in his head. And then the pupil was made to observe that anatomically this miniature human being is no more than a mere indication. Things grow different; only the most minute anatomical investigation could avail here; although on the other hand, as it were in compensation, they express themselves especially strongly in the astral body. Having however only bare indications of them, they cannot be made use of in ordinary life. Yet we can learn to do so. And even as the pupil was shown how to experience the inside of his bones, so was he shown how to experience, in a really living way, this particular part of his being.

And here we come to something that is in truth more akin to the whole Western outlook than are many other things that come over to us from the East. For the East too speaks of this concentration on the root of the nose, this concentration on the point between the eyebrows. (This is how the exact spot is defined.) But in truth this concentration is a concentration on the miniature man that is situated in this spot and can be grasped astrally. A meditation can actually be so formed as to enable one to apprehend something in the region like a miniature man in embryonic development. The pupil in that school received this guidance: he learned to apprehend, in intensely concentrated thought, a kind of embryonic development of a miniature human being.

By this means did the pupils who had the faculties for it, develop the two-petaled lotus-flower. [Footnote: see Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner] And then it was said to them: The animal develops this faculty downwards, to the fluid of warmth and of electro-magnetism. Man on the other hand develops into the astral what has its place here in the head and nose. At first sight it appears to be merely a sense of smell, but the faculty, the activity of the eye plays over into it. Man develops this into the astral. He acquires the faculty whereby he is able, not merely to follow that fluid as do the animals, but to evoke continual interchange with the astral light, and to perceive by means of the two-petaled lotus-flower what he is continually writing into the astral light his whole life long. The dog scents only that which has remained, that which is there present. Man has a different experience. Inasmuch as he moves with his two-petaled lotus-flower, even when he cannot perceive with it, he is forever writing everything that is in his thoughts into the astral light; and now he acquires the faculty that enables him to follow what he has written; and to perceive at the same time something else, namely, the true difference between Good and Evil.

In this manner echoes of ancient primeval treasures of wisdom were still present, of which the rudiments were still taught in later days, even practically. And we can see how very much has been lost under the influence of the materialistic streams that began to work so forcibly about the middle of the nineteenth century. For such things as I have been indicating to you were still, to a certain degree at least, experienced and known in certain circles, isolated and hermit-like though they were. And in the most varied domains of life knowledge was still derived from such hidden sources, knowledge that was later entirely disregarded, and that many today long to find again. But on account of the crude methods that prevail in our time, external cognition cannot regain it.

Now together with all else that was taught to the pupils of that little circle, there was one special and definite teaching. It was shown to the pupil how when he makes use of the organ that is really an organ of smell raised up into the astral light, then he learns to know the true substance of all things, he learns to know Matter. And when he comes to a knowledge of the inside of his bony system, and thereby learns to know the true and authentic World Geometry, to know the way in which the forces have been inscribed into the world by the Gods, then he learns to understand the Forms that work in the things of the world. Thus if you would learn to know Quartz in its substance—so it was said to the pupil—then look at it in the two-petaled lotus-flower. If you would learn to know its crystal form, how the substance is given shape and form, then you must apprehend this form out of the Cosmos with the power of apprehension that you can gain by living experience of the inside of the bony system.

Or again, the pupil was taught as follows.—If you use your head-organ, then you learn to know how a plant is fashioned in respect of Substance. If You learn to experience the inside of your bony system, then you learn to know how a certain plant grows, why it has this or that form of leaf, this or that arrangement of its leaves, why it unfolds its blossoms in this or that manner.

Everything that is Form had to be understood in the one way, everything that is Substance in the other way. And it is really interesting to find, when we go back to Aristotle, how he makes this distinction in respect of everything that exists, the distinction between Form and Substance. In later times, of course, it was taught in a merely abstract way.

In the stream that came from Greece to Europe the abstractness with which these things were set forth in books was enough to drive one to despair; this went on throughout the Middle Ages, and in still more recent times has gone from bad to worse. But if you go back to Aristotle, you find that, with him, Forms really lead back to the experience I described, you find with him the true insight into things that is able to see in every head that which he calls the Matter or Substance in the things. This insight possessed by Aristotle was the aspect of his teaching that was carried into Asia.

But now the inner knowledge—that is to say, the knowledge that is in accord with the Akashic Records—the inner knowledge of the philosophy taught in Greece, points us to something of which I could naturally only give quite an external indication in my Riddles of Philosophy, where I showed how Aristotle held the view that in Man, Form and Matter flow into one another; in Man, Matter is Form and Form Matter. You will find this where I am speaking of Spirit in Riddles of Philosophy.

Aristotle himself, however, taught it in quite a different way. Aristotle taught that when you approach the minerals, you experience in the first place their Form by means of the inside of the bones of the lower leg, and you experience their Substance in the organ of the head. The two are far apart. Man holds them apart, Form and Substance; in the mineral kingdom itself they come together in crystallisation. When man comes to an understanding of the plant, then he experiences its Form by means of his experience of the inside of the thigh-bone, its Substance once more by means of the organ of the head, the two-petaled lotus-flower. The two experiences have already come a little nearer. And when man experiences the animal, then he feels the animal in its Form through the experience he has of the inside of the bones of the lower arm, and again he feels its Substance through the organ of the head—this time the two are very near together. And if now man experiences Man himself, then he experiences the Form of Man through the inside of the upper arm that is connected with the brain by way of the speech formation. I have often spoken of this in my introductory words on Eurhythmy. There the two-petaled lotus-flower unites with what goes from the inside of the upper arm to the brain. And particularly in speech we experience our fellow human being no longer divided as to Form and Content, but as one in Form and Content.

This teaching still survived in all its concreteness in the time of Aristotle. And as we have said, a trace of it can still be found as late as the nineteenth century. But there we come to an abyss. In the ‘forties of the nineteenth century these things were utterly and completely lost. And the abyss lasted until the end of the nineteenth century when the coming of the Michael Age gives the possibility for these truths to be found again. When, however, men step over this abyss, they are really stepping over a threshold. And at the threshold stands a Guardian. Men were not able to see this Guardian when they went past him between the years 1842 and 1879. But now they must, for their own good, look back and take note of him. For to continue not heeding him and to live on into the following centuries without heeding him would bring terrible trouble upon mankind.

Easter is felt by large numbers of human beings as a festival connected on the one hand with the deepest and most intimate feelings of the human soul, and on the other hand with cosmic mysteries and cosmic riddles of existence. Indeed we cannot but observe the connection of Easter with the secrets and riddles of the Universe when we bear in mind the fact that Easter is a movable festival, the date of which has to be reckoned year by year from that constellation of the stars which we shall shortly consider more in detail. At the same time we must observe how many customs and sacred ceremonies have been associated with the Easter Festival for centuries—customs and ceremonies which lie very near to the heart of large numbers of humanity. These things will show us the immense values which mankind has gradually laid into the Easter Festival in the course of historic evolution.

In the first centuries of Christianity—not at its immediate foundation but in the course of the first centuries—Easter became a most important festival connected with the fundamental thought and impulse of Christianity, I mean, with that impulse which arises for the true Christian from the fact of the Resurrection of Christ.

Easter is the festival of the Resurrection. Yet at the same time it leads us back into pre-Christian times. It leads us to the festivals which were held about the time of the Spring Equinox (which still plays a part in our calculation, at least, of the date of Easter). It points to those old festivals which were connected with the reawakening of Nature—with the springing of life that grows forth once more from the Earth.

Here we already find ourselves within the very subject of these lectures; for here already we must touch upon the connection of Easter with the evolution of the Mysteries in the history of mankind.

Easter as a Christian festival is a festival of Resurrection. The corresponding Heathen festival, taking place about the same time of the year as our Easter, was a kind of Resurrection festival of Nature—the coming forth again of what was asleep in Nature throughout the winter time. But we must emphasise most strongly at this point that the Christian Easter is by no means coincident as to its inner essence and meaning with the Heathen festivals of the Spring Equinox. On the contrary, if we do want to relate it to the old Pagan times, we must connect the Christian Easter with certain festivals which, proceeding from the ancient Mysteries, were enacted at the Autumn season. This is a remarkable fact in the determination of the Easter Festival, which by its very content is obviously connected with certain of the ancient Mysteries. Easter above all can remind us of the deep and radical misunderstandings that have arisen, in the course of evolution, in the world-conceptions of mankind with regard to matters of the greatest significance. Nothing less has happened than that the Easter Festival has been confused with an altogether different one, and has thus been removed from Autumn and turned into a festival of Springtime.

We have here touched something of infinite significance in human evolution. Consider the content of this Easter Festival. What is it in its essence? It is this: Christ Jesus, the Being who stands at the centre of the Christian consciousness, passes through death. Good Friday is held in memory of this fact. Christ Jesus lies in the grave. It is a time that takes its course in three days, representing the union of Christ with Earth-existence. This time is celebrated in Christendom as a festival of mourning—the time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday is the day when the central Being of Christianity rises out of the grave; it is the day of remembrance of this. Such is the essential content of the Easter Festival: the Death, the lying in the Grave and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Now let us look at the corresponding ancient Heathen festival in any one of its forms. Only then shall we be able to penetrate into the connection between the Easter Festival and the Mysteries. In many places and among many people, we come across ancient Heathen festivals whose external structure—and the structure of the ceremonies which were enacted in them—is decidedly similar to the Easter-content of Christianity.

From the manifold festivals of ancient time, we may select for an example the Adonis festival. Through long, long periods of pre-Christian antiquity this festival was celebrated among certain peoples of Asia Minor. A sacred image was the central point of the festival. It was an image of Adonis—Adonis as the spiritual representative of all that is the springing and thriving force of youth in man, of all that appears as beauty in the human being.

True it is that in many respects the ancient peoples confused the substance of the image with what the image represented. The ancient religions often thus present the character of fetish worship. Many human beings saw in the image the actual and present God—the God of beauty, of the youthful strength of man, of the unfolding germinating forces which reveal in outward glory all the inner worth and inner greatness that man contains, or can contain, within him.

With songs and acts of ritual representing the deepest human grief and mourning, this image of the God was lowered into the waves of the sea, where it had to remain for three days. Or if the sea were not near it was lowered into a lake. Or again, an artificial pond was constructed near the sacred place of the Mysteries, so that the image of the God could be submerged and left for three days. During the three days the whole community associated with this cult remained in an atmosphere of deepest earnestness and stillness. After three days the image was withdrawn from the water. The songs of grief and mourning were transformed into songs of joy, hymns to the resurrected God, to the God who had come to life once more.

This was an outward ceremony which deeply stirred the hearts of large circles of mankind. And this ceremony indicated, in an outward act of ritual, what took place in the Holy of Holies of the Mysteries with every human being who was about to reach initiation. For within the Mysteries in those ancient times every human being who was to receive initiation was led into a special chamber. The walls were black, the whole space was dark and gloomy, empty save for a coffin, or something not unlike a coffin. Beside the coffin those who accompanied the candidate for Initiation broke forth into songs of mourning, songs of death. The candidate was treated like one who is about to die. He was given to understand that when he was now laid in the coffin, he would have to undergo what the human being undergoes in the first three days after death.

On the third day there appeared at a certain place, within sight of the one who lay in the coffin, a twig or a branch to represent springing, thriving life. And now the songs of mourning were transferred into hymns of joy and praise. With consciousness transformed, the man arose out of his grave. A new language, a new writing, was communicated to him; it was the language and writing of spiritual Beings. Henceforth he was allowed to see the world—for now indeed he could see it—from the standpoint of the Spirit.

What was thus enacted in the hidden depths of the Mysteries with the candidates for Initiation was comparable to the sacred cults or rituals enacted in the outer world. The content of the sacred ritual, pictorial as it was, was none the less similar in structure to what took place with chosen human beings in the Mysteries. Indeed the cult—and we may take the special cult of Adonis as representative—the cult was explained at the proper season to all those who partook in it. It was enacted in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed somewhat as follows: “Behold, it is the Autumn season! The Earth is losing her adornment of plants and green foliage. All things are fading and falling. In place of the green and springing life that began to cover the Earth in Springtime, snow will soon come to envelop, or drought to lay waste, the Earth. Nature is dying, but while all things are dying around you, you are to experience that in the human being which is only half like the death you see around you in all Nature. Man also has to die. For him, too, there comes the Autumn season. And when man's life draws to a close, it is right for the hearts and minds of those who remain behind to be filled with sorrow and deep mourning. And that the full earnestness of the passage through death may come before your souls, that you may not experience it only when death approaches you yourselves, but may be mindful of it ever and again—it is enacted before you Autumn by Autumn how the divine Being who is the representative of the beauty, youth and greatness of man, dies and undertakes the same journey as all the things of Nature. Nevertheless, just when Nature is laid waste and bare, when all things in Nature are on the way to death, you also are to remember another thing. Remember how man passes through the gate of death! All that he experienced here in this earthly life was like the things that die in Autumn-time. For in this earthly realm he experiences only what is transient. But when he has passed from the Earth and lives on out into the far spaces of the Cosmic Ether, then will he behold himself growing ever greater and greater, till the whole Universe becomes his own. For three days he will live outward and outward into the wide spaces of the Universe. And then, while here on Earth the earthly eye is turned to the image of death—for the earthly eye is turned to all that dies, to all things transient—yonder in the Spirit after three days the immortal soul of man awakens. Yonder the soul arises, arises to be born again for Spirit-land, three days after passing through the gate of death.”

Deep and penetrating was the inner transformation when these things were enacted in the candidate's own person during the Initiation ceremony, in the hidden depths of the Mysteries. The profound impression, the immense and sudden jerk which the life of a man underwent in this ancient form of initiation, awakened inner forces of the soul within him. (As we shall presently see, in modern times it cannot be done in this way but must be done in quite another way.) The inner forces of the soul, the powers of seership were awakened in him. He knew that he stood henceforward no longer in the world of the senses but in the spiritual world.

I may perhaps sum up in the following words the instruction that was given, once more at the right and proper time, to the pupils in the ancient Mysteries. They were told: That which is enacted in the Mysteries is an image of what takes place in spiritual worlds, in the Cosmos. Sacred cult is itself an image of what is enacted in the sacred Mysteries. For everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries was fully clear that events which the Mysteries concealed within the earthly realm—events enacted there upon the human being—were true images of what man experiences in the wide spaces of the astral-spiritual Cosmos in other forms of existence than in this earthly life. And those who in ancient times were not admitted to the Mysteries—since according to their stage in life they could not yet be chosen to receive the vision of the spiritual world directly—were instructed in the corresponding truths through the sacred cult or ritual, that is to say, through a picture of what was enacted in the Mysteries.

Such, then, was the purport of the Mystery which we have learned to know in this example of the Adonis festival. Autumn, when earthly things were fading away, becoming waste and bare, Autumn, expressing so radically the transitory nature of all earthly things, the dying process and the fact of death—this Autumn time was to call forth in man the certainty, or at least the pictured vision, of how the death that overcomes all Nature in the Autumn, overcomes man too, nay even overcomes the representative of all beauty, youthfulness and greatness in the human soul, portrayed in the God Adonis. Even the God Adonis dies, and is dissolved in the earthly prototype of the cosmic Ether—in the Water. But even as he rises again out of the Water, even as he can be drawn forth from the Water, so is the soul of man drawn forth from the Waters of the world, that is to say, from the cosmic Ether, approximately three days after the human being here upon Earth passes through the gate of death.

It was the secret of death itself which those ancient Mysteries sought to represent in the corresponding Autumn festival. They made it visible in picture form, in that the first half of the sacred ritual coincided with the dying and the death in Nature, while on the other hand the very opposite was shown to be the essential truth for man himself. Such was the meaning and intention of the Mysteries: the human being shall turn his gaze to the death of Nature, in order to become aware how he himself dies in the outward semblance, while in his inner being he is resurrected—resurrected, to begin with, for the spiritual world. To unveil the truth about death was the meaning and purpose of this ancient Pagan festival which was connected so closely with the Mysteries.

Then in the further course of human evolution the great Event took place. What had been undergone at a certain level by the candidate for initiation in the Mysteries—the Death and Resurrection of the soul—took place even as to the body with Christ Jesus. For how does the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who is acquainted with the Mysteries! He gazes back into the ancient Mysteries. He sees how the candidate for Initiation was led, in his soul, through death to the Resurrection of the soul; that is to say, to the awakening of a higher consciousness in the soul. The soul died, to rise again in a higher consciousness. We must above all hold fast to this, that the body did not die, but the soul died, in order to be awakened to a higher consciousness.

What the soul of every candidate for Initiation underwent, Christ Jesus underwent even in the body. That is to say, He underwent it on a different level. For Christ was no earthly man. He was a Sun-Being dwelling in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence what the candidate for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries had undergone in his soul, could be undergone in the entire human nature by Christ Jesus upon Golgotha.

Those who still had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries and of the above Initiation-rite—it was they who understood most deeply what had happened upon Golgotha. Indeed to this day, it is they who understood it most deeply. For they could say to themselves: For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been led through the death and resurrection of their souls into the secrets of the spiritual world. The soul was kept separate from the body during the act of Initiation. The soul was led through death, to life eternal. What was thus experienced in the soul by a number of chosen human beings, was undergone even in the body by a Being who descended from the Sun at the Baptism by John in Jordan, and took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The act of Initiation that had been repeated again and again through long, long years, now became a historic fact.

The essential thing was that man should know: because it was a Sun-Being who took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore what was accomplished for the Initiates only with respect to the soul and the soul's experience, could be accomplished now even into the bodily existence by this Being. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal Earth, there could be a Resurrection of the Christ. For the Christ rises higher than the soul of the initiate could rise. The candidate for Initiation could not carry the body into those deep regions of the sub-sensible into which Christ Jesus carried it. Hence, too, the candidate for Initiation could not rise so high in resurrection as the Christ. Yet it remains true that but for this difference in respect of cosmic greatness, the ancient rite of Initiation appeared as a historic fact at the sacred place of Golgotha.

Yet even in the first centuries of Christianity there were only few who knew that a Being of the Sun, a cosmic Being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, that the Earth had really been fertilised by the descent from the Sun of a Being whom until then man upon Earth had only been able to behold within the Sun, by the methods cultivated at the places of Initiation. This was the essential point in Christianity, inasmuch as it was also accepted by those who had real knowledge of the ancient Mysteries. They could say: The Christ to whom we lifted ourselves up through our initiation, the Christ whom we could reach by our ascent to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to Earth.

It was indeed a festival mood, nay, a mood of sublime holiness which filled the hearts and souls of those who, living in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, had some understanding of this Mystery. Gradually, and by processes which we shall yet have to trace, what had thus been an immediate and living content of their consciousness became a memory, a festival in memory of the historic event on Golgotha. But while this “memory” was taking shape, the consciousness of who the Christ was as a Being of the Sun, became lost ever more and more. Those who had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries could not fail to know about the Being of the Christ. For they knew that the real Initiates, being made independent of the physical body and passing in their souls through death, rising into the Sun-sphere and there visiting the Christ, had received from Him—from Christ within the Sun—the impulse for the resurrection of their souls. They knew the nature of the Christ because they had raised themselves to Him. With their knowledge of this Initiation rite, the ancient Initiates knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought for in the Sun, had now visited mankind on Earth. Why was it so? The sacred rite that had been enacted with the candidates for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries in order that they might reach up to the Christ within the Sun, could no longer be enacted in this way. For in the course of time, human nature had undergone a change. By the very evolution of the human being, the ancient ceremony of Initiation had become impossible. It would no longer have been possible through that ancient Initiation ceremony to visit the Christ in the Sun. It was then that He descended to enact on Earth a sacred deed to which human beings might henceforth turn their gaze.

What is contained within this secret is one of the very holiest things that can possibly be uttered on this Earth.

For how did it really appear to the human beings in the centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha?

From an ancient Initiation sanctuary man upon Earth looked upward to the Sun-existence and became aware, through his Initiation, of Christ within the Sun. Man looked out into Space in order to approach the Christ. And how did the evolution of mankind go forward in the succeeding periods? I must now represent Time itself: the Earth in one year, the Earth in a second year, in a third year, and so on in the course of Time. Spatially, the Earth is of course always present but here I have represented the course of Time. The Mystery of Golgotha has taken place. A human being living, let us say, in the eighth century A.D., instead of looking upward to the Sun from a sacred place of the Mysteries so as to reach the Christ, looks backward through the course of Time—back to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the turning-point of Time—at the beginning of the Christian era—he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus he can find the Christ within an earthly action, within an event on Earth. He finds the Christ within the Mystery of Golgotha.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha, what had formerly been a vision in Space, became henceforward a vision in Time. That was the significance of what had taken place.

We must however especially contemplate what took place during Initiation in the ancient Mysteries. It was a picture of the death of man and of his resurrection in the life beyond. Then we must consider the structure of the sacred cults, the festival of Adonis, for instance. For this in turn was a picture of what took place within the Mysteries. When we contemplate all this, these things—the three united into one—come before us in a sublime and transcendent aspect concentrated in the one historic action upon Golgotha.

Outwardly upon the scene of history there appears what was hitherto accomplished in the deep and inner Holy of Holies of the Mysteries. For all human beings there now exists what existed hitherto only for the Initiates. Men no longer need an image that is immersed and symbolically resurrected from the sea. Henceforth they shall have the thought—the memory—of what took place in all reality on Golgotha. The outward symbol, relating to a process that was experienced in Space, is now to be replaced by the inward thought and memory, without any picture to the senses—the memory of the historic event of Golgotha, experienced purely in the soul.

Strange is the course of human evolution as we perceive it in the succeeding centuries. Man's penetration into spiritual things becomes ever less and less. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot find its way into the minds of men. Evolution tends now to develop the sense for material things. Men lose the inner understanding of the heart, which once told them that just where outer Nature reveals her transitoriness and appears as a dying existence, the life of the Spirit can be seen, and with it they lose their understanding for that outer festival which can most truly be felt when Autumn comes with its fading, dying process, inasmuch as the death of the Earthly and Natural corresponds to the Resurrection of the Spiritual.

Thus it becomes possible no longer for Autumn to be the time of the Resurrection Festival. Autumn loses its power to turn man's thought from the transitoriness of Nature to the eternity of the Spirit. Man now needs the support of material things, needs the support of what does not die in Nature, but springs forth again in Nature. He needs to connect his Resurrection Festival with that which is resurrected in outer Nature—the force of the seed which was laid into the Earth in Autumn-time. He takes the material as a symbol for the Spiritual because he is no longer able to receive inspiration for a true perception of the Spiritual itself. Autumn no longer has the power to make manifest through the inner power of the human soul the Eternity of the Spirit, over against what is transient in the world of Nature. Man needs the support of external Nature, of the external Resurrection in Nature. He needs to see how the plants spring out of the Earth, how the Sun increases in strength, how light and warmth increase in strength once more. He needs the Resurrection in Nature in order to celebrate the thought of the Resurrection.

At the same time he loses that immediate inner relationship which he had with the Adonis Festival, and which he can also have with the Mystery of Golgotha. The inner experience which could arise at the earthly death of man, loses its power. In that inner experience the human soul was aware how the man who in the earthly sense passes through the gate of death, undergoes in three days what can indeed fill the soul with solemnity and earnestness. Then, however, the soul must become inwardly joyful, inasmuch as out of this very death the human soul arises after three days to spiritual immortality.

The power that lay in the Adonis Festival was lost. To begin with, it was intended for humanity that this power should arise with still greater intensity. Man had gazed upon the death of the God, the death of all that is beautiful in mankind—of all that is great and filled with the strength of youth. This God was immersed in the ocean on the day of Mourning, on the day of Chara (Charfreitag is Good Friday; Chara means mourning). They fell into a solemn, earnest mood. This was the feeling they first wanted to unfold in view of the transitoriness of Nature. But then this very feeling of the transitoriness of Nature had to be transformed by the soul into a feeling of the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. When the God—or image of the God—was lifted out again, the true believer beheld the image of the human soul a few days after death. “What happens to the dead man in the Spirit, behold! it stands before thy soul in the image of the resurrected God of youthful strength and beauty!”

This truth, deeply united with the whole destiny of man, was really awakened in the human spirit year by year in the Autumn season. In that ancient time men could not have thought it possible to take their start from external Nature. That which was perceptible in the Spirit was represented in the symbolic action of the sacred cult. But the time came when this picture of ancient times had to be blotted out in order that the memory, unassisted by any image—the inward memory, experienced purely within the soul, the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha in which the same truth is contained—should take the place of the picture. To begin with, humanity had not the power for it to be so. For the Spirit descended into the very depths of the soul of man. To this day it has remained so; man needs the support of external Nature. But external Nature provides no symbol—no perfect symbol—of the destinies of man in death. Thus the thought of death itself was able to live on, but the thought of the Resurrection disappeared more and more. Though the Resurrection is still referred to as an article of faith, the fact of the Resurrection is not a really living experience in the humanity of modern times. It must become alive again through the anthroposophical conception reawakening the sense of man to the true Resurrection thought.

The Michael thought, as was said at the proper season, must lie near to the anthroposophical heart and mind as the thought of the Herald of Christ. The Christmas thought too, must be made ever deeper in the heart of the anthroposophist. And the Easter thought must become especially sacred and joyful. For Anthroposophy has to add to the thought of Death, the thought of the Resurrection. Anthroposophy itself must become like an inner festival of Resurrection for the human soul. It must bring an Easter mood into man's world-conception. This will indeed be possible if it is understood how the thought of the ancient Mysteries can live on in the true Easter thought. And this will still be possible if there arises a true conception of the body, soul and spirit of man, and of the destinies of body, soul and spirit, in the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world of Heaven.

In attempting to give a kind of introduction to Anthroposophy I shall try to indicate, as far as possible, the way it can be presented to the world today. Let me begin, however, with some preliminary remarks. We have usually not sufficient regard for the Spiritual as a living reality; and a living reality must be grasped in the fulness of life. Feeling ourselves members of the Anthroposophical Society and the bearers of the Movement, we ought not to act each day on the assumption that the Anthroposophical Movement has just begun. It has, in fact, existed for more than two decades, and the world has taken an attitude towards it. Therefore, in whatever way you come before the world as Anthroposophists, you must bear this in mind. The feeling that the world has already taken up an attitude towards Anthroposophy must be there in the background. If you have not this feeling and think you can simply present the subject in an absolute sense—as one might have done twenty years ago—you will find yourselves more and more presenting Anthroposophy in a false light. This has been done often enough, and it is time it stopped. Our Christmas meeting should mark a beginning in the opposite direction; it must not remain ineffective, as I have already indicated in many different directions.

Of course, we cannot expect every member of the Society to develop, in some way or other, fresh initiative, if he is not so constituted. I might put it this way: Everyone has the right to continue to be a passively interested member, content to receive what is given. But whoever would share, in any way, in putting Anthroposophy before the world, cannot ignore what I have just explained. From now on complete truth must rule in word and deed.

No doubt I shall often repeat such preliminary remarks. We shall now begin a kind of introduction to the anthroposophical view of the world.

Whoever decides to speak about Anthroposophy must assume, to begin with, that what he wants to say is really just what the heart of his listener is itself saying. Indeed, no science based on initiation has ever intended to utter anything except that which was really being spoken by the hearts of those who wished to hear. To meet the deepest needs of the hearts of those requiring Anthroposophy must be, in the fullest sense, the fundamental note of every presentation of it.

If we observe today those who get beyond the superficial aspect of life, we find that ancient feelings, present in every human soul from age to age, have revived. In their subconscious life the men and women of today harbour earnest questions. They cannot even express these in clear thoughts, much less find answers in what the civilised world can offer; but these questions are there, and a large number of people feel them deeply. In fact, these questions are present today in all who really think. But when we formulate them in words they appear, at first, far-fetched. Yet they are so near, so intimately near to the soul of every thinking man.

We can start with two questions chosen from all the riddles oppressing man today. The first presents itself to man's soul when he contemplates the world around him and his own human existence. He sees human beings enter earthly life through birth; he sees life running its course between birth (or conception) and physical death, and subject to the most manifold experiences, inner and outer; and he sees external nature with all the fullness of impressions that confront man and gradually fill his soul.

There is the human soul in a human body. It sees one thing before all others: that Nature receives into herself all the human soul perceives of physical, earthly existence. When man has passed through the gate of death, Nature receives the human body through one element or another (it makes little difference whether through burial or cremation). And what does Nature do with this physical body? She destroys it. We do not usually study the paths taken by the individual substances of the body. But if we make observations at places where a peculiar kind of burial has been practised, we deepen this impression made by a study of what Nature does with the physical, sensible part of man, when he has passed through the gate of death. You know there are subterranean vaults where human remains are kept isolated, but not from the air. They dry up. And what remains after a certain time? A distorted human form consisting of carbonate of lime, itself inwardly disintegrated. This mass of carbonate of lime still resembles, in a distorted form, the human body, but if you only shake it a little, it falls to dust.

This helps us to realise vividly the experience of the soul on seeing what happens to the physical instrument with which man does all things between birth and death. We then turn to Nature, to whom we owe all our knowledge and insight, and say: Nature, who produces from her womb the most wonderful crystal forms, who conjures forth each spring the sprouting, budding plants, who maintains for decades the trees with their bark, and covers the earth with animal species of the most diverse kinds, from the largest beasts to the tiniest bacilli, who lifts her waters to the clouds and upon whom the stars send down their mysterious rays—how is this realm of Nature related to what man, as part of her, carries with him between birth and death? She destroys it, reduces it to formless dust. For man, Nature with her laws is the destroyer. Here, on the one hand, is the human form; we study it in all its wonder. It is, indeed, wonderful, for it is more perfect than any other form. to be found on earth. There, on the other hand, is Nature with her stones, plants, animals, clouds, rivers and mountains, with all that rays down from the sea of stars, with all that streams down, as light and warmth, from the sun to the earth. Yet this Realm of Nature cannot suffer the human form within her own system of laws.¹ The human being before us is reduced to dust when given to her charge. We see all this. We do not form ideas about it, but it is deeply rooted in our feeling life. Whenever we stand in the presence of death, this feeling takes firm root in mind and heart. It is not from a merely selfish feeling nor from a merely superficial hope of survival, that a subconscious question takes shape in mind and heart—a question of infinite significance for the soul, determining its happiness and unhappiness, even when not expressed in words. All that makes, for our conscious life, the happiness or unhappiness of our earthly destiny, is trivial in comparison with the uncertainty of feeling engendered by the sight of death. For then the question takes shape: Whence comes this human form? I look at the wonderfully formed crystal, at the forms of plants and animals. I see the rivers winding their way over the earth, I see the mountains, and all that the clouds reveal and the stars send down to earth. I see all this—man says to himself—but the human form can come from none of these. These have only destructive forces for the human form, forces that turn it to dust.

In this way the anxious question presents itself to the human mind and heart: Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes? And at the sight of death, too, the anxious question arises: Where is the world, that other world, from which the human form comes?

Do not say, my dear friends, that you have not yet heard this question formulated in this way. If you only listen to what people put into words out of the consciousness of their heads, you will not hear it. But if you approach people and they put before you the complaints of their hearts, you can, if you understand the heart's language, hear it asking from its unconscious life: Where is the other world from which the human form comes?—for man, with his form, does not belong to this. People often reveal the complaints of their hearts by seizing on some triviality of life, considering it from various points of view and allowing such considerations to colour the whole question of their destiny.

Thus man is confronted by the world he sees, senses and studies, and about which he constructs his science. It provides him with the basis for his artistic activities and the grounds for his religious worship. It confronts him; and he stands on the earth, feeling in the depths of his soul: I do not belong to this world; there must be another from whose magic womb I have sprung in my present form. To what world do I belong? This sounds in men's hearts today. It is a comprehensive question; and if men are not satisfied with what the sciences give them, it is because this question is there and the sciences are far from touching it. Where is the world to which man really belongs?—for it is not the visible world.

My dear friends, I know quite well it is not I who have spoken these words. I have only formulated what human hearts are saying. That is the point. It is not a matter of bringing men something unknown to their own souls. A person who does this may work sensationally; but for us it can only be a matter of putting into words what human souls themselves are saying. What we perceive of our own bodies, or of another's, in so far as it is visible, has no proper place in the rest of the visible world. We might say: No finger of my body really belongs to the visible world, for this contains only destructive forces for every finger.

So, to begin with, man stands before the great Unknown, but must regard himself as a part of it. In respect of all that is not man, there is—spiritually—light around him; the moment he looks back upon himself, the whole world grows dark, and he gropes in the darkness, bearing with him the riddle of his own being. And it is the same when man regards himself from outside, finding himself an external being within Nature; he cannot, as a human being, contact this world.

Further: not our heads but the depths of our subconscious life put questions subsidiary to the general question I have just discussed. In contemplating his life in the physical world, which is his instrument between birth and death, man realises he could not live at all without borrowing continually from this visible world. Every bit of food I put into my mouth, every sip of water comes from the visible world to which I do not belong at all. I cannot live without this world; and yet, if I have just eaten a morsel of some substance (which must, of course, be a part of the visible world) and pass immediately afterwards through the gate of death, this morsel becomes at once part of the destructive forces of the visible world. It does not do so within me while I live; hence my own being must be preserving it therefrom. Yet my own being is nowhere to be found outside, in the visible world. What, then, do I do with the morsel of food, the drink of water, I take into my mouth? Who am I who receive the substances of Nature and transform them? Who am I? This is the second question and it arises from the first.

When I enter into relationship with the visible world I not only walk in darkness, I act in the dark without knowing who is acting, or who the being is that I designate as myself. I surrender to the visible world, yet I do not belong to it.

All this lifts man out of the visible world, letting him appear to himself as a member of a quite different one. But the great riddle, the anxious doubt confronts him: Where is the world to which I belong? The more human civilisation has advanced and men have learnt to think intensively, the more anxiously have they felt this question. It is deep-seated in men's hearts today, and divides the civilised world into two classes. There are those who repress this question, smother it, do not bring it to clarity within them. But they suffer from it nevertheless, as from a terrible longing to solve this riddle of man. Others deaden themselves in face of this question, doping themselves with all sorts of things in outer life. But in so deadening themselves they kill within them the secure feeling of their own being. Emptiness comes over their souls. This feeling of emptiness is present in the subconsciousness of countless human beings today.

This is one side—the one great question with the subsidiary question mentioned. It presents itself when man looks at himself from outside, and only dimly, subconsciously, perceives his relation, as a human being between birth and death, to the world.

The other question presents itself when man looks into his own inner being. Here is the other pole of human life. Thoughts are here, copying external Nature which man represents to himself through them. He develops sensations and feelings about the outer world and acts upon it through his will. In the first place, he looks back upon this inner being of his, and the surging waves of thinking, feeling and willing confront him. So he stands with his soul in the present. But, in addition, there are the memories of experiences undergone, memories of what he has seen earlier in his present life. All these fill his soul. But what are they? Well, man does not usually form clear ideas of what he thus retains within him, but his subconsciousness does form such ideas.

Now a single attack of migraine that dispels his thoughts, makes his inner being at once a riddle. His condition every time he sleeps, lying motionless and unable to relate himself, through his senses, to the outer world, makes his inner being a riddle again. Man feels his physical body must be active and then thoughts, feelings and impulses of will arise in his soul. I turn from the stone I have just been observing and which has, perhaps, this or that crystalline form; after a little time I turn to it again. It remains as it was. My thought, however, arises, appears as an image in my soul, and fades away. I feel it to be infinitely more valuable than the muscles or bones I bear in my body. Yet it is a mere fleeting image; nay, it is less than the picture on my wall, for this will persist for a time until its substance crumbles away My thought, however, flits past—a picture that continually comes and goes, content to be merely a picture. And when I look into the inner being of my soul, I find nothing but these pictures (or mental presentations). I must admit that my soul life consists of them.

I look at the stone again. It is out there in space; it persists. I picture it to myself now, in an hour's time, in two hours' time. In the meantime the thought disappears and must always be renewed. The stone, however, remains outside. What sustains the stone from hour to hour? What lets the thought of it fluctuate from hour to hour? What maintains the stone from hour to hour? What annihilates the thought again and again so that it must be kindled anew by outer perception? We say the stone ‘exists’; existence is to be ascribed to it. Existence, however, cannot be ascribed to the thought. Thought can grasp the colour and the form of the stone, but not that whereby the stone exists as a stone. That remains external to us, only the mere picture entering the soul.

It is the same with every single thing of external Nature in relation to the human soul. In his soul, which man can regard as his own inner being, the whole of Nature is reflected. Yet he has only fleeting pictures—skimmed off, as it were, from the surfaces of things; into these pictures the inner being of things does not enter. With my mental pictures (or presentations) I pass through the world, skimming everywhere the surfaces of things. What the things are, however, remains outside. The external world does not contact what is within me.

Now, when man, in the sight of death, confronts the world around him in this way he must say: My being does not belong to this world, for I cannot contact it as long as I live in a physical body. Moreover, when my body contacts this outer world after death, every step it takes means destruction. There, outside, is the world. If man enters it fully, he is destroyed; it does not suffer his inner being within it. Nor can the outer world enter man's soul. Thoughts are images and remain outside the real existence of things. The being of stones, the being of plants, of animals, stars and clouds—these do not enter the human soul Man is surrounded by a world which cannot enter his soul but remains outside.

On the one hand, man remains outside Nature. This becomes clear to him at the sight of death. On the other hand, Nature remains external to his soul.

Regarding himself as an object, man is confronted by the anxious question about another world. Contemplating what is most intimate in his own inner being—his thoughts, mental images, sensations, feelings and impulses of will—he sees that Nature, in whom he lives, remains external to them all. He does not possess her.

Here is the sharp boundary between Man and Nature. Man cannot approach Nature without being destroyed; Nature cannot enter the inner being of man without becoming a mere semblance. When man projects himself in thought into Nature, he is compelled to picture his own destruction; and when he looks into himself, asking: How is Nature related to my soul? he finds only the empty semblance of Nature.

Nevertheless, while man bears within him this semblance of the minerals, plants, animals, stars, suns, clouds, mountains and rivers, while he bears within his memory the semblance of the experiences he has undergone with these kingdoms of Nature, experiencing all this in his fluctuating inner world, his own sense of being emerges amid it all.

How is this? How does man experience this sense of his own existence? He experiences it somewhat as follows. Perhaps it can only be expressed in a picture:

Imagine we are looking at a wide ocean. The waves rise and fall. There is a wave here, a wave there; there are waves everywhere, due to the heaving water. One particular wave, however, holds our attention, for we see that something is living in it, that it is not merely surging water. Yet water surrounds this living something on all sides. We only know that something is living in this wave, though even here we can only see the enveloping water. This wave looks like the others; but the strength of its surging, the force with which it rises, gives an impression of something special living within. This wave disappears and reappears at another place; again the water conceals what is animating it from within. So it is with the soul life of man. Images, thoughts, feelings and impulses of will surge up; waves everywhere. One of the waves emerges in a thought, in a feeling, in an act of volition. The ego is within, but concealed by the thoughts, or feelings, or impulses of will, as the water conceals what is living in the wave. At the place where man can only say: ‘There my own self surges up,’ he is confronted by mere semblance; he does not know what he himself is. His true being is certainly there and is inwardly felt and experienced, but this ‘semblance’ in the soul conceals it, as the water of the wave the unknown living thing from the depths of the sea. Man feels his own true being hidden by the unreal images of his own soul. Moreover, it is as if he wanted continually to hold fast to his own existence, as if he would lay hold of it at some point, for he knows it is there. Yet, at the very moment when he would grasp it, it eludes him. Man is not able, within the fluctuating life of his soul, to grasp the real being he knows himself to be. And when he discovers that this surging, unreal life of his soul has something to do with that other world presented by nature, he is more than ever perplexed. The riddle of nature is, at least, one that is present in experience; the riddle of man's own soul is not present in experience because it is itself alive. It is, so to speak, a living riddle, for it answers man's constant question: ‘What am I?’ by putting a mere semblance before him.

On looking into his own inner being man receives the continual answer: I only show you a semblance of yourself; and if you ascribe a spiritual origin to yourself, I only show you a semblance of this spiritual existence within your soul life.

Thus, from two directions, searching questions confront man today. One of these questions arises when he becomes aware that:

Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him;

the other when he sees:

The human soul exists, but Nature can only approach this human soul by becoming mere semblance.

These two truths live in the subconsciousness of man today. On the one hand, we have the unknown world of Nature, the destroyer of man; on the other, the unreal image of the human soul which Nature cannot approach although man can only complete his physical existence by co-operating with her. Man stands, so to speak, in double darkness, and the question arises:

Where is the other world to which I belong?

Man turns, now, to historical tradition, to what has been handed down from ancient times and lives on. He learns that there was once a science that spoke of this unknown world. He looks to ancient times and feels deep reverence for what they tried to teach about the other world within the world of Nature. If one only knows how to deal with Nature in the right way, this other world is revealed to human gaze.

But modern consciousness has discarded this ancient knowledge. It is no longer regarded as valid. It has been handed down to us, but is no longer believed. Man can no longer feel sure that the knowledge acquired by the men of an ancient epoch as their science can answer today his own anxious question arising from the above subconscious facts.

So we turn to Art.

But here again we find something significant. The artistic treatment of physical material—spiritualisation of physical matter—comes down to us from ancient times. Much of this treatment has been retained and can be learnt from tradition. Nevertheless, it is just the man with a really artistic subconscious nature who feels most dissatisfied today; for he can no longer realise what Raphael could still conjure into the human earthly form—the reflection of another world to which man truly belongs. Where is the artist today who can handle earthly, physical substance in such an artistic way?

Thirdly, there is Religion. This, too, has been handed down through tradition from olden times. It directs man's feeling and devotion to that other world. It arose in a past age through man receiving the revelations of the realm of Nature which is really so foreign to him. For, if we turn our spiritual gaze backwards over thousands of years, we find human beings who also felt: Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him. Indeed, the men who lived thousands of years ago felt this in the depths of their souls. They looked at the corpse passing over into external Nature as into a vast Moloch, and saw it destroyed. But they also saw the human soul passing through the same portal beyond which the body is destroyed. Even the Egyptians saw this, or they would never have embalmed their dead. They saw the soul go further still. These men of ancient times felt that the soul grows greater and greater, and passes into the cosmos. And then they saw the soul, which had disappeared into the elements, return again from the cosmic spaces, from the stars. They saw the human soul vanish at death—at first through the gate of death, then on the way to the other world, then returning from the stars. Such was the ancient religion: a cosmic revelation—cosmic revelation from the hour of death, cosmic revelation from the hour of birth. The words have been retained; the belief has been retained, but has its content still any relation to the cosmos? It is preserved in religious literature, in religious tradition foreign to the world.

The man of our present civilisation can no longer see any relation between what religious tradition has handed down to him and the anxious question confronting him today. He looks at Nature and only sees the human physical body passing through the gate of death and falling a prey to destruction. He sees, more-over, the human form enter through the gate of birth, and is compelled to ask whence it comes. Wherever he looks, he cannot find the answer. He no longer sees it coming from the stars, as he is no longer able to see it after death. So religion has become an empty word.

Thus, in his civilisation, man has around him what ancient times possessed as science, art and religion. But the science of the ancients has been discarded, their art is no longer felt in its inwardness, and what takes its place today is something man is not able to lift above physical matter, making this a vehicle for the radiant expression of the spiritual.

The religious element has remained from olden times. It has, however, no point of contact with the world, for, in spite of it the above riddle of the relation of the world to man remains. Man looks into his inner being, and hears the voice of conscience; but in olden times this was the voice of that God who guided the soul through those regions in which the body is destroyed, and led it again to earthly life, giving it its appropriate form. It was this God who spoke in the soul as the voice of conscience. Today even the voice of conscience has become external, and moral laws are no longer traceable to divine impulses. Man surveys history, to begin with; he studies what has come down from olden times, and—at most—can dimly feel: The ancients experienced the two great riddles of existence differently from the way I feel them today. For this reason they could answer them in a certain way. I can no longer answer them. They hover before me and oppress my soul, for they only show me my destruction after death and the semblance of reality during life.

It is thus that man confronts the world today. From this mood of soul arise the questions Anthroposophy has to answer. Human hearts are speaking in the way we have described and asking where they can find that knowledge of the world which meets their needs.

Anthroposophy comes forward as such knowledge, and would speak about the world and man so that such knowledge may arise again—knowledge that can be understood by modern consciousness, as ancient science, art and religion were understood by ancient consciousness. Anthroposophy receives Its mighty task from the voice of the human heart itself, and is no more than what humanity is longing for today. Because of this, Anthroposophy will have to live. It answers to what man most fervidly longs for, both for his outer and inner life. ‘Can there be such a world-conception today?’ one may ask. The Anthroposophical Society has to supply the answer. It must find the way to let the hearts of men speak from out of their deepest longings; then they will experience the deepest longing for the answers.

• 1. This sentence and the rest of the paragraph in which it occurs must of course be read in the context of the lecture as a whole. Taken by itself it may well arouse the objection: ‘The human form is as much within Nature's system of laws as those of the plants and animals. Certainly Nature destroys it after death; but does she not also bring it to birth?’ It may help to remind the reader that Dr. Steiner is at this stage merely putting into words a feeling, which, he expressly says, arises when we stand in the presence of death. Later on in the book, when he deals with the relation in which the human body stands to the world of nature, he shows how the human form in fact has an origin quite different from those of other living creatures. Editor.

Studies that are concerned with the karma of human beings must be undertaken with deep earnestness and inwardly assimilated. For it is not the mere knowledge of some particular karmic connection that is important. What is really important is that such studies should quicken the whole of man's nature, enabling him to find his bearings in life.

Such studies will never be fruitful if they lead to greater indifference towards human beings than is otherwise the case; they will be fruitful only if they kindle deeper love and understanding than are possible when account is taken merely of the impressions of a single life.

Anyone who reviews the successive epochs in the evolution of mankind cannot fail to realise that in the course of history very much has changed in man's whole way of thinking and perception, in all his views of the world and of life. Generally speaking, man is less interested in the past than in the future, for which the foundations have yet to be laid. But anyone who has a sufficiently clear grasp of how the souls of men have changed in the course of the earth's evolution will not shrink from the necessity of having himself to undergo the change that will lead him to study, not merely the single earthly life of some individual, but the succession of earthly lives, in so far as these can be brought within the range of his vision.

I think that the examples given in the last lecture—Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Pestalozzi, and others—can show how understanding of a personality, love for this personality, can be enhanced when the latest earth-life is viewed against the background of other lives of which it is the outcome.

And now, in order that our studies may be really fruitful, I want to return to a question to which, as many of those present here will know, I have already alluded. Reference is often made in spiritual science to the existence in olden times of Initiates possessed of clairvoyant vision, personalities who were able to communicate the secrets of the spiritual world. And from this the question quite naturally arises: Where are these Initiates in our own time? Have they reincarnated?

To answer this question it is necessary to point out how greatly a later earth-life may differ from a preceding one in respect of knowledge and also in respect of other activities of the soul. For when in the time between death and a new birth the moment approaches for the human being to descend to the earth and unite with a physical-etheric organisation, a very great deal has to take place. The direction towards family, race and so forth, has indeed long been determined, but the resolve to undergo this tremendous change in the form of existence, the change involved in the transition from the world of soul-and-spirit into the physical world—this resolve is a stupendous matter. For as you can well imagine, circumstances are not as they are on earth, where the human being grows weaker as he approaches the end of his normal life; after all his experiences on earth he will actually have little to do with the decision to enter into a different form of existence when he passes through the gate of death. The change, in this case, comes upon him of itself, it breaks in upon him.

Here on earth, death is something that breaks in upon man. The descent from the spiritual world is completely different. It is a matter, then, of fully conscious action, a deliberate decision proceeding from the deepest foundations of the soul. We must realise what a stupendous transformation takes place in the human being when the time comes for him to exchange the forms of life in the pre-earthly existence of soul-and-spirit for those of earthly existence. The descent entails adaptation to the prevailing conditions of civilisation and culture and also to the bodily constitution which a particular epoch is able to provide. Our own epoch does not readily yield bodies—let alone conditions of culture and civilisation—in which Initiates can live again as they lived in the past. And when the time approaches for the soul of some former Initiate to use a physical body once again, it is a matter of accepting this body as it is, and of growing into the environment and the current form of education. But what once was present in this soul is not lost; it merely comes to expression in some other way. The basic configuration of the soul remains but assumes a different form.

Now in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. it was still possible for the soul to acquire a deep knowledge of Initiation truths, because at that time, especially in Southern Europe and Asia Minor, body followed soul, that is to say, the bodily functions were able to adapt themselves inwardly to the soul. One who may have lived in the early Christian centuries as an Initiate, with a soul wholly inward-turned and full of wisdom, is obliged to descend to-day into a kind of body which, owing to the intervening development, is directed pre-eminently to the external world, lives altogether in the external world. The result is that owing to the bodily constitution, the inner concentration of soul-forces that was still possible in the 3rd or 4th century of our era, is so no longer. And so the following could take place in the course of evolution.—I am telling you of things that reveal themselves to inner vision.

There was a certain Mystery-centre in Asia Minor, typical of all such institutions in that part of the world in the early Christian centuries. Traditions were everywhere alive in those olden days when men were deeply initiated into these Mysteries. But everywhere, too, men were more or less aware of the rules that must be imposed on the soul in order to acquire knowledge leading to its own deep foundations, as well as out into the cosmic All. And in the early Christian centuries these very Mysteries of Asia Minor were occupied with a momentous question.

Boundless wisdom had streamed through the sanctuaries of the Mysteries. If you will read what was described in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact—as far as description was possible in a printed publication at that time—you will see that the ultimate aim of all this wisdom was an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And in these Mysteries of Asia Minor the great question was: How will the sublime content of the Mystery of Golgotha, the reality of what has streamed into the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha—how will it evolve further in the hearts and minds of men? And how will the ancient, primeval wisdom—a wisdom that encompassed the Beings who have their habitations in the stars and the manifold orders of Divine-Spiritual Beings who guide the universe and the life of man—how will this primeval wisdom unite with what is concentrated in the Mystery of Golgotha? How will it unite with the Impulse which, proceeding from a sublime Sun-Being, from the Christ, is now to pour into mankind?—That was the burning question in these Mysteries of Asia Minor.

There was one personality who with his Mystery-wisdom and Mystery-experiences felt this question with overwhelming intensity. It is in truth a shattering experience when in the search for karmic connections one comes upon this man who was initiated in one of these Mysteries in Asia Minor in the early Christian centuries. It is a shattering experience, for with his Initiation-knowledge he was aware in every fibre of his being of the need to grasp the meaning and import of the Mystery of Golgotha, and he was faced with the problem: What will happen now? How will these weak human souls be able to receive it?

Weighed down in soul by this burning question concerning the destiny of Christianity, this Initiate was walking one day in the wider precincts of his Mystery-centre, when an experience came to him of an event that made an overwhelming impression—the treacherous murder of Julian the Apostate. With the vision and insight of Initiation he lived through this event.

It was known to him that Julian the Apostate had attained a certain degree of Initiation in the ancient Mysteries, that he wanted to preserve for the spiritual life of mankind, the impulses that had been cultivated in the ancient Mysteries, to ensure their continuance, in short to unite Christianity with the wisdom of the Mysteries. He knew that Julian the Apostate proclaimed, in the sense of the Mystery-wisdom, that as well as the physical Sun there is also a Spiritual Sun, and that whoever knows the Spiritual Sun, knows Christ. But this, teaching was regarded as evil in the days of Julian the Apostate and led to his treacherous murder on his journey to Persia. This most significant, symptomatic event in world-history was lived through by the Initiate of whom I am speaking.

Those of you who for many years have been listening to what has been said on the subject of karmic connections in world-history, will remember that in the lectures I once gave in Stuttgart on certain chapters of occult history—reference was also made to the same theme at the Christmas Foundations Meeting¹—I spoke of the deep tragedy of Julian the Apostate's position in the history of humanity.

His death was felt and experienced by the Initiate to whom I am now referring, whose Initiate-knowledge, received in a Mystery-centre in Asia Minor, was shadowed by the question: What will become of Christianity? And through these symptomatic events there came to him the crystal-clear realisation: A time will come when Christianity will be misunderstood, will live only in traditions, when men will no longer know anything of the glory and sublimity of Christ, the Sun-Spirit Who dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth.

All this lay like a weight upon the soul of the Initiate. And for the rest of his life at that time he was heavy-hearted and sorrowful in regard to the evolution of Christianity. He experienced the consternation and dismay which a symptomatic event of the kind referred to must inevitably cause in an Initiate.—It made an overwhelming, shattering impression upon him.

And then we go further.—The impression received by this Initiate was bound to lead to a reincarnation comparatively soon afterwards—in point of fact at the time of the Thirty Years' War, when very many outstanding, interesting incarnations took place, incarnations that have played an important part in the historical evolution of mankind.

The Initiate was born again as a woman, at the beginning of the 17th century, before the actual outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. She lived on into the time of the conflict and was in contact with certain attempts that were made from the side of Rosicrucianism to correct the tendencies of the age and to make preparation in a spiritual way for the future. This work, however, was largely overshadowed and submerged by the savagery and brutality prevailing during the Thirty Years' War. Think only of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz which appeared shortly before its outbreak. And many other significant impulses came into the life of mankind at that time, before being stamped out or brutalised by the War.

This personality, who as an Initiate had experienced the deeply symptomatic event connected with Julian the Apostate and had then passed through the incarnation as a woman in the 17th century, was born again in the 19th century. All that had become even more inward during the incarnation as a woman, all that had formerly been present in the soul—not the Initiation-wisdom but the horror caused by the terrible event—all this, in the last third of the 19th century, poured into a peculiarly characteristic view of the world which penetrated deeply into the prevailing incongruities of human existence.

The whole tenor and trend of the present age is such that it is difficult for one who has carried over ancient Initiation-wisdom from an earlier earth-life into the life of the 19th and 20th centuries, to work effectively through deeds. And so, in this case, what was brought over—deeply transformed and apparently externalised, though in reality still inward—pressed its way from the heart—the seat of the old Initiation-wisdom—towards the senses and sense-observation, striving to find expression in poetry, in literature.

That is the reason why recent times have produced so many really splendid examples of literature. Only they are incoherent, they are simply not intelligible as they stand. For they have been created not only by the personality who was present on earth at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th centuries, but an additional factor has been some experience in a past life such as I have related, an experience that had such a shattering effect upon an Initiate—albeit an Initiate in Mysteries already decadent. This shattering experience in the soul works on, streams into artistic, poetic qualities of soul—and what, in this case, comes over in so characteristic a way, lives itself out in the personality of Ibsen.

When this vista is open to one, the secrets of the evolution of humanity light up from writings which appeared at the end of the 19th century and which cannot be the work of a single man but of a man through whom and in whom earlier epochs are also coming to expression.

In approaching a theme like this, we shall certainly not lose respect either for the course taken by world-history or for the single personality who stands before us with greatness and distinction. In very truth, the experiences that come upon one in this domain are shattering—that is to say when such matters are pursued with the necessary earnestness.

Now you will often have heard tell of an alchemist who lived in a comparatively early period of the Middle Ages: Basilius Valentinus (Basil Valentine), a Benedictine monk. His achievements in the spheres of medicine and alchemy were of momentous significance and to study him in connection with karmic relationships in world-history leads to remarkable results, results which show very clearly how difficult it is to understand the age in which we ourselves are living.

Many things in our time are not only incomprehensible but often repellent, disagreeable, horrifying in a certain respect, and if we look at life merely as it is perceptible to the senses, it is impossible not to feel indignation and disgust.

It is different, however, for one who can perceive the human and historical connections. Things are by no means what they seem! Traits may show themselves in life to-day for which the onlookers have, quite understandably, nothing but censure and indignation. And yet all the time, even in the unpleasant elements themselves, there may be something that is intensely fascinating. This will be the case more and more frequently.

As I said, there in the early Middle Ages we find Basilius Valentinus, a Benedictine monk, engaged in the pursuit of medicine and alchemy in his cellars in the monastery and making a number of important investigations. There are others with him who are his pupils and they write down what Basilius Valentinus has said to them. Consequently there are hardly any original writings of Basilius Valentinus himself; but there are writings of pupils which contain a great deal that is genuinely his wisdom, his alchemical wisdom.

Now when, at a certain time of my life, one of the pupils of Basilius Valentinus who especially interested me came into my field of vision, I realised: This pupil is again in incarnation, but spiritually there has been a remarkable metamorphosis. He has come again in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.

But the alchemical activity, directed without co-ordination towards the senses, manifested outwardly as a view of life in which alchemical concepts are always, so to speak, being welded into sense-observations. In this later incarnation the man observes external facts—how people act, how things happen among them, how they talk to one another—and he groups it all together in a way that is often repellent. But the explanation lies in the fact that the personality in question had, in an earlier incarnation, worked at alchemy under Basilius Valentinus. And now he jumbles everything together—the relationships between people, how they behave to one another, what they say, what they do and so forth. He does not look at these things with the eyes of a modern philistine—far from it!—but with the eye of a soul in which impulses from his former alchemical pursuits are still alive. He jumbles up events that occur among men, makes dramas out of them, and becomes: Frank Wedekind.

These things must of course be studied in pursuance of a longing for a genuine understanding of man. When this is the case, life becomes, not poorer, but infinitely richer. Take Wedekind's ‘Hidalla’ or any other of his dramas which make the brain reel when one attempts to find the thread connecting what comes first with what comes later. Yet there is something fascinating about it for anyone who can look beyond the surface, and the commonplace judgments of the critics sitting in the stalls will leave him untouched. From their own standpoint, of course, these critics are justified—but that is of no account. The real point is that world-history has here produced a strange and remarkable phenomenon.—Alchemical thinking, flung as it were across centuries, is now applied to human life and human deeds; these, together with human rules and standards are all jumbled into a hotchpotch, just as once in alchemical kitchens—at a time when alchemy was already on the decline—substances and their forces were mixed in retorts and tests made of their effects.

Even in respect of the point of time at which they occur on earth, the lives of men are determined by connections of destiny and karma. Let me give you another example in corroboration of this.

We turn our gaze back to the time when the Platonic School flourishes in Greece. There was Plato, surrounded by a number of pupils. In their characters these pupils differed greatly from one another and what Plato himself depicts in the Dialogues, where characters of the most varied types appear and converse together, is in many respects a true picture of his School. Very different characters came together in this School.

In the School there were two personalities in particular who imbibed, each in a very different way, all that fell from Plato's lips, bringing such sublime illumination to his pupils, and that he also carried further in conversations with them.

One of these two pupils was a personality of rare sensitiveness and refinement. He was particularly receptive to everything that Plato did, through his teaching on the Ideas, to lift men's minds and hearts above the things of earth. Everywhere we find Plato affirming that over against the transitoriness of the single events in man's life and environment, stand the Eternal Ideas. The material world is transitory; but the material world is only a picture of the Idea which—itself eternal—passes in perpetual metamorphoses through the temporal and the transitory. Thus did Plato lift his pupils above the transitory things belonging to the external world of sense to contemplation of the eternal Ideas which hover over them as the heavens hover over the earth.

But in this Platonic treatment of the world, man in his true being fares rather badly. For the Platonic conceptions and mode of thinking cannot properly be applied to man, in whom the Idea itself becomes alive in objective reality. Man is too individual. The Ideas, according to Plato, hover above the things. This is true in respect of the minerals, crystals and the other phenomena of the lifeless sense-world; Goethe too, while on the track of the archetypal plant (the ‘Urpflanze’) was observing the varying types; and the same applies in the case of the animals. With man, however, it is a matter of seeking the living Idea within each single human individuality. It was Aristotle—not Plato—who taught that the Idea as entelechy has entered into the human being.

The first of the two pupils shared with whole-hearted fervour in this heavenward flight in Platonism. With his spiritual vision he could accompany Plato in this heavenward flight, in this soaring above the earth, and words of mellowed sweetness would fall from his lips in the Platonic School on the sublimity of the Ideas that hover over and above the things of earth. In his soul he soared to the Ideas. When he was not lingering in his world of vision but living again in his heart and mind, going about among the Greeks as he loved to do, he took the warmest interest in every human being with whom he came into contact. It was only when he had come down as it were to everyday life that his heart and feelings could be focused upon the many whom he loved so well, for his visions drew him away from the earth. And so in this pupil there was a kind of split between the life of heart when he was among living human beings and the life of soul when he was transported to the Eternal Ideas, when he was listening in the Academy to Plato's words or was himself formulating in words full of sweetness, the inspirations brought by Platonism. There was something wonderfully sensitive about this personality.

Now a close and intimate friendship existed between this man and another pupil in the Platonic School. But in the course of it, a different trend of character which I will now describe, was developing in the friend, with the result that the two grew apart. Not that their love for one another cooled, but in their whole way of thinking they grew apart; life separated them. They were able, at first, to understand one another well, but later on even this was no longer possible. And it led to the one I have described becoming irritable and ‘nervy’ as we should say to-day, whenever the other spoke in the way that came naturally to him.

The second pupil was no less ready than the first to look upwards to the Eternal Ideas which were the inspiration of so much living activity in the School of Plato. This pupil, too, could be completely transported from the earth. But the deep, warm-hearted interest in numbers of his fellow human beings—that he lacked. On the other hand he was intensely attracted by the myths and sagas of the ancient gods which were extant among the people and were well-known to him. He interested himself deeply in what we to-day call Greek Mythology, in the figures of Zeus, Athene and the rest. It was his tendency more or less to pass living human beings by, but he took a boundless interest in the gods whom he pictured as having lived on earth in a remote past and as being the progenitors of humanity.

And so he felt the urge and the strong desire to apply the inspiration experienced in his life of soul to an understanding of the profound wisdom contained in the sagas of the gods and heroes. Men's relation to such sagas was of course completely different in Greece from what it is to-day. In Greece it was all living reality, not merely the content of books or traditions.

This second personality who had been on terms of intimate friendship with the first, also grew out of the friendship—it was the same with them both. But as members of the Platonic School there was a link between them. Now the Platonic School had this characteristic.—Its pupils developed forces in themselves which tended to separate them from one another, to drive them apart after the School had for a time held them close together. As a result of this, individualities developed such as the two I have described, individualities who in spite of their different natures belonged together and who then grew apart.

These two individualities—they were born again as women in Italy in the days of the Renaissance—came again to the earth in modern times; the first too early and the second rather too late. This is connected with the strong resolution that is required before making the descent to incarnation.

Having passed through the gate of death, the one I described first, who had soared in spirit to super-earthly realms but without the fullness of human nature which expressed itself only in his heart and feelings, was able between death and rebirth to apprehend what pertains to the First Hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; to some extent he could also apprehend the Second Hierarchy, but not the Hierarchy immediately above man, not, therefore, the Hierarchy, through which one learns how the human body is built up and organised here on earth.

He thus became a personality who in pre-earthly existence had developed little insight into the constitution and nature of the human body; hence, when he was born again, he did not take into himself the final impulse. He made a partial, not a full descent into the body, did not come right down into it, but always hovered a little above it.

His friend from the Platonic School waited before descending to incarnation. The reason for the waiting was that had the two of them met, had they been actual contemporaries, they would not have been able to tolerate one another. And yet, for all that, the one who had been wont to speak at such length about his intercourse with men, recounting it with such charm and sweetness to the other—who did not go among his fellows but was engrossed in the myths and sagas of the gods—this first personality was destined to make a deep impression upon the other, to precede him. The second followed later.

This second personality, having steeped himself in Imaginations of the gods, had now developed a high degree of understanding of all that has to do with man. Accordingly he wanted to extend his time in the spiritual world and gather impulses that would enable him to take deep hold of the body. And what actually happened was that he took hold of the body too forcefully, he sank too deeply into it.

Thus we have here two differing configurations of destiny. Of two members of the Platonic School, one takes too slight a hold of the body in the second incarnation afterwards and the other takes too strong a hold. The one cannot completely enter his body; he is impelled into it in his youth but out of it again soon afterwards and is obliged to remain outside. This is Hölderlin.

The other is carried so deeply into his body that he enters with too much force into his organs and suffers almost lifelong illness. This is Hamerling.

Thus we have before us great human destinies stretching through the ages of time, and the impulses which gave rise to these destinies; and we are now able to divine how the spiritual impulses work. For we must place this fact in all clarity before our souls: an individuality like Hölderlin, who has come from the Platonic School and who cannot enter fully into his body but has to remain outside it, such an individuality experiences in the dimness of insanity, impulses that work in preparation for coming earthly lives, impulses that destine him for greatness. And it is the same with the other, Robert Hamerling.

Illness and health appear in quite a different light when considered in the setting of destiny than when they are observed within the bounds of the single earthly life.

I think it can surely be said that reverence will arise in men's hearts and minds when life is treated in this way—reverence and awe for the mysterious happenings brought about by the spiritual world. Again and again I must emphasise that these things are not being told in order to satisfy cravings for sensation, but to lead us more and more deeply into a knowledge and understanding of the spiritual life. And it is only through this deeper penetration into the spiritual life that the external, sense-life of man can be explained and illumined.

• 1. Lecture-Course XVI. Occult History. Stuttgart, December 27th–31st, 1910 and January 1st, 1911. World-History in the Light of Anthroposophy. Dornach. December 24th–31st, 1923.

As I have said, theoretical explanations about karma and repeated earthly lives cannot but remain unliving and inadequate, until our thought in this direction really flows into our understanding of the life around us. We must contemplate life itself in the light of karma and repeated earthly lives. But such a contemplation requires the very greatest earnestness, for it may indeed be said that the temptation is very great for man to spin out all manner of ideas about karmic connections and repeated earthly lives. The temptation is great; the source of illusions in this sphere is exceedingly great. And indeed, real investigations in this sphere can be made only by one to whom the spiritual world has in a sense been opened through his own soul-development.

Hence it must also be said that in these matters especially the investigator must rely on those foundations of conviction in his audience which may follow from other things he has brought to light. Indeed we ought not to have any confidence in one who begins without more ado to speak about repeated earthly lives in detail. What is derived from such occult depths as these must be confirmed and supported by the fact that many other things have already been produced which give a real basis for confidence in the spiritual investigator.

Now I think I may say that in the twenty-three to twenty-four years during which we have cultivated Anthroposophy, enough occult material has been gathered to warrant the description at this present time even of these bold researches into karma and repeated earthly lives, for the benefit of those who may have gained true confidence through the other realms of spiritual life which have been unfolded before them in the course of time. True, many are present here to-day who have been in the society for a comparatively short time. But the evolution of the society would be made impossible if we always had to begin at the beginning for those who enter newly; and on the other hand, to our great joy and satisfaction, large numbers of our oldest Anthroposophical friends have come here at this busy time when so many lecture-courses are to be given. Many Anthroposophists are gathered here who have witnessed nearly the whole period of Anthroposophical development and as time goes on opportunities must be created in the Anthroposophical Society for those in the earlier stages of membership to be properly introduced to all that must now be cultivated for the further course of the society's development.

I had to make these preliminary remarks, because what I shall say to-day will be given more in the form of a simple communication, and much of it may well appear exceedingly bold. It will however form the starting-point for what will follow in the succeeding lectures.

A human life after all only appears in its true nature when we consider how it passes through repeated lives on earth. Serious and responsible research in this domain is however by no means easy, for the results we gain do in a certain way contradict our habitual ideas on the subject.

At first sight, when considering the life of a man on earth with all the contents of his destiny, most people will be struck by those events of destiny which are connected with his outer profession or inner calling, with his social position and the like. As to the essential content of his earthly life, a human being will naturally appear to us in the light of these characteristics, nor need they by any means be superficial, for they may signify much for his inner life of soul. Nevertheless, to look into those depths in which repeated lives on earth are seen, it is necessary to look aside from many of these obvious and outer things that stamp themselves upon the destiny of a human being in his earthly life.

In effect, we must not imagine that the outer or inner calling of a man has a very great significance for his karma that passes through repeated lives on earth. True, even if we take a comparatively external and typical calling, that of a civil servant for example, we can conceive how much it is connected, even outwardly, with his destiny. Nevertheless, for the deepest relationships of karma or destiny those things that we can describe in a man as proceeding from his external calling are sometimes of no significance at all. And so it is with inner callings too. How easily we are tempted, in the case of a musician, to think that at any rate in one former earthly life he was, if not a musician, an artist of some kind. But it is by no means always so. Nay, I must go farther—it is so only in the rarest cases. For when we investigate these things in reality, we find that the continued thread of karma or destiny goes far deeper into the inner being of man and is little connected with his outer profession or inner calling. It is far more concerned with the inner forces of soul and resistances of soul, with moral relationships which can, after all, reveal themselves in any and every calling whether it be an outer or an inner one.

For this very reason, the investigation of karma—of the thread of destiny—requires us to concentrate on circumstances in the life of a human being which may often appear outwardly trivial or of small importance. In this connection I must refer again and again to a fact that once occurred to me.

I had to investigate the karmic connections of a certain human being. He had many characteristics in this his present life. He had a certain task in life, he had indeed his profession. But to intuitive vision, from all that he did out of his profession, or that he did as a philanthropist and the like, no indication of his former earthly lives could be found. Not that these things were unconnected with his former lives on earth, but for spiritual vision they gave no clue. One could penetrate no farther when concentrating on these facts of his profession or of his philanthropic work. On the other hand, curiously enough, a quite unimportant peculiarity of his life gave a result. He frequently had to lecture. Every time before he began he quite habitually took out his pocket handkerchief and blew his nose! I often heard him lecture, and without exception whenever he began to speak (I do not mean when he began to speak in conversation, but whenever he had to speak continuously) he first took out his pocket-handkerchief and blew his nose. Now this gave a picture from which there radiated out the power to look into his former lives on earth.

I give this as a particularly grotesque example. It is not always so grotesque; but the point is, we must be able to enter into the whole human being if we wish to look in any valid way into his karma.

You see, from a deeper point of view, the special calling of a man is, after all, something that results from education and other circumstances. On the other hand, it is deeply connected with his inner spiritual configuration if every time before he begins to make a speech he simply cannot help taking out his pocket-handkerchief and blowing his nose! That is a thing far more intimately connected with the being of a man. Still, I admit, this is a radical and extreme example. It is not always quite like this. I wanted only to awaken in you the idea that for the investigation of karma, that which lies on the obvious surface of a man's life is as a rule of no use. We have to enter into certain intimate features of his life—I do not mean into things that one pries into unjustifiably—but into the finer qualities and characteristics that nevertheless appear quite openly.

Having said this by way of introduction, I will now relate a certain instance perfectly frankly and straightforwardly, and of course with all the reservations which are necessary in the case. I mean with the reservation that everyone is free to believe or disbelieve what I now say, though I must assure you that it is based on the deepest and most earnest spiritual-scientific research.

These things do not by any means come to one if one approaches them with the deliberate intention to investigate, like a modern scientist in his laboratory. In a certain way, researches on karma must themselves result from karma.

I had to mention this fact at the end of the new edition of my book Theosophy, for among the various strange requirements that have been made of me from time to time during my life, this too occurred not long ago.—It was suggested that I should submit myself to examination in some psychological laboratory, so that they might ascertain whether the things I have to say on spiritual science are well founded. It is of course just as absurd as if someone were to produce mathematical results and, instead of testing their accuracy, you were to challenge him to submit to an examination in a laboratory, to see whether or not he was a real mathematician. Absurdities of this kind go under the name of scholarship to-day and are taken seriously by learned people!

I said quite definitely at the close of the new edition of my Theosophy, that experiments in this spirit can of course give no result. And I also mentioned that all the paths of approach which lead to the discovery of a certain occult result must themselves be prepared in a spiritual, in a super-sensible way.

Now I once had occasion to meet an eminent doctor of our time, who was well known to me by reputation and especially by his literary career. I had a very high regard for him. You see, I am mentioning the karmic details which led to the investigation, the results of which I shall now describe. The investigation itself took a very long time and only reached its conclusion during the last few weeks. Only now has it reached a stage which enables me conscientiously to speak of it. I am mentioning all these details in order that you may see some at least of the inner connections, though of course not all of them.

Thus I made the acquaintance of this doctor, a man of our own day. When I met him I was in the company of another person whom I had known very well for a long time. This other person had always made, I will not say a deep, but a very thorough impression on me. He was exceedingly fond of the society of men who were interested in occultism in the widest possible range, though an occultism somewhat externally conceived. He was fond of relating the views of his many acquaintances on all kinds of occult matters, and especially on the occult connections of what the modern artist should strive for, as a lyric and epic poet, or as a dramatist. Around this person there was what I might call a kind of moral, ethical aura. I am applying the word ‘moral’ to all that is connected with the soul-qualities under the command of the will.

I was paying a visit to him, and in his company I found the other man first mentioned, whom I knew by reputation and respected very highly for his literary and medical career. Everything that took place during this visit made a deep impression on me and impelled me to receive the whole experience into the realm of spiritual research.

Then a very remarkable thing happened. By witnessing the two persons in the company of one another, and by the impression which my new acquaintance made on me—(I had known him for a long time as an eminent literary and medical man and had a great regard for him, but this was the first time that I saw him in the flesh)—by these impressions I gained certain perceptions. To begin with however, it enabled me, not to investigate in any way the connections in life and destiny of my new acquaintance. On the contrary, my seeing them together shed light as it were upon the other one, whom I had long known. And the result was this.—He had lived in ancient Egypt, not in his last, but in one of his former lives on earth. And (this is the peculiar thing) he had been mummified, embalmed as a mummy. Soon afterwards I discovered that the mummy was still in existence. Indeed a long time afterwards I saw the actual mummy. This, then, was the starting-point. But once the line of research had been kindled in connection with the person whom I had long known, it shed its light still farther, and eventually I was enabled to investigate the karmic connections of the other man, my new acquaintance, the doctor. And the following was the result.

As a general rule one is led from one earthly life of a human being to the preceding one. But in this case intuition led far back into ancient Egypt, to a kind of chieftain in ancient Egypt. It was a chieftain who in a certain sense, indeed in a very interesting way, possessed the ancient Egyptian Initiation, but had become somewhat decadent as an Initiate. In the further course of his life, he began to take his Initiation not very seriously, indeed he even treated it with a certain scorn. Now this man had a servant, who in his turn was extremely serious. This servant was of course not initiated; but both of them together were given the task of embalming mummies and procuring the substances for this purpose, which was no easy matter.

Now especially in the more ancient periods of Egypt, the process of embalming mummies was very complicated and demanded an intimate knowledge of the human being, of the human body. Nay more, of those who had to do the embalming—if they did it legitimately—deep knowledge of the human soul was required. The chieftain of whom I spoke had been initiated for this very work, but he gradually became, in a manner of speaking, frivolous in relation to this, his proper calling. So it came about that in the course of time he betrayed (so they would have put it in the language of the Mysteries) the knowledge he had received through his Initiation to his servant, and the latter gradually proved to be a man who understood the content of Initiation better than the Initiate himself. Thus the servant became the embalmer of mummies, and at length his master did not even trouble to supervise the work, though of course he still took advantage of the social position, etc., which this honourable task involved. But at length his character became such that he no longer enjoyed great respect, and he thus came into various conflicts of life. The servant, on the other hand, worked his way up by degrees to a very, very earnest conception of life, and was thus taken hold of, in a remarkably congenial way, by a kind of Initiation. It was no real Initiation, but it lived within him instinctively. Thus a large number of mummies were mummified under the supervision and co-operation of these two people.

Time went on. The two men passed through the gate of death and underwent the experiences of which I shall speak next time—the experiences in the super-sensible which are connected with the development of karma or destiny. And in the Roman epoch they both of them came back to earthly life. They came back at the very time when the dominion of the Roman Emperors was founded, in the time of Augustus—not exactly, but approximately, in the time of Augustus himself.

I said above that this is a matter of conscientious research, no less exact in its methods than any researches of physics or chemistry, and I should not speak of these things unless for some weeks past it had become possible for me to speak of them so definitely.

The chieftain, who had gradually become a really frivolous Initiate, and who, when he had passed through the gate of death, had felt this as an extraordinarily bitter trial of earthly life, experiencing it in all the bitterness of its effects—we find him again as Julia, the daughter of Augustus. She married Tiberius, the step-son of Augustus, and led a life which to herself seemed justified but was considered, in the Roman society of that time, so immoral that at length both she and Tiberius were banished.

The other man—the servant who had worked his way from the bottom upwards nearly to the grade of an Initiate—was born again at the same time, as the Roman historian Titus Livius, or Livy.

It is most interesting how Livy came to be an historian. In the ancient Egyptian times he had embalmed a large number of mummies. The souls who had lived in the bodies of these mummies—very many of them—were reincarnated as Romans. And certain ones among them were actually reincarnated as the seven Kings of Rome. For the Seven Kings were no mere legendary figures. Going back into the time when the chieftain and his servant had lived in Egypt, we come into a very old Egyptian epoch. Now through a certain law which applies especially to the reincarnation of souls whose bodies have been mummified, these souls were called back again to earth comparatively soon. And the karmic connection of the servant of the chieftain with the souls whose bodies he had embalmed was so intimate, that he had to write the history of the very same human being whom in a previous life he had embalmed, though naturally, he also included the history of many others whom he had not embalmed. Thus Titus Livius became an historian. Now I would like some, indeed as many of you as possible, to take Livy's Roman History, and, with the knowledge that results from these karmic connections, to receive a real impression of his style. You will see that his peculiar penetration into the human being and his tendency at the same time towards the style of the myth, is akin to that intimate knowledge of man which an embalmer could attain.

We do not perceive such connections until the corresponding researches have been made. But once this has been done, a great light is shed on many things. It is difficult to understand the origin of the peculiar style of Titus Livius, who as it were embalms the human beings whom he describes. For such is his style. Real light is thrown upon it when we point to these connections.

Thus we have the same two people again as Julia and Titus Livius. Then Julia and Livy passed once more through the gate of death. The one soul had had the experience of being an Initiate to a considerable degree, and having then distorted his Initiation by frivolous conduct. He had discovered all the bitterness of the after-effects of this in the life between death and a new birth. He had then undergone a peculiar destiny in his new life on earth as Julia, of which life you may read in history. The result was, that in his next life between death and a new birth (following on the life as Julia) he conceived a strong antipathy to this his incarnation as Julia. And in a curious way this antipathy of his was universalised. For spiritual intuition shows this individuality in his life between death and a new birth as though perpetually crying out: “Would that I had never become a woman! It was the evil that I did in yonder life in ancient Egypt which led me thus to become a woman.”

We can now trace the life of these two individualities still farther. We come into the Middle Ages. We find Livy again as the glad poet and minstrel in the very centre of the Middle Ages. We are astonished to find him thus, for there is no connection between the external callings. But the greatest possible surprises that a human being can possibly have are those that result from a real study of successive lives on earth. The Roman historian, with his style that proceeded from a knowledge of man acquired in embalming mummies, with his style so wonderfully light—we find him again as the poet Walther von der Vogelweide. His style is carried upwards, as it were, upon the wings of lyric poetry.

Walther von der Vogelweide lived in the Tyrol. He had many patrons; and among his many patrons there was one very peculiar man, who was on familiar terms with alchemists of every kind, for there were scores of alchemists at that time, in the Tyrol. This man was himself the owner of a castle, but he frequented all manner of alchemists' dens and hovels. In so doing he learned extraordinarily much, and (as happened in the case of Paracelsus too) by spending his time in the dens of alchemists he was impelled to study all occult matters very intensely, and gained an unusually intense feeling for occult things. He thus came into the position of rediscovering in the Tyrol what was then only known as a legend, namely, the Castle in the Mountain—the Castle in the Rocks—(which indeed no one would have recognised as such, for it consisted of rocks, it was hollowed out of the rocks)—I mean, the Castle of the Dwarf King Laurin. The daemonic nature in the district of the Castle of the Dwarf King Laurin made a profound impression on him. Thus there was a remarkable combination in this soul—Initiation which he had carried into frivolity, annoyance at having been a woman and having thus been drawn into the sphere of Roman immorality and, at the same time, Roman cant and hypocrisy about morals; and lastly, an intimate knowledge, though still only external, of all manner of alchemical matters, which knowledge he had extended to a clear feeling of the nature-daemons and of other spiritual agencies in nature.

These two men—though it is not recorded in the biography of Walther, nevertheless it is the case—Walther von der Vogelweide and this other man often came together, and Walther received many an influence and impulse from him.

Here we have an instance of what is really a kind of karmic law. We see the same people drawn together again and again, called to the earth again and again simultaneously, complementing one another, living in a kind of mutual contrast. It is interesting once more, to enter into the peculiar lyrical style of Walther. It is as though at last he had grown thoroughly sick of embalming dead mummies and had turned to an entirely different aspect of life. He will no longer have anything to do with dead things, but only with the fullness and joy of life. And yet again, there is a certain undercurrent of pessimism in his work. Feel the style of Walther von der Yogelweide, feel in his style the two preceding earthly lives: feel too, his restless life. It is extraordinarily reminiscent of that life which dawns upon one who spends much of his time with the dead, when many destinies are unburdened in the soul. For such indeed was the case with an embalmer of mummies.

Now we go on.—My further researches into this karmic chain led me at length into the same room where I had visited my old acquaintance, whom I had recognised as an Egyptian mummy. And now I perceived that this very mummy had been embalmed by the other man whom I now met in his room. The whole line of research led me back to this same room. In effect, I found the soul who had passed through the servant of the old Egyptian embalmer, through Titus Livius, through Walther von der Vogelweide—I found him again in the doctor of our time, in Ludwig Schleich.

Thus astonishingly do the connections in life appear. Who, with the ordinary consciousness alone, can understand an earthly life? It can only be understood when we know what is there in the foundations of a soul. Theoretically, many people know that deep in the foundations of the soul there are the layers of successive earthly lives. But it becomes real and concrete only when we behold it in a specific instance.

Then inner vision was directed out of this room once more. (For in the case of the other man, who had been mummified by this one, I was led to no more clues—at any rate to no important ones.) On the other hand I now perceived the further soul-pilgrimage of the old chieftain, of Julia, of the discoverer of Laurin's Castle. For he came back to earth as August Strindberg.

Now I would like you to take the whole life and literary work of August Strindberg and set it against the background which I have just described. See the peculiar misogyny of Strindberg, which is no true misogyny, but proceeds from quite different foundations. Look, too, at all the strange daemonic elements that occur in his works. See his peculiar attraction to all manner of alchemistic and occult arts and artifices. And at length, look at the adventurous life of August Strindberg. You will find how well it stands out against the background which I have described.

Then read the Memoirs of Ludwig Schleich, his relations to August Strindberg, and you will see how all this arises once more against the background of their former earthly lives. Indeed, from the Memoirs of Ludwig Schleich a very remarkable light may suddenly arise, a light truly astonishing. For the man in whose company I first met Ludwig Schleich—the man of whom I said that in his ancient Egyptian life he was mummified by Schleich—it is he of whom Schleich himself tells in his Memoirs that he led him to Strindberg. In a past life, Strindberg and Schleich had worked together upon the corpse. And the soul who dwelt in that body, led them together again.

Thus, all that we have to explain to begin with about repeated earthly lives and the karmic connections in general, becomes real and concrete. Only then do the facts that appear in earthly life become transparent. A single human life on earth is an entire mystery. What else can it be, until seen against the background of the former lives on earth?

My dear friends, when I explain such things as these I always have an accompanying feeling. If these things which it has become possible to set forth since the Christmas Foundation Meeting are to be regarded in a true sense they demand real earnestness in the listener. They demand an earnest spirit. They require us to stand with real earnestness in the Anthroposophical Movement. For they might easily lead to all manner of frivolities. But they are brought forward here because it is necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to-day to take its stand on a basis of real earnestness and to become conscious of its tasks in modern civilisation.

Having thus laid the foundation, I wish to speak in the next lecture about the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. And in the following lecture which I shall then announce, I shall pass on to describe what these studies of karma may become for the human being who wishes to understand his own life in its deeper meaning.

Having spoken so often about the School of Chartres and its great significance for the inner spiritual life of the West, I have received a welcome gift during the last few days: a gift of pictures, some of which have been put up here for you to see. Others will be added next Tuesday. In these pictures you will see what wonderful architectural works and works of sculpture in the mediaeval sense, arose at the place where flourished that spiritual life of which I have now spoken so often.

The personalities who were gathered in the School of Chartres still had the impulse, even in the 12th century, to enter as teachers or students into the living spiritual life that had arisen in the turning-point of time—I mean in the epoch of European evolution when humanity, inasmuch as they were seekers after knowledge, still sought it in the living weaving and working of the nature-beings, and not in the conception of void and abstract natural laws.

Thus in the School of Chartres there was a deep devotion to spiritual powers, notably to those that hold sway in Nature. All this was cultivated there—no longer, it is true, by Initiates into the ancient Mysteries—but by personalities who had the heart and mind to receive from tradition much that had once been direct spiritual experience. And I have told you of the mysterious radiations of light from the School of Chartres which we can truly recognise in the spirit of Brunetto Latini, the great teacher of Dante. I tried to explain how the individualities of Chartres worked on in the spiritual worlds in unison with those who afterwards came down, more in the Dominican Order, as the bearers of Scholasticism. We may put it thus.—The individualities of Chartres were obliged to see, out of the signs of the times, that there would be no place for them within the earthly life until the time when the element of Michael, which was to begin at the end of the 19th century, should have been working for a while on earth.

In a far-reaching sense these individualities of Chartres took part in the super-sensible teachings of which I spoke last time—teachings that were given under the aegis of Michael himself, so as to pour forth impulses which were to hold good for the spiritual life of coming centuries. And it may be said indeed that anyone who would devote himself to the cultivation of spiritual life to-day must necessarily stand under the influence of those great impulses.

Broadly speaking we may say that there have been very few reincarnations of the spirits of Chartres hitherto. Nevertheless it was granted to me to look back upon the School of Chartres through a certain stimulus, if I may describe it so, which came to me out of the life of the present time.

There was a monk in the School of Chartres who was altogether devoted to the life-element that existed in that school. But in the School of Chartres, especially if one was truly devoted to it, one felt as it were a twilight mood of the spiritual life. All that was reminiscent still of the great and deep impulses of the spiritual Platonism that had been handed down—all this was living in Chartres. But it lived in such a way that the bearers of the spiritual life of Chartres said to themselves: In the future, alas, the civilisation of Europe will no longer be receptive for this living, Platonic spirituality.

It is touching to see how the School of Chartres preserves as it were the portraits of the inspiring genii of the Seven Liberal Arts, as they were called: Grammatica, Dialectica, Rhetorica, Arithmetica, Geometría, Astronomía and Musica. Even in the reception of the Spiritual that was contained in the Seven Liberal Arts, they still saw in them the living gifts of the gods, coming to man through spiritual beings. They did not see the mere communication of dead thoughts about dead laws of Nature. And they could see that Europe in the future would no longer be receptive to these things. Hence there was a feeling of evening twilight in the spiritual life.

Now one of those monks who was especially devoted to the teachings and the works of Chartres, was, after all, reincarnated in our time. He was reincarnated, moreover, in such a way that one could find in this case most wonderfully the echo and reflection of the former life in the present. This personality lived in our time as an authoress who was not only my acquaintance, but my friend. [Marie Eugenie delle Grazie.] She died a considerable time ago. She bore within her a strange mood of soul, about which I should not have spoken until now, although I observed it many years ago. To speak of these things has indeed only been possible since the Christmas feeling came over our Anthroposophical Society. For this has brought a peculiar illumination over these things, and it is possible, as I have already said, to speak about such matters openly and without embarrassment to-day.

When one was in conversation with that authoress, she returned again and again to the theme that she would like to die. But her desire to die did not spring from a sentimental or hypochondriac, nay, not even from a melancholic mood of soul. If one had the psychological vision to enter into such things, one found one's way far, far back into her soul until at length one had to say: It is the echo and reflection of a former life on earth. In a former life on earth a seed was planted which now comes forth, I will not say in the longing for death, but in this feeling that the soul, being now incarnated, yet has nothing really to do with this present age.

Her writings, too, are of this nature. They seem to be written out of a different world—not indeed as to their facts and communications—but as to their mood and feeling. And we can understand this mood only if we find the way from the dim light of her writings, from the dim light that lived as a fundamental disposition in her own soul, back to that monk of Chartres who felt in Chartres the evening twilight mood of a living Platonism.

In this authoress it was not a question of temperament or melancholy or sentimentality; it was the raying-in of a former life on earth. And her present soul was like a mirror into which the life of Chartres really penetrated. Not indeed the content of the teachings of Chartres, but their moods and feelings, had been transmitted from the one life to the other in this personality. Transplanting oneself into these moods, and looking back, one could receive in them as it were spiritual photographs of the personalities who are also to be found by direct spiritual research in the worlds where they now are—the personalities who taught in Chartres.

Thus you see, life brings to one in many ways the karmic possibilities to gaze into these matters. Last time, I described my experiences with the Cistercian Order. To-day I would supplement what I then said by referring to the evening twilight mood of the School of Chartres which penetrated into the heart and soul of an extraordinarily interesting personality, who lived again in the present time. She has long ago found her way back into the worlds for which she longed. She has found her way back to the Fathers of Chartres. And if her whole soul-life had not been dominated by a kind of weariness as the karmic outcome of the mood-of-soul of yonder monk of Chartres, I could scarcely imagine a personality more fitted to behold the spiritual life of the present day in connection with the traditional life of the Middle Ages.

There is another thing which I would mention here. When there are such karmic impulses working deep in the foundations of the soul, we find what is otherwise a very rare occurrence: we find in the physical expression of the countenance in a later incarnation, a likeness to the former. The face of yonder monk and of the authoress of the present time were indeed extraordinarily alike.

Now in these connections I will gradually pass on to the karma of the Anthroposophical Society, or of the individualities of its members. For as I said last time, a large number of the souls who stand sincerely within the Anthroposophical Movement were connected somewhere and somewhen with that stream of Michael which I must now characterise. You will remember all that I have said in this connection about Alexander and Aristotle and about the events in super-sensible worlds at the time when the 8th Council in Constantinople took place here in this world of sense. You will remember what I said of the continuation, in the spiritual and in the physical, of the life of the Court of Haroun al Raschid, until at length I spoke of that super-sensible School which stood under the aegis of Michael himself. Deeply significant was the teaching of that School. On the one hand it pointed again and again to the connections with the ancient Mysteries, to all that must now come forth once more in a new form from the content of the ancient Mysteries, to permeate modern civilisation with spirituality. On the other hand it pointed to the impulses which souls, devoted to the spiritual life, must have for their work into the future. And we know that from an understanding of the spiritual stream we may also come to understand how Anthroposophy, in its real essence, signifies the impulse for a renewal, for a true and sincere understanding of the Christ-Impulse.

For in the Anthroposophical Movement we find two kinds of souls. A large number of them have partaken in those currents which were, so to speak, the officially Christian ones in the first centuries. They witnessed all that came into the world as Christianity, notably in the times of Constantine, and immediately after him. Many of those who approached Christianity with the very deepest sincerity at that time and received it with inner depth and penetration, many of them are found in the Anthroposophical Society to-day with the deep impulse towards an understanding of Christianity. I do not mean so much the Christians who followed such movements as that of Constantine himself; I rather mean those Christians who claimed to be the true Christians, who were distributed in different Christian sects. In those Christian sects we find many of the souls who to-day approach the Anthroposophical Movement sincerely, though often through subconscious impulses which the surface consciousness may even largely misinterpret.

But there are other souls: there are those who did not partake directly in that development of Christianity. They either partook in Christianity at a later stage of its development when the deep inner life of the sects was no longer there, or on the other hand—and this is the most important thing—they still had, living and unextinguished in the depths of their souls, much of what was experienced in pre-Christian time as the ancient wisdom of the heathen Mysteries. They too often partook in Christianity; but it did not make so deep an impression upon them as upon the other souls described before. For there still remained alive in them the impression of the teachings, the rituals and practices of ancient Mysteries. Now among those who have entered the Anthroposophical Movement in this way we find many who are seeking for the Christ in an abstract sense. The other souls above described are happy, so to speak, to find Christianity once more within the Anthroposophical Movement. But many of the souls I now mean grasp with real inner understanding the Cosmic Christianity which Anthroposophy contains. Christ as the Cosmic Spirit of the Sun is taken hold of most especially by the souls (and they are very numerous in the Anthroposophical Movement) in the depths of whom much is still living of what they underwent in connection with ancient heathen Mysteries.

Now all this is deeply connected with the currents of the whole spiritual life of mankind in the present time—I mean the present time in a wider sense, reaching over decades and centuries.

Anthroposophy after all has grown out of the spiritual life of the present time, and though in its contents it has nothing directly in common with this spiritual life, karmically it has grown out of it in many ways. We must turn our eyes to many things which do not apparently belong to what works in Anthroposophy directly, if we would include in our spiritual horizon all that partook in the different streams I have mentioned. I said a little while ago that we only truly understand what takes place outwardly on the physical plane if we see in the background what is poured down from the fields of the spirit into these events as they take place on the physical plane. We must regain the courage to bring into our present life that feeling of the ancient Mysteries. We must connect the physical events not merely abstractly with a vaguely Pantheistic or Theistic or whatever spiritual life. We must become able to trace the detailed events, nay more, the inner experiences of men within these events, to the spiritual source and background.

We are led to do so among other things by something that belongs to the deepest tasks of the present time. For in the present time we must seek again for a real knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit—not a knowledge rooted in abstract ideas or laws, but one that is able to look into the true foundation of the human being as a whole. To gain such knowledge man must be searched through and through in his conditions of health and sickness; and not in a merely physical sense as is customary to-day, for then we should not learn to know the human being. By merely physical knowledge we can never learn to know what works so deeply into the life of man, determining his destiny: his unhappiness, his sickness, his abilities or absence of abilities. Karma in all its forms—this we can only know if from the starting-point of the physical we can trace the spiritual life of a man and his inner life of soul.

How do people work, in the ordinary scientific striving of to-day? They study the human being quite externally as to his organs and vessels, his nerves, the vessels of the circulation of the blood and so forth. But when the health and sickness of man are studied in this fashion one cannot find the spirit and soul in all these things.

Indeed the anatomist or physiologist of to-day may well speak in the words of a famous astronomer of the past, who, in answer to a question which his sovereign had put to him, replied:“I have searched through the whole universe, through all the stars and all their movements, but I have found no God!” So said the astronomer. And the anatomist or physiologist of to-day could say: “I have searched through them all—heart and kidneys, stomach and brain, blood-vessels and nerves—but I have found neither soul nor spirit.”

All the problems and difficulties of modern medicine, for example, are subject to this influence. And all these things must be dealt with in the Anthroposophical Movement today, according to the tasks which are placed before it. In general terms these questions must be unfolded before the Anthroposophical Society as a whole; in detail they must be treated in an expert way within the several groups. Thus, for example, I am now speaking on Pastoral Medicine to a group who are prepared for it by training and profession. Here we must seek the way into those great connections which proceed in the last resort from the workings of the streams of karma. In time to come it will be seen how pathology and therapeutics, how the observation of man in sickness and disease, will make it absolutely necessary to enter into the deep questions of the soul and spirit. As I have said again and again, the external and physical—the physical as presented by natural science—is to be respected in the fullest sense. Yet men will find themselves compelled to take into account the higher members of man's nature when considering disease and health. This will be seen in the book¹ on which my dear fellow-worker Frau Dr. Wegman and I are working together, on the subject of man in health and in disease. Now these researches especially, seeking the ways of entry from the physical man into the spiritual, can only lead to good and promising results if we set about them in the right way. For in such work we must not only use the knowledge-forces of the present, but we must use the knowledge-forces which arise by picking up the threads of karma—the karmic threads proceeding from the history and evolution of mankind. We must indeed work with the forces of karma in order to penetrate these secrets.

In the first volume, only the beginnings of our work will be published. The work will then be carried forward and from the more elementary expositions we shall proceed to unfold the particular knowledge of man which can arise from this medical, therapeutic and pathological aspect of spiritual science. This work has only been made possible through the presence in Frau Dr. Wegman of a personality whose medical studies have entered into her in such a way as to evolve quite naturally, as a matter of course, towards a spiritual conception and perception of the human being.

Now it is in the course of these researches, when we behold in spiritual perspective all the workings of the human organs, that those perceptions also arise which lead us in turn to the deeper karmic connections. The same manner of perception must be evolved to perceive the spiritual realities that underlie, not the whole man, but his several organs. (For, if you will, it is the Jupiter world that underlies one organ, the Venus world that underlies another, and so forth.) The same insight which we must evolve in this direction, leads also to the possibility of perceiving human personalities in past earthly lives. For in the present earthly life man stands before us within the limits of his skin. But when we become able to gaze into his single organs, what was contained within the skin expands and expands. Each of the single organs points us to a different direction of the universe. The organs prepare the roads that lead us far out into the macrocosm, until far out yonder the human being once again appears as a complete and rounded whole. It is the human being built up once more in the spirit, having transcended the present form, the form that is enclosed within the skin—it is this that we need. For the sum-total of the human organs—which even physically is altogether different from what the present-day anatomist or physiologist conceives—when we trace it out into the cosmos, leads to perceptions which correspond in turn to the spiritual perception of the former earthly lives of man. Then we experience the inner connections that shed their light upon the evolution and history of mankind, explaining what is physically there to-day. For in reality the whole past of human beings lives in the present time. Yet the vague and abstract saying by itself is of no avail. Materialists too will say the same. The point is to perceive how the past is living in the present.

And of this I would now give you an example, an example which is in itself so wonderful that it called forth in me the greatest imaginable wonder when I first came to it as a result of spiritual research. And many things which I have said before must now be rectified, or at any rate must be completed, by that which I shall now set forth.

You see, for one who studies history with feeling for its inner meaning, a certain event in the first centuries of Christianity is wrapped in the atmosphere of a strange mystery. We see on the one side a personality of whom we may well think that in his inner life he was little fitted to take hold of Christianity or to make it what it then became, the official Christianity of the West. I mean the Emperor Constantine, of whom we have so often spoken. Then, side by side with him (not literally of course, but gazing back into that age from a considerable distance in time), side by side with Constantine we see Julian the Apostate. Julian the Apostate, he of a truth was one in whom the wisdom of the Mysteries was living, as we may know. Julian the Apostate could speak of a Threefold Sun. Indeed he lost his life through being regarded as a betrayer of the Mysteries, because he spoke about the Threefold Sun. Of these things it was no longer allowed to speak in his time; still less would it have been allowed in earlier times. But Julian the Apostate stood in a peculiar relation to Christianity. In a certain sense we must again and again be surprised that the genius, the fine spirituality and intellect of Julian was so little receptive to the greatness of Christianity. It was simply due to the fact that in his environment he saw very little of what he conceived as a true inner sincerity, whereas among those who introduced him to the ancient Mysteries he found great sincerity—positive, active sincerity. Such was the case with Julian the Apostate.

Yonder in Asia he was murdered. Many a fable is told about the murder. The truth is that it took place because he was regarded as a betrayer of the Mysteries. It was a murder altogether pre-arranged.

Now if we make ourselves to some extent acquainted with that which lived in Julian we cannot but be deeply interested in the question: How did his individuality live on in later times? For his was a peculiar individuality, one of whom it must be said that he would have been better fitted than Constantine, better than Clodvig and all the others, to make straight the ways of Christianity. This lay inherent in his soul. If the time had been favourable, if the conditions had existed, he could have brought about out of the ancient Mysteries a straightforward continuation from the pre-Christian Christ, the true macrocosmic Logos, to the Christ who was to work on within mankind after the Mystery of Golgotha. He was indeed a vessel well prepared. Strange as it may sound, we find it so, if we enter into his true spirit. We find in the foundations of his soul the true impulse to take hold of Christianity. But he did not let it emerge, he suppressed it, misled by the stupidities which Celsus had written about Jesus. It does indeed happen now and then that men of real genius are led astray by the stupidest effusions of their fellow-men. Thus we may have the feeling: Julian would really have been the soul to make straight the ways of Christianity and to bring Christianity into its true and proper channel.

We now leave the soul of Julian the Apostate in that earthly life and follow the same individuality with the highest interest through spiritual worlds. But there is always something vague and unclear about it. Only the most intense spiritual striving can come at length to a clear perception of his further course.

On many matters very adequate ideas existed in the Middle Ages. They might be legendary, but they were adequate; they corresponded to the real events. Legendary though they may be, how adequate are the narratives that centred round the personality of Alexander the Great. How vividly his life appears, as I already said, in the description of Lamprecht the Priest!

But that which lives on of Julian, lives on in such a way that we must say again and again: It seeks to disappear from before the vision of mankind. And as we seek to follow it we have the greatest difficulty, so to speak, in keeping it within our spiritual field of vision. Again and again it escapes us. We trace it through the centuries into the Middle Ages and it escapes us. But when at length we do succeed in following it to the end, we land at a strange place, which though it be not historic in the proper sense, is in reality more than historic. We come at length to the figure of a woman, in whom we find again the soul of Julian the Apostate. It was a woman who accomplished an important deed in her life under the impression of an essentially painful event. For she beheld, not in herself, but in the person of another, an image of the fate of Julian the Apostate, inasmuch as Julian the Apostate went on a campaign to the East and there lost his life by treachery.

The woman whom I mean is Herzeleide, the mother of Parsifal, who was an historic character though history itself tells nothing of her. In Gamuret, whom she married and who lost his life through treachery upon an Eastern campaign, she was pointed to her own destiny in the former life as Julian the Apostate. This went deep into her soul, and under this impression she achieved what is told to us in a legendary way—yet it is historic in the truest sense—of the education of Parsifal by Herzeleide.

The soul of Julian the Apostate who had remained thus in the depths and of whom one would believe that it should have been his very mission to prepare the right way for Christianity—this soul is found again in the Middle Ages in the body of a woman who sent out Parsifal, to seek and to find the esoteric paths for Christianity.

Mysterious like this, and full of riddles, are the paths of mankind in the background, in the foundations of existence. This example—and it is strangely interwoven with the one which I already told you in connection with the School of Chartres—this example may make you realise how wonderful are the paths of the human soul and the paths of evolution for all mankind.

We shall continue speaking of it in the next lecture, when I shall have more to say of the life of Herzeleide and of what was then sent forth, physically, in Parsifal. I shall begin next time at this point where we must break off to-day.

• 1. Fundamentals of Therapy; an Extension of the Art of Healing through Spiritual Knowledge, by Rudolf Steiner, Ph.D. and Ita Wegman, M.D. (Zurich). English translation by George Adams, M.A.

My dear friends,

We will again start by letting the words resound from the cosmos near and far, which can be heard by everyone who correctly understands the world. But before doing so, because again many new members of the esoteric school are present, I must say at least a few words about the meaning of this school.

I will put it briefly. This School must be recognized as one which brings down its information from the spiritual world to human souls. Therefore, what lives here in the School and what is brought to human souls are to be perceived as communications from the spiritual world itself. From this you will understand that membership in the School must be regarded as serious in the highest degree.

This seriousness has only become possible because of the Constitution which the Anthroposophical Society received during the Christmas Conference. Since then the Anthroposophical Society as such is an openly public institution, but at the same time one through which an esoteric breath flows, which has been better received than the former exoteric one.

So nothing more is expected from the members of the Anthroposophical Society than that they feel themselves to be receivers of anthroposophical wisdom. And, of course, what is generally expected of decent people in life.

But membership in the School implies even more, that the member recognize the serious conditions for membership—namely the basic condition that anyone who wishes to belong to the School should present himself in life in such a way that he is in every respect a representative of anthroposophy before the world.

To be a representative of anthroposophy before the world necessarily means that whatever he or she does in connection to anthroposophy, be it ever so remotely connected, also be with the approval of the leadership of the School, that is, with the esoteric Executive Committee at the Goetheanum. Thus through the School a real stream can enter the anthroposophical movement, which today is represented by the Anthroposophical Society.

Therefore, it is necessary that membership in the School be understood in such a way that the member feels in his whole being that he is a part of what is being done and revealed from here in the Goetheanum. Such a condition should not be taken as a restriction on human freedom, my dear friends, for membership in the school rests on reciprocity. The leadership of the School must be free to give what it has to give to whom it considers right to do so. And the fact that no one is obliged to be a member of the School, but that it depends on his free will to be a member, means that the leadership may also place conditions on membership without anyone claiming that his free will is in any way infringed upon. It is a free agreement between the leadership of the School and those who wish to be members.

Furthermore, in order that the School really be taken seriously, it cannot be otherwise than that the leadership exercise its right to revoke a membership whenever it considers necessary because of certain events. And, my dear friends, that the leadership of the School takes this seriously is shown by the fact that since the relatively short time the School has existed, sixteen members already had to be suspended for shorter or longer lengths of time. And I must again emphasize that this measure will have to be strictly adhered to in the future, regardless of the personalities involved, because we will be entering ever more deeply into esoteric matters.

* * *

And now the words will be spoken which are always spoken at the beginning of our deliberations, reminding us of the admonitions which resound from all the events and beings of the world to all those who have the heart to understand them: the admonition to self-knowledge, which is the true foundation of world knowledge.

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with cosmic might?
Who speaks in depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

My dear friends, we have advanced, in respect to what has been sent to us from the spiritual world in the form of mantras, to the mantric verses which correspond to the esoteric situation in which we feel ourselves: first of all, in meditation we imagine the being standing at the abyss of existence speaking to us.

Let us imagine it once more, for we cannot recall it to our souls too often. We see before us everything belonging to the kingdoms of nature. We observe the glorious heavenly bodies; we see the floating clouds; we see the wind and the waves, the thunder and lightning. We see everything from the humblest worm to the sublimest revelations in the glittering stars. Only a false asceticism, unrelated to true esotericism, could in any way despise this world that speaks to the senses. The person who wishes to be truly human can do nothing other than intimately relate to the sense-perceptible life, from the humblest creature to the majestic, divinely glittering stars.

We must never despise the grandeur and awesome beauty of all that surrounds us, which we must acknowledge; we must go forward step by step in the world and be able to appreciate what our eyes see, what our ears hear, what the other senses perceive, what we can grasp with our reason. However, a moment comes as you look around at the expanse of space, at the interweaving of time, that despite all the grandeur and awesome beauty in your surroundings, you cannot find there what the inner nature of your being is. So you must say to yourself: the inner source of my being is to be sought elsewhere. The very power of such a thought affects us.

What follows for the soul can only be expressed in imaginative thoughts. At first these imaginative thoughts lead us to a wide field in which everything earthly and sense-perceptible is spread out before us. We find it to be radiant with the sun, we find it to be shining light. But as we look all around us we find our own self nowhere. Then we gaze before us and see that this sunny field, which is grandiose and beautiful and sublime to the senses, is blocked by a dark, night-bedecked wall. We see ourselves entering deeply into the darkness. We intuit that perhaps there in the darkness is our self's true origin; but we cannot see into it.

And as we follow the path forward, the abyss of existence, the threshold to the spiritual world, appears before us. We must cross over this abyss. The Guardian stands there warning us that we must be mature in order to cross over the abyss, for with our thinking, feeling and willing habits which correspond to the physical sense-perceptible world, we cannot cross over the abyss of existence into the spiritual world in which our real self originated.

The Guardian of the Threshold is the first spiritual being we encounter. Every night we are in this spiritual world when we sleep. But it is like darkness around our I and our astral body, because we can only enter this spiritual world when sufficiently mature. The Guardian of the Threshold protects us from entering immaturely. But now as we encounter him he sends us his grand admonishments. And the admonishments are contained in the mantric verses which until now have formed the content of these esoteric lessons.

Those of you who do not yet have these mantric verses can obtain them from other members of the School. But the following procedure must be observed: not the person who is to receive the verses asks for permission, but the one who gives them.

These verses have not only shown us how our hearts are to react if we wish to cross over the abyss of existence, they have also shown us what our souls will feel once we have overflown the abyss and gradually sense—not yet see, but sense—how the darkness, which was at first night-bedecked, gradually becomes lighter. At first we feel becoming lighter, and we feel that the elements—earth, water, air, fire—are different on the other side, that we are living in another world. And the world in which we recognize our own being, and therewith the true form of the elements, is indeed another world.

During the last lesson we considered the meditation with which we were to imagine how the Guardian stands before the abyss of existence; now we are already beyond it, first we feel—not yet see—how the darkness becomes lighter. The Guardian speaks to us, after he had previously made clear to us how we should comport ourselves in relation to the four elements. He tells us how these four elements change for us. He then asks questions.

Who answers? The hierarchies themselves answer these questions. From one side the third hierarchy—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—from the other side the second hierarchy, from a third side the third hierarchy.

The third hierarchy—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—answers when the Guardian of the Threshold asks what becomes of the earth's solidity. The second hierarchy—Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—answers when the Guardian of the Threshold asks us what becomes of the water's formative force, which acts in us and gives us our inner configuration. And the first hierarchy—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim—answer when the Guardian asks us what becomes of our breathing, of the air's stimulating power, which awakens us from dull plant-like existence to sentient-feeling existence.

Such mantras are to penetrate our souls, our hearts, to the extent that we feel ourselves to be within the situation. The Guardian of the Threshold poses the testing, admonishing questions. The hierarchies answer.

The Guardian:
What becomes of the earth's solidity, which supports you?

Angeloi:
Feel as we feel in your thinking.

Archangeloi:
Experience, as we experience in your feeling.

Archai:
Perceive, as we perceive in your will.

The Guardian:
What becomes of water's formative force, which penetrated you?

Exusiai:
Learn the spirit cosmic creating in the human body creating.

Dynamis:
Feel the cosmic life of spirit in the human body's life.

Kyriotetes:
Will the spirit's cosmic working in the human body's being.

The Guardian:
What becomes of the air's stimulating power, which awakened you?

Thrones:
Knowingly grasp inner being in your divine cosmic being.

Cherubim:
Warm your inner life in divine cosmic life.

Seraphim:
Awaken inner light in your divine cosmic light.

These, my dear sisters and brothers, are the admonishing words coming from the communion of the Guardian of the Threshold together with the hierarchies, which bring our souls ever forward if we experience them more and more in the right way.

In this way, we are doing what is appropriate for human beings of today and the future, what in the ancient holy mysteries meant that the student was being guided to the essence of the elements: earth, water, air.

But warmth, which is also an element, pervades everything: in the solid earth element, which supports us, is warmth; in the element of water, which forms us as humans, which gives form to our organs, causing them to develop and grow, warmth is also present; and in the element of air, by which the Jehovah-spirits once breathed into humanity its soul, through which man is even today awakened from his dull, plant-like existence, warmth is present. Warmth is everywhere. We must recognize it as the all-pervading element. We must immerse ourselves in it as the all-pervading element: Yes, we feel so close to it.

We feel far from the solid earth element, though we still feel the earth's support. We even feel far from the water element. The air element maintains a more intimate relation to us. When the air element does not fill us with regularity, when we have too much breath in us, or too little, our inner life indicates how the air-element is connected to us. Too much breath awakens fear in the soul. Too little causes fainting. Our soul is embraced by the air element.

We feel ourselves most intimately united with the warmth element. We ourselves are what is warm or cold in us. In order to live we must generate a certain amount of warmth. We are intimately close to the warmth element. If we want to be closer to it, then not only one hierarchy can speak, then the reminding words must resound together from various hierarchies.

Therefore, when the Guardian of the Threshold asks questions of us concerning the warmth element, the answers from the cosmos are different. The Guardian asks the question:

What becomes of fire's purification, which enkindled your I?

We already know this question; it is the question about our entrance into the element of warmth, or fire. But now the answer does not come from one hierarchy or from a rank of one of the hierarchies, but the answer comes in choir from the Angeloi, the Exusiai, the Thrones; secondly the Archangeloi, Dynamis, Cherubim answer the Guardian's question; and thirdly Archai, Kyriotetes, Seraphim answer. Thus the three answers about the general nature of warmth resound from the choir-like words of the three hierarchies.

Therefore, we are to imagine that when we hear the Guardian of the Threshold's warning reminders, the answers, which resound from our I, but which are stimulated by the hierarchies—come from all sides: first Angeloi, Exusiai, Thrones; secondly speak the Archangeloi, Dynamis, Cherubim; and thirdly speak Archai, Kyriotetes, Seraphim. All three hierarchies always speak: a rank from each of the three hierarchies always speaks. Thus the answers comes to us from the cosmos.

The Guardian speaks:
What becomes of the fire's purification, which enkindled your I?

Angeloi, Exusiai, Thrones:
Awaken in the cosmic etheric vastness the flaming script of life.

From all three hierarchies we are reminded that everything which happened to us during earthly life is recorded in the cosmic ether and we see it recorded there when we have passed through the gate of death. Once we have passed through the gate of death, looking back at our earthly life, but also gazing out at the etheric vastness, what we have done and accomplished in thoughts, feelings and deeds during earthly life is recorded. It is your life's flaming script.

Archangeloi, Dynamis, Cherubim—answer in us:
Create the soul's atoning forces in circling waves of time.

We are admonished during the second stage we go through after passing through the gate of death, where we experience in reverse, in mirror images—that is, in its just atonement—what we have done here on earth. If we have harmed another human being in any way, we experience in the reverse stream of time what the other felt because of us. As I have said, the Archangeloi, Dynamis and Cherubim admonish us in this second stage, which we pass through between death and a new birth.

What our karma works through during the third stage—what happens when as souls we cooperate with other human souls and with the beings of the higher hierarchies

—the Archai (primal powers), Kyriotetes and Seraphim admonish us:
Ask help from the redemptive eternal force of spirit.

We must feel ourselves completely within this situation: the speaking Guardian of the Threshold—his earnest gesture toward us, his admonishment. And from the cosmic vastness, resounding, grasping our heart—what connects us with the riddle of life.

[The fourth part of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian speaks:
What becomes of fire's purification, which enkindled your I?

Angeloi, Exusiai, Thrones:
Awaken in the cosmic etheric vastness the flaming script of life.

Archangeloi, Dynamis, Cherubim—they answer in us:
Create the soul's atoning forces in circling waves of time.

Archai, Kyriotetes, Seraphim:
Ask help from the redemptive eternal force of spirit.

What previously stood before us like a black, night enclosed darkness, is not yet illuminated by light for the soul's eye. But we have the feeling that while we are standing within this black, night enclosed darkness, wherever we reach out we begin to feel a glimmering light. And we find ourselves in the situation where we know that we ourselves are within this glimmering light. We feel ourselves moving toward the Guardian of the Threshold. We had only seen him as long as we were in the field of the senses. Then we stepped into the darkness and heard his questioning, admonishing words.

But these admonishing, questioning words had led us to where we now feel something like a mild weaving, moving light. In this weaving, moving light we make our way to the Guardian of the Threshold seeking help. It is a unique experience: not yet light, but the light is making itself felt; in this felt light the Guardian of the Threshold, manifesting himself, as though he were becoming more intimate with us, as though he were leaning more to us now, as though we were also stepping closer to him.

And what he now says seems as though in [earthly] life a person is whispering something confidential in our ear. And what were at first admonishing, earnest words, trumpet-like, powerful, majestic, from all sides of the cosmos coming to our hearts, continues now as an intimate conversation with the Guardian of the Threshold in weaving, moving light. For now it is as though he no longer just speaks to us, it is as though he whispers to us:

Has your spirit understood?

Our inner self becomes warm when the Guardian of the Threshold says in confidence: “Has your spirit understood?” Our inner self becomes warm. It experiences itself in the warmth. And this inner self feels obliged to answer with devotion, quietly and humbly. Thus we imagine it in meditation:

The cosmic spirit in me
It held its breath within
And may its presence still
Illuminate my I.

[Der Weltengeist in mir
Er hielt den Atem an
Und seine Gegenwart
Mög' erleuchten mein Ich.]

Our I does not answer the question “Has your spirit understood?” with pride and arrogance: “I have understood”, but the I feels: divine being streams through the innermost essence of the human being; it is divine breath in man which quietly lingers and prepares us for understanding.

[The first part of the new mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian:
Has your spirit understood?

The I:

The cosmic spirit in me
It held its breath within
And may its presence still
Illuminate my I.

Secondly, the Guardian in confidence asks:
Has your soul apprehended?

The I answers:
The cosmic souls in me
Lived in the council of stars
And may their harmonies
Resounding create my I.

Again it is not proudly that the I is tempted to answer when the Guardian asks: Has your soul apprehended? Rather is the soul becoming aware that in it speaks the cosmic souls of the beings of the higher hierarchies, and that in what they say not an individual entity is present, but an entire council, a consultative meeting, as if the planets of a planetary system were circling and contributing their respective illuminating forces. Thus do the cosmic souls send their concise suggestions. Our soul hears and hopes that from the harmonies the I will be so formed that the I in the human being is an echo of the cosmic harmonies which arise when cosmic souls take council among each other—like the planets in the solar system—and their advice and harmonies resound in the human soul.

[The second part of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian:
Has your soul apprehended?

The I:
The cosmic souls in me
Lived in the council of stars
And may their harmonies
Resounding create my I.

And the third confidential question which the Guardian directs to the person in this situation is this:

Has your body experienced?

The soul feels that in this body the cosmic forces—which are everywhere—are concentrated in one point in space. But these cosmic forces do not appear now as physical forces. The soul has long since become aware of how these forces, which from outside appear as active physical forces, as gravitational, electrical, magnetic forces, as warmth forces, as light forces, when they are active in the human body are moral forces, are transformed into will-forces. The soul feels the cosmic forces as those which constitute eternal universal justice throughout the succession of earth lives. The soul feels them to be like forces of judgment which weave in the verdicts of karma and therewith the I itself.

When the Guardian asks in confidence:
Has your body experienced?

The human being feels obliged to answer with devotion to universal justice:

The cosmic forces in me
They judge the acts of men
And may their words of verdict
Guide the I in me.

[The third part of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian:
Has your body experienced?

I:

The cosmic forces in me
They judge the acts of men
And may their words of verdict
Guide the I in me.

Thus after having experienced the metamorphoses of the cosmic elements together with the Guardian of the Threshold and the hierarchies, the soul answers the Guardian's three questions with inner devotion; interwoven with what has been poured into it, the soul has advanced somewhat in answering the riddle of the words: “O man, know thyself!”

And today we will compare the opening words after having been filled with the element of warmth in devotion to the spiritual content of the cosmos, feeling how we have advanced further in following the great admonishment: “O man, know thyself!” We will see how we, as human beings, stand between the resounding of the demand for self-knowledge from all the cosmic events and beings, and the mantric verse, which has been contemplated in today's lesson:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with cosmic might?
Who speaks in depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

What becomes of fire's purification, which enkindled your I?
Awaken in the cosmic etheric vastness the flaming script of life.
Create the soul's atoning forces in circling waves of time.
Ask help from the redemptive eternal force of spirit.

Has your spirit understood?

The cosmic spirit in me
It held its breath within
And may its presence still
Illuminate my I.

Has your soul apprehended?

The cosmic souls in me
Lived in the council of stars
And may their harmonies
Resounding create my I.

Has your body experienced?

The cosmic forces in me
They judge the acts of men
And may their words of verdict
Guide the I in me.

My dear friends,

We also begin today with that verse which, by a correct understanding of the universe, resounds to human hearts from all that is and all that is becoming as a call to self-knowledge, which one must first attain for true knowledge of the cosmos.

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the souless void of space,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

Once more let us review in our souls what summarized the contents of the previous Class Lesson. It was also a meditation arising from what the human being can experience when he feels himself completely immersed in the cosmic context, above all in the context of the spiritual world.

Man's path to the abyss of existence, at which the Guardian of the Threshold stands, appeared before our souls. We heard the teachings the Guardian gives to those who cross the threshold. We heard how the person who arrives on the other side of the threshold at first feels himself to be within light, and experiences the world in a new way in that he first hears what the Guardian says, but also what the beings of the higher hierarchies are saying. In the last dialog the Guardian asks a question and the Angeloi, Exusiai, Thrones; Archangeloi, Dynamis, Cherubim; Archai, Kyriotetes, Seraphim speak, one after the other, about the element of warmth, which penetrates everything and reveals itself to be a moral element on the other side of the abyss.

We saw how the Guardian then speaks to the I, asking three questions which penetrate deeply into the human being, and the I answers with humility, as was explained last time, but exchanging words as in a deeply intimate conversation with the Guardian.

The Guardian speaks:
What becomes of the fire's purification, which enkindled your I?

Angeloi, Exusiai, Thrones:
Awaken in the cosmic etheric vastness the flaming script of life.

Archangeloi, Dynamis, Cherubim:
Create the soul's atoning forces in circling waves of time.

Archai, Kyriotetes, Seraphim:
Ask help from the redemptive eternal force of spirit.

The Guardian:
Has your spirit understood?

The I:

The cosmic spirit in me
It held its breath within
And may its presence now
Illuminate my I.

The Guardian:
Has your soul apprehended?

The I:

The cosmic souls in me
Lived in the council of stars
And may their harmonies
Resounding create my I.

The Guardian:
Has your body experienced?

The I:

The cosmic forces in me
They judge the acts of men
And may their words of verdict
Guide the I in me.

The human being beyond the threshold of existence, where the Guardian stands, feels himself to be within weaving, living light. Gradually it becomes not only felt light, but a kind of light about which we can say that he sees it.

From feeling the light in waves, as in spiritual thoughts, so to speak, light appears which is seen by the spirit's eye.

But the human being cannot enter already seeing into this light without hearing another deeply founded admonition from the Guardian. And this admonition refers to a powerful cosmic imagination, something tremendously majestic which the person, even while being here in the sensible world, can receive as an impression—if he has the heart for it. For, when he becomes magically illuminated by the cloud formations and the majestic rainbow, then he can feel as if the spirits beyond the physical sense-perceptible rainbow's glow are shining in through its colors. It is there, builds itself up from the universe, then disappears back into the universe, is placed within the universe like a mighty imagination.

The Guardian reminds us of this rainbow's impression at the moment when it becomes light enough for perception there in the spiritual world.

[The rainbow is drawn on the blackboard.]

And the Guardian reminds us that the one who has come over to the spiritual world should recall the impression from the sensory world which the rainbow had made. For it is remarkable, my dear sisters and brothers, that when we cross over from the physical sensory world to the spiritual world, the image of the rainbow is the easiest to remember and the one which most easily allows us to recall the relationship between the spiritual world, where it is becoming light, and the physical-sensory world, which we have left together with our capacities for knowledge.

Not referring to the view of the rainbow itself, but to the memory of the rainbow which has been called forth by the Guardian of the Threshold, the Guardian now indicates (we will hear the exact words): Try, with the force you normally use to see with your eyes, to prepare the substance with which you will penetrate this rainbow, with which you will pass below, through the rainbow and to the other side.

If we can imagine [the second drawing is made]: here in the cloud formation [white in the upper right-hand corner]—looking up from the earth [small arrow]—the rainbow would be here [red in the cloud formation]. Then the Guardian instructs us to penetrate through that rainbow and from this vantage point [a line is drawn to the small circle on which the word “Warte” (vantage point) is written] which is on the other side, to look back from that cosmic distance at the rainbow. The Guardian instructs us to make our imagination more profound through meditation, if we wish to advance beyond the point we reached during the previous lesson.

When we look back from out there, if you imagine that you go behind the blackboard [white arrow pointing up and left in the first drawing], then look at the rainbow from behind [red arrow pointing down and left in the first drawing], as it appears in memory, looking from behind, then the rainbow becomes a powerful bowl, a cosmic bowl. And we no longer see a bow, we see a powerful bowl extending over half the sky, within which the colors flow into each other.

This is the imagination which the Guardian first introduces:

See the ether-rainbow arc's
Light teeming round,
Let the light creating force
Pass through your eyes,
Your I penetrate the circle,
Observe from the other side's vantage point
Color flooding the cosmic bowl.

[This first stanza of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

See the ether-rainbow arc's
Light teeming round,
Let the light creating force
Pass through your eyes,
Your I penetrate the circle,
Observe from the other side's vantage point
Color flooding the cosmic bowl.

These are the powerful words spoken by the Guardian, my dear sisters and brothers, and you must put yourself correctly in the image-filled situation in which the Guardian of the Threshold's pupil finds himself when he is called to observe the cosmic bowl with its content of color-flooding light.

See the ether-rainbow arc's
Light teeming round,
Let the light creating force
Pass through your eyes,
Your I penetrate the circle,
Observe from the other side's vantage point
Color flooding the cosmic bowl.

We must pass through such images. And if they work deeply into the I, then we see how the beings of the third hierarchy—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—appear in the flood of colors that fill the bowl. They are breathing the colors into their own angelic beings.

Thus we have an idea about the cosmic creation behind the sensory world, which is the result of the deeds of the higher hierarchies; we have a conception of how the spiritual beings act beyond the rainbow, at first breathing in the cosmic bowl's colors, taking them into their own being.

We observe how what flows from the cosmos to the rainbow, penetrating it, then appears behind the rainbow as thoughts, how it is absorbed, breathed in by the angelic beings. Now we learn the true nature of the rainbow. All the thoughts thought by people in a particular place are gathered from time to time through the rainbow's bridge and sent farther out to the spiritual domain, where it is breathed in by the beings of the third hierarchy.

What so magically appears [the rainbow] in the vastness of the universe does not only have a physical meaning; it has a spiritual-inner meaning. And the magical ether-rainbow cannot be discerned from within the physical-sensory world; we can discern it only beyond the threshold of existence, once we have heard the Guardian of the Threshold's various admonitions.

Through the impression we receive from that outlook point of the rainbow as the cosmic bowl, it becomes clear to us how the light, which at first was a dark, night-bedecked sphere, spreads out before us. We are now within it. It brightens: it is sun, the cosmic bowl with its flood of colors seen from the other side of the rainbow.

Then the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai begin to reflect their consciousness within the human soul of how they breathe in the floods of color in order that what exists here on the earth as sense-perceptible may be brought into the spiritual domain, to the extent it is of use there.

And then we perceive how the beings of the third hierarchy have breathed in what they took from the sensible world, what has penetrated them through the rainbow, what they have transformed to the extent that it can be taken into the spiritual world—they go as helpers, with what they have absorbed within themselves, to the even higher spirits, to the spirits of the second hierarchy. For the spirits of the third hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Angeloi, are the helping spirits of the spirit-world. We now hear from them what we see when we behold the color-flooded cosmic bowl—somewhere beyond the rainbow.

Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai:

Sense our thoughts
Breathing the colors of life
To the light-flooded bowl;
We carry the mirage of the senses
To spirit's domain of being
And turn, by the world inspired
To serve the higher spirits.

[This second stanza is written on the blackboard.]

Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai:

Sense our thoughts
Breathing the colors of life
To the light-flooded bowl;
We carry the mirage of the senses
To spirit's domain of being
And turn, by the world inspired,
To serve the higher spirits.

My dear sisters and brothers, let us place the image once more before our souls: the cosmic bowl, half the sky in size, the colors flooding within—which we normally see toned down in the rainbow—weaving, living in one another; the beings of the third hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, approach. They breathe these colors. The thoughts of the beings of the third hierarchy are visible to us in this breathing of colors.

We observe how these beings of the third hierarchy, permeated with these cosmic thoughts, turn to the beings of the second hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, whom they serve. And we have this powerful image before us—the pure spirit-beings appear, the residents of the sun, who only appear when the physical image which the sun casts, disappears; for despite all its greatness in comparison to the earth, it is a small image—for it is only an image. And the sun majestically fills the entire universe, infinitely larger than the gigantic cosmic image. Then the beings of the second hierarchy appear, weaving, living in the pure spirit-domain, but now receiving what the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai bring them. These are not dead thoughts, such as we have. The dead thoughts are taken from the illusion of the senses and become living thoughts through the breath of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. As a powerful offering, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai place these living thoughts before the second hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. The thoughts which are illusions in earthly life are awakened to existence by the beings of the second hierarchy.

And we see how the beings of the second hierarchy receive from the beings of the third hierarchy the thoughts already made living by them; and we see that a powerful resurrection of a new world takes place, created out of what was dead, illusionary, and taken up by the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Thus a new world, a resurrecting world comes into existence through the workings of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes.

Then we see how the remarkable secret of the cosmos works. We see how the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes give over what they received from the beings of the third hierarchy to what we call rays in earthly life—rays of the sun, of the stars. The awakened, now living world-thoughts are given over to all that rays.

In reality rays are not physical. In reality it is the spirit that beams in the rays. But we fail to see, when the rays reach us, what they had previously been given from the realm of the beings of the second hierarchy. All these rays, the rays of the stars, the rays of the sun, have been given what the beings of the second hierarchy weave in world-thoughts, but also what they let be resurrected from the dead thoughts—our thoughts on earth—which were made living by the beings of the third hierarchy. And now we hear how they also give to these raying spiritual forces what works as creative love in the cosmos—what weaves in the sun and star rays as love; the love that floods the cosmos and which is the creative force in the whole cosmos; how they entrust it to the rays of the stars, to the rays of the sun. We now see with the eye of the spirit how the beings of the second hierarchy—raying spirit, awakening love, bearing love—merge with the world.

Thus we hear them speaking, not to us; we are witnesses to a dialog between the beings of the second hierarchy and the beings of the third hierarchy. It resounds across. We only listen. It is the first time in the course of situational meditation that we hear the beings of the hierarchies speaking to each other:

What you have received
From dead illusion made live:
We waken it to existence;
We give it to the rays,
Who manifest with love
The nothingness of matter
In the spirit's essence.

By being witnesses to a heavenly dialog, the once night-bedecked darkness is gradually illuminated for the eye of the spirit. It becomes filled with a soft, mild light.

[The third stanza is written on the blackboard.]

What is received by you
From dead illusion made live:
We awaken it to existence;
We give it to the rays,
Who manifest with love
the nothingness of matter
In the spirit's essence.

If we have heard and have absorbed all this, then we will see with the spirit's eye something else taking place. We have already seen how earthly thoughts are made living ones by the third hierarchy, that what was made living is received by the second hierarchy and then shared with the rays of the stars and with the rays of the sun, and transformed into love. Now we see it taken over by the beings of the first hierarchy and made by these beings into the elements with which to create new worlds; what Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai breathe in from the world, what Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes receive from them and transform into creative forces from which they—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim—shape new worlds.

What is remarkable is this: first we were witnesses to a conversation in heaven between the beings of the third and second hierarchies. Then we hear more with our spiritual ears. The beings of the first hierarchy begin to speak the cosmic words. At first it seems as though we were only to be listeners to a heavenly conversation. But soon we realize that it is not so.

First the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai made their voices heard; then a dialog took place between the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes and the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai; then the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim join the conversation. A choir of the spiritual spheres rings out. We become aware, now that the voices of all nine choirs ring out together, that what they are intoning is directed at us as human beings. And so finally the whole spirit world speaks to us. But only when what has been spoken within the spirit-world is included in the cosmic words of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, is it again intoned in our humanity. It intones to us as human beings:

In your worlds of will
Feel our cosmic working:
Spirit glows in matter,
When we create thinking;
Spirit creates in matter
When we willing live;
World is I-Willing Spirit-Word.

The world is the spirit-word which wills the I; and the world is in the creation by Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

[This fourth stanza is written on the blackboard.]

Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim:

In your worlds of will
Feel our cosmic working:
Spirit glows in matter,
When we create thinking;
Spirit creates in matter
When we willing live;
World is I-Willing Spirit-Word.

The spirit-word, which wills the I, is the world. And as we hear with the spiritual ear these words directed at our humanity, it becomes light in the spiritual world. The mild light which was there before is transformed into spiritual brightness.

This is the experience with the Guardian while the spiritual sphere is becoming light:

See the ether-rainbow arc's
Light teeming round,
Let the light creating force
Pass through your eyes,
Your I penetrate the circle,
Observe from the other side's vantage point
Color flooding the cosmic bowl.

Sense our thoughts
Breathing the colors of life
To the light-flooded bowl;
We carry the mirage of the senses
To spirit's domain of being
And turn, by the world inspired,
To serve the higher spirits.

What is received by you
From dead illusion made live:
We awaken it to existence;
We give it to the rays,
Who manifest with love
The nothingness of matter
In the spirit's essence.

In your worlds of will
Feel our cosmic working:
Spirit glows in matter,
When we create thinking;
Spirit creates in matter
When we willing live;
World is I-Willing Spirit-Word.

And it is as though the Guardian of the Threshold were touching us softly with his spiritual hands. We feel his presence as if he closed our spirit-eyes and we saw nothing for a moment, despite having been in a bright spiritual space a moment before. Words arise within me which I will place at the end of the lesson, to be saved for next time; I do not wish to include them as a mantra for today.

When the Guardian of the Threshold—if we may express with a sense-perceptible picture what takes place in a purely spiritual way—softly places his hands over our eyes so that we do not see the spiritual light around us, something arises in us that acts as a remembrance of the sensory world, which we had left behind in order to acquire knowledge in the spiritual world:

I walked in this world of senses,
Thought's legacy with me leading,
A god's force had led me in.
Death stands at the path's end.
I will to feel the presence of Christ.
In matter's death wakes the spirit's birth.
Thus In spirit I find the world
And know myself in the evolving world.

*

My dear friends, I must remind you of something I said upon the opening of these Class Lessons, and also during the Christmas Conference. It cannot be assumed that things which have been organized in a certain way for good reason may be changed from outside and be organized in a different way. Therefore, I must announce here that in the future no application to the Class will be considered which is not directed to the secretary of the Executive Committee of the Goetheanum, Dr. Wegman, or directly to me. Only applications for participation in the Class Lessons directed to either one of these two addresses will be considered. What has been the rule from the beginning must be continued. The members have not followed this procedure, but have done as they wish. And those who are already members of the Class should make this clear to others who want to participate.

On this occasion I would like to bring to your attention something else, my dear friends, which is especially grave now when the importance of how the Anthroposophical Society is managed must be maintained. Again and again letters are arriving which state: If I don'ive a reply, I will assume the answer to be affirmative. Those who have written in this way know about it. I wish to inform those who have written in this way, and those who intend to do so, to please know that every letter which contains the sentence: I consider no answer to mean yes—that every such letter can form its own answer as being a negative. In the future such letters will not be answered, because one cannot accept such impertinence, but what is written in such letters must be regarded as containing their own rejection.

Blackboard Texts in original German: