The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would now like to deal with some of the questions that have been put to me, and here there are a few questions that seem to me to be particularly important to you.

The first question is about gonorrhea. Now, in order to understand what should actually be done, it is necessary to study the nature of the disease. It seems to me that in this area in particular, people are all too easily satisfied with simply saying: infection, infection, and more infection. That is, after all, what is actually being said. Certainly, in these and similar diseases there is an extraordinarily great and powerful possibility of infection; but the knowledge of contagion is the very least that can be inferred from the knowledge of the healing remedies. It is not much to know that something is contagious. The only thing one can do is to take precautions to reduce the risk of infection. That is something that is self-evident. But it is good to penetrate into the matter at hand, especially with such things.

Now, we must be clear about the fact that the human organism really is a closed system, and that, to a greater or lesser degree, everything that lies outside of it is poisonous to the human organism. So, in fact, anything that lies outside of the human organism is a poison. There are, however, certain adaptations in which the effect that would otherwise be a toxic effect is, so to speak, isolated. And this isolation of an effect that would otherwise be a toxic effect occurs for the realization of etheric impulses and astral impulses, namely when female and male seed unite. It also occurs in numerous other cases, but especially when female and male seed unite. The effect is eminently toxic when the two polar substances combine. So the effect is eminently toxic, but it is isolated and exposed to the forces of the cosmos in isolation, which can even be described in detail. These are the concentrated forces of the sun and moon, to which what arises from the union is then exposed.

This exposure is only possible if the male and female seed actually interact. With any substance that lies outside the female seed, that is, that is produced in organs that are not the female sexual organs, the male seed gives a useless poison everywhere in the human organism as well as in the outside world. Conversely, the female seed releases a poison that cannot be processed with every substance, except for that which is secreted by the male sexual organ. This poison is actually, basically, only under metamorphosis, sometimes a poison for the oystercatcher, sometimes a poison for the tripper. And with that, we are dealing with diseases that are something essentially different than the syphilis diseases that we have discussed. We are dealing with the production of poisons that cannot endure exposure, either in the human organism or beyond the human organism.

Now, such substances are also, in essence, extremely potent infectious agents. They are, in fact, the carriers of parasites of the smallest kind, hypermicroscopic organisms. And it is with such an effect that we are dealing, that is to say, with an interaction of the astral-etheric organization in the male and female, which then, when it works down into the physical, produces these corresponding poisons. That is the essential thing. The danger of infection is secondary. It is always there precisely because in this way the strongest poisons of all are produced for the organ.

I believe that it is extremely important that such things are understood at last, so that we do not always look at the corresponding symptoms, as I would like to call them, in the same way that the entire reproduction of the human race was once viewed, by tracing the whole human race back to Eve's ovary for all of the Earth's future. This is, of course, a very superficial consideration. It is also an easy way out to say: This disease is infectious; the infectious one has been infected again, and one naturally ends up being vague, but one does not arrive at any real insight. But if one arrives at such an insight, as I have just indicated, then one naturally asks oneself the following question. Then one says: How can we now get at the effect that arises in the human organism under the influence of this poison?

So you have to create something to which you can expose this poison, just as you can expose the fertilized female germ to the universe. So you have to create an atmosphere, so to speak, in the astral-etheric organism, an atmosphere that has a certain absorption capacity, not for the poison, which is then excreted when the poison-producing forces are absorbed in the astral and etheric.

And now it is precisely in such things that the healing powers are often allowed to work together from two sides, and one will really be able to achieve good things in such a case if one takes a preparation, such as some carbonate of alkali, alkali carbonate internally and then applies compresses locally, strong oily eucalyptus compresses locally, but allows both things to work together. This will most certainly lead to a cure, even if it is perhaps slow but thorough. This is because the alkali carbonates essentially work in such a way that they create a special etheric body from the human being's entire etheric body, so to speak; and the eucalyptus extract works in such a way that it flows through this created etheric tract as if it were astral. So that one actually creates an atmosphere around the genital tract that absorbs the poison-producing forces. This is what one can envisage in the process.

Would anyone like to say something about this right now? All these things are not really here to be discussed, but to be tried out. They will prove themselves. Now I would like to address a question that I have found here, and that is:

Can a patient who has become a morphine addict due to severe asthma be successfully weaned, including from morphine, using the remedies citric acid, Prunus spinosa and Nicotiana tabacum, as applied by the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute

in Stuttgart?

With asthma, it is a difficult matter, because asthma is essentially based on the fact that the exhalation, the exhalation current, encounters resistance as it passes through the airways. It gets stuck, so to speak. This is something that can be seen very clearly in the astral organism.

It is always somewhat problematic when recording these things, but you are all anthroposophists and will take the things as they are meant, of course. So, the outgoing air stream, you can actually see something like hooks in the human being's astral body, into which it sticks (see drawing). That is the finding. And that just goes to show that asthma is really the one form of illness that is right on the border of purely psychological illnesses, by which I do not mean so-called mental illnesses, but those illnesses that are related to the psychological life. Mental illnesses do not need to be related to the psychological life at all, but can merely be physical illnesses, in which case the psychological is merely a symptom. So-called mental illnesses should not be called mental illnesses at all, because they are almost always a real organic illness that finds a psychological counterpart, simply a shadow image, and that is merely a symptom. It is best to cure so-called mental illnesses by recognizing from the physical findings as a symptom complex whether there is a kidney disease, liver disease, or a real organic brain disease. By mental illnesses, however, I mean those where, for example, psychological effects really underlie them, such as shock effects or anxiety effects and the like, in other words, where psychological causes are present. And with asthma, it is indeed the case that you often have to go back a long way to find the psychological causes.

When one has grown as old as I have, one has always encountered cases of asthma of the most varied kinds, and I must say that often, when looking for the cause of asthma, one has to go back to the embryonic stage, if one goes back to find the cause of the onset, apart from the karmic one. And the external causes often really lie in the embryonic stage. They lie in the fact that the mother has had shocks or worries that have occurred again and again during pregnancy. Such things have an extraordinarily strong effect on the entire mucous membrane system of the respiratory tract, and it is from this that the causes for what later manifests itself in asthmatic symptoms already go out during the embryonic period.

Now, however, the following is of particular importance for asthmatic symptoms: asthma manifests itself in very different ways, depending on the individuality of the person, and it is very important that we can really fight the other symptoms of asthma that exist in the organism. Then we make the organism strong enough that it can do something itself later to fight the asthma. And so I would now like to indicate the possibilities of how to deal with these matters, since it is indeed an irregular movement of the astral body in the bronchial-lung area.

There is something, I might say, very ingenious at the bottom of it, as asthma is generally a very ingenious disease. If one examines a person suffering from asthma with, if I may say so, occult vision, one finds that in his case, above all, what I might call the inner appetite of the organism is eliminated.

Let us first agree on this concept of the “inner appetite” of the organism. You only come across this concept of the inner appetite of the organism when you observe very young children. They don't just taste with their tongues. I have always said this to teachers: young children do not just taste with their tongues, they taste with their whole organism. The whole organism is something like a fine organ of taste. It is just that later on this tasting is localized around the palate, tongue and so on. But this differentiation, which occurs relatively early, is only a partial one. In subconscious spheres, the human being tastes and thus generates this inner experience of appetite through his whole organism. Simply the whole organism has that striving power that is called appetite.

Now, when there is a loss of appetite in the separate main tract, as is experienced, there is also, and this is particularly the case with the asthmatic to a high degree, a loss of appetite in the organism. And in asthma, the whole organism loses its appetite; it has no desire to absorb the ingested nutrients, especially those that enter the general circulation. He even has an aversion, but he is unaware of it because it is unconscious within, especially towards cooked food. This can be observed quite well from external symptoms that occur in his life. This must be dealt with first. You must first restore the appetite of the organism.

It is generally good to know how to help an organism that you think has lost its appetite, that is, where the right connection between the etheric organism and the astral organism is interrupted, because that means being without appetite. Now it is good to know what is good for it. And it is always good to teach the organism the right dosage of what can be obtained in the form of tannic acid, for example from sage leaves, from nut leaves, from oak bark or willow bark; in short, if one teaches the human organism, I want to say, that which perhaps corresponds to the first decimal place, just only in terms of percentage, of tannic acid. This is what is particularly important for the astral body in such a case. It is stimulated to extend its activity to the ether body when it is supplied with this tannic acid. The ether body, on the other hand, does not react to this. So if you supply tannic acid on one side only, you will only cause disorder. You have to help the ether body on the other side as well. And this can be done, for example, by making a leaf extract from Veronica officinalis, from this speedwell, and extracting the bitter substances from it by name. These bitter substances are found in such plants – they can also be extracted from other plants wherever these bitter extractive substances are found in them — and then you will take one or the other in turn, in the morning one and in the evening the other, for example, and you can then regulate the rhythm between the astral and etheric bodies and in this way initiate the healing. Then you instruct the patient to lie in bed for weeks on end, not to get up at all, but to sleep in a chair, and when he tries to fall asleep, to meditate on breathing in the mind, thus to see or feel in the mind: inhalation, spreading the breath, exhalation, - to breathe quite consciously when he falls asleep; when he wakes up, to let him start breathing consciously again for a few minutes. If you strengthen your moral powers in this way, applying them to your own organism, namely to breathing, but in such a way that you can apply them unwaveringly - in any other position than when sleeping in a chair, especially when lying position, it is quite impossible for the patient to carry it out – and then use this as the third act of the cure, it is to be hoped that the asthma itself can be controlled even in very late stages of development. Morphine addiction is then only a consequence, and this will then be removed. One must try to fight the morphine addiction then.

Now for another interesting case that has been presented to me. However, I would like to emphasize that, of course, it is more or less problematic to give things without seeing the patient in question. It is just that I would like to say that the case can also be constructed ideally, but let us briefly state what is at hand in this forty-five-year-old postal clerk who, as a result of something, has suffered a nervous breakdown, then initially, it seems, became sleepless and ended up in a state where the patient is no longer in control of himself, where the head thinks alone, and is therefore automatic. That was probably the first stage. Then this stage seems to have passed into another, where he developed a trembling of the limbs after two years and probably also convulsive states in the limbs.

The main thing to do in such a case is to know that the whole condition is not located in organs other than those that have a directing effect on the human will system through the ego organization and the astral organization. The will system comes into consideration. And the irregular and abnormal nature of the will system is already evident in this peculiar surrender to the automatism of thought. This has nothing to do with thoughts, but everything with the will that underlies the development of thought. But everything is aimed at working deeply down into the subconscious in order to actually form the will in the mere metabolic-limb-organism, to pull it out of the rhythmic organism, to pull it out of the nerve-sense organism. So the tendency to relocate the entire physical and etheric will organs to the lower organism is actually present.

You would certainly have been able to observe this tendency in such a case, had you had the opportunity to observe this postal clerk, let us say, from some point in time and again after two years. You would have noticed that the reciprocal relationship between the lower lip and the upper lip had changed during these two years. Two years ago, it would have seemed to you that perhaps a certain, not quite harmonious relationship had taken place in the movement of the upper lip to the lower lip, that one has the feeling that it does not fit together as it does in normal people, and after two years it will have become stronger. The lower lip will have continued its naughty movements more than the upper lip. You will be able to observe such things. You will also be able to observe such an interrelationship between the legs and arms in discordant movements.

Now, in such a case, a combination of a drug treatment, a physical treatment, let us say, with a spiritual treatment in eurythmy therapy should be considered. These two things must be combined here, and this case is actually typical of this.

In such cases, use comfrey baths with a fairly strong addition of comfrey, which you can then count on for silicic acid. Comfrey has a very high percentage of silicic acid, so use comfrey baths and you will be able to achieve a significant strengthening of the ego organization through these comfrey baths. But it is only there under the influence of the bath. There is a constant danger that it will disappear again after a short time. It is driven towards the tendency to be something lasting if you now have eurythmy therapy vocalization, simply vocalization, after the bath has run its course, for an hour of eurythmy therapy vocalization. That is what you are stimulating then, which was initially only predisposed in the equisetum bath. And then you can hope, in this way, to fight the matter, above all from the periphery, from the limb organism. You just have to try to find the point from which you can fight the matter.

Now I have been somewhat concerned with this other case, which is very interesting; it is just not clearly presented. It says here:

Lupus-like, increasingly severe proliferation of the mucous membrane on the palate, causing difficulty in swallowing, in a thirty-seven-year-old female patient who had pulmonary tuberculosis seven years ago, second and third degree, but who has now largely recovered. She had an operation for gallstones that were not present.

I would like to know what happened immediately after the operation on gallstones that were not present!

Suffers from disorders of the digestive tract, from flatulence, which is beneficially influenced by eurythmy therapy S-exercise and has been minimal lately; has been suffering from severe grief for years. Could a successfully performed I-exercise have caused the lupus disease? What should be done?

Do you really think that this is something lupus-like?

It could also be scurvy; it just looks like that.

You don't have to assume that. In reality, it can only be that the plastic power of the etheric organism simply does not work sufficiently into the peripheral tracts. It cannot be anything else. And this would have to be remedied by simply injecting bee venom in perhaps a sixth decimal potency and making the process a total one, which arises from the fact that the bee venom very strongly stimulates the etheric body to take up the astral forces in a way that is truly directed towards the whole human organism.

The underlying organizing principle of the spiritual, bee venom, is at the root of it all again. So that, when it comes to seeing that the organic effect is, so to speak, breaking down at the periphery, and does not want to enter into the periphery, you can always do a great deal of good with bee or wasp venom, and then support the effect of the injection from within by making a liquid pulp of honey and milk, and then giving that as a daily nutritional supplement.

This is something that really presents itself in such a way that one sees that the organism, which has become cramped and shows such abnormal phenomena at various peripheral points, in turn spreads its effect on the one hand, under the influence of the insect poison that enters the circulatory system, and on the other hand, under the influence of that which is substantially related to milk and honey, develops and spreads in the organization. That is what I believe can be recommended in such a case.

Now I would like to talk about the question that, as it seems, is also close to your heart. This is the question of nervous diseases, spinal cord diseases and so on.

Of all nervous diseases, spinal cord diseases are of course the hardest to treat. The other nervous diseases are much more treatable. But one would be able to treat the so-called nervous diseases much more if one considered that in the nerve, in the nerve cord, in the nerve at all, there is a substance that continuously tends towards crumbling. Unlike other parts of the organism, the nerve contains no constructive, sprouting or growth forces. Instead, the nerve contains everywhere that which tends towards the ego organization, in that it actually always wants to separate and crumble. It just has to be continually prevented from crumbling. In the moment when the ego organization is not strong enough to prevent the nerves from crumbling, then the most diverse phenomena actually arise. Depending on whether it is the ego organization or the astral organization that is not strong enough, either the actual nervous diseases arise when the astral organization is not strong enough, or when the ego organization is not strong enough, the various neuralgias arise, or the various conditions with semi-psychic symptoms, and so on.

Now we have to be clear about how to act on the nervous system in such a way that a kind of phantom of the astral and ego organisms arises in the nervous system. This really occurs when one attempts to get the forces – that is, when there is an already severe nervous disease, not a partial one – the silica effect into the whole nervous system. This is, so to speak, something of a postulate, to get silicic acid into the nervous organization.

Now, if there are no particular obstacles or inhibitions, you get the silicic acid into the nervous system because there is an extraordinarily strong affinity between the form of the human nervous system and the arnica substance. This is already very strong. And if you give arnica injections, especially in high potency, of course, in the fifteenth, twenty-fifth, even thirtieth potency, you will find in most cases that the arnica injection works in such a way that the sick person then even gets the urge and drive to do something against his nervous state. For it must always be brought about that the patient suddenly realizes: whatever is in the nerves is relieved by some remedy, and I can now use my ego organization, my astral organism. In this case, it is a matter of relief. In a nervous patient, the ego and astral organisms are intensely occupied with the nervous process. Something must be introduced into the nervous process that imitates the ego organization and the astral organization. And that is precisely what the remarkable configuration in Arnica does. Arnica is, after all, a mixed compositum of all kinds of things, and it is truly a kind of microcosmic imitation of all kinds of macrocosmic things. The Arnica substance does this to a very special degree.

Just think of everything that happens. First of all, there is the silicic acid that is found in Arnica montana. This is the basic substance. It is extremely sensitive, a deeply significant reagent for all possible cosmic influences. Silicic acid is an extremely fine reagent for everything that affects the earth. Then there is always a tendency in Arnica montana to transfer these fine silicic acid perceptions of the cosmos, one might say, and to shape them plastically in the potash salts and also lime salts, which are distributed in Arnica montana in a wonderful way.

Now imagine the whole effect that I described earlier for tannic acid; this effect on the astral organism is also present in arnica. So that what is now brought in from the cosmos is, as it were, plastically imprinted in the potassium calcium salts by the silicic acid, and directly carried into the organism through the tannic acid content of the arnica. Then, as if by a miracle, the arnica substance simultaneously develops a sedative so that the person does not feel the disturbing effect of the penetration of foreign substance into the physical correlate of the astral body. This is because the arnica substance contains something camphor-like. So it contains its own sedative. Then the arnica substance, wonderfully embedded in rubber and similar substances, contains protein substance, which gives it an affinity to the etheric body. And then we have phosphorus inside, namely essential oils, which builds the whole thing up in such a way that it directly becomes a phantom of the human ego-organism. |

Therefore, if you introduce the correct dosage into the organism – but by injection, the other things will not work as strongly by injection – a substance from Arnica montana, you will usually see that, at least initially, there is a strong influence on the nervous system. The right process will be there when you can see how the patient now feels stronger and believes that they can now conquer the problem on their own. This feeling must be evoked. If it does not come, then take the help of Arnica montana, alternating with that which now supports him by also boosting the effect of Arnica montana from the respiratory side, so alternate with a fairly high-percentage formic acid injection. You will see that then the thing can occur.

If you cannot manage that, then it is of course necessary to take an extract of the part of the nervous system of an animal in which the actual source of the disease can be found, depending on whether it is in the brain or in the spinal cord, and then inject this in high potency instead of formic acid in alternation with arnica. So, for example, if you suspect that the nerve disease originates in the visual area, then take the secretion from the four-hilled substance or such a substance of an animal, extract it, take it in a fairly high potency and inject it to support the Arnica montana. Let the support go exactly where it is needed. These are things that one must always observe.

However, a mild toxic effect may occur, especially when Arnica montana cures are successful – it should even occur – that can be observed in something. But you will always see that this mild toxic effect can be counteracted by per os alkalis in some combination. I believe that what I have described here is actually very important for what should be done in the case of nervous diseases, including spinal cord diseases, which could only be diagnosed in the right stage, and in which one should get rid of that medical impudence that is so rampant, especially in Western Europe, that one attributes almost all cases of tabes dorsalis to some kind of syphilitic cause. It is complete nonsense. And if you obstruct your own view from the outset, you will naturally not be able to come to terms with your view. Most of the diseases of the spinal cord do not at all arise from any syphilitic starting points, but from colds that appear harmless to most people, in the gastric or other abdominal tracts, or from the fact that the spine itself has been exposed to a cold. It is just that, well, of course, according to the well-known social conditions of the last decades, the purely external complication of syphilis and spinal cord disease occurred very frequently, and the view was then distracted by this, and one did not do the right thing, namely to fight the consequences of syphilis on its own and those of spinal cord disease with something like what I have just described. It should always be considered and treated as a nervous disease, as I have just described.

Now the interesting thing is that if you localize the nerve disorders in the digestive tract or even in the stomach and they do not go further beyond the digestive organs, you can achieve the same thing – and this is extremely interesting – if you take Chamomilla instead of Arnica montana and treat it in exactly the same way by injection. And this is interesting because you can see from this – because chamomile is almost completely lacking in silica – that silica is only necessary when you get beyond the digestive tract with the nerves. It lacks silica. On the other hand, it contains sulfur, which is particularly beneficial when it comes to stimulating the etheric body in the digestive system.

Now some questions have arisen, but we don't have more time to deal with things in depth: “What is the essence of short-sightedness and long-sightedness?”

Don't you think it's worth asking whether these things could be therapeutically influenced? The causes of these lie on the palm of your hand, and you don't ask about these things. You mean, how can they be therapeutically influenced, whether they can be cured by mere medical remedies? It will be possible to cure them, both short-sightedness and long-sightedness can be cured, and thus also prevented, because you are quite right, glaucoma is of course essentially connected with long-sightedness. People who are not clear-sighted do not easily develop glaucoma. But a medicinal cure, which is indeed possible, will only be successful if it is initiated perhaps even before the age of three. So you have to notice the tendency towards short-sightedness or long-sightedness in the child very early on. Then you can do a lot with highly potentized belladonna. But you actually have to notice it before the child has fully learned to speak and walk. Once the organism has reached the stage of physical development that it has reached, once it has learned to walk, stand and speak, the entire tendency towards the formation of the crystalline lens and the vitreous body, which underlie hyperopia and myopia, is already present. And because it is something purely mechanical and formal, it is difficult to do anything. On the other hand, as long as the eye can still be affected by the unformed, wriggling movements, the as yet unoriented arm movements and so on in the child, and this is achieved by a highly potentized belladonna, which is imbued with a certain feeling, a certain sensation, one might think that something can be done. But it will probably not be easy to make his observations. That is to be said about it.

Now, unfortunately, we have to conclude these considerations. I hope that we will continue them again at a suitable time. It will always give us a very special satisfaction here if we can, so to speak, insert into the announced medical college activity that we can give the doctors something when they come to such meetings. I hope that in the future this can always be achieved in some way or other. But it will also be possible for those friends who stay in touch with the Dornach School to receive answers to their questions about these or those things from time to time – we will make sure that this is done in the right way. So if you send questions to Dr. Wegman, we will provide answers together, although not in the supplement to the 'Goetheanum', of course, but in a form that can only be sent to the doctors. But I believe that we should set it up so that when someone asks a question, the answer should always go to our anthroposophical doctors, because it is always actually interesting for everyone and we will make the most progress this way. We will try to initiate communication with the doctors here in Dornach in a corresponding way.

Dr. Palmer: Dear Dr. Steiner, I hope you will allow me to express my colleagues' and my own heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule over Christmas to devote a few hours to us. We who work at the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart know how much we need these hours, and we would ask you to continue to support us with your advice and assistance.

The only thing I would have liked would have been just that it could have been more hours. But however much we thought about it with Dr. Wegman, it did not result in more than these three hours. As I said, it would have been my wish that it could have been more hours; but hopefully another time! Hygiene as a social issue.

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question?

Questioner: A few lectures ago, the great cosmic world was mentioned; I would like to ask about comets with a large tail. What does that mean?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, gentlemen, we have to remember what I have said just recently. I will repeat some of what we said a few lectures ago.

When we look at the human being, we have to say: Two things are necessary for his whole life, namely for his spiritual development. Firstly, that carbon dioxide rises to the head. After all, humans constantly excrete carbon within themselves. Actually, one can say: Man, insofar as he is a solid body, is made of carbon. So humans constantly excrete carbon from themselves. Now, this carbon would eventually become so in us that we would all become black pillars. We would become black pillars if this carbon were to remain. We need it to live, but we have to constantly convert it again so that it becomes something else. This is done by the oxygen. Now, in the end, we exhale the oxygen with the carbon as carbonic acid. There is carbonic acid in our exhaled air. But you need this carbonic acid. It can also be found, for example, in mineral water, and the bubbles inside contain carbonic acid. This carbonic acid, which is not exhaled, constantly rises to the human head, and we need it so that we are not stupid, so that we can think; otherwise marsh gas, which consists of carbon and hydrogen, would rise to the human head. So for thinking we need carbonic acid.

Now, I have already hinted at what we need for our will, for our volition. So let's start with walking, moving our hands, moving our arms – that's actually where this volition begins: we always have to form a compound of carbon and nitrogen and then break it down again. But this cyanide or prussic acid must constantly, so to speak, enter our limbs. It then combines with potassium in the limbs. Potassium cyanide is formed, but this is also immediately broken down again. In order for us to be able to live at all, there must be a constant process of poisoning and detoxification within us. That is the secret of human life: carbonic acid on the one hand, potassium chloride, which is connected to potassium, on the other. With every movement, with every finger, a little cyanic acid is formed, and the thing is then that we dissolve the thing again immediately by moving our fingers. So that must also be there in man.

But everything that must be there in man must also be there in the universe, must somehow be present in the universe. It is now the case that comets have always been examined again. And with comets in particular, I would say, a kind of little story has taken place in the anthroposophical movement. I once gave lectures in Paris and, purely out of inner knowledge, said that there must be some cyanic acid in comets, that cyanic acid is present in comets. Until then, scientists had not yet noticed that cyanic acid is present in comets. But then, shortly afterwards, a comet came along. It was the one you are talking about. And it was precisely on this comet that it was discovered, using the more sophisticated instruments that were available at the time, that the comet material really does contain cyanic acid! So that one can point to this when people always ask: Has anthroposophy predicted anything? Yes, this discovery of cyanic acid in comets, for example, was clearly predicted. It was the same with many other things, but in the case of the comet it was quite obvious. Well, today there is no doubt, even in the natural sciences, that in the atmosphere of a comet, in the comet's air - after all, a comet is actually made of very fine material, it is actually only ether, only air - there is cyanic acid.

Yes, what does that mean, gentlemen? It means that the same thing that we constantly have to produce in our bodies is also present outside in the comet's atmosphere. Now imagine how often I have said here that the egg is formed from the whole universe - so humans, animals and plants are also formed from the whole universe, in that they are formed from the egg. I would like to explain this to you using the example of the human being, so that you can see exactly what these comets actually mean in the whole universe.

Let us start with something historical, which may seem strange to some, but you will see that what you want is best explained by it. Centuries before Christianity was founded, there were ancient people in present-day Greece, the Greeks. The ancient Greeks achieved so much for intellectual life that even today our high school students still have to learn Greek because it is believed that if you learn Greek today, you will become a particularly clever person. Well, the Greeks really did achieve an extraordinary amount for intellectual life. Today, people do not learn Indian or Egyptian, but Greek. By doing so, people want to express that the Greeks have achieved a great deal for intellectual life. The simple fact that we cultivate Greek with our high school students shows this. The Greeks themselves only did Greek with their children, even though they achieved so much for intellectual life.

Now there were two main tribes in Greece that were of particular importance, but which were very different from each other: one was the inhabitants of Sparta, the other the inhabitants of Athens. Sparta and Athens were the two most important cities in Greece. In addition, there were a few others that were also important, but not as important as Sparta and Athens. The inhabitants of these two cities were therefore very different from each other. I will ignore the other differences today, but they were different in that they spoke quite differently. The Spartans always sat quietly together and spoke little. They did not like to talk. But when they did talk, they wanted what they said to have a certain meaning; it should have power over people. But because man cannot always say something meaningful when he babbles, they remained silent when they had nothing significant to say, and always spoke in short sentences. These short sentences were famous throughout the ancient world. People talked about the short sentences of the Spartan people, and those that became famous were often tremendous sayings of wisdom.

It was different with the Athenians. They loved beautiful speech; they loved it when it was spoken beautifully. The Spartans: short, measured, calm in their speech. The Athenians wanted to speak beautifully. They learned rhetoric by speaking beautifully. They did indeed prattle more; not as much as we do today, but they did prattle more than the Spartans.

What was the difference between the Athenian who talked a lot and the Spartan who talked less but meaningfully and powerfully? It was based on education. The art of education is of course little studied today. But what I am saying is based on education. The Spartan boys in particular were educated quite differently from the Athenian boys. The Spartan boys had to do a lot more gymnastics: dance, wrestling, all kinds of gymnastic arts. And oratory, the actual gymnastics of the tongue, was not practiced at all by the Spartans. They let speaking come naturally.

Everything that lies in language is formed through the rest of the human body's movements. You can observe it correctly: if a person has slow, measured movements that are truly gymnastic, then they will also speak properly. In particular, if a person walks with proper steps, then they will also speak properly. Of course, it depends on the child's age. If a person gets gout in old age, it doesn't matter anymore; they have already learned to speak. It depends on the time when one learns to speak. But the Spartans attached great importance to practicing a lot of gymnastics, and they supported this gymnastics by rubbing the children's bodies with oil and smearing them with sand; then they let them do gymnastics. The Athenians also did gymnastics – gymnastics were done throughout Greece – but much less, and they let the older boys do tongue gymnastics, oratory. The Spartans did not do that.

Now, this has a very specific consequence. You see, when those little Spartan boys did their gymnastics with their bodies oiled and rubbed with sand, they had to develop a great deal of inner warmth – develop a great deal of inner warmth. And when the Athenians did their gymnastics, it was something very special for the Athenians. If it had been a day like today and the boys had not wanted to do their gymnastics outdoors with the Spartans, well, that would have been it! The gymnasts, the educators, would have treated those boys properly! When the Athenians had a day like today, so stormy, they gathered their boys more in the interior of the rooms and let them do oratory. But they called them out when the sun shone brightly, when everything sparkled. Then the Athenian boys had to do their gymnastic exercises outside. For the Athenians thought somewhat differently from the Spartans. The Spartans thought: All the movements that boys make must be done from the inner body; it may be stormy and hailing and raging and windy outside, it does not matter. They said to themselves: It must come from within.

The Athenian said differently. He said: We live by the sun, and when the sun wakes us up to move, then we want to move; when the sun is not there, we do not want to move. So said the Athenian, and therefore the Athenians looked at the external solar heat. The Spartans looked at the inner warmth of the sun, the warmth of the sun that man had already processed, and the Athenians looked at the outer sun, which shines beautifully on the skin - the skin is not rubbed with sand, at least not as much as it is by the Spartans, but the skin is supposed to be worked by the sun. That was the difference. And when schoolbooks today speak of the difference between the Athenians and Spartans, the only impression you get is that there must have been something wonderful about why the Spartans were quiet, measured in their speech, and also hardy, while the Athenians practiced the art of oratory, which was then further developed by the Romans. People today cannot practice history and natural science at the same time. History speaks for itself, and science speaks for itself. But if I tell you that the Spartans rubbed their boys with oil and sand and then let them practice their Spartan arts in all weathers, and the Athenians did not rub their boys with so much sand and oil and otherwise practiced their oratory inside the palestra, then you know how this difference between the neighboring Spartans and Athenians was actually brought about by natural facts.

So let us say that when we have the earth (it is drawn) and the sun here: if you look at the sun as it shines and there is the Athenian, then the Athenian emerges; and if you look not so much at the sun as at what the sun has already done in man, and you look at the more inner warmth, then the Spartan emerges from that. You see, there you have history and natural history combined. That's how it is.

Now we can say: When a person ensures that he develops a great deal of warmth within himself, his speech becomes short and measured. Why? Because he turns more to the universe with his whole mind. But if a person allows himself to be illuminated by the sun like the Athenian, then he turns less to the universe with his mind; then he turns more inward with his mind, outward with warmth; the Spartan: inward with warmth, outward with mind. And from reason, the Spartan has learned the language of the universe; it is wise, it has been developed within him. The Athenian has not learned the language of the universe, but only the movement of the universe, because he has abandoned himself to gymnastics in the warmth of the sun.

When we look at what remains of the Spartans today, we say to ourselves: Oh, these Spartans have rendered the wisdom of the world in their short sentences. The Athenians began to express more of the mind that is within man in their beautiful turns of phrase. What the Spartans had in their language has been lost to humanity for the most part; it disappeared in Greece with the Spartans. Man can no longer live with the language of the universe today. But what the Athenians began to do: beautifully winding sentences - it became particularly great in Rome with the art of fine speech. And the Romans at least still spoke beautifully. In the Middle Ages, too, people still learned to speak beautifully. Today, however, people speak terrible sentences. You only have to look at it in detail – well, you could take any other city, but in Vienna, for example, the elections have been going on for weeks: yes, they are not beautifully spoken, but terribly, a whole flood of speeches, but not beautifully! And that is what has gradually become of what was still cultivated by the Athenians, albeit beautifully. It comes from within man. The universe, truly, does not make speeches – but man does! The Spartans did not make speeches; the Spartans expressed in their short sentences how the universe speaks. They looked up at the stars and thought: Man, he runs around in the world and is a busybody. The star moves slowly, so that it does not move slowly now, quickly now, but always evenly. Then the saying arose that has remained for all time: haste with Weile - and so on. The star still reaches its goal! And so the Spartans in particular have learned a great deal from what is out there in space.

And now we can move on to something that I have already noticed in your case: we can move from warmth to light. I would just like to say the following about warmth. Consider that if a person needs to develop a great deal of warmth, then he should become a strong person. And if a person has the opportunity to be in the sun a lot, then he should become a person who talks a lot. Now you only need to take a quick look at geography: go to Italy, where people are more exposed to the sun, and you will see what a chatty people they are! And go to the north, where people are more exposed to the cold: yes, you may despair sometimes – people do not talk because, when you always have to develop inner warmth, it drives away the inner urge to talk. Even here with us it seems almost strange when someone comes from the north; he stands there to speak – yes, he stands there but doesn't speak yet. Not so when an Italian agitator steps onto the rostrum, he speaks even before he gets up there, he is already talking down below. Then it continues, then it just gushes! When a Nordic person, who needs to generate a lot of warmth because there is no external warmth, is supposed to speak: a Nordic person like that, he stands there - you get desperate because he doesn't even start; he wants to say something, but he doesn't even start. It's true: inner warmth drives away the desire to speak, while external warmth fuels the desire to speak. Of course, all this can be transformed by art. The Spartans developed this speaking calm not through art but through their own racial character, even though they were neighbors of the Athenians because they mixed a lot with people coming from the north. Among the Athenians, for example, there were many who came from hot climates and intermarried with the Athenians; this is how they developed their flow of speech. So there we see how even the oratorical person is connected to the sun and warmth. Now let's move on to light.

All we need to do is remember something I have already told you. Think of a mammal. A mammal develops the germ for a new mammal internally. The germ is carried internally by the mother animal; everything happens internally. Take the butterfly, on the other hand. I told you: the butterfly lays the egg, the caterpillar crawls out of the egg, the caterpillar pupates itself into a cocoon, and the sunlight drives the multicolored butterfly out of the cocoon. On the other hand, look at the mammal (it is being drawn), this mammal develops the new animal hidden in its uterus. Here we have two contrasts again, wonderful contrasts. Look at the egg: it is uncovered. When the caterpillar crawls out, the light is already coming. The caterpillar, I told you, goes to the light, spins its cocoon, the shell that it becomes a pupa, after the light, and the light in turn causes the butterfly. And the light does not rest and does not rest, gives the butterfly its colors. The colors are caused by the light; the light treats the butterfly.

Take, on the other hand, the cow, the dog. Yes, the little cub inside the maternal uterus cannot have the external light; it is closed off in darkness from the outside. So it must develop inside, in the darkness.

But nothing that lives can develop in darkness. It is simply nonsense to believe that something can develop in darkness. But what is the story here? I will give you a comparison. One can indeed hope that once the Earth becomes very poor in coal, direct solar heat will be able to be used for heating through some kind of transformation; but today that is just not yet possible, that one uses the heat of the sun directly for heating. Perhaps it will not take much longer before one comes up with how it can be done; but today we use coal, for example. Yes, gentlemen, coal is nothing more than solar heat, only solar heat that flowed to Earth many, many thousands of years ago, was trapped in the wood and stored as coal. When we heat, we bring out the solar heat that accumulated in the earth thousands and thousands of years ago.

Do not think that only coal behaves towards the sun as I have just described! Other beings, too, behave towards the sun as I have just described, and that includes all living beings. If you look at a mammal, you have to say: every little young animal has a mother, who in turn has a mother, and so on. They have always absorbed the warmth of the sun; it is still inside the animal itself, it is inherited. And just as we bring the warmth of the sun out of the coal, so the small child in the maternal womb now takes the sunlight, which is stored there, from within. — Now you have the difference between what arises in the dog or in the cow and what arises in the butterfly. The butterfly goes straight into the outer sunlight with its egg, allowing it to be completely transformed by the outer sunlight until it becomes the colorful butterfly. The dog or the cow are just as colorful on the inside, but you cannot see it. Just as the warmth of the sun is not perceived in coal – it must first be coaxed out – so too, with the higher contemplation of dog and cow, one must first coax out what light is stored up within. There is light stored up within! The butterfly is colorful on the outside; sunlight has worked from the outside. Yes, in the dog or the cow, I would say, invisible light is everywhere inside.

What I have described to you, people today could easily determine with our perfect instruments, prove it in their laboratories, if they wanted to. They should just make a laboratory, completely dark, totally dark, and then they should compare in this laboratory a newly laid egg and a cow or dog germ in its early state, then you would see that the dimming that can occur in the dark room shows this difference that I am describing. And if one were to photograph what one does not see with one's eyes - the eyes are not sensitive enough for that - one would be able to prove that the butterfly egg has the spectrum yellow and the dog and cow egg has the spectrum blue in the photograph. These things, which one can see spiritually - one does not need the external when one can see them spiritually - will still be proved with the most perfect instruments.

Now we can say: the butterfly is formed in the external sunlight, the cow or the dog is formed from the sunlight that is stored internally. Thus we have come to know the difference between warmth, which works externally, which makes a person talkative, the light that works externally, which causes the many colors in the butterfly, and the warmth within, which makes a person silent and measured – the light within a being that gives birth to living young, which must receive the light internally. And now we can move on from there to the subject of our question.

There are also things that a person needs inside, but which he must not develop in excess inside, because otherwise he would die from them. And that includes prussic acid, which is also known as hydrogen cyanide. If a person were to continually produce hydrogen cyanide throughout the day, beyond the little bit that is already there, well, that wouldn't work, that would be too much. A person does produce a little prussic acid in himself, but very little. But he also needs some from outside; he absorbs it with what he inhales. It is not much, but a person does not need more.

Now, gentlemen, this potassium cyanide is not present in ordinary air. If comets did not appear from time to time, this potassium cyanide would not be present in the air. Comets and then these meteors, shooting stars, which, as you know, fly through the air in such great numbers, especially in midsummer, bring down this potassium cyanide. And man actually draws his strength from it. Therefore, people who have become weak in their muscles should be sent into the air, which has not only become fresh from the earth, but has become fresh from the whole universe, which has experienced meteorite influences. And it is the case that people who suffer from what used to be called consumption, for example, who become weak in their muscles and for whom this weakness is particularly pronounced towards spring, are sent in the fall to breathe this air that has been refreshed by the universe. In spring there is nothing that can be done; that is why such people most easily die in spring. You have to take precautions, because you can't really do anything for such people until the fall. When the meteor forces deposit their cyanide with the small amounts of potassium cyanide that come in from the universe during the summer, these people should then, when August ends and fall comes, with their weak limbs, come to areas where summer has deposited its best, namely potassium cyanide. Then their limbs become strong again. So for people you notice this happening to, the next year will be very bad for them, because they become weak, and you should actually take precautions in the spring, when you can't do much with external things. You should say to yourself: When spring comes, I will give such people, depending on how weak they have become, the juice of certain plants, for example the juice of blackthorn. If you store the blackthorn juice – you know the tart, acidic plant – and bring it into the mouth of a person who becomes weak in spring, you can sustain them throughout spring and summer. Why? Well, you see, when you give a person the juice of blackthorn, this blackthorn juice forms all kinds of salts. These go to the head and take the carbonic acid with them. So we tilt the head to help this person through spring and summer. And in the fall we have to take him to an area where he is able to take the other thing, which has to go more to the limbs. Carbonic acid goes to the head; we insert it after the head by introducing blackthorn. If we have been fortunate enough to have brought a person through the summer in this way, we can take him to a suitable area in the fall. He should stay for two or three weeks in such air, which we know has just received meteorical influences. Then it is the case that the person, having been strengthened during the spring and summer, really does regain the strength of his limbs.

Yes, gentlemen, there you have the two effects side by side. There you have the earthly effect, which is actually a lunar effect, the earthly effect in the blackthorn juice, and there you have the cosmic effect in what the comets, and when there is no comet, the shooting stars have left behind – it is the same with them, only small; but there are many – which has an effect from the universe. Just as you basically have nothing earthly in the butterfly with its transformation, but light from the universe, just as you have warmth from the universe, from the sun, in the protected eggs, so you also have human warmth within you, which you must develop inwardly in your substance and which stimulates exactly the opposite of the external warmth.

Thus we can see everywhere how there is an alternation in man, but also how there is an alternation in the whole universe: sometimes things must come from the outside of the universe, sometimes from within the earth or from within man. Now you will say: Yes, certain things are regular; but they cannot alone bring about what they are supposed to bring about. Day and night change regularly; they bring about the one thing that comes from the earth. Now, comets appear more or less irregularly; shooting stars too. And that is also the case. There is no such regularity with shooting stars as with the rest. If an astronomer wants to observe a solar eclipse, he can find the exact time when it begins – that can be calculated –; it belongs to the regular, but does not work from the sun. So he can still go to supper beforehand and still get to the solar eclipse. If he wants to observe the meteoritic swarming of shooting stars at the right time, he has to watch the whole night, otherwise he cannot find them. That is the difference between what comes irregularly from the universe to Earth and what is regular.

Now you can raise an interesting question. You can say: The comets that are connected with the cyan - which is connected with our will in our human being - these comets appear irregularly; one comes soon, then it is long absent. - It always also gives rise to superstition in people; but precisely that which does not always appear makes them superstitious when it comes. In the sunrise and sunset, only the formerly prepared human minds have seen the divine; later, superstitious minds have then dreamed up all sorts of things about comets. You may now ask: Why is it not the case with comets that, just as the sun appears at certain hours of the year in the morning, a comet also appears? Well, if that were the case, if comets could regularly appear and disappear with their tails just as regularly as the sun and moon rise and set, then we humans would have no freedom; then everything else in us would be as regular as sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. And what is connected with this regularity in the universe is also a natural necessity in us. We must eat and drink with a certain regularity, and sleep with a certain regularity. If the comets rose and set with the same regularity as the sun and moon, we could not begin to move arbitrarily, but would have to wait: we would be in a state of rigor; the comet would appear, and we could leave! If it disappeared again, we would fall into a state of rigor again. We would have no freedom. These so-called wandering stars are what give man his freedom from the universe. And so we can say: that which is necessary in man, hunger, thirst in their course, sleep, waking and so on, comes from the regular phenomena; and that which is arbitrary in man, which is freedom, comes from the comet-like phenomena and this gives man the strength for the power that works in his muscles.

In recent times, people have completely forgotten how to look at what is free in a person. People no longer have any sense of freedom. That is why, in more recent times, people have become obsessed with what is only necessity. Now people express their attitudes in their festivals. For example, they have festivals for necessity: Christmas, Easter; but they have dropped the autumn festival, the Michaelmas festival, because it is connected with freedom, with the inner strength of the human being. And so, actually, people study at most the material side of the comets. The other, they say: Yes, you can not know about that. - And on the one hand, you see today that people shy away from freedom; on the other hand, you see that they have no real mind, no reason to study the irregularities in space. If they were not there, then you would have no freedom. So we can say: the Athenians took up what was inside people. That made them talkative. On the one hand, materialism has become terribly talkative. But this also makes it insensitive, dull to everything that can be used to strengthen one's resistance to meteorite influences. That is why Michaelmas is at most a farmers' festival, and the other festivals are something that is related to necessities, although they are no longer as respected as they were in ancient times because people have forgotten the connection with the spiritual world altogether.

In this way, everything becomes transparent. When people understand again how beneficial the influence of the comet is, they will probably remember that they like to celebrate some kind of festival in the fall to have a kind of freedom celebration. That belongs in the fall: a kind of Michaelmas festival, a freedom celebration. People today let this pass because they have no understanding of it at all; they have no understanding of freedom in nature outside, and therefore also no understanding of freedom in man. You see, the honorable Lady Moon and the majestic Lord Sun, they sit on their thrones, they want to have everything measured because they have no right sense for freedom in the universe, in the cosmos. Of course, it must also be. But the comets are the freedom heroes in the universe; they therefore also have within them the substance that is connected with activity in humans, with free activity, with arbitrariness, with the activity of the will. And so we can say: When we look up at the sun, we have in it that which always plays rhythmic games within us, the heart and breathing. If we look at a comet, then we should actually write a poem about freedom every time a comet appears, because it is connected with our freedom! We can say: Man is free because in the universe, freedom also reigns for these enthusiasts in the universe, the comets. And just as the sun mainly owes its nature to the acid character, so the comet owes its nature to the cyanic character.

You see, gentlemen, that's where you come to the nature of comets, and that is an extraordinarily significant connection, as you can see that suddenly there is something in the whole universe that is alive, but that lives in a way that is similar to us humans. So you can also say: the Spartans had more sense for the non-withdrawal from the sun, and that is why they appreciated everything that was connected with the universe - this did not arise from external arbitrariness. And Lykurgos, the lawmaker of Sparta, had iron money made. In the schoolbooks you will find: Lykurgos had iron money made so that the Spartans should remain fine Spartans. That is nonsense. In truth, Lykurgos was instructed by those who still knew these things in Sparta; they told him that comets contain cyanide of iron, and so he had iron minted in Sparta as a symbol of the comets for the money. That was something that arose from wisdom; while other nations were changing over to gold coinage, which expresses that which is more in the sun, the image of the solar life in us.

Thus it is that one sees that in the customs of ancient peoples there is still something more of what they knew of the universe.

You see, in the early days after the founding of Christianity, it spread first in the south, as far as Rome, and then later, from the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries onwards, it spread northwards. Now let's take a look at Europe at the time when Christianity spread, that is, at the time of the founding of Christianity, or shortly thereafter. I would like to answer the question: What did Europe or our civilization look like at the time when Christianity spread?

If we imagine Asia over there (a drawing is made), Europe is like a small appendage of Asia, like a small peninsula. You will know that Europe looks like this: here we have Scandinavia, here we have the Baltic Sea; we then come to Russia. Here we have present-day Denmark. Here we come across the north coast of Germany, here we come to the Dutch area, here to the French area. Here we come to Spain, here we come across to Italy. Now we come to the areas that we already know: we come to the Adriatic Sea, we come across to Greece; then there is the Black Sea. Here we come up against Asia Minor, and across there we would come to Africa. On the other side, here we would have England with Wales, and then here Ireland, only briefly mentioned.

Now I will try to explain to you what Europe looked like at the time when Christianity was gradually spreading across Europe. Here, Europe is closed off from Asia by the Ural Mountains. We then have the mighty river, the Volga, and if we had come to these areas, which today form southern Russia, Ukraine and so on, at the time when Christianity came from the south, we would have found the Ostrogoths there, a people who later completely disappeared from this area, moved further west and then merged with other peoples in the west. So at the time when Christianity began to spread, we have the Ostrogoths here. You will see in a moment how all these peoples began to migrate at a certain point in time. But at the time when Christianity came up from the south, these peoples in Europe were settled in this place.

If you take the Danube, then further upstream you have today's Romania and today's Hungary. In these areas – today's Hungary and today's Romania – the Visigoths were located at that time. If we go further upstream, here to today's western Hungary, north of the Danube, we have the Vandals. That was the name of these peoples back then. And where today is Moravia, Bohemia and Bavaria, the so-called Suevi were located, from whom the Swabians then emerged. If we go further up – this is where the Elbe rises and then flows into the North Sea: here, everywhere, they are all Goths. But here is the Rhine, which you know well; so that would be today's Cologne – here around the Rhine, the so-called Ripuarian Franks live. Further up, where the Rhine flows into the North Sea, the Salic Franks live. And here, as far as the Elbe, the Saxons live. The Saxons got their name from the people who were to the south. They got their name because these peoples to the south noticed that they preferred or almost exclusively ate meat, and they called them “carnivores”.

Here, in these areas, the Romans had spread: even in present-day France, in present-day Spain and so on, here too were Greco-Roman peoples everywhere. Christianity spread among them first, and then it pushed north. It can be said that Christianity came to these areas earlier than to the more western areas. Among the Goths, for example, we have an old bishop: Wulfila, which means “the little wolf.” Wulfila made a Gothic translation of the Bible very early on, in the 4th century. This Bible translation is very interesting because it differs greatly from later Bible translations. It is contained in an extraordinarily valuable book that is now in the library in Uppsala, Sweden; and it can be seen from this that Christianity spread here in the east earlier.

If you follow what I have written, you will find: So there are the Greco-Roman peoples; but in these areas, in the oldest times, there is still an ancient population everywhere, an ancient population of Europe that is very interesting. This population of Europe, which I have now marked in red on the drawing, had already been pushed back more towards the western regions by the time Christianity pushed up from south to north. For originally none of these peoples were in these regions at all, but only at the time when Christianity was spreading; they were all more in the east. All these peoples are to be imagined living on the border between Asia and Europe. And what the Slavs are today are even further inside Asia.

The question now is this: if we go back to the times before the emergence of Christianity, I would have to draw this whole map of Europe with red lines; the whole of Europe was permeated by an ancient Celtic population. And all the things that are in Europe later, that I have drawn and written down for you, actually came from Asia only later – the few centuries before, the few centuries after the founding of Christianity. And that raises the question: Yes, why do these peoples migrate all at once? These peoples began to move during a certain period of world history; they pushed their way into Europe. This happened for the following reason: if you look at present-day Siberia, it is actually a huge, barren area that is very sparsely populated. Not so long ago, namely not long before the emergence of Christianity, a few centuries before, this Siberia was still much lower land, and this lower land was relatively warm. And then it rose. A country does not have to rise very much for it to become cold in the countries that were previously warm, and the lakes dry up and it becomes desolate. So nature itself caused the people to move from east to west.

The Celtic population in Europe was a very interesting population. The migrating peoples to the west encountered the Celtic population. They were a relatively peaceful population. The Celtic population in Europe still had what could be called an original form of clairvoyance, a real original form of clairvoyance. When these people set about any kind of craft, they thought: the spirits will help them with this craft. And when someone felt that he was adept at making boots – they didn't have boots yet, but things to cover their feet – he saw in his skill the help of the spirits. And he could really perceive what was helping him from the spiritual world. These ancient Celtic people still viewed their lives in such a way that they were, in a sense, “on familiar terms” with the spiritual world. And that is why these peoples also produced very beautiful things. The Celtic population also penetrated into Italy in ancient times, bringing with them many beautiful things, which helped to soften the rough Roman way of life, which had come about through the marauding people. It was precisely through the penetration of the Celtic population that the original Roman coarseness was somewhat mitigated.

So here, in ancient times, there was Celtic population throughout Europe. In the south, there was a Roman-Greek, Romance-Greek, Latin-Greek population. And, as I said, due to the elevation of Siberia, which made Siberia barren, these peoples moved over. And at the time when Christianity pushed up from south to north, the map of Europe looked like this (pointing to the drawing).

It is very strange, gentlemen: certain peculiarities of the peoples are well preserved, other peculiarities are less well preserved. For example, one must note the following: among the peoples who moved from Asia into Europe were the Huns, who had Attila as their most powerful king. But Attila is a Gothic name! For Attila means 'little father' in Gothic. Because many of the peoples that I have written down here also recognized the Hun king Attila as their king, he was given a Gothic name. But these Huns were very different from the other peoples. And that was because all these more savage peoples who came over had originally been mountain peoples in Asia. The somewhat tamer peoples who came over, like the Goths, were more the peoples of the plains. And the wild deeds of the Huns and also later the wild deeds of the Magyars came from the fact that they were originally mountain peoples in Asia.

It so happened that the Romans, more and more independent of Christianity, extended their rule northwards, and there they came into contact with these peoples who came over from Asia. Many wars broke out between the Romans and the peoples who were here in the north. Last time I already mentioned the name of a very important Roman writer, Tacitus. He wrote a lot about Roman history, but he also wrote a very great and powerful little book called “Germania”. In it, about a hundred years after Christianity had already been founded, he gave a magnificent description of the peoples who lived up there, so that in Tacitus' description, these people come to life before you. But I have already told you the other thing: Tacitus writes as one of the most educated Romans, but he did not know more about Christianity than that it was founded as a sect in Asia by a certain Christ, who was executed by the court! So Tacitus was writing in Rome at a time when Christians were still enslaved, when they still lived in their underground catacombs, actually not even that correctly. And so there was still no Christianity among these northern people.

But these northern people also had a religion back then. And it is very interesting to see what kind of religion these northern people had. Remember again, gentlemen, how religious ideas developed among southern and eastern peoples. We have spoken of the Indians; they looked primarily at the physical body, that is, at something of the human being. The Egyptians looked at the etheric body - again something of the human being. The Babylonians and Assyrians looked at the astral body – again something of the human being. The Jews saw the I in their Yahweh – again something of the human being. Only of the Greeks – and this then passed over to the Romans – must I tell you: they saw less of the human being, they turned their gaze more to nature. And the Greeks were truly the greatest observers of nature.

But these people here in the north, they have seen nothing at all of man as such, of the inner man, even less than the Greeks. It is interesting: these people here in the north have completely forgotten the inner human being, and they do not even have memories of what could be thought about the inner human being. The Greeks and Romans at least still had memories; they were neighbors of the peoples all over the Near East, of the Egyptians, Babylonians and so on; they had memories of what these ancient peoples had thought. These Nordic peoples only looked at their surroundings, only at what was outside of people. And they did not see nature, but rather the nature spirits outside of people. The ancient Greeks saw nature; these people here in the north saw the nature spirits. That is why the most beautiful stories, fairy tales, legends and myths originated precisely among these people, because they saw the spirits everywhere. The Greeks saw the tall mountain, Mount Olympus; but the gods lived on Mount Olympus. These people up here in the north did not say, “The gods live on a mountain.” Rather, they saw the god himself in the summit of the mountain, because the summit of the mountain did not appear to them as a rock. When dawn shone on the mountain top, gilding the mountain and the morning sun rising over the mountains, these peoples did not see the mountain, but this weaving of the morning sun over the mountain; that was the divine for them. It seemed ghostly to them. It was quite natural for them to see the ghostly spread over the mountains in this way.

And the Greeks built temples for the gods. Throughout Asia Minor, temples were built for the gods. These people in the north said: we will not build temples. What does it mean to build temples? It is dark inside them; but over the mountains, there is light and brightness. And the gods, that is, the spirits, must be worshiped by going up the mountain.

Now they have thought about it: Yes, when the light shines over the mountains - it comes from the sun; but the sun is most beneficial in the middle of summer, when St. John's Day, as we call it today, approaches. Then they climbed up the mountains, made a fire and celebrated their gods not in the temple, but on the high mountains. Or they said: Yes, the sunlight and the warmth of the sun go into the earth, and in spring what the sun causes comes out of the earth again. And that is why you have to worship the sun, even when it sends its power out of the earth. They felt this particularly charitably in the forests, where many trees grow out of the way the sun's power works back from the earth. That is why they worshiped their gods in forests. Not in temples, but on mountains and in forests.

And, you see, these peoples believed in spirits for everything. The ancient Celts, who were driven out by these peoples, still saw the spirits themselves. These peoples no longer saw the spirits, but in all of nature, they regarded as divine whatever shone as light, whatever was there as warmth, whatever acted as air in the clouds. And that was the old Germanic religion, the old religion, which was then driven out by Christianity.

Christianity came to these areas in two ways. First, it pushed up into southern Russia, and into these areas that are now Romania and Hungary. That is where Wulfila translated the Bible. A Christianity emerged that was much more genuine than the Christianity that spread everywhere from Rome by the second route. From Rome, Christianity spread more as domination. And one can say: if Christianity, as it arose here in the East through Russia, in the time when there was no Slavic population, if Christianity had spread there, it would have become quite different; it would have become more inward, because it would have had much more Asian character. The Asian character is an inward one. And the Christianity that spread from Rome took on more of an external form, which then became dead in the cult because the meaning of the cult was no longer recognized. I have spoken to you about the monstrance and the Santissimum, which actually represents the sun and the moon – but that was covered up, it was no longer accepted. And so a spiritless cult has spread. This spiritless cult was then carried over to Constantinople by a spiritless Caesar; the city of Constantinople was founded. And in later times, the changed Christianity also spread to the other countries.

The Christianity that is in Wulfila's translation of the Bible, for example, has completely disappeared from Europe. For it is more the cultic Christianity, the externalities, that spread from here. And in the East, when the Slavs came, what was more cultic, which has a very little inwardness, spread even more.

Now, what I have told you about the religious beliefs of these peoples later underwent a certain change. It is always the case among people that they originally know what it is about; then they no longer know what it is about, and it remains only a memory. It remains something external. And so, from the gods that people saw, from the spirits everywhere in nature, three main deities were formed: Wotan, who was actually imagined to be something like light and air floating over everything. Wotan was worshipped, for example, when there was a heavy storm; then it was said: Wotan is in the wind, Wotan is blowing in the wind.

It was a peculiarity of these peoples that they expressed in their language what they perceived in nature. That is right, they worshipped Wotan as blowing in the wind. Do you feel when I say: Wotan blows in the wind - the three w's? It was something terrible for these people when a storm came and they imitated this stormy weather by saying: Wotan blows in the wind! - That is how we would say it today, but it was very similar in the old language.

And when summer came and people saw lightning and heard thunder during a storm, they also saw spiritual things in it. They imitated this in language, and they called the spirit that rolls in the thunder Donar: Donar roars in thunder. The fact that this was in the language shows that these people were connected to the outside world. The Greeks were not so strongly connected with the outside world. The Greeks sought this more in rhythm than in the formation of language. In these Nordic peoples, it was already in the language itself.

And when, for example, these peoples crossed over to Europe and first encountered the Celts, constant fighting and wars broke out. Warring was something that was always there in those days when Christianity was spreading. Just as the spiritual was seen in the blowing wind and the rolling thunder, so it was also seen in the storm of battle. It was the case that the people had shields and with these shields in closed rows they stormed forward in crowds. So they still stormed forward when they came into the fight with the Romans. And when the Romans threw themselves against them and these northern tribes stormed down, then the Romans heard above all a terrible shouting: a thousand throats shouted into their shields as they charged forward. And they feared much more than the Germanic swords what was charging towards them with terrible shouting. And if you were to storm in shouting something similar to what these peoples shouted into their shields, if you wanted to imitate that today, then you would have to say it sounded like: Ziu zwingt Zwist! Ziu zwingt Zwist! - Ziu was the spirit of war; they believed that he was storming ahead with them. When such a Germanic tribe stormed forward, they felt: There is a spiritual being among them that forces discord. “Zwist” is war. Ziu forces discord! - and that now rushed into the shields. And the Romans heard this muffled: Ziu forces discord! Ziu forces discord! and it rushed over the Romans' heads. As I said, they were terribly afraid of that, more than of all the bows and arrows and so on. It was really something in which the spiritual lived in the courage, in the bellicosity of these people.

You see, if these people were to rise again as they were then – of course they rise again, since people re-embody themselves, but they have forgotten the story – but if they were to rise again as they were then and saw the present population, well, they would put all the sleepyheads in their place! Because they would say: It's not right for a person to walk around as a sleepyhead! They should put on a nightcap and go to bed. They had a completely different outlook on life, they were mobile.

Then, of course, there were also times when these peoples could not wage war. But, gentlemen, when they were not waging war, they had bearskins, on which they lay, and then they drank – they drank terribly. That was the second occupation. Well, in those days it was considered a virtue; after all, it was not quite as dangerous a drink as it is today, it was a relatively harmless drink brewed from all sorts of herbs. Beer developed from it later, but very differently, of course. But these peoples drank it in large quantities. They only felt like humans when this mead, this beer-like, sweetish drink, went sweetly through their whole body. Sometimes you still come across people in whom you can see how something like this lives in them when they feel a bit like descendants of these ancient Germans. Once I met a German poet in Weimar who drank almost as much as the ancient Germans! But of course he drank beer. The ancient Germans drank this mead-like drink. We got to talking, and I said to him: Yes, it's actually impossible for someone to be so thirsty! - And he said: Yes, thirst – when I'm thirsty, I drink water; but when I'm not thirsty, I drink beer. When I drink beer, I don't drink it for thirst, I drink it for fun! And so it was with these Teutons: they became merry and energetic when the mead-like sweet liquid ran through their limbs as they lay on their bearskins.

The third main occupation was hunting. And agriculture was actually practised rather incidentally by the subjugated peoples of that time. When such a people spread out, it was the case that others were subjugated; they then had to do the farming. These were unfree people. And when war came, they had to join; they had to carry the weapons and so on. Of course, in those days there was a great difference between the free population and the unfree. The free population, who waged war, hunted, and drank on the bearskins, came together to order matters. And when they came together, they discussed matters of a judicial or administrative nature and so on, everything that was necessary. Nothing was written down, because they could not write in those days. Everything was only discussed orally. And there were no cities; people lived scattered in villages. They always formed a kind of community of a hundred and a hundred villages, so about a hundred villages together. They then belonged together; they were called a hundred-ship. And in turn, large associations of hundred-ships were then a district. And the hundred-ships had their assemblies, the districts had their assemblies. For those people who were allowed to come together, for the free, there was actually quite a bit of democracy in this respect. And what was held there was not called an imperial council, not a parliament – these are words that came later. It was called a thing because a specific day was set for the meeting, and anything that was not given a specific name was called a thing. You can still hear it today when you hear English people talking about something and they can't think of the name straight away, they always say: thing = thing. The word “thing” has already been discredited today. I once got into trouble because of that. I was once commissioned to draft a resolution that had been written, and I put “thing” into this resolution; and the chairman at the time, who was a very famous astronomer, held it against me terribly because it is such a terrible word in our time; you cannot use it where serious people come together! But in the old days it was called a thing. People didn't say they were going to the Reichstag, they said they were going to the Tageding. And if someone talked, they were said to be vertageding the matter. And you see, the word 'defend' was formed from the word 'vertagedingen'. This is how words are formed later: defend originated from vertagedingen. Today, the word “defender” is only used in the context of court. Here in Switzerland, we don't say “defender”, but “ Fürsprech”, but everywhere else they say “defender”. This is how these people lived with their gods and spirits among themselves. And then the southern peoples brought Christianity to these people.

But again, in the West, Christianity arose in two ways. It was partly brought up directly from Rome; but there was another line in which Christianity spread, and that was this: from Asia, more across the very southern areas here, where the Latin-Roman element has not gained much influence, across Spain to Ireland. And in Ireland, in the first centuries of Christianity, there was a very pure way of spreading Christianity. And this way of spreading Christianity in Ireland also spread to Wales. And from there, Christian missionaries also moved into Europe. They brought Christianity with them, in part; in part, it came up from Rome.

You see, gentlemen, I told you that in the monasteries, for example, and even at the first universities, much of the old science was still available, so that with Christianity the old science was connected. What has been preserved of the ancient wisdom of the stars, which later disappeared completely in Europe, actually all came from Ireland. From Rome, basically, only the cult spread. And only later, when Central Europe turned to the gospel, did the gospel join the cult. But much of what came from Ireland lived among the people. You see, in Europe, Christianity has gradually become completely absorbed into secular rule. And the good elements of Christianity that were present up here, where the Gothic Bible translation by Wulfila was created, and those that came over from Ireland, have actually more or less completely disappeared later on. They were still present in many ways in the Middle Ages, but then more or less completely disappeared. You see, from Rome, they actually proceeded very cleverly. In these peoples, who I have written down here for you and who were originally pushed by nature itself to migrate from Asia to Europe – they could not stay there because the land had become barren – but a certain wanderlust took hold. And it is strange what happens there.

Take the Elbe, for example. Up here on the Elbe lived a people in the time just after the advent of Christianity: they were the Lombards. They lived to the northeast of the Saxons, on the Elbe. Soon after, two centuries later, we find these same Lombards down there on the Po, in Italy! So the Lombards migrated over here. We find the Goths, the Ostrogoths, here on the Black Sea at a time when Christianity had not yet arrived but had already been established. Soon after, a few centuries later, we find them here, where the Vandals and the Visigoths used to be. The Visigoths migrated further west. We find the Visigoths here in Spain after some time. We find the Vandals here on the Danube. A few centuries later, the Vandals were no longer in Europe at all, but over there in Africa, opposite Italy. These peoples were now migrating. And just as Christianity was spreading, these peoples were migrating; they were pushing more and more to the west. The Slavs came much later.

And what happened in the West? The Romans had already achieved world domination when Christianity emerged. The Romans actually behaved extremely shrewdly. At the time when these peoples came over to the west and pushed against the Romans, the Romans were actually already quite emaciated, weak, rather ghastly fellows, and they couldn't really do much other than shake and tremble with their lower legs when this: Ziu forces discord! rolled into the shields from up there. Then they trembled like aspen leaves. But in their heads they were smart, proud, arrogant, haughty.

Now, these peoples were necessarily different. There was, of course, a big difference: these people down there had their lands, their fields, were settled, had something behind them. These peoples up there didn't care much about location; they migrated. And so it came about that the Romans often took in these peoples who were storming south. They gave them land, for the Romans had land in abundance everywhere. They gave them land. And so it came about that these peoples changed from hunting and war to agriculture, to farming. But how did it happen when the Romans gave them land? Yes, these Germanic peoples now had the land; they could dig up the fields. They could do that, but the Romans did the administration! In this way, the Romans gradually made themselves rulers. And this rule was strongest here in the west. In the area that was later populated by Germans, the people resisted for a long time. But people like the Goths, they moved into Italy, came together with the people from there, and became dependent. Yes, the Roman-Latin population was clever. What did they do? Well, they said: If we carry the sword, it is no longer right. They had become emaciated guys. What did they do? They made warriors out of the people who came in! When the Romans wanted to wage war, they waged it with the Germans, so they were the warriors! They were given their fields, but in return they had to go to war. Those who had remained at the top as Germanic people were at war with their own former warriors! The Romans waged war against them under the leadership of the Germanic people! And so, in the early days when Christianity spread, the wars that were actually waged by the southern population, the Roman population, were waged with the help of the Germanic people themselves, who had been absorbed by them. At most, only the leaders of the Roman armies were Romans. The mass of the soldiers were actually Germanic peoples who had become Roman. And now the task was to introduce the religious element from Rome in a way that would appeal to these people. In these earliest times, people were much more attached to their religion than they were later. And so, for example, the following came about. You see, these people saw light and air everywhere in nature as the spiritual. They felt it hard when the snow came in October, November, when the snow covered the earth and then actually all spiritual had to disappear. On the other hand, they particularly revered the time when our Christmas falls today. Then they felt: Now the sun is coming again. It was the winter solstice. The sun turned back to the people. And so a spiritualized nature was still very much what they assumed in these peoples.

The Romans, who had already adopted Christianity in their system of government, left this solstice festival to the Germans. But they said: We do not celebrate the solstice here, but the birth of Christ. And so the Germans were only able to continue celebrating their festival at the same time as they had previously done so, with a different meaning.

Now, the ancient Germans saw some kind of spirit under every significant tree, one might say. The Romans made a saint out of a spirit! And so they basically re-baptized everything that was contained in the old pagan religion. This went largely unnoticed by the people, and in this form, Christianity was actually spread among the Germanic peoples. Festivities such as those celebrating the return of the sun and so on were observed precisely because the ancient Germans loved celebrating with the gods in the open air, in the mountains and forests.

So we can say that in more recent times, since the founding of Christianity, it has been cunning that has been most prevalent in Rome. And basically, Europe has been ruled by cunning for many centuries – by Roman cunning. It has gone so far that the Romans have always preserved the old Latin language in schools, and the vernacular was actually only spoken among the people. When the Romans introduced Christianity and science, they did not speak in the vernacular – that did not come until the 18th century – but they presented science everywhere in Latin. For a long time, Romanism was also noticeable in its original form.

But now, what happened in the West, through Spain, France and into England? You see, there Romanism really remained alive. That is why the language in which Romanism lives on came into being. Here, in Central Europe, the Germanic element was more dominant. That is where the Germanic languages originated. Over here, the Romance element triumphed; that is where the Romance languages came into being. But in terms of their origin, all these people who were there, both those who migrated to Spain and those who migrated to Italy, are actually Germanic. I have written down the Ripuarian Franks and the Salian Franks, who later moved over there – they were all Germanic tribes that settled in France. And the Romance language spread like a cloud over these Franks who moved into France, and became French or Spanish. The old Latin lives on in a modified form.

Only further east, from the Rhine onwards, did the people as a people say to themselves: Well, the scholars in there in the schools, with their wigs, they can speak Latin, and those who want to become priests can listen to them; but the people have kept the language. And that is how the antagonism arose that still troubles Europe today, this antagonism between Central Europe and Western Europe.

From the east, the Slavs gradually came. I had to tell you: these peoples come over to the west, where some of them disappear, some of them also adopt another language, and so on. Then the Slavs came, settled in the east of Europe, and in some places advanced quite far. Here, for example, the old Germanic element mixed with the Slavic element; for certain reasons, which I will explain to you next time, the Slavs in the east over there got the name “Russians”; on the other hand, those who now moved into these areas, they disappeared among the Germanic peoples. A blood mixture remained. And that is how the Borussians came into being, those who are the vanguard of the Russians. Borussians then became “Prussians”! That is just the transformed word. There is a lot of Slavic blood in it. While the Slavs themselves, when they remain behind, are more passive, more of a quiet population, when they absorb other blood, they become combative! This belligerence, which was present in ancient Germanic peoples, then passed over to them. And so what was in Prussia became a rather belligerent population; and what migrated to the west, the Czech population, actually became a rather belligerent population as well.

And so Europe stirred itself up, I would say. And into this porridge Christianity was added. Well, we will continue with that next time.

I should like first to say a few words about the verse I wrote on the blackboard yesterday at the end of the lecture. It begins:

If we want really to understand the being of man for the purposes of treatment, we must be absolutely clear about the fact that we cannot take into consideration only what binds the human being to the earth, for that is of importance only in the very first years of childhood, up to the time of the change of teeth, and then no longer. After the change of teeth we have to consider those forces which really organize the human being away from the earth. For this purpose he has his etheric body and the etheric body is essentially different from the physical body. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is not. The physical body strives towards the earth, the etheric body away from the earth in all directions, in all directions of cosmic space. You include the universe when you study the physical body and the etheric body of man. The physical body is inwardly connected with the earth, the etheric body with everything that lies in the perceptible universe around the earth. So that you can think of all the forces which work upon the physical body as being forces which draw the human being to the earth, and all those forces which work upon the etheric body as forces which draw the human being away from the earth.

These forces exist and work in the human being. Therefore one cannot really say that the human being takes in some substance which was first outside and is then within him. It is not so. These centrifugal forces are working within the human being and because of this the substance immediately falls within the realm of the whole universe, of the whole visible universe.

Then, in regard to the astral body of man, you must picture to yourselves that it really comes from the realm of the spaceless; it merely assumes the form of spatial activity.

And when you come to the ego, you really can make no picture at all. The ego works neither from above nor from below; it works in such a way that one simply cannot make a diagram of it. The ego works only through the flow of time, through the continuity of time. What proceeds from the ego organization of man cannot be put into a picture. It is a reality at every point; it neither streams in nor streams out, it works in the purely qualitative sense.

When we look out into the worlds of the ether it is as if, with our etheric body, we were always losing ourselves in these worlds, but all the time the astral is streaming in towards us—the astral that is also not spatial but works as if it came towards us from the periphery of the universe. And now suppose that we have to do with vegetable protein in food. In the first place, vegetable protein has heaviness; in the second place, as protein, it strives towards the cosmos. When you introduce vegetable protein into the human organism the other two kinds of forces immediately begin to work on it—the forces which work in from all directions and those forces which as the forces of the astral work in from beyond space, as it were, upon this protein. And now suppose everything that might work in this way upon the human being were only capable of making him into a round, spherical body. You find the form which the working of these forces produce—the forces streaming outwards from and into the earth—you find this form in the bird's egg. These forces take shape in the egg. Why is it that not merely an egg-like form but a form with definite configuration is produced from an egg? If only those forces were at work of which I have just told you, all that could happen would be a completion of the egg shape. The bird would be complete when the egg is complete. But a bird has a very definite shape and has it because, in the first place, the moon circles round the earth. What I am saying about the bird also applies to the human being. If it were a case of the moon alone circling around the earth, no bird would arise, but what would happen would be this—that the egg shell would get soft and fall away and a spherical being would emerge, a spherical being consisting essentially of protein. Now the moon does not only circle around the earth, but there are all kinds of different constellations in space. The moon is always passing these constellations, and as it passes them it modifies the forces which proceed from them. Picture to yourselves that the moon is passing the Pleiades. The egg is then exposed to the forces which are the result of the in-streaming of the Pleiades and this in-streaming is modified by the moon. From the Pleiades there streams a force which is modified by the moon which is standing in front of them and exercising its influence, and as a result of this there arises the head of the bird. Therefore we can say that the bird's head is formed from the cosmos by cooperation between the planet moon and the fixed stars which are arranged in a special way in the Pleiades. The moon passes on and, let us say, it now stands in front of the constellation of Libra whose forces are again modified by the position of the moon. Here we have a different set of forces and besides this, the moon which was full moon when it stood in front of the Pleiades, has now, in front of Libra, become New Moon. The moon in connection with the constellation of Libra works differently from when it is working from a position in front of the Pleiades and the effect upon the egg is the formation of the bird's tail. The rest lies in between. So, if you want to study the form of the bird you must study how the moon passes by the cosmic constellations.

What is a person who has knowledge of earthly conditions able to say about the form of man, or, for that matter, of any living being? He can only say: Yes, of course, the Eagle has a definite form, the vulture has a definite form, the kangaroo has a definite form, and so on. Why have they these particular forms? If you remain at a standstill within the earthly world, as science does, there is only one answer: The animal has inherited its form from its ancestors. Thought can find no other answer. This answer is just like the logic of the saying: Penury comes from poverty. But this is no explanation at all. You must go further back. Those ancestors received it from their ancestors, and so you go on, in a vicious circle. We must study the cosmic forces and constellations of the stars if we are to have any understanding of the form of a living being.

But this is not all that I have to say. If only these things happened, very beautifully developed beings would be produced but they would all of them be like jellyfish, as the human being actually was in far past epochs of the earth. In the Atlantean epoch the human being was a kind of jellyfish. This was because the only substance he could absorb was in a plastic, fluid state, and out of this he was able to build up his physical body. The reason he was able to incorporate into himself potassium, sodium, and the other substances is because the other planets of our system, as well as the moon, pass through Libra, Aries, Taurus and so on, and they member into us those things that enable us to have the true form of man. In the formation of the human head, the influence of the moon is also united with the forces that go out from Mercury and Venus and the constellations into which they enter with the other planets. If these other constellations were not combined with the moon constellations, we should all be born as hydrocephalics. Organic metal is incorporated into us because the constellations of Mercury and Venus are working in conjunction with the moon constellation. We should get a terrible form of rickets, not only bow legs but legs that would be elastic, and our arms would be jelly-like structures if the planets that are more oriented to Saturn were not to combine with the moon constellation and if Saturn himself were not to work together with Jupiter and Mars. It is the sun which brings about the rhythmical balances between these two categories of planets.
The first two lines of the verse, therefore, should help you to understand how the human being is actually formed out of the cosmos. We shall not really progress until astronomy—but in the sense I have just indicated—is introduced into our medical science. Most of what is said about these things does not signify much. There is a muddle because things that happen in the human being are ascribed either to external, earthly circumstances, or to heredity. But when one comes down to details, the result is nil, because it is forgotten that the origin of the human form must be understood by a knowledge of the starry heavens in their qualitative aspect, in their inner aspect. The most important planet in the process of the formation of the human being is the moon. The moon must cooperate everywhere; the other planets modify the influence of the moon. The moon is the most important.

The verse continues:

Behold all that moves thee in Air
And thou wilt experience man's ensoulment.

Schau, was luftig dich bewegt,
Du erlebest Menschenbeseelung.

Now everything that works in the human etheric body, forms and shapes the human being. But the human being would be an automaton imbued with life, even if his form were as it is today, if only those forces which I have described to you were to work upon him. But the surroundings work upon him, all that lives and weave in the element of air around us. The ether and also the astrality of the cosmos weaves in the air. And just as externally our spatial form is developed under the influence of the moon in connection with the heavens, so we are inwardly ensouled because the sun is working together with the heavens. When the sun is standing in Leo, for example, it influences the cosmic forces (note well that we are not here speaking of the sun's own forces). It is then working, in the air, upon what affects us through our breathing and blood circulation, and is continually changing. The air changes as the sun passes on its course. Thereby the form becomes ensouled, so that we can really say: The constellations of the sun in the cosmos work in the airy element in the surroundings of the earth and this enables us to be beings of soul.

The verse continues:

Behold what is changed in the Earthly
And thou wilt discern the spiritualizing of man.

Schau, was irdisch sich wandelt:
Du erfassest Menschendurchgeistung.

By this metamorphosis is meant the gradual passing of the human physical body into the corpse. By the side of these words we write the sign of Saturn. Why? Now the Saturn forces work not only in the place where Saturn stands in the heavens. So far as space is concerned, Saturn is far away from the earth and the direct influences of this planet upon the human being from outside do not amount to very much. But Saturn has forces which are sucked, with tremendous strength, into the earth. The Saturn forces are sucked with tremendous strength into the earth and when we look beyond the earth, we really do not find these forces to any extent. But when we look at the earth herself, at what is on the surface and towards the interior of the earth, it is a different matter altogether. Suppose you see a snail crawling over the ground. The snail passes on but it leaves its slime behind it. The slime remains and you can follow the whole path taken by the snail. So it is with Saturn. He passes on, but wherever he has shone upon the earth he leaves his traces behind him—very, very definite traces If in much earlier epochs of earth evolution these traces had not remained as forces in the earth, we should have no lead. Lead originates from the primal substance, from the Saturn forces that are working in the earth, that were sucked in by the earth. In ancient times, when conditions were different, the lead forces came into being in the earth. These Saturn forces still have their afterworkings in the human being and it is an influence quite different from that of sun and moon.

We should not be beings of spirit, but beings of body and soul only, if these Saturn forces were not present. You can take this as a focus for thought, my dear friends. Nothing is without reason and purpose in the universe. Just ask yourselves: During what period of time has Saturn had opportunity to impregnate his forces into the earth from all directions? He has done this in the course of thirty years—the thirty years during which he circles around the sun and earth. This period is the time which the human being takes from his birth to the point where a certain phase of his life is concluded. When the human being has lived on the earth for thirty years, he reaches a certain point—a point which does not, of course, coincide exactly with the precise line taken by Saturn in the heavens—but during this period Saturn has impregnated the earth from every direction. When the human being is thirty years old, a second impregnation begins. Thus the influence of Saturn upon the whole earth is connected with the human being, and it is ultimately due to this fact that we have a body in which processes of demolition take place.

In the human organism there are not up-building forces alone. If it were so we should be without consciousness. Our vitality has to be damped down in a certain way. The destructive forces must always be there. The development of our organism not only advances but retrogresses and in this retrogression the unfolding of spiritual life takes place. Spiritual life does not proceed from life, but as life retro gresses the spiritual life finds a place in what, figuratively speaking, has been left empty. This process is due to the forces that arise in the earth as a result of impregnation by the Saturn forces. Therefore I placed the sign of Saturn by the side of the third couplet.

Now these Saturn forces by themselves would make little old and wizened people by the age of thirty. At the age of thirty we should begin to walk on crutches. Fichte was willing to respect the human being up to the age of thirty, but he once said that all thirty-year-olds ought to be done away with, for thereafter they are no longer able to cope with the world, they are weak cripples. The state of things Fichte was getting at, however, would irrevocably happen if Saturn were the only planet whose forces could unfold in the earth. But the Saturn forces are modified by the forces of Jupiter and of Mars. Because of these forces the demolition process up to the age of thirty is not so complete. Something still continues and we have to thank Mars and Jupiter for the fact that we are not old men at the age of thirty. If we want to understand why existence is still possible for the human being at the age of forty-five, we must look out into the cosmos.

Moon and Saturn, therefore, are the heavenly bodies which stand nearest to and farthest from us in the planetary system. The planetary system as it is today is really an inorganic structure because as far as Saturn [Translator's note: In the German, the text gives Jupiter, but the sense appears to indicate Saturn.] it came out of what was once a single cosmic body, whereas Uranus and Neptune came from beyond and joined themselves to it. As antiquity did not discover Uranus and Neptune, Saturn was taken to be the outermost planet and it is still justifiable today to go as far as Saturn. Astrologers still have an inkling of these things for they connect Uranus and Neptune only with those human qualities which transcend the personal, make a man a genius, go beyond the individual personal element—where he is concerned with things that no longer have to do with his personal development. All astrological statements are to this effect. Uranus and Neptune only come into play when a man becomes a genius or strives to transcend the human element, when his organization has the tendency to expand or decay too strongly. Uranus and Neptune are planets who have behaved like tramps in the universe and were then held captive by the planetary system belonging to our earth. The near and the far heavenly bodies regulate what is in the human being—the moon regulates his form, Saturn—working from the earth—the formless spiritual, inasmuch as Saturn breaks down form, dissolves it inwardly all the time. And the sun brings about rhythm between the two.

These things must be known. Primeval knowledge was aware that the same forces which correspond with our third couplet:

Behold what is changed in the Earthly
And thou wilt discern the spiritualizing of man,

are the same complex of forces which once expressed itself in the formation of lead. So that we can say: The forces which split up the physical organism in order that the spiritual may find a place, are also present in lead. Forces of disintegration have brought lead into existence. If we introduce lead into the human organism, splittings take place. If there is too little demolition going on within the human being and he needs certain processes of disintegration, we must give him lead in some form. Vice versa, if the condition is such that formative power is lacking, so that the human organism is becoming too “spongy” as it were, ancient knowledge teaches that the forces of the moon which in olden times streamed in to form the substance of silver, must be brought into play. The forces of silver can bring sponginess to form, they give support to the moon forces. The whole planetary system is connected with substances that are remedial:

Saturn = Lead
Jupiter = Tin
Mars = Iron
Sun = Gold
Venus = Copper
Mercury = Quicksilver
Moon = Silver.

These correspondences are treated with unbelievable superficiality nowadays, whereas in reality they are based upon most minute investigations which were carried on in the Ancient Mysteries. Such knowledge had been well and truly tested. Thorough investigation was made of Saturn's constellation when, for example, the forces of disintegration were insufficiently active in an organism and the vitality, the connective forces too strong, so that in his whole constitution the human being was suffering from a condition of organic stupor (for stupor need not necessarily affect only the sensory activity). It was observed that such a condition set in after a certain constellation of Saturn had taken place. Whereas Saturn had formerly worked strongly upon the human being, it was observed that he got into this condition when Saturn had set and could no longer completely unfold its forces. In such a case, lead was given as a remedy. Indications which are still to be found in dilettante books today are actually true, because, not knowing their origin, people have not been able to spoil them. If things had been different, speculation would have taken place and then we should most certainly have erroneous indications. They remain correct because men have lost the knowledge of their origin. They remain through tradition. Human thinking cannot spoil these truths.

What works from out of the earth upon the human being is, in reality, the force of Saturn which has been held fast, sucked in by the earth.

Just think what tremendous consequences these things have in the realm of human knowledge. You simply cannot connect the human being as studied by modern natural science with the moral life. The moral life hovers somewhere in the realm of abstraction. Especially in Protestantism which to the greatest extent of all has lost connection with the spiritual, with the cosmos; everything moral is segregated off, remains mere belief. The reality is that the human being is a creature who is cared for and fostered from out of the cosmos and the moral forces stream into him together with his astrality. Realization of this fact enables you to think of man as being inwardly united with the moral world. In true medicine you are led back to what makes man into a moral being, into a being who in his very organism can experience the moral and no longer merely heeds it as an external commandment.

This is what I wanted to say and I think you can take it away with you as a guide in many things. You can, of course, get the data from somewhere else. But how these data are circumstanced within the human organism—this you can only realize from such things as have now been said. You can read in any medical vade mecum that lead has this or that effect. You will understand why it has such effect if you really assimilate what has been said here. Because these things are drawn from the spiritual world they make far less claim upon the memory than upon man's physical power of assimilation. What a person learns lies in the realm of his own option, but what he experiences otherwise and what is impressed of itself into his memory, is actually there. You will notice something strange about what you assimilate in this way. If you do not constantly live with it in meditation you will soon sweat it off, so to speak. The peculiarity of spiritual truths is that they cannot, properly speaking, become memorized truths. You cannot retain in your organism what you ate a week previously. A ruminant can retain food, but only for a short time. In the ruminant there is organic imitation—a rudiment in the physical body of what otherwise lies entirely in the etheric body, namely, the memory. So far as spiritual truths are concerned, they must be experienced over and over again until they become habit—not retained as memory pictures but become habit. The essence of meditation is that we make an appeal to what, in reality, is present only in earliest childhood. In that period of life we have no picture memory and so our earliest experiences are forgotten. They live in a memory which functions through habit. And it is this form of memory that we must return to when we want inwardly to digest spiritual truths; otherwise we very quickly sweat them off.

Because you want to receive esoteric truths, an appeal must be made to your faculties of meditation and of inner assimilation; otherwise you will not be able to make use of what is given you. If you activate these faculties you will develop that delicate sensitivity which leads you, not instinctively but intuitively to perceive how a plant or stone may work in the human organism—things that are still expressed abstractly in the so-called Doctrine of Signatures. You will be developing not only your physical body but your etheric body too and what I have called memory through habit will give you a more delicate faculty of perception for what is contained in the physical environment and the faculty to behold the world as one to whom the questions about diseases of the lung, heart, etc., come from the human organism and the answers as to the remedial plants, minerals, etc., from the environment.

Question: Many of us want to have a far-reaching understanding of the position in which we find ourselves. We feel inwardly that Anthroposophical truths are something radical and that tremendous things depend upon their practical realization. How can that which we feel so deeply, be realized, and how can we reach an understanding of our own destiny and tasks for the future? We feel that we shall only be able to act truly if we get to understand our own karma in its wide connections and at the same time unfold the courage not to run away from it but to fulfill it in practice in the right way.

I think I hear something between the lines of what you have said and realize in what direction your feelings tend. You must enlarge your question if this is not so. The question you have put, touches, of course, something that must be known today. Especially just recently, there has been a great deal of talk about the end of Kali Yuga among circles of young people, more among the youth than among the old. The reason for this is that at the end of the nineteenth century a new age did indeed dawn in humanity. To begin with, the old life continues. When you have a ball and push it, it rolls and when you take your hand away it still goes on rolling. Similarly, what human beings experienced up to the end of the nineteenth century goes on rolling for the time being. But because the forces are no longer behind it, it is assuming worse forms than it took in the age that has passed away. But side by side with the continuance of the old time, an Age of Light is really dawning in the world, in concealment. An Age of Light is shining into the world and its first rays must be caught by Anthroposophy.

At the present time, of course, I am speaking much more radically about certain karmic relationships than I did before the Christmas Foundation. You will realize this from other lectures which I am giving now. Those who can be at the lecture this evening will find that certain human connections are actually spoken of. But for all that I cannot enter quite concretely into matters which would be beloved by sensationalism. Strict laws must invariably be observed in these things and I know that a certain desire—not necessarily born of a lust for sensation—might be satisfied if one could reveal to every individual his previous earthly life. But one cannot go as far as that. On the other hand certain points of view which may be significant, can be mentioned.

Taking human life in general today, we have, if I may put it so, two kinds of human beings. This is due to the fact that at certain times the spiritual evolution of humanity was different from what it was in other times. There was a wavelike movement, but the waves flowed not only one behind the other, but side by side with each other. For example, at a certain time the evolution of Western Christianity became more superficial, was externalized. It was not possible for human beings to get at the essence of what Christianity had to offer them. A reaction took place among the Kathares. And so there were living, side by side, men who lived very external lives and men who wanted to deepen themselves inwardly. Something similar happened, when, under the influence of Comenius and even earlier than that, the Moravian Brotherhoods were founded far into Hungary and Poland. All the time there were living together men whose souls were striving strongly for spirituality and men who were driven to externalization, simply by the karma of civilization. The fact that one person comes into the one group and another person into another, is connected with earlier karmic conditions. In modern times a great point is how far a man in his earlier incarnation belonged to the one or the other of these groups. Let us suppose, then, that a man is born today who lived in a phase of Christianity which was quite externalized. Such a man will be an entirely different person from one who, let us say, belonged to the Bohemian Moravian Brothers. In what does the difference consist?

We can only discover the essential characteristic of the conclusion of Kali Yuga when we go into the concrete circumstances—otherwise it all remains so much historical construction. The Age of Darkness lasted until the year 1899 when the Age of Light began. This mere fact does not tell us very much. We must enter into the concrete, spiritual facts. Men who are born at the end of Kali Yuga and who have strongly spiritual aspirations—this must not make for conceit, you must receive it simply into your store of knowledge—such men are, speaking in the widest sense, those who have been born from among the heretics, from among those who strove for inner deepening. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were brought down to the earth human beings who had not lived within the general stream of a Christianity that was being externalized, but in such sects which inserted themselves in this general stream and were striving for greater inwardness. What is the result?

Now when we are passing through the time between death and a new birth we learn, in a spiritual way, to know the Human All, just as here on earth we can study the World All that is outside the human being—the universe. The Human All is equally great and equally detailed, for the human being has within him just as much as the cosmos. We can study this with our forces of will when they have been transformed. We acquire an exact knowledge of the human being. Now there is a difference between the two groups of which I have just spoken. Those men who had entered more into externalization were not able, in their passage between death and a new birth, to enter into the spiritual world in the right way. In the spiritual world they passed thoughtlessly by the essentials of human nature. They were reborn and especially those people who were born in the second third of the nineteenth century were men of the kind who were thus externalized in their previous life. They brought into their earthly life no understanding of the human being and his nature. They regarded the body as an instrument for eating, drinking, walking, standing, sitting, but they were not interested in the human being in his reality because they had no interest of this kind in their life between death and a new birth. These were the people who were satisfied with materialism, because they felt no need for knowledge of the human being. The materialists who only want to have knowledge of matter understand the human being least of all.

It may be said with a peaceful conscience that those who are sitting here are reborn heretics (you must not ascribe this to yourselves as a virtue) heretics who experienced a strong urge between death and rebirth to fathom the nature of the human being and thus, subconsciously, to make the human being into a tremendous riddle. This comes to light in the urge to learn more than materialistic medicine has to offer and so, as you have said, an inner fulfillment of karma is certainly indicated. You must not take these things lightly, for if you were to do so you would fall into misunderstandings. You would not reach what you want to reach because you have had certain definite experiences between death and rebirth. And the result of not finding in earthly life that for which one has striven for centuries is not so that it merely makes one superficial. The Age has passed when people who have received between death and rebirth the truths concerning man can become superficial without being punished for it. At the present time young people are certainly not in a position to lead superficial lives and go Scot-free because they ruin themselves inwardly, ruin themselves organically.

The bad thing is not that people today are materialistic in their thoughts, that they chatter about monism and the like. That is not the really bad thing and they will easily get over it. What a man speaks is not of such great significance, but what then goes back into his feeling and will—this weaves in his organs, and if people do not deepen themselves spiritually they will not be able to sleep properly. That is the essential thing. If people undergo no such deepening today what will the consequence be? The consequence will be that hardly will the years 1940-1950 have come, and over greater and greater areas there will be widespread epidemics of sleeplessness. Such people will no longer be capable of working for civilization.

Therefore your karma leaves you no choice: either you leave it unheeded, as was possible before the end of Kali Yuga, or you must heed it. You must really take in all seriousness what I have now told you about the configuration of your karma. This, of course, remains a generalized description, but you can certainly find it useful if you frequently ponder the particular circumstances of your own life. You will discover something remarkable when you think about these special circumstances. The Youth Movement theorizes too much and consequently one hears too much of the same theories. If the young people would really study what youth today is experiencing—it is in truth very different from what the former generation experienced—the Youth Movement would at one bound take on a very different form. We are striving to give our Youth Movement here a concrete form so that it does not remain in the realm of abstraction.

Consider what is to be the subject of today's lecture only as an insertion into the series of lectures this winter. It is perhaps justified precisely by our fateful time, in which the two Central European empires, so closely connected with each other, must approach the great demands of historical becoming in our present and for the future. I also believe I am justified in saying something about the intellectual life of Austria, since I lived in Austria until I was almost thirty years old and had not only the opportunity but also the necessity from a wide variety of perspectives to become fully immersed in Austrian intellectual life. On the other hand, it may be said that this Austrian intellectual life is particularly, I might say, difficult for the outsider to grasp in terms of ideas, concepts, and representations, and that perhaps our time will make it increasingly necessary for the peculiarities of this Austrian intellectual life to be brought before the mind's eye of a wider circle. But because of the shortness of the time at my disposal I shall be unable to give anything but, I might say, incoherent pictures, unpretentious pictures of the Austrian intellectual life of the most diverse classes; pictures which do not claim to give a complete picture, but which are intended to form one or other idea which might seek understanding for what is going on in the intellectual life beyond the Inn and the Erz Mountains.

In 1861, a philosopher who was rarely mentioned outside his homeland and who was closely connected to Austrian intellectual life, Robert Zimmermann, took up his teaching post at the University of Vienna, which he then held until the 1890s. He not only awakened many people spiritually, guiding them through philosophy on their spiritual path, but he also influenced the souls of those who taught in Austria, as he chaired the Real- und Gymnasialschul-Prüfungskommission (examination commission for secondary modern and grammar schools). And he was effective above all because he had a kind and loving heart for all that was present in emerging personalities; that he had an understanding approach for everything that asserted itself in the spiritual life at all. When Robert Zimmermann took up his post as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1861, he spoke words in his inaugural academic address that provide a retrospective of the development of worldviews in Austria in the nineteenth century. They show very succinctly what made it difficult for Austrians to arrive at a self-sustaining worldview during this century.

Zimmermann says: “For centuries in this country, the oppressive spell that lay on the minds was more than the lack of original disposition capable of holding back not only an independent flourishing of philosophy but also the active connection to the endeavors of other Germans. As long as the Viennese university was largely in the hands of the religious orders, medieval scholasticism prevailed in its philosophy lecture halls. When, with the dawn of an enlightened era, it passed into secular management around the middle of the last century, the top-down system of teachers, teachings and textbooks, which was ordered from above, made the independent development of a free train of thought impossible. The philosophy of Wolff – which in the rest of Germany had been overcome by Kant – in the diluted version of Feder, with a smattering of English skepticism, became the intellectual nourishment of the young Austrians thirsting for knowledge. Those who, like the highly educated monk of St. Michael's in Vienna, longed for something higher had no choice but to secretly seek the way across the border to Wieland's hospitable sanctuary after discarding the monastic robe. This Barnabite monk, whom the world knows by his secular name of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and the Klagenfurt native Herbert, Schiller's former housemate, are the only public witnesses to the involvement of the closed spiritual world on this side of the Inn and the Erz mountains in the powerful change that took hold of the spirits of the otherworldly Germany towards the end of the past, the philosophical century."

One can understand that a man speaks in this way who had participated in the 1848 movement out of an enthusiastic sense of freedom, and who then thought in a completely independent way about fulfilling his philosophical teaching. But one can also ask oneself: Is not this picture, which the philosopher draws almost in the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps tinged with some pessimism, some pessimism? It is easy for an Austrian to see things in black and white when judging his own country, given the tasks that have fallen to Austria due to the historical necessities – I say expressly: the historical necessities – that the empire, composed of a diverse, multilingual mixture of peoples, had to find its tasks within this multilingual mixture of peoples. And when one asks such a question, perhaps precisely out of good Austrian consciousness, all sorts of other ideas come to mind.

For example, one can think of a German Austrian poet who is truly a child of the Austrian, even the southern Austrian mountains; a child of the Carinthian region, born high up in the Carinthian mountains and who, through an inner spiritual urge, felt compelled to descend to the educational institutions. I am referring to the extraordinarily important poet Fercher von Steinwand.

Among Fercher von Steinwand's poems, there are some very remarkable presentations. I would like to present just one example to your souls as a picture of this Austrian intellectual life, as a picture that can immediately evoke something of how the Austrian, out of his innermost, most original, most elementary intellectual urge, can be connected with certain ideas of the time. Fercher von Steinwand, who knew how to write such wonderful “German Sounds from Austria” and who was able to shape everything that moves and can move human souls from such an intimate mind, also knew how to rise with his poetry to the heights where the human spirit tries to grasp what lives and works in the innermost weaving of the world. For example, in a long poem, of which I will read only the beginning, called “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primeval Instincts).

In the boundless expanse
of our ancient mother Night,
hark! there seems to be a struggle
of the most mysterious power!
Do we hear foreboding stride?
Has longing awakened?
Has a flash of inspiration ignited?
Do dreams glide through the vastness?
How the forces of the forces intoxicate each other,
blissful exchange!
Sudden hurrying,
quiet lingering,
revelatory listening
alternates with waving
Amazed fear!
The charm of attainment
Rises, to sink,
Sinks, to hate,
White with the pale
Image of the embrace
Hatred not to grasp.
Dark ramifications
Sprouting affections
Seek for tendrils.
Heavy thoughts
Dawn and falter
Over the expanses,
Seem to guess
Or to guide.
What they prepare
Are they the seeds
Of mighty deeds,
Radiant times?
Who felt the stirred up
Creatively!
Who wandered through it,
Blissfully enjoying,
Or untangled it,
Opening up great things!
Up there it moves like a ghostly embrace,
We in warmth,
We also gain,
search and ponder,
see ourselves lifted,
highest endeavor
happily interwoven.
That blows around us,
arises in us:
“It is you, ideas! -—"

The poet sees how, as he seeks to delve into the “choir of primal urges” that are world-creative, ideas come to him. He seeks to rise up to that world that lived in the minds of the philosophers I had the honor of speaking of last week: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But we may ask ourselves how it was possible for that intimate bond to be woven in Fercher von Steinwand's soul, which must have connected him – and it really connected him – between the urge of his soul, which awakened in the simple peasant boy from the Carinthian mountains, and between what the greatest idealistic philosophers in the flowering of German world view development sought to strive for from their point of view. And so we ask: Where could Fercher von Steinwand find this, since, according to Robert Zimmermann's words, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel were not presented in Austria during Fercher von Steinwand's youth – he was born in 1828 – since they were forbidden fruit during his youth there? But the truth always comes out. When Fercher von Steinwand had graduated from high school and, equipped with his high school diploma, went to Graz to attend the University of Graz, he enrolled in lectures. And there was a lecture that the lecturer reading it on natural law was reading. He enrolled in natural law and could naturally hope that he would hear a lot of all kinds of concepts and ideas about the rights that man has by nature, and so on. But lo and behold! Under the unassuming title “Natural Law,” good Edlauer, the Graz university professor, the lawyer, spoke of nothing but Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the entire semester. And so Fercher von Steinwand took his course in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel during this time, quite independently of what might have been considered forbidden, and perhaps really was forbidden, according to an external view of Austrian intellectual life. Quite independently of what was going on at the surface, a personality who was seeking a path into the spiritual worlds was therefore immersing himself in this context with the highest intellectual endeavor.

Now, when one sets out to follow such a path into the spiritual worlds through Austrian life, one must bear in mind – as I said, I do not want to justify anything, but only give pictures – that the whole nature of this Austrian spiritual life offers many, many puzzles to those – yes, I cannot say otherwise – who are looking for a solution to puzzles. But anyone who likes to observe the juxtaposition of contradictions in human souls will find much of extraordinary significance in the soul of the Austrian. It is more difficult for the Austrian German to work his way up than in other areas, for example in German, I would say, not so much in education, but in the use of education, in participating in education. It may look pedantic, but I have to say it: it is difficult for the Austrian to participate in the use of his intellectual life simply because of the language. For it is extremely difficult for the Austrian to speak in the way that, say, the Germans of the Reich speak. He will very easily be tempted to say all short vowels long and all long vowels short. He will very often find himself saying “Son” and “Sohne” instead of “Son” and “Sonne”. Where does something like that come from? It is due to the fact that Austrian intellectual life makes it necessary – it is not to be criticized, but only described – that anyone who, I might say, works their way up from the soil of the folk life into a certain sphere of education and intellect has to take a leap over an abyss – out of the language of their people and into the language of the educated world. And of course only school gives them the tools to do so. The vernacular is correct everywhere; the vernacular will say nothing other than: “Suun”, quite long, for “Sohn”, “D'Sun”, very short, for “Sonne”. But at school it becomes difficult to find one's way into the language, which, in order to handle education, must be learned. And this leap across the abyss is what gives rise to a special language of instruction. It is this school language, not some kind of dialect, that leads people everywhere to pronounce long vowels as short vowels and short vowels as long vowels. From this you can see that, if you are part of the intellectual life, you have a gulf between you and the national character everywhere. But this national character is rooted so deeply and meaningfully, not so much perhaps in the consciousness of each individual as, one might say, in each person's blood, that the power I have hinted at is experienced inwardly, and can even be experienced in a way that cuts deep into the soul. And then phenomena come to light that are particularly important for anyone who wants to consider the place of Austrian higher intellectual life in the intellectual life of Austrian nationality and the connection between the two. As the Austrian works his way up into the sphere of education, I would say that he is also lifted into a sphere, in terms of some coinage of thought, some coinage of ideas, so that there really is a gulf to the people. And then it comes about that more than is otherwise the case, something arises in the Austrian who has found his way into intellectual life, something that draws him to his nationality. It is not a home for something that one has left only a short time ago, but rather a homesickness for something from which one is separated by a gulf in certain respects, but in relation to which one cannot, for reasons of blood, create it, find one's way into it.

And now let us imagine, for example, a mind – and it can be quite typical of Austrian intellectual life – that has undergone what an Austrian scientific education could offer it. It now lives within it. In a certain way, it is separated from its own nationality by this scientific education, which it cannot achieve with ordinary homesickness, but with a much deeper sense of homesickness. Then, under certain circumstances, something like an inner experience of the soul occurs, in which this soul says to itself: I have immersed myself in something that I can look at with concepts and ideas, that from the point of view of intelligence certainly leads me here or there to understand the world and life in connection with the world; but on the other side of an abyss there is something like a folk philosophy. What is this folk philosophy like? How does it live in those who know nothing and have no desire to know anything of what I have grown accustomed to? What does it look like over there, on the other side of the abyss? — An Austrian in whom this homesickness has become so vivid, which is much deeper than it can usually occur, this homesickness for the source of nationality, from which one has grown out, such an Austrian is Joseph Misson.

Misson, who entered a religious order in his youth, absorbed the education that Robert Zimmermann pointed out, lived in this education and was also active in this education; he was a teacher at the grammar schools in Horn, Krems and Vienna. But in the midst of this application of education, the philosophy of his simple farming people of Lower Austria, from which he had grown out, arose in him, as in an inner image of the soul, through his deep love of his homeland. And this Joseph Misson in the religious habit, the grammar school teacher who had to teach Latin and Greek, immersed himself so deeply in his people, as if from memory, that this folklore revealed itself poetically in him in a living way, so that one of the most beautiful, most magnificent dialect poems in existence was created. I will just, to paint a picture for you, recite a small piece from this dialect poetry, which was only partially published in 1850 – it was then not completed – just the piece in which Joseph Misson so truly presents the philosophy of life of the Lower Austrian farmer. The poem is called: “Da Naaz,” - Ignaz - “a Lower Austrian farmer's boy, goes abroad”. So, Naaz has grown up in the Lower Austrian farmhouse, and he has now reached the point where he has to make his way into the world. He must leave his father and mother, the parental home. There he is given the teachings that now truly represent a philosophy of life. One must not take the individual principles that the father says to the boy, but one must take them in their spiritual context; how it is spoken about the way one has to behave towards luck when it comes, towards fate ; how one should behave when this or that happens to one; how one should behave when someone does one good; how one should behave towards kind people and how towards those who do one harm. And I would like to say: to someone who has undergone his philosophical studies to the extent that he has become a theologian, this peasant philosophy now makes sense. So the father says to the Naaz when the Naaz goes out:

From the first song.
Teach your children on the road.

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
Gootsnom, wails scho soo iis! und probiast tai Glück ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and my mother were dreaming and dreaming, as you know, seeing nothing else.
What we see, work and worry about,
We do it for the children, what we don't do, is not good enough! —
If we are once a little pressed for time and are short of hands, take it easy, but find us a few decent places for the children, preferably under the shade of trees, where the fish spawn. —
If your luck turns around, so live not all the days,
Stay even, in the middle of the river, don't cut the rope too short.
Luck is round and round, so roll it back again soon.
If good luck and misfortune happen, it doesn't lie in sorrows.
Don't let anything get you down, don't let it get to the clouds.
If we're down, we'll pull through, I hope so, he'll do it again!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Kopfhängad, grod ols won amt' Heana s Prot häden gfressa:
Töös mochts schlimmi nöd guit, gidanka'r ös Guidi no pessa!
Look at the situation we are in, think about the future!
If you give us something, don't be stingy, take this and that: it's good!
Look, my dear, we realize: a little courtesy is not too much to ask for! —
It's getting more chivalrous, foreign people, it's a saying, a word of honor.
Don't be too proud, don't be afraid of a fool.
Don't open your coat, don't let your luck run out.
There are two weeks below and one above, so give an old one. If no one chips what is also often there, give a groden. Look after your health, health is allways good for the soul. What have we, who have everything in this world, if we are not healthy? Our friends and our comrades in arms! Olli, they may know us – and fools, fools is the best!

Translation:

A lesson from my father for the journey

Ignaz, now listen, what I say to you, your father says to you.
In God's name, because it has to be so, and you should seek your fortune in the wide world,
That is why I have to tell you this, and take to heart what I say to you.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that you can't make anything out of that.
You slave away, toil, work hard and weaken yourself with worry. You do this for the sake of your children; what wouldn't you do to keep them from going astray. If you have grown weak and sickly later in life, and hard times come, they will also jump in lovingly, but you can find this in proper, righteous children, helping to provide the things that the state and life demand so that we can have some relief.
If you should ever be lucky, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road, don't stray from the right path in life.
Luck is round like a ball; it rolls away from us just as easily as it comes to us. If something doesn't work out or you experience misfortune, don't talk about it to people. Stay calm; don't let anything show on your face; don't be timid; complain about everything to God only; ask him; I tell you, he makes everything better again! Acting sad, withdrawing, making sour faces, being whiny: none of this achieves anything. |
Hanging your head as if the chickens had eaten your bread:
This does not improve anything bad, let alone make the good even better!
Keep the possessions you take with you; plan for the future a little.
If someone gives you something, accept it without being ungracious and say, “May God reward you!” —
Pay attention, Ignaz; and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite! —
Don't be contrary; being away from home makes people modest; that's a saying and it's true.
Don't be tempted into gambling; don't pay too much attention to the dance floor.
Don't have your cards read; and don't seek your destiny in the dream book.
If two paths go in different directions, and one of them is new, then go the old one.
If one of them is uneven, which is often the case, then go the even one.
Guard your health; of all goods, health is the better one.
Admit it: what in the world do you really possess if you don't have your health?
-----
If you come home one day and no longer find us old people in this little room,
then we will be where your grandfather and grandmother are joyfully awaiting us,
where our benefactors will find us and our deceased relatives. Everyone will recognize us immediately – and this, Ignaz, is a very beautiful thing. Now it says:

From the second song.
How the girl leaves her father's house and gives her father's home sorrow and tears.

Vodar and Muidar said: “Good luck for all we hope for,
We wish you a long life and good health!”
“As you wish,” said Muida and wiped the tears from my eyes,
“If you want respect and honor in this world, that's how we pray."
“People set it up earlier and people later,
I and your dad, we pray, child, that no misfortune befalls you.
Go to your niece and nephew and bring them to the Moata; stop by in Piasenrait, don't stay at the Moam's, you'll find a welcome, see everything beautiful, Naaz, and say hello a lot; When you come, we will be very happy to see you, when you come home!"
The old woman cries and gives him a Guglhupf cake, a soapbox and
, in addition, a white, newly washed cloth.
Hoamlih gives him three more in a paper bag.
The Vada gives him an extra two guilders, more can't be given.
“Money, Naaz, is a piglet that won't be viable at will, Naaz."
The door opens, and Naaz looks around the room,
“Main!” says Muida, ‘that's a terrible thing to say!’
He points to the gun rack hanging just inside the door:
“Gootsnom!” Muida says, makes a cross on his forehead with a damar – and then
-----
“I'm serious, Naaz, now goodbye, take care that all is well, Naaz!
Come on, let's go to the barn, so that we know right away
Where or when or what or said that something has fallen. If you come across the Graanitz, don't take a smudge pot full of ears
Drink from a watered well, it helps for the Hungarian crown!»
Godspeed once more and once more and go out into the world with trepidation.
Hunotmal doesn't ring, they look around and beckon to their father. “Look at your sign,” cries the father of the wide world, ‘it's not valid!” “Go to the Moam,’ cries the old mother, ‘we greet you, don't forget us.’

Narration:
How Ignaz leaves his father's house and his parents see him off.

Father and mother, I bid you farewell and God bless you for all the kindness you have shown me.
I hope with all my heart that you live a long life and stay healthy.
As God wills, says the mother and wipes her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief,
If the Lord calls us from the world, we are prepared for it.
For some people it is given up earlier and for some later.
I and your father pray, Ignaz, that no misfortune befalls you.
We will walk with you for a bit and accompany you to the image of the Mother of God.
Once you are in Piasenrait, stop by at your aunt's. You will be welcomed there.
Tell her all the nice things, Ignaz, and give her our warmest regards.
If she can come, we would be very happy if she visited us.
So speaks the old mother and wraps him a crumpet, a pastry, and also a piece of white bread in a freshly washed 'cloth'. She secretly gives him three shiny new twenties, wrapped in paper. The father gives him a two-guilder piece, more he cannot give. We don't have much money, Ignaz, take what you can with good will.
Before the door opens, Ignaz looks around and takes one last look at the room.
“Oh dear,” says his mother, ‘that's a bad sign, as if you'll never see it again,’
and she dips two fingers into the holy water font hanging next to the door.
In God's name, says the mother, and makes a cross on his forehead with his thumb – and they leave. Now it's getting serious, Ignaz, now God keep you, be well, Ignaz, Let us hear from you from time to time so that we always know how you are doing or if you are sick. When you come to Graanitz, take a handful of earth beforehand,
Austrian for: border. Drink it in diluted wine, it helps against fever.
They say goodbye to you, once and again, and part sadly.
A hundred times is not enough for them to look around and wave their hands.
“Mind your ID,” the father calls from afar, ‘don't lose it.” “Go to your aunt,’ the old woman calls, ‘we send her our regards, don't forget that.’

The entire philosophy of the farming community emerges before the friar, and so vividly that one sees how intimately he has grown with it. But he is also connected to something else: to that which is so fundamentally connected to the Austrian character, to the character of the Austro-German peasantry in the Alps: to the direct, unspoilt view of nature that arises from the most direct coexistence with nature. The description of a thunderstorm is owed to what comes to life again in Joseph Misson. It vividly describes how the Naaz now travels and how he comes to a place where heath sheep graze, which a shepherd, called a Holdar there, knows how to observe closely: how they behave when a thunderstorm is coming. Now he tells himself what he sees there:

When a cloud appears in the west and it doesn't come from below, it means a thunderstorm.
“One,” he thinks, ‘is coming, the other is going, now you have to decide which way you're going.’
Get on a donkey and look – now it thunders!
Immediately again – and how it rumbles over the Beringer!
It roars and rushes powerfully into the wood, that it is completely out!
“Oh, where this breaks out, our heaven be gracious!"
Then the Holdar, takes off his hat and ‘if only,’
he looks at the Guirkan, ‘if only it doesn't scare someone!’
“Just as we are,” he says, ‘two thunderstorms are coming together.’ (This convergence of two thunderstorms is now vividly described.)
And the dog sticks its snout up in the air and sniffs the air.
He points to a swallow, which flies quietly to the barn and drinks.
Then it is quiet and sultry and the air thickens.
The birds fall asleep in the nests and the sheep bow their heads.

Reproduction:
How Ignaz gets caught in the weather and doesn't know whether to

Listen, he says to himself, sit down for a moment and think about which way you will go.
He goes to the heath and looks around – suddenly there is a clap of thunder,
followed by another, and how it rumbles over the mountains!
It creaks and hisses mightily in the wood, as if it were completely dead. Well, may the Lord have mercy on anyone this happens to, says the lad to himself, taking off his coat, saying, looking at the clouds, just hoping it doesn't start raining. It seems to me, he says, like two thunderstorms mixed together. And the dog lifts its muzzle to sniff the air, then, sensing no danger, draws its tail between its legs, goes over to the lad and lies down beside him. Now it is quiet and sultry, and the leaves tremble in the trees, the birds sleep in their nests, and the sheep put their heads together.

The good Naaz is aware of all this, and then the poet, who has meanwhile described how the Naaz entered “a Lucka” - a rock cave, a stone cave - waits there until the worst is over. Then he hangs his boots on the other shoulder and continues on his way. But the adventure with the weather is not over yet. Naaz comes to a little stream; which has of course swelled due to the weather. Naaz sees that:

"Look, the stream is so big, now I can't go around! —
Töös owa», sockt a, «wiat toh wos sain? iozt kan ik nid umi!»
He looks like a fool, the stream is too big, now he cannot cross it.
But something like that, he says, what could it be? Now I cannot cross it!

Now, in such a way, Misson, this man who really created from the depths of the folk tradition, wanted to embody the figure of Naaz. When one takes on such a figure, one sees how deeply, deeply in the subconscious soul, I could say, Austrian nationality sits with those souls who have also worked their way up into a high sphere of education. And one sees from such an example what remains of nationality for the soul in the higher sphere of education when one looks at this Austrian nationality.

One must say: mystics, in the sense that the human soul really delves into its inner life, really tries to understand what lives and moves within man, such mystics are not really found in Austria. Mystics who deal a lot with the human ego cannot flourish there. On the other hand, to feel the mysterious forces of nature in a certain way, more than just poetically, I would say, to feel the gnomes, the goblins, the spirits of nature in their liveliness, also with a certain humor, so that at the right moment you do not feel compelled to admit the full reality, but to feel in the co-experience of nature that which lives and moves in nature as a higher spiritual being – that is Austrian again. Therefore, within the Austro-German national character, it is not easy to find mystics who could be successors of Eckhart, Johannes Tauler.

On the other hand, the remarkable peasant philosopher Conrad Deubler is a truly Austrian figure. He was born in 1814 in Goisern, in the middle of the mountains, and died there in 1884 as an innkeeper. He was and remained a true farmer; but a man who so he has grasped it vividly, has penetrated it with his peasant wisdom, with a certain, I would say, curt peasant wisdom, — Conrad Deubler, such a philosopher could flourish; a philosopher who did not get involved in lengthy justifications, but liked this doctrine, and now he took from the Austrian mind everything to make this teaching appear plausible. From a primitive, elementary, rustic understanding he brought about, I might say, a Darwinian conception adapted to the Austrian peasant, by means of which he was able to carry on a copious correspondence with the great theologian and writer David Friedrich Strauss, with Feuerbach, with Ernst Haeckel, and so on. To grasp the whole expanse of nature with the intellect is more to the taste of the Austrian soul than to mystically immerse oneself in it. Therefore, one finds individual people among Austrian farmers who know every little herb in the mountains, who are also spiritually connected to the inner workings of each little herb, who, for example, engage with philosophers such as Ennemoser and Eckartshausen, who want to give a certain deeper picture of nature in its entirety, and who also want to place the human being in this picture of nature. But within this Austrian peasantry and that which arises from this peasantry, one will not easily find a pure mystic who engages in the contemplation of the human soul, averting his gaze from the external world of the senses. For it is the direct connection with that which makes an impression on the senses that characterizes the Austrian mind in the broadest sense for anyone who sees it – the seeing of more than the sensual, but the direct seeing – the seeing that does not need to reflect, that seeing that, I might say, sometimes skips the mind and goes directly to the heart.

Therefore, it can be said that in Austrian poetry, the soul and the landscape resonate with each other directly, sometimes in a way that is so moving, as in the case of Lena; but in general, this absorption of the whole soul in what can be done directly by a person, what can be accomplished by him without it being related to immediate usefulness, - that is something that belongs to the emotional qualities of the Austrian.

I would like to say, on the one hand, on this side of the Leitha, in the Austrian mountains, in the Austrian regions, there is something that can be depicted in a picture, as I attempted with Joseph Misson. On the other side of the Leitha, you are immediately in touch with the wide-open spaces of the Hungarian steppes; but you also live with what resounds in the sensual, I would say, spiritually, which the sensual tries to exhaust spiritually as much as it can be exhausted. Anyone who has ever crossed over to Hungary and listened to a Hungarian band, with all that these people put of their souls into their simple and wonderful playing, in which pain rages demonically, the lust and the exuberance of life at the same time, understands a poem like that of the Hungarian Szäz, which refers to this direct coexistence with the sensual, but which is felt spiritually, deeply spiritually and emotionally:

Listen, oh listen to the violin's song.
How it laments and how it weeps;
So much sorrow in four strings,
So much pain and grief combined!

Like the nightingales' flutes
In the silent, shadowy forest,
How the sobs of the abandoned orphan

That is lament, that is sorrow,
Which oppresses and yet uplifts,
Which weeps for the past, yet hopefully
Lives for a beautiful future.

Listen, a curse is heard – and swords
Mix clashing into the But a little fiddle bow.

Hear, oh hear the violin sounds,
How it spurs and laughs and cries,
In four strings such feeling,
So much joy and pain combined! —

You have to look very closely to understand the relevant things, you have to look very closely at the intimate interweaving of the senses with the outside world, so that the senses, in their interweaving with the outside world within the sensual, can more easily see the spiritual than when this spiritual awakens intellectually in the mind. It can be said that when it comes to making a judgment directly from the heart, to criticizing or approving the world, the Austrian will, under certain circumstances, have a little confidence in himself. He will also, especially if he has learned something, like to move in abstract terms, he will like to give something to the culture of the head, but above all want to be rooted in the culture of the heart. But the way from the head to the heart, the way from the heart to the head, is just so long, and it is so difficult to find! Often one easily stops in the middle!

It is, in a sense, quite characteristic of what, for example, a good connoisseur of Austrian culture, a contemporary, said about an Austrian personality, the former director of the Burgtheater in Vienna, Max Burckhard: that despite all his energy, the most characteristic thing about this quintessentially Austrian man, Max Burckhard, was that he never really wanted to undergo the transition from feeling to understanding or from understanding to feeling. He wanted to keep them both separate. While Max Burckhard was director of the Vienna Burgtheater, Hermann Bahr recounts, and Wilbrandt's play 'The Master of Palmyra' was to be performed at the Burgtheater, a play that is considered by many to be particularly significant and that for many is something tremendously high-minded, Burckhard did not want to stage the play. He could not understand why something so significant was seen in it; he always rejected it. So it was that well-meaning people, that is, people who meant well by Wilbrandt and the “Master of Palmyra,” managed to at least get Burckhard to attend a lecture on the “Master of Palmyra” in a really high-level society. He knew the piece, of course, but it was not to be read to him, but all the beautiful, aesthetic passages, the treatises were to have an effect on him, which the invited real professors and asthetics had to present about the mastery of this piece. Well, Burckhard was really a very clever man who, when it came down to it, was able to dialectically stand his ground and get into the spiritual ideas. He listened to the lecture. He did not just listen to the lectures of the aesthetes and professors, who said that something had been created “from the depths of human nature that points to the highest regions of spiritual life”. He also listened to how the beautiful characteristics are to be understood according to all chapters of aesthetics. He was silent. He did not allow himself to follow these trains of thought in any way. He could understand them, of course. It would have been easy for him to refute the matter from his point of view, to get involved in it. On another occasion, he might have done so, getting involved in long-winded discussions about the matter. He remained silent, he said nothing. Then ladies, especially the lady of the house, approached him: didn't he at least want to say how he related to all the witty remarks about one of the most witty plays ever written. Was it not the duty of the Burgtheater to perform the epoch-making play? But he did not engage in a discussion. He said: “I'm not putting it on!” And why? Why? They wanted to hear from him, the witty man, how he related to all the things that had been discussed wittily for hours. He just said: “Because it's a Holler!” — “A Holler” is something that means the same in Austria as “quatsch” in Berlin. But he did not engage in a discussion. That is to be taken as characteristic. He relied on his immediate judgment of the heart, on what his mind told him, and he did not find it necessary to engage in discussions of dialectics and so on; his whole criticism was that it is a “Holler”.

And so it is interesting to see, actually, how at a time when the most wonderful and glorious discussions were being held within the rest of the German-speaking world about the significance, nature and essence of drama, discussions in which Goethe and Schiller participated in such a profound way – I am referring in particular to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century – how in this period a discussion of aesthetics, of the meaning and essence of drama, was also ignited in Austria. But how was the discussion of drama ignited there in Austria? In a very strange way, everything that was presented there for and against this way of thinking ignited in Austria; what was discussed in such a well-known profound way within the Schiller-Goethe circle and the broader circles of the whole of German intellectual life, all of this ignited in Austria in a very peculiar way, namely through dance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two types of dance were the subject of a very energetic and significant discussion there. At the turn of the century, Noverre was the master of dance; and his student was then Muzzarelli. Muzzarelli represented a dance, a style of dance, in which the main thing was to make beautiful movements, artificial movements, to intertwine artificial movements through their lines, where the external spatial image of presenting oneself was taken into account. Now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an opponent of this 'dance form' emerged in the person of Salvatore Vigano. And for this dance form of Salvatore Vigano, whose wife in particular danced the dance form he represented in a masterly fashion, whole texts were written, which did not apply to any other dance form. Whole stories, whole narratives were clothed in the dance form, so that the situations, the gestures, the form of expression, the events, the content to be told, were expressed. And now one should just delve into the far-reaching, passion-stirring discussions that have arisen about which dance is artistically the right one.

There was the Austrian playwright Ayrenhoff, who had already grown old at the time, the author of a large number of plays, who was completely on the side of the Muzzarelli dance, who spoke out most negatively against Salvatore Vigano and against the impossibility of expressing inner feelings through dance in such an unchaste way. Ayrenhoff could not understand that they even wanted to dance entire pieces, such as 'Richard the Lionheart' or 'The Daughter of the Air'. Ayrenhoff had been educated in the appreciation of beautiful form, of the sweep of lines, and his dramas were also constructed in this way. The sweep of lines in the portrayal of characters, seeing how some situation dissolves into a joke, or the transition of a situation into a joke, that was what mattered. These extraordinary forms were what mattered. He saw this in Muzzarelli's dance as well. And he was an important poet for Austria at that time. His importance can be seen from the fact that he received extraordinary recognition from Frederick the Great, who otherwise had no interest in German literature of the time. And “The Stagecoach”, a comedy by Ayrenhoff, Frederick the Great called “the best comedy that is written at all except the comedies of Moliere”. Yes, Frederick the Great went so far as to once show himself at a parade of the field marshal lieutenant - because that was Ayrenhoff and at the same time a poet - because he, Frederick the Great, was so interested in him.

On the other side, on Viganos' side, was Heinrich Joseph von Collin, who came from Belgium; but in a sense, Belgium belonged to Austria at that time. He had written the tragedy “Regulus,” but also other plays. Collin now advocated expression in dance with great enthusiasm. And he now staged his dramas in such a way that they expressed inwardness in what was being portrayed; that it was not so much about the way situations and jokes followed one another, about the external forms, but rather that the inner nature of the human being was expressed in what happened on stage. And Robert Zimmermann, who is deeply rooted in Austrian intellectual life, has spoken very beautifully of this Heinrich Collin, showing that this Heinrich Collin, who is basically also completely forgotten in Austria, but who But who can lead us deep into the course of Austrian intellectual life, who knew nothing of Fichte, and in his dramas revived the same kind of soul-feeling that lay in Fichte's philosophical representations. To make matters worse, Heinrich Collin's brother, Matthäus von Collin, has explicitly shown how Heinrich Collin knew nothing of Fichte, how he arrived at Fichteanism, but in a poetic way, in his Austrian way, entirely out of a strange parallelism of intellectual life, in the way that I have just described.

Without reflecting on the intuition, without merging into the intuition, Fichte comes back to what I described eight days ago. He says: The outer sense world, that which man lives out in the sensual, outer existence, is the sensualized material of our duty. Now that duty confronts him in such a deeply objective way and at the same time becomes related to the divine weaving and being that permeates the world, Fichte comes to say: one must not think in such a way that external sensual happiness could be bestowed on the one who faithfully fulfills his duty, but — even if this is somewhat one-sided, in the way it is presented, the energy of a certain striving of German idealism expresses itself in it; things must not be taken dogmatically – but what Fichte says is: the one who is completely absorbed in his duty must not claim that the reward for it will somehow be found in the external world of the senses. Therefore, the truly tragic – and this was Fichte's conviction – will appear when duty does not find any reward, but rather finds misfortune in the external world.

Heinrich Collin presents the same tendency in his plays. He wants to embody in a dramatic way the human soul that is built upon itself, that can live within itself without combining the happiness of the sensual world with duty. And so a deeply ethical trait emerges, but one that is intimately connected with the direct contemplation of the world as it presents itself to the senses; one that has even emerged from an aesthetics that has been formed through dance.

This close connection with observation, this life in direct perception and also the placing of what the heart experiences in direct perception, the reluctance to seek the way from the head to the heart, must be seen as one of the characteristics that are really deeply connected with this Austrian intellectual life.

And so many things in this Austrian spiritual life appear to us in such a way that contradictions are present in it, but contradictions that, if one lets them take effect in the right way, seem understandable in people who, within Europe, are placed in difficult tasks, in the mediation of the West with the East, and, I would like to say, must feel this placing in every detail of their way of life.

One can say: Wherever we touch this Austrian intellectual life, it appears to us as follows: the innermost is directly fanned in the outer world, without the mediation of a mystical dialectic. And from this underground, a phenomenon as likeable as the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri can be explained – as I said, I only want to present images. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of an Austrian civil servant; deformed from birth (he was a twin), he already went through a difficult, painful youth, and then, after he had familiarized himself with the diversity of Austrian intellectual life, he became acquainted with Darwinism. For Carneri, Darwinism is not something that he simply accepts, but rather, for him, Darwinism becomes a life riddle itself. That the world, in the sense of Darwinism, can be explained by the externally observable development, is understandable to him, despite the fact that he has immersed himself deeply in German idealism. But in a certain respect, Darwinism becomes a life riddle for Carneri, the Austrian philosopher: If Darwinism is correct, what about human morality, human ethics? And so Bartholomew of Carneri becomes, one might say, the greatest ethicist, the greatest moral teacher of Darwinism. He interprets Darwinism in such a way that he seeks within the purely natural development, how the forces of nature complicate up to man, so that he still sees a spiritualization in this complication of the forces of nature, as they configure themselves. He does not want a rift between nature and spirit, but he does not want to stop at nature. He wants to chase the spirit out of itself in the configuration of the forces of nature. At the same time, he wants to find the connection between human ethics and human moral life and the explanation of nature in terms of Darwinism. Thus, for Carneri, the necessity to create an ethic arises directly from the world that appears vivid to him through Darwinism. I would like to say that what the human heart wants and needs to set before itself must be directly connected to the secrets and mysteries of nature. And it is particularly interesting to see in Bartholomäus von Carneri how he now strives for a unified world view, for a world view that fully embraces Darwinism in the spirit of the times, in the spirit of nineteenth-century materialism, but can only embrace it if if spirituality springs and can spring everywhere in nature itself, but a spirituality that is grasped directly in feeling, that is not first brought down from some transcendental spheres, as with Fichte, but that appears to him directly during the experience of sensuality. It is remarkable how the characteristic of Austrianism appears precisely in such a personality, in a personality like Carneri, who, however, also wants to place himself uniformly in the world in a different way, who everywhere sets out to show how, on the one hand, nature reaches up to the spirit, and on the other hand, the spirit works down to nature, how a unity lives in everything. Carneri also sought to depict this unity in life. He sought to bring it into life. And so one of the personalities arises, who appeared in particular in the 1860s and 1870s in Austria as fine minds, one of the personalities who were then also politically active. Carneri was on the side of the intellectual Austrian politicians of the 1870s, Plener, Beer, Herbst, Berger and so on. But wherever he spoke – and he often spoke – his words were imbued with a lofty idealism, but precisely with an idealism rooted in Darwinism, which was aware of its roots in Darwinism: I may be an idealist because my ideals come to me directly when I immerse myself in the development of nature.

It is the same spirit, in another field, that then again held sway in Robert Hamerling. In Robert Hamerling, in whom, I might say, the Austrian German found expression in the fact that Hamerling's motto was: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland,” which combined good Austrian-ness with good German-ness. In this Hamerling everything that can be called the interpenetration of idealism with direct feeling and with intuition found direct expression. Even in Austria, where people might have been better able to understand it, Hamerling's vividly sensual images, I would say sensually imbued images, were often condemned, for example in his “Ahasver,” also in “Aspasia” and in “King of Sion.” But they did not understand that it was precisely Hamerling's idealism, which I would call Austrian idealism, that needed the sensory image to visualize itself in, so as not to suffer from the division of the world into the sensual on the other. And so for Hamerling the spiritualized sensual, the aesthetic idealism, became the goal toward which he directed his whole feeling, his whole perception and his whole thinking as a vision of the future. And in many respects it is precisely in the case of such intellectuals as Carneri and Hamerling that the difficulties of Austrian intellectual life come to light, difficulties which consist in the fact that one is placed in a multiform surging mass of humanity and has to find one's way. Hence the phenomena that so often occur within Austrian intellectual life, where a clear view of this or that remains with mere description and does not somehow find its way into action and then peter out in a certain pessimism. Hence certain phenomena are only possible in Austrian intellectual life.

Is it not really somewhat strange that there was an Austrian in the first half of the nineteenth century who was born near Znaim, who bore the typically Austrian name Karl Postl, who also became a clergyman at his mother's request, but then, like the Barnabite monk Karl Leonhard Reinhold, also cast off the robe of the order and disappeared? He has disappeared. Then a book appears: “Austria as it Is,” from America; it describes Austrian views. That was in 1828. Then, from this same Karl Postl, who called himself not Karl Postl but Charles Sealsfield, appear, for example, descriptions of the decline of the Native Americans, from which one can see how fundamentally sound this man's direct view of nature is. No one at that time had any idea that the simple Karl Postl from Austria was hidden in this Charles Sealsfield. All the stories that otherwise appear on similar subjects – just see for yourself – are written, so to speak, from the point of view of a certain education, written in a certain way, so that you notice the theory. These Postl stories are written in such a way that the eye immediately grows into what it sees; the whole soul grows together with direct perception. He then spends his lifetime from the age of thirty to the age of sixty in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland, where he is also buried. He returns and describes the life of Germans in America in such a vivid way that it should still have a significant effect on the soul today, if only it were read.

A specifically Austrian phenomenon is also a personality, whom not only the younger, but perhaps the older members of the audience gathered here have met, those books that are written, as is modestly stated on the title page, “for maidens”; “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” it says. A story, a wonderfully vivid story, steeped in a Goethean, one might almost say, Greek spirit. On the title page it says: “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” by Christian Oeser, “Letters on the Main Subjects of Aesthetics.” Published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the first edition, these books experienced many editions. Those who read them today still get something from them that can expand the heart, that can warm the soul. Christian Oeser - yes, who is Christian Oeser? This Christian Oeser is the same man who, for example, had a drama published in Pressburg in 1839 that nobody knew the author of – “Life and Deeds of Emerich Tököly” “by A. Z.”, that is, from A to Z, so that all the letters between A and Z are included. Those who understood something about dramatic characterization saw in the figure of Tököly a Hungarian Götz. It is a portrayal that can be directly compared to Goethe's “Götz von Berlichingen”, which was born out of the struggles that took place in Hungary shortly before the drama was written and that moved many, many souls and the world. The drama went out into the world, and so did several others by the same author. No one knew who it was from. That remained so. In 1869, the German Schiller Foundation took a decision to pay the then support allowance to a Mrs. Therese Schröer in Vienna. The document with which the allowance was paid stated that it had been learned that the widow of one of the most worthy German writers was not living in circumstances befitting her and his merits, and that she was therefore being paid this annual allowance. It was the widow of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, the author of many plays, who had to remain unnamed, the author also of that “Weihgeschenkes für Jungfrauen”, which is imbued with the spirit of Goethe; a quiet man who was a secondary school teacher in Preßburg, but who, as such, wrestled with the highest problems of human life, who was poor and whom no one knew. Even in his own town no one could or might know that this man was the author of these dramas.

Many similar phenomena could be cited. They show that in order to get to know Austrian intellectual life, one must not consider it in terms of what, I mean, goes as a more or less Catholic, as a more or less Protestant current through the development of the times but how one must grasp this Austrian intellectual life where it works out of the root of the people and where it can appear directly in its great significance. One must not look at Austrian intellectual life through the lens of the fact that Austria is a more Catholic country. On the one hand, this Austrian intellectual life works its way to the roots of the nation, as we have seen with Misson; on the other hand, however, it works its way up to great heights in a remarkable way. Consider, for example, the following phenomena: When the Protestant pedagogue Friedrich Dittes, who was brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development and placed at the head of the K.K. When the Protestant pedagogue, who had been brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development, looked around for important pedagogues of the immediate past, he, the Protestant pedagogue who had been brought from Germany, found the Austrian Vincenz Eduard Milde to be one of the most important pedagogues of the immediate past. In 1811, Milde published an “educational theory”. In Misson, we have come to know a mind that, clothed in the robes of a religious order, worked its way up to what I would call the management of educational life, and then worked its way back down to the roots of folklore, creating his “Naaz”: peasant philosophy! In Milde we see another priest, a good Catholic; a Catholic in whom Friedrich Dittes, the Protestant pedagogue, finds one of his most important pedagogical predecessors. Spiritual life reaches out across the differences of confession in a wonderful way. Instead of a long further description, I would like to read you just one passage from Milde's theory of education, so that you can see how, in this book, published in 1811, educational work is understood in a soul-drenched way; how, in contrast to on, who worked his way down into the people, to the highest views, the most ideal views of general human activity through pedagogy, the Catholic priest Milde works his way up, how seriously, how dignified, how tremendously deep he takes the pedagogical profession. He describes how the teacher should behave in order to gain the right relationship with the pupil; first:

"1. Through diligent study of anthropology; 2. through reading well-written biographies and truthfully portrayed educational histories; 3. through thoughtful interaction with children, through unnoticed, quiet observation of them, especially of their behavior towards other children; 4. by remembering his own youth, by reflecting on the course, the reasons, the means and obstacles his own education, on the difference between his present and former way of thinking and feeling; 5. by reflecting on the success and failure of his efforts in educating the pupil; 6. by observing the methods of other educators and the success of their way of treating the children”; - finally - ‘7. by observing the course of development of nature left to itself.’

The meaning of life should be built on a healthy anthropology, that is, the study of man. Then the teacher should constantly consult with himself, as it were, meditating, in order to always find the way to the child's soul. A truly soul-filled educational vision is also poured out on this quite remarkable work, which arose, so to speak, in the quiet of Austrian intellectual life through a man who was a clergyman in the outer life, who rose to become Archbishop of Vienna and who, in his way, truly represents that Austrian intellectual life to which one attaches such great importance and to which one must attach such great importance; that Austrian intellectual life that is directed towards the general human and basically maintains the connection with the roots of the people everywhere. Yes, I say, in 1811 a leading work on education appeared in Austria that had a great impact and was also highly praised by the Protestant pedagogue Dittes in the 1860s and 1870s. It was published again very recently by the Austrian pedagogue Franz Tomberger in a short outline. One must only consider what that means. In 1811, it had only been a short time since teachers in very, very remote areas of the Austrian lands, namely the German-Austrian lands, had a very strange position, not only in the village but also in the city. Not only did the teacher not have a school building – in many areas, shortly before this “Erziehungslehre” was published, a school building was a rarity; the students gathered around the teacher, the teacher went from house to house, sometimes he was there, sometimes in the next house; wherever there was space, he taught. But that was not the only thing. For example, paying the teacher a salary, yes, that would not have been understood; that is something that must be given freely! But the teacher only needed to teach the students in winter; in summer, the children were needed outside in the fields anyway. Well, so that he doesn't starve, he is granted the right to herd cows during the summer, to be a “Holdar”. But that did not prevent all that I have just described from happening. And that did not prevent a work on the art of education from appearing after such a relatively short time in Austrian intellectual life that it was not only exemplary but also epoch-making. One has to familiarize oneself with this juxtaposition of contradictions that arise from the difficulties of Austrian life.

But this is also why the Austrian needs what appeared in the most diverse forms in Viennese life in the course of the nineteenth century. Actually, a piece of Viennese life is also what you were able to get to know here in Berlin some time ago, although it had been quite “de-Viennified” to a certain extent, as connoisseurs generally admitted – what you were able to get to know through the performance of “Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind” by Ferdinand Raimund, with the character of Rappelkopf, and, what is also well known from the same author, “Verschwender”. I do not want to speak of a well-known matter, but rather show how Austrian intellectual life can be illustrated here and there, as it were, by the splashing of a wave that makes visible in pictures what lives in Austria. Therefore, I want to speak less about Ferdinand Raimund than about the man who replaced him in the hearts of the Viennese in the 1830s and 1840s, when Raimund had become very much a part of their lives: Nestroy. And Johann Nestroy, as a folk dramatist, is, I would say, truly an Austrian product. Indeed, one has even had to hear from some clever people of the present day that Nestroy is even characterized by his fellow countrymen as not being a real Viennese, because in the early days of his career, in particular, he only told the Viennese rough truths, not only created folk plays where honest people are always right, but where he could really, forgive the harsh expression, give the people a piece of his mind. Plays like these made up the content of his first theatrical career. He actually created a great deal; in thirteen years, he wrote around seventy such farces. But they truly contain that Austrian spirit that those who know it recognize as being truly embodied in Nestroy. It is not true that the Austrians of that time wanted to hear honest portrayals of characters from the theater, of people who recognize the simplicity of life. No, that was then and Nestroy grew out of it – what was demanded was that one could say: Now he has given them what for again, that is, he has really given them a telling-off. And with such a scolding, Nestroy, himself playing at the Vienna Karl Theater, actually entertained the Viennese so much that one can say: one sees in the spirit that lives in these Nestroy folk farces, one might say folk city farces, the Austrian spirit that needs to, in the criticism of life as well as in the jokes about life, in the humor of life, to overcome many a difficulty; who needed to let his soul feel at ease after hard work in a light way, and yet in a way that was not entirely free of sympathy and antipathy. And so Nestroy is truly a typical figure of Austrian urban popular theater around the mid-nineteenth century. He had his view of life and of the events of life expressed by a character in the following manner: “I believe the worst of everyone, even of myself, and I have seldom been mistaken!” With this view of life, he, who was personally kind and loving, and who in personal dealings actually had only kind and loving words, really created character figures that easily illustrate the view of life of the Austrians in Vienna at that time , that Austrianness that wanted to be hard at work, but that wanted to build a philosophy of life from the heart, without much dialectic, that also had to have humor, that also should not exaggerate the seriousness of life too much. There was a lot in the way of facing life. So Nestroy created a character that kept reappearing under this name or under a different name; once he called him “Schnofer!” And this Schnoferl also had an attitude towards life. For example, he once talks about how he fared in life with love: “With love, things went splendidly for me, it was all right, but with dislike, things are always bad!” This same Schnoferl, who, as I said, cannot see the funny side of life, once said about what he saw in his own heart: “The pragmatic story of my heart falls into three miserable chapters: futile musings, failed attempts and worthless triumphs.” Those are the three miserable chapters. Nestroy portrayed such characters with great acuity, so much so that an important Viennese critic once said: “In Nestroy, you could see the demonic expression that could intensify to the point of being devilish when he let his eyes play from the stage into the audience.” And so Nestroy expressed well a certain Austrian view of life in need of humor in the years before 1848, or even from the beginning of the forties.

Then came a time when one could not bear this outpouring of good and evil, this Nestroyan world beyond good and evil, of good, over-good and evil people, for a while. One wanted more honest figures, one wanted to be moved more and sworn at less. One had had enough of swearing for a while, one wanted to be moved. Nestroy didn't really like that, and so he said: Yes, in the past people still knew something about what a life story is; in modern times, if you go by those who now create life stories for the stage, if there are only three jokes in it - in Nestroy's plays there was one joke after another - there are only corpses in their blood, gravediggers and blubberers. He didn't really want to go along with that. But then again, he was able to keep up with the times. And so Nestroy found a peculiar, I would even say humanly free point of view, especially during the difficult year of 1848. He was a liberal man, he was a man who was thoroughly on the side of the progressives, who did not depend on anyone in any direction, but at the same time he found the right words for many a cry for freedom, for those who only go so far. And so he managed to maintain Austrian humor even in these difficult times. Just look at this: in a play that was written during one of Austria's most difficult times, “Freedom in Krähwinkel” – he also played in this play himself – this Austrian describes how the mayor of Krähwinkel imagines freedom. He has the constable Klaus express it: “Freedom is something terrible. The Lord Mayor always says: the ruler is the father, the subject is a little child, and freedom is a sharp knife.” And one of those who, in a Nestroyesque way, understands this a little, who also understands the people of Krähwinkel in their pursuit of freedom, characterizes them in the same way: ”No, I know the people of Krähwinkel. I know the Krähwinkler, you just have to let them run riot; once the rapture is over, we'll catch them with our hand in it, and then we'll really tweak the people's nose.” In the role that Nestroy himself played, to which he gave the name ‘Ultra’, a freedom fighter now appears who is really portrayed in such a way that humor can once again take hold of him. Nestroy spoke the following through the Ultra: “Now that the fight that had broken out has ended happily, he proclaims freedom: 'I proclaim freedom of speech, of the press and other freedoms for Crowwinkel, indifference of all classes, free speech, free elections according to previous opinion, an infinitely broad basis, which will gradually extend in length, and in order to avoid all disputes in this matter, no system at all.” Then Ultra comes – one must always imagine him as presented by Nestroy himself – to an opinion about what reaction actually is. What is reaction? “Well,” says Ultra, ‘as it was on a large scale, so we have had it here on a small scale. Reaction is a spectre, but spectres only exist for the timid: so don't be afraid of it, then there will be no reaction at all.’

But in Nestroy's personality itself there is something like a thoroughly correct placing of his own personality in life. A person like Nestroy was thoroughly a personality who was accessible to the depths of the soul. But what he created, he wanted to create from direct life and for direct life. And so Nestroy is not at all inclined to reflect on the ego. Once, he came into contact with the profound, inestimably esteemed poet Friedrich Hebbel, the great poet Hebbel. But Hebbel and Nestroy were like the north and south poles. Friedrich Hebbel, outwardly impeccable in his suit, correct in every gesture, Nestroy naughty in every gesture, with a rustic suit that he wore with particular dignity! Now Nestroy became acquainted with a play like “Judith and Holofernes”, a play in which Hebbel has actually exhausted the infinite depths of the human soul and embodied them in dramatic form so that one must say: It is truly a wonderful struggle with the existential problems of life, reaching the heights of the human spirit, but not for Nestroy, one might be tempted to say, because it cannot be readily and directly taken humorously. But he took it humorously, precisely as a taunt, saying, “No, that's nothing!” He also thought, “That's a nonstarter!” I'll do a Holofernes now, Judith and Holofernes, that must be the right thing; that's not something that Hebbel did.” But now he wanted to create a character in Holofernes who was so completely turned inward, to his human ego. Nestroy was very good at creating a character who acted entirely out of the abundance of the soul's will and wanted something. But he only wanted into this ego in a genuinely Austrian way, so to speak. Yes, not through speculation, not through dialectics, not even through dramatic dialectics! So he presents himself as a figure of Holofernes, full of ego, full of the power of personality, so strong that he wants to see who is stronger, “I” – or, as he said – “I or I!” – so that he feels doubly. So he wants to wrestle with himself, so that he sees who is stronger, I or I. That becomes Nestroy's Holofernes. But he knows how to position himself in life just right. And when he hears that people say that he denies a purely artistic principle with his plays that are directly inspired by folklore, well, he says that he will not allow such an accusation, because people should consider what it actually means to write folk plays. Anyone who writes popular plays and even wants to compare himself to Goethe is just like someone who makes a Zwetschkenkrampus and wants to act as a rival to Canova. A Zwetschkenkrampus is a figure made out of dried plums on St. Nicholas' Day to look like a clown or Santa Claus.

We also need to be thoroughly familiar with this side of Austrian identity. Because it is deeply, deeply interwoven with what the Austrian soul seeks in a certain view of life, which I would characterize in the following way: Because of the difficulties of his life, the Austrian feels the need to rest in a view of life that makes one forget the seriousness of life and yet, in turn, brings strength in the subconscious soul to be prepared for life. Nestroy is certainly deeper than those who took over from him at the end of the nineteenth century. You cannot compare Nestroy's farces with those of Berg, who certainly wrote more in the same period, but had sunk to a much lower level. But this peculiar view of life, which in turn goes back to a general human one, is part of the overall shaping of this Austrian's soul. And this view of life also shows that in Austria something comes from much deeper human sources and shapes the life of the soul than all that which is usually conceived of as ideas that draw together human development. One must not think of the Austrian as being wrapped up in this or that prejudice, but to get to know him, one must consider Austrian national character. |

I have only been able to present it to your minds in a few images today; I have not really chosen them with the aim of making the Austrian lovable, but simply to describe him as he is. I did not want to summarize anything special, but only to show individual traits, of course very individual lost traits, but which can nevertheless illustrate this or that, illustrate above all how a special note, a special tone, lives in this Austrian character, over the whole of this Austrian culture, from such figures as I have described to you today, to the Magyar Emmerich Madách, the man who created the well-known “Tragedy of Man”. Out of a life of suffering, and truly out of a life of suffering, Madách rose to create a form of human philosophy that suited him. He shows the creation of man, Adam and Eve. He shows how Adam and Eve are placed in the world by the divine creator, perceiving this world as a mystery. Now Lucifer shows them what will follow. Adam is shown how he will live again, how he will return in Egyptian times, how he will live as an Egyptian, as a pharaoh; how Eve will be his slave. The Egyptian culture with all that it can trigger in the soul of the re-embodied Adam is presented by the poet. And further, we are led into the Roman period; Adam is reborn in the time of the Roman Empire. In the time of Christianity, in turn, in the time of the Franco-English culture, in the time of the German culture; at the end of the earth time, he is placed in an embodiment. The whole of human life is led past him.

As one can see, there are many paths that lead up from the depths of joy and suffering that can arise in the Austrian soul, up to the peaks of human world and life views. And it is a special note that one must say: It is precisely through the contemplation of this special note, this special 'tone in Austrian folklore that it already corresponds to an inner necessity that, for example, the German-Austrians were separated for a time from the general German intellectual life. It was precisely through this separation that they developed their innermost selves properly, that they emphasized what was truly their own in the right way. But such a separation does not destroy what connects the peoples. And what we see today, this interaction of the two Central European empires into a great overall concept of Central Europe, into an overall being of Central Europe, is firmly anchored in both the inhabitants of the one and the inhabitants of the other empire, if one looks straight into the depths of the soul. This can be seen in the depths of the national character, for example, where the will of Austria is realized, and again in the heights of Austrian achievement. When, as it seemed, a deep rift had opened up in 1866 between the hearts of the great German Empire and the hearts of the best Austrians, there was not a mood at the height of humanity after that year 1866 that cried out for revenge. There was not a mood that was later in other places, after a people had been defeated, where it was said that one must always and again and again bring the thought of revenge to life in one's soul. No, but an 'Address was delivered to the throne immediately after 1866 in Austria, which contained the words; 'It is not the secret thought of retaliation that guides our steps; a nobler satisfaction is granted to us if we succeed more and more in transforming disfavor and enmity into respect and affection through what we achieve and what we create.

These words also express the bond between the Austrian and German hearts that has been so beautifully realized today. That bond, which is expressed so beautifully in a poem by von Hamerling that truly springs from the Austrian soul: Germany is my fatherland, but in Austria I feel my motherland. I feel a sense of belonging to my mother country. This sense of belonging was so vividly experienced that it can be expressed in a few words that originated in Austria. These are strange words, perhaps not in a completely satisfactory form, but they are words that may be read aloud, especially in our time. I will say afterwards in which period these words were written. In a poem entitled “Austria and Germany” it says:

Let Russia and England prudently confer,
Perhaps not even unhappily find it,
If we here engage in a little battle,
If they try to take away our just rights!

You, German brothers, will not advise here –
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us every ambition will fade
Before the: One people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has existed anywhere in German hearts,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:

What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So let us also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

They could be words written in our time. But they were written in April 1859 by the son of that Tobias Gottfried Schröer I mentioned, by Karl Julius Schröer, who worked in Vienna, having come from Zisleithania, in Austria. He worked in a way that can be said to have been suitable for, on the one hand, connecting the soul with what lives and weaves in the people and, on the other hand, carrying the souls up to the heights of spiritual life – Karl Julius Schröer, who first developed a beneficial activity as director of the Viennese Protestant schools and then as professor of German literature at the Technical University. I myself feel — please excuse this personal remark — deeply connected with this activity, because Karl Julius Schröer was once my dear teacher. This Karl Julius Schröer, on the one hand, he carried his popular research into the really deep foundations of folklore. First of all, he had Christmas plays printed that were performed among the farmers during the Christmas season but that had emerged from the people themselves. Then he was a dialect researcher, a researcher who studied the peculiarities of the Austrian dialect in the Gottschee region in Carniola, among the Germans of Spiš in Slovakia, among the so-called Heanz in western Hungary, who also researched the dialect of Lower Austria and everywhere pointed out the close connection between all Austrian intellectual life and its roots in the folk tradition; and who, on the other hand, carried the soul up to the heights of Goethe's world view through research into Faust, and in this sense again had a beneficial effect on his students. In 1859 this man expressed Austria's unity with Germany in this way. I have quoted his words to show how the Austrian national character leads to that beautiful and glorious ideal towards which we must strive today and which must develop out of the great demands and devoted deeds of our time: a Central Europe in which everything that has long been working together in our hearts will finally be united. And especially by considering the special tone that prevails in Austrian nationality and Austrian intellectual life, one can say that what should be achieved there in separation will be able to combine with the wider Germanic character in a more intimate way for the benefit and blessing of Central European development. And so we see, I would say, even if we look with an understanding of the essence of nationality at what is developing out of blood and suffering and pain in our time as a future ideal for Central Europe, we see that something is developing that must be created by the devoted and courageous deeds of arms, but which is firmly rooted, so firmly rooted that the guarantee of its durability can be seen in the hearts and souls of those who are drawing closer together and have joined forces for common action.

In conclusion, let me say: what is now coming together historically is not only coming together through external necessity, it is coming together through the inner bonds of the souls, the hearts of the peoples of Central Europe.

If we look back upon the evolution of humanity, if we look back—let us say—as far as history permits it, we shall encounter something very strange. Various phenomena enable us to examine what we thus encounter. Above all, (and we shall see to-day that what we are about to say may be applied to every human heart, to every human soul) we may examine the evolution of humanity with the aid of various documents, traditions and writings which have been pre served. We shall find in them something very strange and peculiar. If we go back to the conceptions which were formed by the various peoples of ancient times in connection with the origin of the world and of the sources of what is good and moral, we shall find that the conceptions which thus arose are laid down in legends—in myths and legends. We come across such legends and myths in a more or less beautiful, lofty, sublime or even less significant form among the various peoples of the earth. A modern man is so very much inclined to consider these myths and legends as poems and to say: They were invented by the peoples during their infancy, because they did not as yet possess the sources of modern science. They have, for instance, formed all kinds of ideas about the origin of the world: the Greeks and their gods, the ancient Germanic peoples and their gods, and, if you like, the American peoples, whose legends have recently been dscovered and which are found to correspond with what exists among other peoples. If we learn that among the Central-American peoples Quetzalcoatl and Vitzliputzli play a role which is more primitive but similar to that of other mighty characters created by other races we shall see that such legends and myths exist among all these peoples ... And, as already stated, a modern man is easily inclined to say: These are poems, fantastic inventions of man's spirit, in order to explain the origin of the various beings of the world and of the various phenomena of Nature!

Among the various documents, there is one which I have already considered with a greater number of the friends who are now present. It is a lofty, mighty document: the Genesis, the beginning of the Old Testament. At Munich we have already seen how infinitely deep are the contents of the Genesis.¹ Several of you have also heard the explanations supplied by spiritual knowledge in connection with the various Gospels, which are, as it were, the last documents of this kind. We find that such documents have been preserved and that they have arisen at various periods of time as we were passing through our preceding incarnations, periods of time through which we have passed during our preceding lives on earth. Those who advance in spiritual knowledge must learn to realize that they have lived during times when men spoke, for instance, of Zeus, Hera and Chronos, and so forth, when they spoke of the phenomena of Nature in a different way from the one which is usual to-day, that they spoke of them in the form of myths, legends and fairy-tales. We must bear all this in mind. We must say to our selves: How do matters stand with our soul that has taken up these things (most people are not aware, so to speak, of what has been deposited within them) which now come to the fore again?

I shall now describe to you very simply what happens with a person who takes up within him these documents—to begin with, in the form of legends, myths and poems—and who then penetrates into occult science, into occultism, and who uses occult science as an instrument enabling him to understand them more and more. He will experience something very strange. I will take, for instance, just one case: What will take place within him in connection with the Old Testament?

In the case of the Old Testament, which most modern men read in such a way that they consider it as a very beautiful collection of all kinds of images about the world's origin, he will find that he will gradually say to himself: Infinite wisdom is contained in these things which are rendered in such a peculiar way! And he will gradually discover that the single words and sentences contain things—provided he understands them rightly—to which occult investigation can lead him along entirely independent paths. And his respect for these writings will grow. The most efficacious means perhaps of increasing our appreciation of these documents is to penetrate to some extent into spiritual science.

A question may then arise and may be placed before our soul. The human being may then say: How do matters really stand as far as this question is concerned? The ancient documents have been preserved: if we penetrate into them we discover in them the deepest, most significant spiritual meaning. Even if today we cannot feel entirely convinced of the fact that these documents contain, indeed, an overwhelming wisdom, we should persevere in our search and penetrate into them more and more. We shall then see that the wisdom which they contain is indeed overwhelming. It is not we who bring anything into them ... it would be quite ridiculous to say that we bring anything into them. The documents themselves contain this wisdom. Indeed, the greatest discoveries which can be made in the, sphere of spiritual science, the loftiest things which can be found again with great effort through occult investigation—all this may afterwards be discovered, for instance, in just one word of the Bible in the Genesis. This is very strange, is it not so?

We find, however, that there is a certain difference between the Old Testament and all the other legends, myths and documents. This is a fact which we should bear in mind. For there is a difference. Consider, for instance, the legends of the Greeks, of the ancient Germans, even what is contained in the Vedas of the Hindoos, or Persian documents. Take whatever you like—if you compare it with the Old Testament you will find a tremendous difference. This difference appears quite clearly to the unprejudiced investigation of an occultist the more he penetrates into these things. This difference appears in the following way: We shall gradually discover that all the other documents set forth in a legendary form the riddles of the phenomena of Nature, the riddles connected with all these phenomena of Nature, and also with the human being, in so far as he has a kind of natural form of life, in so far as the powers of Nature compel him to do this or the other thing. The Old Testament, however, is the one and only document in which we find the human being described from the very beginning as an ethical soul-being, not merely as a being of Nature. And everything in the Old Testament is described in such a way that the human being is placed within the course of evolution, as an ethical soul-being. Every other statement made by modern science rests upon a very weak foundation; it dissolves into nothing if we really observe things. This is the great difference which appears to us. We may therefore say: Everything else in the world shows us that men have obtained mighty revelations from one or the other direction, they have obtained mighty revelations which were expressed in the legendary form of myths and which have arisen out of deep wisdom. We may also say that as far as the Old Testament is concerned the human beings have had certain definite revelations which are connected with the ethical soul-mysteries of man. This is a fact which is, in any case, quite clear.

Another difference appears, however, if we compare the New Testament with all the other documents of this kind. We find in it a spirit which differs entirely from the one contained in any other document, even in the Old Testament. How can we grasp this difference if we approach the question as anthroposophists? We shall realize this difference if we first place another phenomenon before our soul.

Let us imagine, first of all, a man who has never heard anything about spiritual science, who is entirely the product of a scientific or of another so-called sensible education of our modern time, and who has, therefore, never had the chance to permeate the ancient documents with spiritual science. We may perhaps imagine him as a learned person or as an unlearned person—the difference is not so great—we may imagine him in any case as a person who has had no contact with spiritual science and we see him approach these ancient documents, Greek, Persian, Indian, Germanic documents, and so forth. We imagine him approaching these documents, equipped with everything which modern thinking can give him, if he is really unable to feel even a breath of what constitutes spiritual investigation a very strange thing will appear. There will be a difference according to his more or less greater inclination toward poetry or toward a matter-of-fact mentality, but on the whole we may say that something very strange will appear. Such a man will never be able to understand the ancient documents, he will never be able to penetrate into the way in which wisdom is offered by them, he is simply unable to do it, it is quite impossible for him to understand them. In this sphere, we come across the strangest examples; it may suffice to refer to one of the most recent attempts to explain these ancient documents. A little book has just appeared, which is extremely interesting because it is so absurd. It attempts to explain, as it were, all the myths up to the Gospels, beginning with the earliest documents of the most primitive peoples. It is really a book which is extraordinarily interesting because of its grotesque way, its grotesquely stupid way of grasping things. It is entitled “Orpheus,” and its author is Salomon Reinach, who is well known in France as an investigator in this sphere, and among scientists he is a characteristic example of a man who has not even had the slightest inkling of the way in which it is possible to penetrate into such things. In this book, a definite method is applied to everything, and the author passes sentence upon everything. He sees nothing but symbols, and there are no real beings behind Hermes, Orpheus, etc. These characters are merely symbols and allegories to him ... It is not proper to repeat the explanations which he gives for these symbols; he speaks of them in such a way that it is not necessary to repeat them. Every reality contained in these things can thus be proved to be non-existent ... the reality of Demeter and of Persephone is explained away, he decrees that they do not exist. According to this author, all these names are merely symbols. He follows a method according to which it would be easy to prove to children, eighty years hence, that a man named Salomon Reinach has never lived in France at all, at the beginning of the twentieth century, but that the civilization of that time has merely comprised the contents of this book in the name of Salomon Reinach. This could be proved quite well! In spite of all, these things have caused a great sensation. And according to this same method evidence has been produced in Germany to the effect that Jesus has never lived at all. This too has caused a great sensation.

You see, we may now ask: Why is it not possible to-day to penetrate into these things without the aid of spiritual science, (and it is a fact that it is not possible to do this without spiritual science) what is the true reason for this? If we wish to understand the true reason for this, we must gain a deeper insight into the evolution of humanity. We must look back a certain while into this evolution of humanity. And as a result we shall really feel compelled to say: Indeed, the science which men possess to-day, the science which is taught to-day in the elementary schools concerning the sun, and so forth, this is something which the ancients did not possess they did not possess a science which could be grasped with the understanding, with the intellect. This is something to which the human race has advanced little by little. And when our souls were born during earlier incarnations, they were certainly not able to take up this form of science, for this did not exist, this was not as yet incorporated in our civilization But the more we go back into the course of evolution, the more we shall find (quite apart from the fact of seeking the reasons for this which have often been explained to many of you here, in this or in that direction) that men possessed a deep wisdom of an entirely different kind from the one of to-day, wisdom concerning spiritual things which modern men are unable to express in their scientific form. This wisdom ruled in the souls of men, it lived in their souls. Wisdom was simply there. Particularly the initiated leaders of humanity possessed this wisdom, and if the anthroposophical spirit lives within us, it can be proved historically that a primal revelation, a primal wisdom was spread over the whole human race upon the earth, a wisdom which took on this or that form, ac cording to the various stages of evolution. If anyone considers history with a truly anthroposophical spirit he will discover this primal, original revelation. But something else is needed: the ordinary, modern scientific mentality must pass through a preparation if it wishes to penetrate into these documents and grasp their true meaning—I shall now relate a simple fact—a preparation is needed enabling a modern man to penetrate into the spirit of these writings. If he passes through this preparation he will be able to penetrate into the spirit of these writings. This preparation consists in the study of the only documents which can be studied to-day in a direct and immediate way, namely, the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. If we are filled with an anthroposophical spirit it is possible to approach these documents in a direct and immediate way and to understand them.

Even if we know nothing whatever about Anthroposophy, but if our feelings are filled with an anthroposophical spirit (this can be the case with many people) we may feel that something special lives in the Gospels and in the Epistles of St. Paul. This is indeed a strange fact! And in the case of an occultist another strange thing arises, something quite special will arise in his case. Namely, in the case of an occultist we may find that in accordance with modern prejudices he has, let us say, a certain aversion to approach these Gospels. It is quite possible to be filled with an occultistic spirit and yet to feel an aversion to the Gospels, to say, that they are only one religion among many others. No attempt is made to approach the Gospels, and it is possible to understand this aversion. But if we do this as occultists, if we have this strange attitude as occultists, we shall find that we cannot grasp what is contained in other documents. Everywhere we shall find something which we cannot understand. We may be content with this, but if we continue to penetrate more and more deeply into these things we shall never reach a goal unless we have passed through a preparation by studying the Gospels. On the other hand, it is a fact that if someone who may even be a well-trained occultist approaches an oriental or an occidental document and comes across a very hard nut which he cannot crack ... he will immediately be enlightened about the things contained in other documents if he approaches—even if it is only in spirit—the events of Palestine and if he allows them to inspire him. This is an undeniable fact. A ray of light can go out of the Gospels, and this is an experience which can be made. We must admit that the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul are indeed necessary if we wish to go back into earlier times. It is not possible to ignore them, to take no notice of them. Particularly the occultist will always realize this. If he is really able to read the spiritual documents, the Akasha Chronicle, it will not be necessary for him to consult the written Gospels—but he must approach the events of Palestine, he cannot ignore them. Otherwise, certain preceding things will always remain dark. I am therefore not drawing your attention to the records, or to the written word, but to the events, in the form in which they have rea1ly taken place within the course of human evolution. This is a very important fact.

I wish to throw some light upon this fact also from another side. Let us bear in mind what I have already stated. It is not possible to ignore, as it were, the event of the Christ, and if we wish to understand what has been given to humanity in the form of a primordial revelation we shall always trip up somewhere. I must say the following if I wish to describe the true aspect of things. Let us suppose that a modern occultist investigates the past and that he has no understanding (for it is this understanding which is so important) for the event of the Christ. He disregards the event of the Christ and proceeds to investigate earlier events of human evolution. He will then find that he grows uncertain everywhere, really everywhere. Of course, he can persuade himself that he feels quite certain about these things, but if he is honest he will have to admit that things are not entirely as they should be. Let us now imagine an occult investigator before the time of Christ Jesus, an occult investigator who has reached such a high degree of development in clairvoyance and also in other directions that he is able, even before the Christian era, to survey the whole past in such a way that, had he lived after the event of the Christ, he would have passed through the Christ event in his retrospective survey, a man who is therefore in advance of his time. Let us suppose that he lived five or six centuries before Christ and that he reached the maturity of a modern occultist; that is to say he is able to go back into the earlier events of human evolution by passing through the Christ event. And we may then ask ourselves: How would an occultist who is so much in advance of his time, that even five or six centuries before Christ he can go back into the earlier events of human evolution by passing through the Christ event, how would such an occultist have to appear in order to avoid falling a prey to the luciferic and ahrimanic powers? Let us suppose that it would really be necessary for him to pass through the Christ event ... This Christ event, however, has not yet taken place at the time in which he lived. In the case of such a man it appears that he will easily content himself with what he discovers—and he will then speak of all kinds of things which are not quite correct, for it is not possible to speak correctly about things if they are not seen correctly—but otherwise nothing will happen to him. Or else he will reach the point of saying: “There is something amiss, something I cannot find when I turn my gaze backwards. I cannot discover this something which I need along my path.” And he will then have to admit to himself: “Here I begin to grow uncertain. I must find this missing ‘something,’ but it does not exist as yet upon the earth. It cannot as yet be found within the evolution of the earth.”

You see, I have now painted theoretically, as it were, the portrait of a personality who lived during the 5th and 6th century before Christ, a personality who would have been mature enough to discover Christ Jesus in a retrospective survey, but he could not discover him because Christ Jesus had not as yet appeared upon the earth. He could not discover Christ Jesus as an earthly fact. A short time ago this theory took on the form of a vivid reality. I experienced it this year during a visit to one of our groups abroad which has adopted the anthroposophical manner of contemplating the world, during a visit to our group at Palermo. As the ship approached Palermo, I suddenly realized: “The solution of a riddle will present itself to you, a riddle which can only be solved easily here, at this place, through the immediate impressions which can be gained here.” Soon afterwards I found the solution of the riddle. The personality concerning whom I have just spoken to you in a theoretical manner, immediately appeared in the whole atmosphere of Sicily, I might say, in the whole astral body of Sicily. His presence was an altogether living one. In the whole atmosphere of Sicily continued to live a personality that is very enigmatic in many respects, the personality of Empedocles, the ancient philosopher. This ancient Greek philosopher has in fact lived in Sicily during the fifth century before Christ, and even external history knows that he was a profound initiate in many different spheres and that he accomplished magnificent things just here, in Sicily.

If to begin with, we turn, as it were, our spiritual gaze upon this man he will appear to us, from an occult standpoint in a very strange light. The occult fact which presents itself to us is the following. If we look back upon the development of Empedocles, if we follow his occupations as statesman, architect and philosopher, if we follow him upon his journeys, if we see him in the midst of his enthusiastic pupils initiating them into the various mysteries of the world—if we follow him spiritually in this manner, without the aid of external history, we shall discover in him a personality who possessed an infinite amount of scientific knowledge of the kind which is only known to a modern man. Empedocles had an altogether modern mentality, a modern aura, and he was indeed constituted in such a way that he sought to discover the origin of the world. In fact, according to his degree of development and everything which had taken place, he would necessarily have found the Christ in his retrospective survey. But the Christ had not yet appeared. It was not possible as yet to find Him upon the earth; He was still absent from the earth. These experiences in particular made Empedocles waver and developed within him a strange desire, and in his case it transformed itself into something entirely different from what takes place in the superficial minds of modern times. This desire transformed itself into the passion to consider the world in a materialistic way. Lucifer approached him. We should try to form a vivid picture of the way in which this took place. Empedocles possessed a modern spirit, but at the same time he was initiated in many different mysteries. He was clairvoyant to a high degree. Let us now imagine vividly that his modern way of thinking made him feel inclined to consider the world from a materialistic aspect; he has, in fact, drawn up a materialistic system which describes the world more or less from the stand point of a modern materialistic chemist, namely, as a combination and separation of elements. The one difference is that Empedocles distinguishes only four elements. He thought that various beings arise according to the way in which these four elements combine. As a result of these thoughts he felt the strong desire to discover in a true and real way what lies behind these material elements, what air and water really contain. If we peruse the Akasha Chronicle today and look into water, air, fire and earth we shall discover in them etherically the Christ. Empedocles could not find Him, but he felt the tremendous impulse to discover something in air and water, fire and earth, to find out what they really contain. And we can see how this personality is seized by the strong desire to penetrate at all costs into what constitutes the material elements. This desire finally induces him to make a kind of sacrifice. It is not merely a legend that Empedocles threw himself into the crater Aetna in order to unite himself with the elements. The luciferic force, the strong desire to grasp the elements, led him to a bodily union with the elements. The death of Empedocles continues to fill the atmosphere of Sicily, and this is a great mystery connected with this strange country.

Let us now picture the soul of Empedocles who has laid aside his body by allowing it to be burned. His soul is born again in a later period of time, when the Christ has already appeared upon the earth. Entirely new conditions now exist for this soul. In the past, this soul has, as it were, sacrificed itself to the elements. Now it is born again. But now it can discover the Christ when it looks back into time. And all the past knowledge concerning the elements rises up again in a new form, the knowledge which this soul once possessed arises in a completely new form. In fact, the personality of Empedocles was born again later, but at the present moment it is not permissible for me to mention his name. If we study the reincarnation of Empedocles in a more northern country, if we observe him as he then lived at the turning point of the Middle Ages and the modern time and if we compare this character with the Empedocles who threw himself into Mount Aetna, we shall see livingly before us the gigantic impulse which has arisen through the fact that the Christ event has in the meantime taken place upon the earth.

What thus takes place in the case of this one definite personality applies, however, to every soul, to the souls of each one of you. At the time in which the Christ event was drawing nigh, all these souls have looked back with a certain feeling of discomfort into past, even if they have not felt the mighty impulse experienced by Empedocles. They felt uncomfortable because they had lost their bearings and because the time of the modern scientific man who looks back into the past ... was gradually approaching, and something resembling the case of the men of earlier times begins to spread ... If we go back to earlier times we find that those who have preserved this tradition faced the masses and related to them—let us imagine this vividly—mighty tales which are contained, for instance, in the legends told to the ancient Greeks. But this induced the ancient Greeks to experience the truth of these legends, when they were, let us say, in a special condition which was still possible at that time to a greater extent than now, and these legends gave them, as it were, a push enabling them to look into the spiritual world. But the human beings lost this capacity. The inner force enabling them to rise into the spiritual world was lost to the extent in which intellectual knowledge began to develop. You may calculate and find in any little manual when our modern conceptions began to arise, these modern conceptions which children take up, if not with the mother's milk, at least with the school milk! These modern conceptions reach back to a few centuries before our Christian era. This is a tremendous turning-point. And if we wish to go back still further, if we wish to understand the ancient documents, it will not be possible for us to understand them, for now they appear to us merely as poems, legends and myths. We cannot go back further, and this is something which should really be borne in mind more clearly. More and more it will be the case that people who do not bring with them, as it were, an inherited disposition to understand the ancient documents, will be unable to understand them.

The opinion will gradually spread that there is a great field of illusion behind everything which is accepted as science, because the majority of scientists believes that now we fortunately know how the earth moves round, and that all the explanations of earlier times in this connection are nonsense. This opinion is already prevalent to-day. We go backwards into time ... The Copernican world-conception arises somewhat later, but even in the case of geometry we cannot go back further than Euclid. And further back, behind all this, a modern man can only see black darkness. He cannot find wisdom and the primordial revelation, he cannot find the path which leads into them. If we really accept this as a fact, something resulting from the deepest anthroposophical studies may then condense itself to a fundamental conviction—and this may take place even in the simplest mind, provided the feelings are sound.

Man must, after all, reach the point of saying to himself “The form in which I see the world is not its true aspect.” If this were its true aspect it would not be necessary to investigate it. Investigation would not be necessary at all, for the world would immediately appear in its true aspect. Modern investigation, however, does not consider the world in this way. The Copernican system would not exist if men were simply to accept what the senses reveal to them. Even external science contradicts the experiences gained through the senses. If we progress we shall see that we cannot stay by what the senses give us, by what we obtain through the external experiences which we make in the physical world. These must in any case be corrected, even by external science. This fact is perhaps not generally recognised; nevertheless, it is true. As soon as we begin to understand our own being—even if it is only with the aid of ordinary thinking and with what we can learn to-day—we shall be obliged to admit that the essential point of everything is to have an insight into the illusion created by the senses, for otherwise science would not exist and reflection would not exist. If this is indeed the case, we must discover something which enables us to understand without any difficulty in which direction and toward which goal the world is gradually developing. We shall find the confirmation of this fact if we consider matters a little in the light of Anthroposophy. We may therefore say to ourselves: Once upon a time there was a primordial wisdom; the human beings were constituted in such a way that they received a primordial wisdom which they could only see in pictures, but nevertheless they possessed such a primordial wisdom, and they have gradually lost the understanding for such a wisdom the more human evolution progressed; men were less and less able to grasp this primordial wisdom. And another fact is quite clear, namely, that they began to lose this understanding to the extent in which science and the intellectual understanding developed. We may now ask: What can have arisen at a certain definite moment?

Let us imagine the whole situation. Let us picture a man of pre-Christian times, who lived under certain conditions. He will have looked out into the world, he will have seen all manner of things, but within his soul there also lived the possibility of seeing behind these things. He still possessed this disposition. Consequently, it was an undeniable fact for him that there is an etheric body behind every flower. This was a fact for him. Gradually he began to lose this capacity. He lost it because it was banished by the intellectual understanding which rules to-day. The intellectual capacity cannot be united with the other one, for they are two hostile forces. This is an undeniable fact, and every occultist knows by experience that the understanding, or ordinary thought, sears and burns the clairvoyant manner of looking upon things. Even in the course of history, the knowledge based upon the ancient clairvoyance was lost to the extent in which the understanding, or the intellect in the ordinary meaning, have arisen, and the loss of the old clairvoyant wisdom also implied the loss of the capacity to understand the ancient traditions. A few centuries had to pass, and the kind of man I have just described to you had to be replaced by another kind who might perhaps have said: “It would, of course, be a serious prejudice to think the truth can be discovered in the way in which the world presents itself to our senses. Human reason must supplement everything!” Particularly this belief in human reason was the decisive factor; human reason must first pounce upon the phenomena which appear to the senses and then grasp them logically.

Such a kind of man would perhaps have said: “The special advantage of the human being over all the creatures of the earth is the fact that he is endowed with reason, that he can understand cause and effect as they manifest themselves behind the sense-phenomena. He is able to discover this. And his intellect enables him to communicate with other men through the means of speech. For it is easy to see that speech is a child of reason.” And he might also have said: “Reason is, of course, the highest of all things.” Now, if we wish to draw a vivid picture of such a person, we should imagine him saying to himself: “Rely on your understanding and reason, dissect everything with your reason, and then you will surely reach the truth!” Let us suppose that we are actually facing such a man. I have given you a description from a theoretical standpoint, yet this particular type of man has appeared very frequently. A characteristic thinker of this kind was Cicero, who lived shortly before Christ. If you study Cicero you will immediately see that he thinks exactly in this way, namely, that reason is able to grasp everything. It is not true that the world appears as it presents itself to the senses, nevertheless human reason is able to grasp everything! Just in the case of people who lived shortly before Christ we find an invincible faith in reason. They even identify reason with God himself, who rules within things. Cicero adopts this standpoint.

Let us suppose, however, that someone succeeds in discovering the secrets connected with all this. Let us suppose that someone contemplates all this in an entirely unprejudiced way and sees how everything results little by little. How would he then describe the whole period? Let us suppose that one century before Christ a man who is endowed with deep insight contemplates all these things ... How would the whole course of history appear to him? Well, he would say: “We can see two currents in humanity. One is the old clairvoyant power, with a descending course. Reason appears in its place, and it roots out and destroys within the human being the possibility of looking into the spiritual world. A great darkness spreads over the spiritual world. Those who accept the authority of reason will indeed think that their reason can discover what lies behind things. But these people forget the true nature of reason, about which they talk so much. Reason is linked up exclusively with the brain. It is a force which can only use the brain as its instrument. It belongs to the physical world and must, therefore, share the qualities of the physical world” ... Such a man would say: “You may, if you like, rely on your intellect and I say that it enables you to grasp what lies behind things, since the things in themselves are not real. Consider, however, that reason itself belongs to these things. You are a physical being among other physical beings, and your reason belongs to the physical world. If you think that reason enables you to discover what lies behind all the other things, you will demolish the foundation under your feet.” This is what he would say, and he would add: “Indeed, men are more and more inclined to use their reason, to rely upon their intellect. They have this inclination. But in doing so, they raise up before them a wall hiding the spiritual world, for they make use of an instrument which can not be applied to the spiritual world, for it is limited to the physical world. Humanity, however, unfolds in the very direction of developing this instrument.” And if this man had known the real course of events, he would also have said: “If men return to the spiritual world at all, they should not only be able to use their intellect, which can be applied solely to the physical world, but an impulse must arise enabling them to ascend once more to the spiritual worlds, an impulse which drives the intellect itself along this upward path. But this can only take place,” this person would have said, “if something dies within the human being, if something which calls forth in him the firm belief in the exclusive rule of reason perishes. This must die.” In fact, we imagine the human being gradually descending into the material world and developing his brain more and more. If the human being were to depend exclusively on his reason, he would be unable to abandon it, to come out of it. His physical body would then deceive him and persuade him to do away with everything which cannot be grasped by earthly reason. But it is the physical body which dulls man in this manner, because it gradually develops to a very high degree, and man does not realise that he thus remains within the physical world. Try to imagine this and you will see that the human being is then caught as if in a trap. He is quite unable to escape out of himself. Human evolution has so far reached the point of preventing man from going out of his own self, and so he faces the danger, of being gradually overwhelmed by his physical body. What can help the human being at all in this case? If just at the time when the intellect reaches this point, there arises the possibility of changing the intellect so, that the part which blinds it, dies, then this part must die. An impulse must arise which is able to overcome once and for all that part in man which can overwhelm him through a blind faith in mere reason. Try to feel the power of this impulse; try to feel that this was the meaning of human evolution! The bodily constitution developed in such a way that it would have overwhelmed man. He would have reached the point of thinking that he must remain within the physical world and yet be able to penetrate through Maya, without bearing in mind that he himself lived in this Maya through his intellect. This would have taken place had not something arisen which can tear him out of it, as soon as he accepts it, and which is able to counteract the fall into the physical sphere. Indeed, its influence reaches as far as the etheric body, so that the etheric body is then able to kill what leads man into a similar illusion. The human being would otherwise have remained imprisoned in this trap.

Let us now turn away from such a person who would have spoken in this way when the time of Christ Jesus was approaching, and let us consider the way in which a modern man, or anyone of us, would look at things. He would say to himself: If I consider the development of man in an unprejudiced way and see how the intellect, this instrument belonging to Maya, has gradually gained strength, I would undoubtedly be on the wrong track if I follow merely the course of the world's evolution. For, this is arranged in such a way that if I do not take up within me the impulse which kills that part leading me astray in this direction, I am unable to free myself from the intellect. What must therefore have taken place? I must be able to look back upon a time in which this impulse has entered. I must find something within the historical evolution of humanity which brings about the fact that the continuous stream of evolution has been reversed in a materialistic sense. If to-day I were to look within my own being without finding anything of this kind, what would I then have to find? I would trace in that case the gradual growth of the intellect, until I reached a time, at the beginning of our era, when the intellect began to work ... and further back? There it grows dark, pitch black darkness rules there, and I shall need something entirely different. Then it will grow light, and here everyone must encounter the Christ! Anyone who is at all willing to believe in the possibility of progress, and that during the following incarnations he will have within him something which will lead him upwards and will prevent his being overwhelmed by Maya, must meet the Christ when he looks back into time. Upon looking back, everyone must encounter the Christ. This can give him an impulse leading him upwards.

Let us now suppose that the gospels did not exist, and that we would not need them as anthroposophists. Let us suppose that we do not need the gospels; that all we need is to study the course of human evolution in an unprejudiced way and to say: What would become of every human being if he were unable to look back upon an event which has swung the whole meaning of the earlier course of evolution over to the other side? We simply must encounter the Christ if we go back into the course of evolution! Anthroposophists must be able to find Him, and the clairvoyants will find him under every circumstance. This is a mystery which is connected particularly with Christianity. Documents may be questioned. Indeed, the gospels are not real historical documents. All the clever people, Jensen and others, who decree in a trivially learned manner that the gospels do not exist and upon them as mere legends, have a certain justification for doing this, because they depend solely upon their external reason. But if we are anthroposophists we are able to say that we do not need the gospels; we only need the facts supplied by spiritual science itself, and if we go back into time we shall discover the living Christ, as He appeared to Paul in the event of Damascus. Paul has experienced in advance what we, too, are able to experience if we search for the Christ in a truly anthroposophical spirit. Paul was, after all, in the same position of a modern anthroposophist who does not wish to accept the gospels. At his time the gospels did not exist, but Paul was able to go to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, this did not convince him, for otherwise he would not have left Jerusalem. The events described in the gospels did not convince him. It is not necessary, therefore, that the contents of the gospels should convince a modern person. All that is necessary is that he should be in a position to experience, through Anthroposophy, what Paul has experienced, and this experience will then become for him an event of Damascus. He will then have the proof of Christ's existence, in the same way as Paul, without the aid of documents.

Of course, this points to very deep things in human evolution, to extraordinarily deep things in the evolution of man. In a certain sense, every human being, even the simplest man, may experience what the reincarnated Empedocles has experienced during the 15th and 16th century, who looked back into earlier times and was able to see what he was unable to see before. Before, he had grown so uncertain that he threw himself into Mount Aetna. He cast his glance backwards during the 15th and 16th century and what he was unable to grasp in any way during his previous incarnation he was now able to grasp clearly through the Christ principle. And this enabled him to become one of the most remarkable personalities of the later era.

This is how matters appear to every human being, without the aid of any document, simply through retrospection. At some later time, all men will be able to look back into an earlier incarnation and they will distinguish exactly the incarnations before and after Christ. What may be felt to-day instinctively by a simple soul who reads the gospels, will arise, later, in the form of knowledge. This is the chief difference between the gospels and other documents: they are the first documents which we must understand. The gospels are a great, beautiful and mighty point of transition. It we pass through it, light begins to spread, while everywhere else there is darkness.

It is indeed so. Christianity is only at the beginning of its evolution, and a modern man may find that he often loses his thread when he investigates earlier things. But if he returns to one of the events in the life of the Christ he will feel inspired, and it will grow light about him. Even a simple person may experience what occultists discover, namely, he will be able to feel within his soul a reflection, as it were, of what I have just explained. He may feel very depressed owing to his human weaknesses and mistakes and he may admit to himself: “What I am to-day, is the result of all the generations!” But then he would deny this and would have to admit to himself, instead, that he himself has been his own father and his own mother. There is, consequently, something within us connecting us with the rest of humanity, and we may feel very depressed by all human mistakes, weaknesses and illnesses. Nevertheless, even the simplest soul always has the possibility of rising. These words should not be understood in the orthodox meaning. What is possible for an occultist is also possible for the simplest soul. Such a simple man may feel as weak possible, but if he begins to read the gospels, strength will flow out of the gospels, because the power of the Word streams out of them and penetrates into the etheric body. The gospels are strengthening words, words of strength. They do not speak merely to the intellect, but penetrate into the deeper forces of the soul. And they are not merely based upon the intellect which exists in Maya, but they penetrate into the deeper forces, which can, as it were, console the intellect concerning its own nature. This is the great strength of the gospels; they exist for every one of us, and this is the powerful element distinguishing them from all the other documents. This fact, too, may not be accepted, but its rejection would imply that the possibility of human progress is denied altogether.

You see, this points to a fact which cannot be grasped right away. And now you will be able to realize what was needed for the preparation of a person whom I have already set before your soul hypothetically, who announced, one century before our era: “A man must come who will give us the impulse which will bring about the great turning point in the course of events.”

This person was a significant man, and he also underwent the necessary preparation. For a long time, the attempt had already been made, among those who knew things, to bring about the possibility that at least a few people, as it were, should understand the times which were approaching, that they should understand what was being prepared, namely, that, on the one hand, men were being drawn into a snare, and that, on the other hand, through the appearance of the Christ, they could be led upwards again. This was taught prophetically. The man who was chosen to teach this prophetically, more than one century before our era, within the circles of people who were able to understand these teachings, was an initiate of the community of the Essenes, which was closely related to the circles frequented by the Christ. He announced the coming of One Who would lead men upwards again. The man who taught this within the community of the Essenes was a very significant individuality. External history really knows very little about him, but at least a few writers mention the legends referring to him which were handed down traditionally. Thus he is not merely a mythological character, or one who is named exclusively in occultism, He lived a hundred years before Christ and he even instructed one of his five or six pupils to write down his teachings. One of the pupils of this man, who drew attention to the Christ and announced His coming, understood the meaning of his teachings. This man, therefore, had a pupil, who was called Matthew, and he wrote down the mysteries relating to the Christ. The individuality who taught them was Jeshu ben Pandira.² He had to suffer martyrdom because he taught these things, he was stoned to death in his own country, and afterwards his lifeless body was hanged. We should not confuse Jeshu ben Pandira with Jesus of Nazareth. Jeshu ben Pandira, the great prophet of the Christ, instructed his pupils to write down what he knew, and these documents then came into the hands of the man who included them with the mysteries which they contained, into the gospel which is known to us as the Gospel according to Matthew. It is an important, a preeminently important fact to realize, in the first place, the necessity of the Christ impulse, and in the second place, in an occult historical way, how Jeshu ben Pandira, through the fact that he was first stoned and immediately afterwards crucified, set forth, as it were, symbolically what took place afterwards in the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ was not stoned, but crucified, and a wonderful thing took place simultaneously with His death, for at the very moment when His blood streamed out of His wounds something passed over into the atmosphere of the earth, which brings to those who take up this event in their etheric body when they look back into time, to those who pass through this event and look, as it were, into the grave of the Christ, something leading them into a past filled with light, because they have passed through this moment. But without this experience, darkness spreads over everything which lies before it.

Consider what has been said to-day. It was my task to point this out to you. This subject, however, is so vast and encompassing that mere indications can be given. Nevertheless, these indications were treated so that if you investigate what you already know and what you carry in your heart, you will find to what a great extent life itself and your own soul prove the truth of what I have told you to-day.

• 1. Secrets at the Bible Story of Creation
• 2. Compare the lecture published in German by the Philos. Anthrop. Verlag “Jeshu ben Pandira, der Vorbereiter für ein Verständnis des Christus-Impulses.”

Well, gentlemen, has anyone thought of anything else today?

Questioner: I have a question about the purpose of carnival. Is there anything we can hear from Dr. Steiner about that? Where does the carnival celebration come from, what does it mean?

Dr. Steiner: So you mean, what is the purpose of carnival? Well, you see, the carnival festival cannot be understood by asking about its purpose, because, at least according to the way it is celebrated today, you will admit that after all, humanity could do without carnival over the years. So you can say that, from today's point of view, the carnival festival is basically pointless. But it no longer has its original meaning either. It has gone with such things as carnival festivals, just as it has gone with the medals, with the robes and so on. They used to have their good sense; little by little they have lost that sense. Well, it is not true that the other festivals of the year are also gradually disappearing; little by little, if they are no longer revived in their meaning, they lose their significance. Not much has been done yet to restore the significance of Carnival. In fact, Carnival would have a profound impact on all of social life if it regained the original meaning it had, for example, in ancient Rome, where it was celebrated a little earlier.

If we go back to ancient Rome, we find the following. People back then were also divided up, if one may say so, as they are here in the present day: one was a civil servant, the other was a warrior, the third was a laborer, and so on, and the division was even harsher then than it is today, at least in a social sense. For a slave could even be bought as a human being! So one can say that the differences between people in ancient Rome were still very, very significant. But the awareness that one had this or that position should be lost, at least for a few days of the year. Isn't that right? Today we talk about democracy and mean, at least initially and more in the theoretical sense, that all people are equal. Now, the Romans did not believe that at all, but for them, the one who was born into any higher class was only a real human being. You know that even in our times, the saying still applied to certain people: “A man only begins with a baron.” So those who are below the baron are not human.

In ancient Rome, this was of course extremely pronounced. Even if the nobility was not introduced in the same way as it appeared later – because that is a medieval institution from the so-called feudal period – there was still a great difference between the classes in ancient Rome. But now, for a few days a year, people were supposed to be equal, democracy was supposed to prevail. Of course, it was not possible for people to come with their ordinary faces, otherwise they would have been recognized; so they had to wear masks. Then they were what the masks were. There was also a person who was the carnival king. During these days he could do whatever he wanted. He could give orders when otherwise he only received orders. And the whole of Rome went mad for a few days, out of place; and people could also behave differently towards their superiors, did not need to be polite to them - so for a few days, to make people equal! And this institution naturally led to people not exactly weeping and mourning during these days; for it pleased them to be able to live like that for a few days. The carnival revelry then developed out of this joy: People only played crazy tricks when they were freed for a few days. And so the whole carnival merrymaking came about.

The result of this was that, because people liked it very much, it has been preserved. But things are preserved without people knowing the original meaning. So carnival remains only as the time when you do crazy things – because you were allowed to do crazy things. Then the church decided that it was necessary to have Ash Wednesday immediately afterwards, so that people would feel that they were guilty, that they were not allowed to do everything they wanted, and so on. And since Christianity, at least in earlier times, had developed the custom of making people do without, Lent was established. And it was naturally expedient to attach Lent to the carnival season, because then people did without the least; they did everything they liked as well as they could. Afterwards it is much worse not to eat the things one has eaten before. It was then as if time had not gone forward. And so these festivals came together.

The only thing was that in Rome, Carnival was much earlier, around our present-day Christmas time, because everything was moved a little to a later season. That is how we got today's carnival. I believe that the date of the carnival in all other areas is based on the Easter season. But that, as I hear, only leads to it being celebrated twice!

Well, that is what needs to be said in answer to this question. It can be said of many things in humanity that they originally had a meaning but then later lost that meaning. Then one wonders: Why all this?

Well, maybe someone has something else to ask today.

Questioner: I would like to ask the doctor if he would perhaps continue the story from last time.

Questioner: I would like to ask Dr. whether it is possible for people to insult another person or cause him pain, that is, to influence others? Mrs. A had a three-year-old child who always saw entities coming in through the door and windows. The child often had restless nights, and especially when the woman had washed her underwear – the woman borrowed things in the house – the child always became restless. Finally, there was nothing left; then the woman died later. I would like to ask Dr. Steiner if something like this would be possible?

Dr. Steiner: These are, of course, things that touch on all kinds of areas in which superstition can play just as strong a role - because people are gullible - but also the facts. You just have to be clear about the fact that there are connections in the world that cannot be easily traced physically. I will start from very simple connections.

Look at it this way: take a grape harvest. You harvest the grapes and press them, prepare them, put them in barrels, store them in the cellar. Now, you will notice that when the next wine is ready - when the time comes for the wine to ferment again - it becomes restless. He remains, without having a physical connection, still in contact. This is a simple fact that shows you that there are such connections in nature itself that cannot easily be followed with the eye and so on.

Now, as you know, there is already a way to bridge the ordinary visibility. You only need to remember that even in inanimate nature there are devices today that overcome the ordinary visible – not the finer visible, but the ordinary visible. You only need to think of radiotelegraphy! What is radiotelegraphy based on? It is based on the fact that you have an electricity exciter somewhere; initially, no wire connects to it, but it stands alone. Somewhere else, without any connection to it, there is an apparatus that contains certain fine discs that can be set in motion. Such an apparatus is called a coherer. At first glance, they have no physical connection at all, but when you excite electricity here, it causes the signs to move there; and if you connect it to a device, you can receive the messages there, just as you can receive electricity through the wires. Of course, it is based on the fact that electricity propagates, but you just can't see it; it propagates without a gross physical connection. So even in inanimate nature you have a connection that is such that you can say: at least to a certain extent, the visible is overcome.

Now we can take the matter further. Imagine certain twin brothers or sisters. When they reach a later age, even twin brothers and sisters who are not physically connected can be in touch with each other. One may be here and the other there. Nevertheless, it can be observed that at a particular time one of the twins may fall ill, for example, and the other, who is further away, also! Or one of them will become saddened by something at a certain time; and so will the other. All such things show you that there are effects in the world that cannot immediately be explained as physical influences.

But if you now approach the animal kingdom, you soon realize that there are perceptions in animals, for example, that humans do not have. Suppose, for example, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption occurs in some area that is very damaging to people. People just sit there quietly; you can sometimes see the animals moving away and leaving the area for days beforehand! From this too you can see that there can be a sense of something for the animals that you do not perceive physically. If one were to perceive it physically, then man would also be able to perceive the matter.

From all this you can see that there are connections that are possible in the world outside the physical. Now, when we look at such finer connections, we come to the fact that sometimes people feel something inside them that they certainly could not have perceived physically. For example, I will say: There is a person somewhere - these things have happened in hundreds and thousands of cases - who suddenly flinches and sees something in front of him like a picture - it is of course only a dream - and he cries out and says: My friend! But the friend may be far away; he may be experiencing it in Europe, or he may be in America. My friend! Something has happened to him! It turns out that he has died. So these things do happen. Once again, we can see how such effects can take place without there being any physical connection.

Yes, but it must be said that it is good for our human race that these things are not all too widespread; because just think, if your head were capable of perceiving everything that one person or another thinks or says about you, for example, then it would be a terrible story! Isn't it true, you know, if you have a telegraph device, then the device must first be set up, the wire must first be switched on, and then the transmission takes place. Likewise, in wireless telegraphy, this must be in order, must not be disconnected (pointing to the drawing), then the transmission takes place. Now, in general, in the case of a fully healthy person, it is so that the person is not connected to all the currents that are going on; he is disconnected; but in special cases it can certainly happen that one is connected to something.

Take for example – I cannot go into your case in detail for the good reason that you probably do not know how strongly it is attested; but I will go into a similar case, and then you will be able to explain this too. I only want to talk about things that are absolutely authenticated, because otherwise it is very easy to end up with mere talk. You probably did not experience the case yourself, but read about it or heard it related? So I will only go into what is well authenticated. Suppose: A woman A had an argument during her pregnancy with a woman B who lives in the neighborhood. It does happen, doesn't it, that people argue with each other. Now perhaps this woman B, who lives in the neighborhood, cursed woman A very strongly, and woman A was terribly frightened when woman B shouted and swore. As a result, the child that is born may become somewhat dependent on Ms. B, but Ms. B may also become somewhat dependent on the child. It may well be that the child becomes receptive to what Ms. B gives it as underwear or the like when she washes it. But on the other hand it can also be important for Mrs. B to receive underwear; she then needs, because she does have a little remorse about what she did to Mrs. A, to have something from this house to continually reassure her; and in the moment when she is then deprived of it, she seeks to get it in every possible way. People who want to get something like that, without being thieves by nature, can steal all kinds of things. They become thieving only for these things; otherwise they do not steal, but seek to get these things in every way. Then it can even happen that, when these things are withdrawn from them, because there are also spiritual and mental influences on a person's health, they suffer from a kind of inner wasting away, from a wasting fever and die, or let us say, even from a heart or nerve attack. That is entirely possible.

So you can say: These things happen in the world, and these things can be explained, because, even without a physical connection, an influence is exerted by one person on the other under certain circumstances. But then you always have to be able to go into the cause. It could have been a completely different cause in this case you mentioned. But if, for example, there had been a row between the two women during pregnancy, this could be the cause of an intervention between this woman and the child at a later stage. Now, gentlemen, it was requested that I speak a little further about what I said the other day. I showed you how people in ancient India lived under very different conditions four to five thousand years ago. And it was precisely through this special Indian nature and the way the peoples were together that these ancient Indians developed the view of the physical human body.

The Egyptians, on the other hand, who had their country entirely under the influence of the Nile, who owed everything they were, so to speak, to the Nile, they have, because man also becomes aware of the ether through this, developed the view of the etheric body of man.

The inhabitants of Assyria and the Babylonians, because the particularly pure air and the high altitude made it easy for them to observe the stars at certain times of the year, developed the astral body as a concept.

And the Jews, who actually had to wander in their early days, who were never settled close to anyone, only later settled, who thought and felt more out of the inner nature of man, they developed the view of the human ego.

Thus, the conception of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I has gradually developed. You see, the word Yahweh means nothing other than: I am the I-am. That is the meaning of the word. Since Yahweh is considered the supreme God, this confession of the supreme God clearly points to the human ego.

If we follow the development of the story, we find that all these peoples have actually expressed more in their thoughts and feelings what they have experienced. The Indian has experienced a fertile, rich nature - everything is in a state of perpetual bloom and growth: a rich, lush nature. So he actually perceived the richness of the physical, and he developed the view of the physical body from his own view. The Egyptian, on the other hand, saw that only the Nile, which you can see, can help him; so he developed the doctrine of the ether, and so on. But all these people actually developed everything they experienced.

In contrast to this, there was another people. We can say (a drawing is being made): here is ancient India, here Arabia; here then Egypt, there flows the Nile. Now it goes over here, and here we have a land facing Africa, which then connects to Europe. Here again would be Assyria, as I told you last time, here Egypt, here India; here would be Palestine, where the Jews settled; and here we have Greece. In this Greece, peoples settled who had immigrated from the most diverse areas of Asia and Europe, and who thus mixed with each other there. They also found original inhabitants when they immigrated, but the Greek people gradually developed on this peninsula of Europe. These Greek people were actually the first, one might say, to open their eyes and see something of the world that was not only experienced from within. The Indians experienced nature from within; the Egyptians experienced the effects of the ether; the Assyrians experienced the astral body in the stars; the Jews experienced their ego. The Greeks were actually the first, as I said, to turn their eyes outward and look at the world. The others did not really look at the world. So one can say: The Indians and the Egyptians, nor the Babylonians nor the Jews, had a particularly developed view of nature; they did not know much about nature because they did not open their eyes and look out. It was only with the Greeks that an understanding of nature arose, because the Greeks opened their eyes and looked outwards. And so it was only in Greece that man really became aware of the external world.

You see, the Indians knew very well: this physical world here is part of the whole world, and I came out of the spiritual at birth; I go back into it after death. The Egyptians believed that the mummies had to be preserved so that people could come back; but they also paid particular attention to the spiritual. The Babylonians saw the will of the spirits in the starry sky that they observed, in the astral. So they also believed in spirits. And you know that the Jews were of the opinion that Jehovah, Yahweh, would lead them back to those ancient times when the patriarchs lived. So basically they also looked to what connects man to the spiritual world.

With the Greeks, it became different. They were actually the first to have become attached to the external world. The earlier peoples did not care much about the external world. The Greeks were very interested in the outer world; and there is a Greek saying that says: It is better to be a beggar in the upper world, that is, he means in Greece, on earth, than a king in the realm of shadows, that is, of the dead. So the Greeks, above all, have grown fond of the world and have thereby also gained a view of nature for the first time.

The other peoples, for example, developed a view of man. Among the Indians, in particular, there was already a certain view of man in the most ancient times. But they did not gain this view of man by taking dead people to the dissecting room and cutting them up! If the Indians had to do that, they would never have gained their view of man. Rather, they sensed how the liver and lungs behave in the individual parts of the human body - this was still possible in those days. They knew this through inner knowledge. This is what led the Indians to their great wisdom: they knew through inner sensing and feeling how the liver works and so on. Today, people only know how a piece of meat tastes in their mouths. The Indians knew how a piece of meat behaves in the intestines, what the liver does, what the gall bladder does, through inner experience, just as people today feel the pieces of meat they eat in their mouths.

The Egyptians developed geometry because they needed it. They had to determine again and again where the fields were located; after all, the Nile flooded everything every year. This is also something that can be invented out of the head. The Babylonians developed astrology, the knowledge of the stars - again something that has nothing to do with the earthly; they had no strong interest in the earthly. And the fact that the Jews have no strong interest in the earthly is shown by the fact that a Jew is more likely to have an interest in anything than in what is actually in the world of the senses around him; he is good at thinking, but he has no real interest in what is in the world of the senses around him.

The people who are most interested in what is in the sensory world around them are the Greeks. If you do some research, it is interesting to note that they saw the whole world differently from the way we see it today. That is very interesting. Today we see the sky as blue. The Greeks did not have the same impression of the color blue as we do, but saw the sky as much darker, almost blackish, with a slightly greenish tinge. They perceived red particularly strongly. With our dull perception of red, we can no longer imagine the strong impression that the red color made on the Greeks! It is precisely because humanity has gradually developed a sense of blue that humanity has in turn moved away from the sensual impression. So the Greeks first became particularly attached to what existed outside of them. And that is why the Greeks were particularly skilled at developing what we today call mythology. The Greeks worshipped a whole pantheon of gods: Zeus, Apollo, Pallas Athena, Ares, Aphrodite; they saw gods everywhere. They worshipped a whole pantheon of gods because what they loved as external nature seemed to them to be everywhere still alive and spiritualized. Not as dead as it is with us, but everywhere still animated and spiritualized, it seemed to them. So they worshiped the gods everywhere in the nature itself that they had come to love.

But as a result, during the Greek era, all those people who had become dependent on Greek civilization, Greek culture, and Greek intellectual life forgot what the Indians, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians had actually experienced in spiritual terms.

Now you will know, gentlemen, how great an influence Greece actually had on the whole development of mankind. This continues to this day! Anyone who can send their son to grammar school today still has him learn Greek. But in the past it was much more widespread. In the past, you were a donkey, so to speak, if you couldn't speak Greek or at least read Greek writers and poets. Greece has had an enormously strong influence on the world because it was the first to take an interest in this external world.

Now, while this interest in the external world was developing in Greece, the important thing happened in Asia, that from there the mystery of Golgotha developed, that is, when Greece was already overcome, when everything was actually already under Roman rule. But what does this Roman rule mean? It was, after all, completely imbued with the Greek spirit. The educated Romans had also all learned Greek, and anyone who was educated in Rome knew Greek. Greek had gained the greatest influence everywhere. While Greek was spreading in this way, in a little-known Roman province in Asia – at that time Palestine, the Jews had been overcome, Palestine had become a Roman province – a man appeared, Jesus of Nazareth, who said something completely different from anything that people had ever said before. And as you can imagine, because he said something so special, he was not immediately understood by others either. Therefore, at first he was understood only by a few.

What did this personality, Jesus, actually say when he appeared in Palestine? Well, this personality, Jesus, said in the way he was able to express it at that time: Yes, people today believe – that was the “today” at that time – everywhere that man is an earthly creature. But he is not. He is a being that comes from the spiritual world and when it dies, returns to the spiritual world. Today, when Christianity has been in effect for almost two thousand years, one is surprised that such a thing was said at the time. But at that time it was not so. The Asian and African conceptions of the spirit were little known or widespread in Greece. There, people were more turned towards the world. And so, especially against the worldly Hellenism that existed in Rome, what Jesus of Nazareth taught in the first place was something tremendously significant.

But in doing so, he would not have done anything different from resurrecting what earlier peoples, the Indians, the Egyptians and so on, had already said. Only what I have just told you would have been resurrected; only what was already there would have come back. But that Jesus of Nazareth not only revived what was already there, but he also said the following. He said: Yes, if I had only listened to what people could tell me today, I would not have come up with the teaching of the spirit at all, because people no longer really know anything about the spirit. That came to me from outside the earth. And so he realized that he was not just Jesus, but that an entity had emerged in his soul that was the Christ. To him, Jesus was the one who was born of the mother's womb on earth. The Christ was the one who entered his soul only in later times. The truth has emerged in his soul from the fact that people are spiritual by nature.

Now we must ask ourselves: How were the various ancient teachings cultivated in India, in Egypt, in Babylonia and also among the Jews? If you look around at the spiritual life today, you will find the church on one side and the schools on the other. At most, the rulers of the church argue with the rulers of the schools about the extent of the influence of the one on the other; but they are separate from each other. This was not the case with these ancient peoples, neither with the Indians nor the Egyptians nor the Babylonians nor even the Jews. Everything that was connected with religion in those days was at the same time connected with schools; it was one and the same thing to serve both the church and the school. Much of it has, of course, been transplanted into our time; but it is not the same as it was in ancient times, when the priest was also the teacher. The priest was the teacher both in India and in Egypt, Babylonia and so on. The priest was the teacher. And where did he teach? Well, he taught where the service was also performed, where the cult was held. The cult was generally connected with teaching. These were the mystery schools. They did not have churches and schools, but they had such places, that is, such institutes, which were both at the same time, and which we call mysteries today. But the general view was that one must be careful with everything that could be learned there.

You see, gentlemen, that was an old view: that a person should only be mature enough to receive certain knowledge. This has been completely lost today. And so everywhere you had those who held the highest dignity in the mysteries, called “fathers”. This is still reflected, for example, in the Catholic Church, where certain priests are called fathers. In ancient times, among the Indians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians and so on, everywhere those who were actually initiated into the knowledge, who had insights, were called “fathers”. And when these fathers had taught those who had been accepted by them, whom they believed could make them mature, then they also had them, just as they had been called “fathers,” called them “sons.” And all the rest of the people who did not enter into the mysteries, who were not accepted, were called the “children” of the fathers; or they were also called sons and daughters. Now, you can understand that a certain view has emerged. This view consisted in the fact that people, who were much more devout then than they are today, really felt that those who were in the mysteries were their fathers in a spiritual sense as well; they gladly regarded them as their fathers, as their spiritual fathers. And above all, they believed that these spiritual fathers were in closer contact with the gods than they were outside; they outside must first receive the message, the knowledge, from the fathers. And so, gradually, people became very dependent on the fathers. The state that the Catholic Church would like to restore today, I believe, wholeheartedly, was a matter of course in the ancient times. It was like that everywhere. No one rebelled against it. People simply said: If you want to be a real human being, then you either have to be a father yourself, then you communicate directly with the gods, or you have to learn something about the gods from the fathers. So you are a human being because those who are in the schools, in the mysteries, tell you something. This is how the distinction between children of God and children of men, between sons of God and sons of men, came about. Those who were in the mysteries were called the sons of God because they, in turn, looked up to the gods as to their fathers. But those who lived outside, to whom only what was in the mysteries was proclaimed, were called the children of men or sons of men. And so people were divided into sons of God and sons of men or human children. Today this seems even ridiculous to people, but in those days it was quite natural. Today, people do make distinctions – admittedly not in Switzerland, but I don't know whether something similar is gaining a little ground there; but in neighboring countries, right away – now it has ceased somewhat, but it wasn't long ago that one distinguished excellencies from ordinary people, the barons from ordinary people; this was more taken for granted. But in the old days it was simply taken for granted that a distinction was made between the sons of the gods, the children of the gods and the children of men.

The one who then called himself Christ Jesus, who was so named, said: A son of God, a child of the spirit, is not acquired through another human being; rather, everyone becomes one through God Himself. It is only a matter of becoming aware of it. The old man said: The Father from the Mysteries must make one aware of this. - The Christ Jesus said: One already carries the seed of the divine within oneself, and one can, if one only makes the right effort, bring it out of oneself.

But with that, Christ Jesus taught that which makes people all over the world the same in their souls. And the greatest difference that has been overcome by Christ Jesus is that between the Sons of God and the sons of men.

People have misunderstood this in all sorts of ways – the ancients because they did not want the idea to arise that it was no longer possible to distinguish between the Sons of God and the children of men, and the later generations because they no longer knew what was meant by it. Just as the later generations no longer knew the carnival, they also no longer knew what was meant by “sons of the gods” and “sons of man”. That is why the Bible, the New Testament, continually adds that Jesus Christ is sometimes called the Son of God and sometimes the Son of Man, while all the passages that speak of the Son of God and the Son of Man actually mean that both can be used in the same sense; that is why they are spoken of alternately. But if you don't know that this has led to that, you can't really understand the Gospels at all. And they are actually being understood today in a very bad sense, especially by those who profess to do so.

In this way you have presented emotionally what actually came into the world through Christ Jesus. And if I first deal with the external things today, I must say: You see, there were also other great differences between people everywhere. One need only think of ancient India. There were distinctions, like the animals or classes of animals: the Brahmins, the priests, the country people, the laborers. The Egyptians, on the other hand, had a whole army of slaves. The castes were not so strictly separated from each other, but they were still present to a certain extent. Yes, even in Greece and Rome there was still the difference between freeborn and slaves. These external differences have only been wiped out in modern times because the difference between the children of the gods and the children of men has been wiped out. So there was also an enormous influence on the whole social life of humanity from what happened in Palestine through Christ Jesus.

But now one can actually ask about everything: Yes, is it the case that it can be found out where the spiritual actually comes from outside of the earth into the human being? You see, in this respect it is even very difficult to talk today, because today everything is actually only considered materialistically. For example, let us say, language. You know that different languages are spoken in different areas, different countries of the world; but still, the languages all have a secret similarity. The similarity does not have to be as striking as, say, in Germany and England, in Germany and in Holland. But still, it is the case that the languages, despite being different, have a certain similarity. One can find that, for example, the language spoken in India, even if one does not understand it immediately, if one engages with it, the individual word images are similar to those of the German language.

And what do people say when they want to explain something like this today? They say: Well, such a language originated in one place on earth - because everything should only come from the earth - then the peoples migrated, carried the language somewhere else, and it changed a little. But it all comes from one language.

This is the greatest scientific superstition that has emerged in modern times. Because, you see, gentlemen, this scientific superstition is exactly the same as the following: Imagine a person lives in India and he gets warm when the sun shines. Now, the view is formed: man can get warm. - Now, later, people in Europe discover that they also get warm in summer. They also get warm. Now they don't use their intellect to help them, but their senses. They say: “You can't explain getting warm from the present; but in ancient India, people got warm; they emigrated to Europe and transplanted the property of getting warm to Europe.” Yes, gentlemen, if someone says that, then of course he is crazy. But the philologists say the same thing! They do not say, when a language in Europe is similar to a language in India, that the same influence from outside the Earth has worked in India as in Europe, but they say: the language has migrated! If in two regions a person gets warm, one will not say that the property of getting warm was brought here by migration, but one looks up to the common sun, and it warms both those in India and those in Europe. When two languages are found that are similar in distant places, it is not because the language has migrated, but because the common influence, just as the influence of the sun is there for the whole earth, the common influence of extraterrestrials is effective on the peoples of the most diverse areas of the earth. But because men definitely do not want to admit that an extraterrestrial influence takes place in the spiritual, they think up all kinds of things, which one just does not notice are crazy, because they are so learned. If people were not afraid of being thought crazy, they would deny everywhere that the sun warms, but they would say: In primeval times the property of becoming warm arose once, and that has been transplanted over the whole earth. They would deny the influence of the sun, if that were not crazy! This is something that must be taken into account if one wants to understand the origin of Christianity.

It's already too late to answer any further questions today; we can talk about it next Saturday.

Let us first try to bring to mind something that has often been considered in this or that context: that is the relationship of our thoughts, our ideas, to the world. How can we imagine the relationship of our thoughts to the world?

Let us imagine the world as an outer circle and ourselves in relation to it (see diagram on p. 30). At first, it will be clear to us all that we form a picture of the world in our thoughts. We spoke yesterday about how we arrive at conscious thoughts in the physical world. We want to use this circle (small inner circle) to represent what is present in our physical interior through our soul as our thoughts. And I want to say: this circle is intended to represent what we, as the content of our soul with the help of our body, perceive as our thoughts about the world.

Now we know from the various considerations that what we call thoughts actually rest in us on a certain reflection. I have often used the comparison that we are actually also awake outside our physical body, and that the physical body reflects what comes to our consciousness like a mirror. So when we think of ourselves as spiritual beings, we must not actually think of ourselves as being inside there, where – to put it bluntly – our thoughts emerge through our body, but we must think of ourselves as being outside our physical body even when we are awake. So that we actually have to think ourselves into the world with our spiritual-soul nature.

And what is actually mirrored? Well, when thoughts arise in us, something is mirrored in the universe. Let that which lives in the universe and is mirrored in us be indicated by this circle (green). Just as I have the yellow circle here in the human organism as a reflection of something in the universe, I want to indicate something that is mirrored in our thoughts by this green circle in the world itself. And we can say: That which is designated here by this green circle is actually the real thing, the reality, of which our thoughts are only the image, the image reflected back from our body. All this is meant, of course, only schematically.

If we understand in the right sense what actually happens when we confront the world, then we must say that something is generated in us: the whole sum of our ideas is generated in us as a mere image of something that is outside in the world. All that is in our intelligence is an image of something that is outside in the world.

Those who have always known something of the true state of such things in the world have therefore spoken of the truth of the human thought content being spread out in the universe as world thoughts, and that what we have as thought content is just an image of world thoughts. The thoughts of the world are mirrored in us. If our true being were only in our thoughts, then this true being of ours would, of course, be only an image. But from the whole context, it must be clear to us that our true being is not in our head, but that our true being is in the world within us, that we only mirror ourselves in the world thoughts within us. And what we can find in us through the mirroring apparatus of our body is an image of our true reality. All this has already been emphasized in various contexts.

When the physical body dissolves in death, the images that arise in us naturally dissolve as well. What remains of us, our true reality, is basically inscribed in the cosmos throughout our entire life, and it only projects a mirror image of ourselves through our body during our lifetime. Here, you see, lies the difficulty that philosophers continually encounter and cannot overcome with their philosophy, the main difficulty. These philosophers are given, in the first instance, nothing but that which they imagine. But consider that existence is precisely pressed out of the imagination, out of the content of consciousness. It cannot be in it, because what is in consciousness is only a mirror image. Existence cannot be in it. Now philosophers seek existence through consciousness, through ordinary physical consciousness. They cannot find it that way. And it is quite natural that such philosophies had to arise as the Kantian one, for example, which seeks being through consciousness. But because consciousness, quite naturally, can only contain images of being, one can come to no other conclusion than to recognize that one can never approach being with consciousness.

Those who look more deeply then know that of all that is present in consciousness, out there in the world is the true, the real, which is only reflected in consciousness. But what actually happens between the world and consciousness? As a spiritual scientist, one must understand what happens there. Certainly, it is only images that are created by the physical body. The physical body is created out of the universe. It develops during the course of life between birth and death to the point where it can create images, indeed it creates an image of the whole human being that we always encounter when we see ourselves in the mirror of our body. It is only an image, but it is an image. And what is the purpose of this image in the overall cosmic context? Yes, this image must come into being. You see, at the moment when we enter into existence through birth from the spiritual world, an epoch of our existence has actually come to an end in a certain sense. We have entered the spiritual world through a previous death, we carry certain forces into the spiritual world, we live out these forces until what in the fourth mystery drama has been called the midnight hour of existence between 'death and a new birth.

In the second half of life, between death and a new birth, we then gather strength. But where do these forces that we gather want to go? They want to build the new physical body, and when the new physical body is there, the forces that we partake of in the second half between death and a new birth have fulfilled their task. Because they want to represent this new body. They want to come together in the new body. One can say that entire hierarchies are working, struggling, to enable this person to enter into existence through birth from the spiritual universe, as I indicated in the second mystery drama through the words of Capesius. There we see what it evokes in the human mind when man becomes aware of what it means that entire hierarchies of gods are involved in bringing man into the world.

But I would like to say that with these powers, in that they bring about the human being, something very similar happens as it does with the old seeds of a plant: when the new plant has emerged, the old seed has fulfilled its task; it no longer claims to produce a plant. This plant is called upon by the cosmos to produce another seed. Otherwise there would be no further development, and plant life would have had to come to an end with this plant. Thus, if the pictorial consciousness did not arise here, human life would have to end with the renewal of life between birth and death. That which appears as the image of the world is the new germ that now goes through death and, through death, passes over into a new life. And this germ is now really such that it brings over nothing of the old reality, but that it begins at the stage of an image, at nothing, really begins in relation to reality, to outer reality, at nothing.

Please summarize a thought here that is of tremendous importance. Imagine for a moment that you are facing the world. Well, the world is there, you are there too. But you have emerged from the world, the world has created you, you belong to the world. Now life must go on. In that which is in you as reality, which the world has placed in you - this world that you look at within the physical plane - there is nothing that can continue life. But something is added: you look at the world, create an image for yourself, and this image gains the power to carry your existence into further infinite distances. This image becomes the germ of the future.

If you do not consider this, you will never understand that, alongside the sentence “Out of nothing, nothing comes into being,” the other sentence is also fully correct: “In the deepest sense, existence is always generated out of nothing.” Both sentences are fully correct; you just have to apply them in the right place. The continuity of existence does not end with this. If you, let us say, were to wake up in the morning and find that physically nothing at all of you had remained – this is indeed the case when one is approaching a new birth – but only had a full memory of what had happened, thus only the image, you would be quite content. Of course, deeper minds have always felt such things. When Goethe placed the two poems next to each other: “No being can disintegrate into nothingness,” and immediately before it was the poem that means: “Everything must disintegrate into nothingness if it wants to persist in being.” These two poems stand very close to each other in Goethe as an apparent contradiction, immediately one after the other.

But for ordinary philosophy, there is a pitfall here, because it must actually rise to the negation of being.

Now one could again raise the question: What is actually reflected here, if all that is reflected here are only the thoughts of the world? How can one then be certain that there is a reality out there in the world? And here we come to the necessity of recognizing that reality cannot be guaranteed at all through ordinary human consciousness, but that reality can only be guaranteed through that consciousness which arises in us in the regions where the imaginations are, and we get behind the character of the imaginations. Then we find that out there in the world, behind what I have indicated as green, there are not just world thoughts, but that these world thoughts are the expressions of the world beings. But they are veiled by the world thoughts, just as the human inner being is veiled by the content of consciousness. So we look into the world; we think we have the world in our consciousness: there we have nothing, a mere mirror image. That which is mirrored is itself only world thoughts. But these world thoughts belong to real, actual entities, the entities that we know as spiritual-soul entities, as group souls of the lower realms, as human souls, as souls of the higher hierarchies, and so on.

Now you know that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity on Earth falls into two halves. In the older times, there was a kind of dream-like clairvoyance. Through this dream-like clairvoyance, people knew that behind this world, which is ultimately grasped by people in their thoughts, there is a world of real spiritual entities. For in the old dream-like clairvoyance, people did not perceive mere thoughts, just as the newer clairvoyant, who, for example, through the methods of “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” again enters into a relationship with the spiritual world, does not perceive mere thoughts either, but beings of the spiritual world. I have often tried to make this clear, so that I even said in one of the Munich lectures: You put your head into beings the way you would put your head into an anthill: thoughts begin to take on beings and come to life. That was how it was with people in the older days. In their perceiving consciousness, they not only lived in thoughts, but they lived in the beings of the world. But it was necessary - and we know from the various lectures that have been given why it was necessary - that this old clairvoyance, so to speak, dimmed and ceased. For that through which man received his present consciousness, which he needs in order to attain true inner freedom, presupposed that the old clairvoyance slowly dimmed and disappeared. There had to come a time when man was, as it were, dependent on what he, without any clairvoyance, can perceive in the world. He was then naturally cut off, completely cut off from the spiritual world, to put it in extreme terms.

Of course there were always individual spirits who could see into the spiritual world. But while the old clairvoyance was the general, the being cut off from clairvoyance now became, so to speak, the external culture of humanity for a period of time. And we, in turn, are seeking to imprint the consciously attained clairvoyance of this human culture again through our spiritual scientific endeavors. So that we can say: There are two developmental periods of humanity on earth, separated by an intermediate epoch. The first is a period in which dream-like clairvoyance prevailed: people knew that they were connected to a spiritual world, they knew that not only thoughts haunt the universe, but that there are world beings behind the thoughts, beings like ourselves who think these world thoughts. Then a time will come when people will know this again, but through self-achieved clairvoyance. And in between lies the episode where people are cut off. If we take a really close look at what has been said, we have to say that we actually have to expect that at some point in the development of humanity, people will realize that Yes, it makes no sense at all to think that there are thoughts in there in this brain. Because if there were only these thoughts, these images in there, and they did not represent anything, then it would be best to stop all thinking! Because why should one think about a world if this world contains no thoughts in itself?

Of course, in the 19th century people were quite content with the world containing no thoughts, and yet they reflected on the world. But the 19th century simply spread thoughtlessness over the most intimate matters of life. It had the task of bringing this thoughtlessness. But we may still assume that at some point someone may have thought of it in the following way, saying to himself: It only makes sense if we assume that thoughts are not only in there in the brain, but that the whole world is full of thoughts. - If he had now been able to advance to our spiritual science, yes, then he would have said: “Of course, there are thoughts out there in the universe, but there are also beings that harbor these thoughts, just as we harbor our thoughts. They are the beings of the higher hierarchies.

But this time had to come first, so to speak, after humanity had made the deep fall into materialism, that is, into the belief that the world has no thoughts.

One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world. That cannot be what is called Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be, when the tragic moment has come to say: there are thoughts in the world outside, and these thoughts are the real reality, the true, real reality... And where would the time be that had progressed so far that it had drawn the veil over everything spiritual, so to speak, and at the same time said to itself: Thoughts are the real thing in the world, and behind these thoughts there can be no spiritual beings anymore? One did not need to say it out loud, one only needed to feel it unconsciously, so to speak, then one stood there in the world and said to oneself: Yes, there is actually nothing to it with individual life! Individual life has, after all, only a value between birth and death. For that which really lives is not the thoughts of man, but the thoughts of the world, a world intelligence, but a world intelligence without essence. And I believe one could not imagine a greater tragedy than if, say, a Catholic priest had come to this inner realization, so to speak! |

What happens happens out of world necessity. Let us assume that a Catholic priest had come to this conclusion... He could easily have done so, because scholasticism has wonderfully trained the mind, and only if one has thoughtless, untrained thinking can one believe that thoughts are only in the head and not outside in the world. Then, so to speak, this Catholic priest would have undermined himself. For by only acknowledging the world thoughts as eternal, he would have wiped out the whole world, which was prescribed for him to believe through revelation as a spiritual world.

It can truly be said: Whatever can be presupposed through spiritual science also happens in the world. If we have the necessity somewhere to presuppose something as necessary and we have to say: a moment must once have existed in the world when something like this was felt, then that moment must have existed, most certainly. And even if it has passed by completely unnoticed, it has been there.

I would like to point out this moment, this moment when one can see how something that is not yet there, but wants to prepare, wants recognition, recognition of world thoughts, but does not yet want to know about what is behind these world thoughts as the world of the higher hierarchies, comes into a conflict.

In 1769, a pamphlet entitled “Lettres sur l'esprit du siècle” was published in London. It contained allusions to such a mood as I have characterized. And in 1770, another pamphlet appeared in Brussels entitled “Système de la nature. The voice of reason in the age and particularly against that of the other system of nature.” This ‘Autre système de la nature’ was that of Baron Holbach, against which this brochure is directed. This brochure said it wanted to take a stand against what Baron Holbach, as a materialist, advocated in his System of Nature. But the two brochures were hardly read, completely forgotten.

But now the strange thing turned out, that in 1865 a beautiful book appeared in Poitiers, by Professor Beaussire, entitled “Antécédents de Hégélianisme dans la philosophie Française”. This book, which appeared in 1865, was a two-volume work and had been written somewhat earlier than the two brochures mentioned, i.e. around 1760-1770, by the Benedictine monk Leodegar Maria Deschamps, who was born in Rennes in 1733 and died in 1774 as prior of a Benedictine monastery in Poitou. The first volume contained what Deschamps called at the time: “Le vrai système.” It was not published until 1865, together with parts of the second volume. It had been in manuscript form in the Poitiers library for so long. Nobody had paid any attention to it, except during the period in which it was written. What Deschamps – for the two pamphlets I mentioned also originated from him – wanted to express in 1769 and 1770 is now expressed in a strong first volume, which was published a century later by Professor Beaussire. That is what it contains. And the second volume contained a detailed correspondence and a presentation of all the efforts that Deschamps made at the time – let us put ourselves in the time when this was: namely before the outbreak of the French Revolution – described all the efforts that Deschamps made to somehow bring about the breakthrough of his “vrai système”. We learn there that the man really, I would say, stood between two fires: On the one hand, wherever his “vrai système” was discussed, he was warned that if the church found out about the “système”, he would be unconditionally subject to the harshest of punishments as a priest. On the other hand, even the so-called freethinkers showed very little interest in his writing. They were interested, but they did not want to do even the smallest thing that he asked: find a publisher. Rousseau, Robinet, Voltaire, the subtle Abbé Yvon, Barthélemy, even Diderot, they all knew this “vrai système”. It was even read to Diderot in his salon. He did not understand it immediately and therefore wanted to keep it to read through; but the good priest Deschamps was so anxious that he took it back because he did not want to put it into other hands. So he was always torn between these two things: on the one hand, he did not want his “vrai système” to be known; on the other hand, he wanted it to really take hold of humanity.

Now let us take a look at what Deschamps presented as his “vrai système” in his first volume. He really did present what I just spoke of, which was bound to come up at some point. He calls that which is in the head (see drawing on p. 40) by designating it as force, “intelligence”; and he calls that which is out there, what I have drawn here in green, “comprehension”. And the significant thing is that he recognized: Yes, if one now conceives this whole mass of thoughts of the world in the spiritual eye, it is a web of world thoughts. If you look at only the individual object, it actually only has meaning when it is placed in the whole fabric of world thoughts. Fundamentally, it is nothing in itself. That which is something, which is there, is the whole fabric of world thoughts.

And that is why Deschamps distinguishes between “le tout” and “tout.” He calls the whole fabric of world thought “le tout,” and he distinguishes “le tout” from “tout.” The first is the sum of all particulars. A subtle distinction, as you can see. “Le tout” is the whole, the universe, the cosmos; ‘tout’ is everything that is considered a detail. But what is considered a detail is at the same time, as he says, ‘rien’; ‘tout’ is ‘rien’; that is an equation. But ‘le tout’, that means in his sense: the universe of thought.

The more materialistically minded minds, like Robinet and his ilk, could not grasp what he actually meant. And so no one could understand him. It could come to pass, because, so to speak, the materialistic tendency was already there, that the works of this Benedictine prior were left to molder. Because, it is not true that in 1865 a professor published the work – after all, that is nothing special. They always did that, you know, they collected and published such old tomes, regardless of their content.

So the time that was to come, the time of materialism, had passed over what had taken hold in the lonely soul, the lonely spirit of a Benedictine prior.

It is probably difficult for today's humanity to learn to delve deeper into the corresponding expressions, which are truly wonderful expressions, namely through the way in which one is placed after the other here : “tout, rien” he calls at the same time, in that he goes further to describe the world, “etre sensible”; and then he forms the expression “neantisme” also “rienisme”, yes even “neantete” and “rienite”. And now consider the relationship between n&antisme, rienisme, n&antete, rienite, and what we call Maya, and you will see how closely all these things are related, and how, into the age of material ism, I might say, that which instinctively still remained from the earlier consciousness of looking into a spiritual world, of which the last remnant remained: “le tout,” the cosmic world of thought.

Of course, one must also recognize the greatness of such a thinker when he can no longer appeal to us 150 or 160 years later. I am convinced that if, for example, our dear female friends were to obtain these two volumes from some library, and if they were to work their way through the difficult philosophical part of the first half of the first volume and then read the second half of the first volume , they would become quietly furious at the views that Deschamps now develops regarding the position of women, for he has desperately unmodern views on the subject and, in the spirit of Plato, regards women from the point of view of communism. So we must not want to take everything in Deschamps' work at face value. But we must bear in mind what makes him such an interesting personality, especially if we want to consider the progress of the development of humanity. The important thing, however, is that in him we see, as it were, a spiritual view dying out. He is not even read, one could even say not even printed, although the most significant minds of his time knew him. Even a great mind such as Diderot did not even see fit to recommend its publication. All of this has been absorbed by the emerging materialism,

As you can see, we must work vigorously and energetically. For it is, after all, a matter of nothing less than bringing a new impulse to the spiritual development of humanity in the face of what, I might say, has emerged so surely and so strongly that, from a certain point in time, it has trampled to death everything that still reminded people of anything other than a more or less materialistically conceived world view.

And there was indeed tragedy in this personality of Deschamps. For he was, after all, a Benedictine priest. And the strange thing was this: Baron Holbach said in his “System of Nature”: Religion is the most harmful thing that the human race can have, religion is the greatest fraud, and should be eradicated as quickly as possible -; in contrast to this, Deschamps said: No, “le vrai systeme” must be adopted, and when people adopt “le vrai systeme”, then religion will disappear. But it must be preserved until people have accepted “le vrai systeme”. Then, so to speak, all the revealed truths behind it will be dropped, and in their place will be established the fabric of world thoughts. So this priest, who besides had to teach his boarding school boys the catechism and everything that religion had to offer every day, waited until his “vrai système” would become common property and religion would disappear as a result! There is something highly tragic about this.

When we stand today before the outer world, which in many respects believes itself to be beyond materialism, but which is terribly mistaken in this respect, then it is of course primarily a matter of teach people again that what we have as a world of perception within us is a reflection of the truth, and that we are actually always outside of our bodies with our true spiritual-soul nature. I have already discussed this here in another context. I also pointed out at the time that I had presented this from an epistemological, purely philosophical point of view at the last philosophers' congress in Bologna. Unfortunately, however, none of the philosophers at the time understood what was actually meant philosophically. Even the chairman of the congress, the famous philosopher Paul Deußen, is one of them. After my speech, he merely said: Yes, I have heard something about Theosophy. I have read a brochure that Franz Hartmann wrote against Theosophy. That was all Deußen could say about my lecture, Deußen, one of the most well-known and, in the field of Indology, most revered philosophers of the present day.

But we must be clear about the fact that it must really be the first step: to make plausible to the world consciousness of humanity this peculiar relationship of the spiritual and soul to the physical. Then the spirit that is at work in the course of human development will bring it about that people will recognize more than could be recognized in the 18th century, that people will see behind the “entendement” » the hierarchies and know that the «entendement» is that which the hierarchies live out as the thought content of the world, just as we live out the intelligence, «intelligence», through our being.

But some things will necessarily be connected with this change in the spiritual consciousness of humanity, which we have been talking about now and also in these days in a certain context. For what matters most of all for us – and I must keep emphasizing this – is not just to absorb knowledge, but to connect with every fiber of our spiritual and soul being with the results of spiritual research, so that we learn to think, feel and sense in the spirit of spiritual research. Then, wherever we are in life, wherever karma has placed us, whether we have a more material or a more spiritual occupation, we will truly carry into the individual branches of life that which is spiritually felt, felt and thought in us. |

And this must be said: anyone who expects a continuation, a real progress of culture from something other than such a spiritual deepening of humanity will wait in vain if it is left to him. The only thing that will really advance humanity is this spiritual deepening; for the events that otherwise take place can only be brought to a prosperous end if there are as many souls as possible that are able to feel, sense and think spiritually. Spiritual thinking must coincide with what is otherwise happening in the world if there is to be progress in the future of civilization.

What must be lived out as the karma of materialism, you are now experiencing when you look around at what is happening in the world. It is the karma of materialism being lived out. And the one who can look into things will find in all details - even in all details - the karma of materialism being lived out.

We will only find the way into a prosperous future if we find our way through what, I would like to say, under the leadership of Christ, in the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, arises for the soul's perception, if we orient this perception of the soul to the results of spiritual science. And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this intuitive perception and feeling has not to be drawn from spiritual science, and that everything else in the present world is opposed to it, and that we ourselves oppose spiritual science when we do not find ourselves ready to go, so to speak, completely into its spirit. For only spiritual science deals with the human being as such, with the human being as such, in relation to present-day humanity. Everything in present-day humanity is moving towards the goal of denying the human being as such and presenting something other than the human being as that for which one should fight, for which one should work, and of which one should think.

As you know, my dear friends, I have been unable to go into the details of our contemporary phenomena since Christmas for reasons I am sure you can guess. But in general, at least, we must appeal again and again to the intuitive perception of those who want to stand in the realm of spiritual science: the greatest in the newer development contains the germs for what humanity must attain. The greatest thing has been achieved by the fact that, in certain currents of human culture, what can merely be called national culture, what can merely be called national aspiration, has receded. For the true inner impulse is for the national to be overcome by the spiritual in the course of human development. Anything that works towards the unification of world territories from a national point of view works against human progress. Precisely there, in the most beautiful measure, that which leads forward can occasionally develop where a part of a nationality lives, separated from the great mass of the nationality, cut off from an entire massif. How something really significant was achieved by the fact that, in addition to the Germans in the German Empire, there were also Germans in Austria and Germans in Switzerland, separated from the Germans in the German Empire. And it would be contrary not only to the course of what one otherwise thinks, but contrary to the idea of progress, to think that a uniformity under a national idea should unite these three limbs into a single nationality, disregarding precisely the great thing that comes from external political separation. And one cannot imagine how infinitely bitter and sad it is when the national point of view is asserted by certain quarters as the only one for the formation of political contexts, when, from a national point of view, demarcations are sought, separations are sought. One can stand aloof from all politics, but fall into mourning when this idea, which is contrary to all real progressive forces, comes to the fore.

A sad Pentecost, my dear friends, when such words are forced from the soul.

But let us hold fast to the other Pentecost, to which attention was drawn yesterday and the day before, to that Pentecost to which the third part of our saying refers: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.”

Let us hold fast to the awareness that the human soul can find the way into the spiritual worlds, and that in our epoch of development the point has come when it is predetermined in the spiritual world that a new revelation should flow into humanity, a scientific revelation of spiritual knowledge that can take hold of human souls and give them what they need now and for the future.

We may say it, my dear friends: when peaceful times come again in place of the present ones, we will be able to speak quite differently – if not some particularly repulsive karma should prevent it – than we have been able to speak on spiritual-scientific ground up to now. But all this presupposes that spiritual science is not just knowledge about us, but a real, a world-wide gift of Pentecost; that we really do not just unite spiritual science with our minds, but with our hearts. For then, through the union of spiritual science with the power of our hearts, what wants to come down from the spiritual world will gather into the fiery tongues that are the tongues of Pentecost.

What wants to come down from the spiritual world as the gift of Pentecost lures into the human soul, not the intellect, but the heart, the warm heart that can feel with spiritual science, not just know about spiritual science. And the more your heart is warmed by the abstractions of spiritual science, which sometimes seem to chill, even though we almost always try to present only the concrete, the better. And the more we can even unite such a thought, as was expressed just yesterday, with our hearts, the better!

We have said that as materialists we usually perceive only one half of the physical world: what grows, springs up and sprouts. But we must also look at destruction, although we must see that destruction does not impose itself on us as the one who sees destruction as a mere nothingness. In all that is like destruction, we must also see the ascent and rising of the spiritual. We must connect ourselves completely with what we can feel and inwardly experience through the results of spiritual science as the spiritual life, the spiritual. Then we will feel more and more the truth of the saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We will have a scientific trust that we will be awakened to the spiritual world through the power of the spirit. And we will not feel with pride, but in all humility, what is to be brought into the world through spiritual science, but we will feel it especially in our hard time, in our time, which asks so many questions about our feelings that can only be answered when spiritual science can truly assert itself. I do not wish to stir up anyone's pride, but I would like to repeat a word that was once spoken when there was also much talk about what should happen through minds that had received something and were to carry it out. It was said to these minds - not to stir their pride either, but appealing to their humility -: “You are the salt of the earth.”

Let us understand the word for ourselves in the right sense: “You are the salt of the earth.” And let us become aware that precisely when the fruits, the fruits of the blood-soaked earth will be there in the future, these fruits will not flourish without spirituality: that the earth will need salt even more afterwards.

Take these words, imbued with heartfelt passion, into your own heart and soul on this Pentecost, when we want to truly imbue our entire being with the truth in the sense suggested: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Thirteen years ago, almost to the day, in a course of lectures¹ that I gave in Stuttgart between Christmas and New Year, I spoke of the same events that we shall treat of in the present course of lectures. Only we shall have to alter the standpoint somewhat. In the first two introductory lectures we have been at pains to acquire an understanding for the radical change in man's life of thought and feeling that has come about in the course of human evolution, prehistoric as well as historic. In to-day's lecture, at any rate to begin with, we shall not need to go back more than a few thousand years.

You know that from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we have to regard as of paramount importance in its consequences for human evolution the so-called Atlantean catastrophe which befell the Earth in the time commonly known as the later Ice Age. It was the last Act in the downfall of the Atlantean continent, which continent forms to-day the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; and following it we have as we have often described, five great successive epochs of civilisation, leading up to our own time. Of the two earliest of these we have no trace in historical tradition, for the literature remaining in the East, even all that is contained in the magnificent Vedas, in the profound Vedantic philosophy, is but an echo of what we should have to describe, if we wanted to recall these ancient epochs. In my Outline of Occult Science I have always spoken of them as the Ancient Indian and the Ancient Persian.

To-day we shall not have to go so far back as this; we will direct our thoughts to the period which I have often designated as the Egypto-Chaldean, the period preceding the Graeco-Latin. We have already had to draw attention to the fact that during the time between the Atlantean catastrophe and the Greek period, great changes took place in regard to man's power of memory and also in regard to the social life of humanity. A memory such as we have to-day—the temporal memory, by means of which we can take ourselves back in time—was not in existence in this third Post-Atlantean period; man had then, as we have described in an earlier lecture, a memory that was linked to rhythmic experience. And we have seen how this rhythmic memory proceeded from a still earlier memory that was particularly strong in the Atlantean period, namely, the localised memory, where man only bore within him a consciousness of the present, but used all manner of things which he found in the external world or which he himself set there, as memorials by means of which he put himself into relationship with the past; and not alone with his own personal past, but with the past of humanity in general.

In this connection we have not only to think of memorials that were on the Earth; in those ancient times the constellations in the heavens served man as memorials, especially in their recurrences and in the variations of these recurrences. From the constellations man perceived how things were in earlier times. Thus did heaven and earth work together to build for an ancient humanity the localised memory.

Now the man of long past times was different in the whole constitution of his being from the man of a later time, and still more so from the man of our own time. Man to-day, in his waking condition, bears the Ego and astral body within him unnoticed, as it were; most people do not notice how the physical bears within it, along with the etheric body, a much more important organisation than itself, namely, the astral body and the Ego-organisation. You, of course, are familiar with these connections. But an ancient humanity felt this fact of their own being quite differently.

And it is to such a humanity that we must return, when we go back to the third epoch of Post-Atlantean civilisation,—the Egypto-Chaldean. At that time man experienced himself as spirit and soul still to a great extent outside his physical and etheric body, even when awake. He knew how to distinguish: This I have as my spirit and soul,—we, of course, call it the Ego and the astral body—and it is linked with my physical body and my etheric body. He went through the world in this experience of twofold-ness. He did not call his physical and his etheric body ‘I.’ He called ‘I’ only his soul and spirit, that which was spiritual and was in a manner connected downward with his physical and etheric bodies, had a connection with them that he could observe and feel. And in this spirit and soul, in this Ego and astral body, man was made aware of the entry of the Divine-spiritual Hierarchies, even as to-day he feels the entry of natural substances into his physical body.

To-day man's experience in the physical body is of the following nature. He knows that with the process of nourishment, with the process of breathing, he receives the substances of the external kingdoms of Nature. Before, they are outside; then they are within him. They enter him, penetrate him and become part of him. In that earlier age, when man experienced a certain separation of his soul-and-spirit nature from his physical and etheric nature, he knew that Angels, Archangels and other Beings up to the highest Hierarchies are themselves spiritual substance that penetrates his soul and spirit and becomes—if I may put it so—part of him. So that at every moment of life he was able to say: In me live the Gods. And he looked upon his Ego, not as built up from below by means of physical and etheric substances, but as bestowed on him through grace from above, as coming from the Hierarchies. And as a burden, or rather as a vehicle, in which he feels himself borne forward in the physical world as in a vehicle of life—so did he conceive of his physical-etheric nature. Until this is clearly grasped, we shall not understand the course of events in the evolution of mankind.

We could trace this course of events by reference to many different examples. To-day we will follow one thread, the same that I touched upon thirteen years ago, when I spoke of that historic document² which represents the most ancient phase of the evolution we have now to consider,—I mean, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh has in part the character of a Saga, and so to-day I will set before you the events that I described thirteen years ago, as they manifest themselves directly to spiritual vision.

In a certain town in Asia Minor—it is called Erech³ in the Epic—there lived a man who belonged to the conquering type of which we spoke in the last lecture, the type that sprang so truly and naturally out of the whole mental and social conditions of the time. The Epic calls him Gilgamesh. We have then to do with a personality who has preserved many characteristics of the humanity of earlier times. Clear though it is, however, to this personality that he has, as it were, a dual nature,—that he has on the one hand the spirit-and-soul nature into which the Gods descend, and on the other hand, the physical-and-etheric into which substances of the Earth and the Cosmos, physical and etheric substances, enter,—it is none the less a fact that the representative people of his time are already passing through a transition into a later stage of human evolution. The transition consisted in this. The Ego-consciousness, which a comparatively short time previously was above in the sphere of spirit and soul, had now, if I may so express it, sunk down into the physical and etheric, so that Gilgamesh was one of those who began no longer to say ‘I’ to the spirit-and-soul part of their being, in which they felt the presence of the Gods, but to say ‘I’ to that which was earthly and etheric in them. Such was the stage of development in the human soul life of that time.

But along with this condition of soul, where the Ego has drawn down from the spirit and soul and entered as conscious Ego into the bodily and etheric, this personality had still left in him habits belonging to the past; and especially the habit of experiencing memory solely in connection with rhythm. He still retained also that inward feeling that one must learn to know the forces of death, because the death-forces can alone give to man that which brings him to powers of reflection.

Now owing to the fact that in the personality of Gilgamesh we have to do with a soul who had already gone through many incarnations on Earth and had now entered into the new form of human existence which I have just described, we find him at this point in a physical existence that bore in it a strain of uncertainty. The justification, as it were, of the habits of conquest, the justification, too, of the rhythmic memory, were beginning to lose their validity for the Earth. And so the experiences of Gilgamesh were throughout the experiences of an age of transition.

Hence it came about that when this personality, in accordance with the old custom, conquered and seized the city that in the Epic is called Erech, dissensions arose in the city. At first he was not liked. He was regarded as a foreigner and indeed would never have been able alone to meet all the difficulties that presented themselves in consequence of his capture of the city. Then there appeared, because destiny had led him thither, another personality—the Epic of Gilgamesh calls him Eabani⁴—a personality who had descended relatively late to the Earth from that planetary existence which Earth-humanity led for a period, as you will find described in my Outline of Occult Science.

You know how during the Atlantean epoch souls descended, some earlier, some later, from the different planets, having withdrawn thither from the Earth at a very early stage of Earth evolution.

In Gilgamesh we have to do with an individuality, who returned comparatively early to the Earth; thus at the time of which we are speaking he had already experienced many Earth incarnations.

In the other individuality who had now also come to that city we have to do with one who had remained comparatively long in planetary existence and only later found his way back to Earth. You may read of this from a somewhat different point of view in my Stuttgart lectures of thirteen years ago.

Now this second individuality formed an intimate friendship with Gilgamesh; and together they were able to establish the social life of the city on a really permanent footing. This was possible because there remained to this second personality a great deal of the knowledge that came from that sojourn in the Cosmos beyond the Earth, and that was preserved for a few incarnations after the return to Earth. He had, as I said in Stuttgart, a kind of enlightened cognition; clairvoyance, clairaudience and what we may call clair-cognition. Thus we have in the one personality what remained of the old habits of conquest and of the rhythmically-directed memory, and in the other what remained to him from vision and penetration into the secret mysteries of the Cosmos. And from the flowing together of these two things, there grew up, as was indeed generally the case in those olden times, the whole social structure of that city in Asia Minor. Peace and happiness descended upon the city and its inhabitants, and everything would have been in order, had not a certain event taken place that set the whole course of affairs in another direction.

There was in that city a Mystery, the Mystery of a Goddess, and this Mystery preserved very many secrets relating to the Cosmos. It was, however, in the meaning of those times, what I may call a kind of synthetic Mystery. That is to say, in this Mystery revelations were collected together from various Mysteries of Asia. And the contents of these Mysteries were cultivated and taught there in diverse ways at different times. Now this was not easily understood by the personality who bears the name of Gilgamesh in the Epic, and he made complaint against the Mystery that its teachings were contradictory. And seeing that the two personalities of whom we are speaking were those who really held the whole ordering of the city in their hands and that complaints against the Mystery came from so important a quarter, trouble ensued; and at length things became so difficult that the priests of the Mysteries appealed to those Powers Who in former times were accessible to man in the Mysteries. It will not surprise you to hear that in the ancient Mysteries man could actually address himself to the Spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies; for, as I told you yesterday, to the ancient Oriental, Asia was none else than the lowest heaven and in this lowest heaven man was aware of the presence of Divine-spiritual Beings and had intercourse with them. Such intercourse was especially cultivated in the Mysteries. And so the priests of the Istar Mysteries turned to those Spiritual Powers to whom they always turned when they sought enlightenment; and it came about that these Spiritual Powers inflicted a certain punishment upon the city.

What happened was expressed at the time in the following way: Something that is really a higher spiritual force, is working in Erech as an animal power, as a terrible spectral animal power. Trouble of all kinds befell the inhabitants, physical illnesses and more especially diseases and disturbances of the soul. The consequence was that the personality who had attached himself to Gilgamesh and who is called Eabani in the Epic, died; but in order that the mission of the other personality might be continued on Earth, he remained with this personality spiritually, even after death. Thus when we consider the later life and development of the personality who in the Epic bears the name of Gilgamesh, we have still to see in it the working together in the two personalities; but now in such a way that in the subsequent years of Gilgamesh's life he receives intuitions and enlightenment from Eabani, and so continues to act, although alone, not simply out of his own will, but out of the will of both, from the flowing together of the will of both.

What I have here placed before you is something that was fully possible in those olden times. Man's life of thought and feeling was not then so single and united as it is to-day. Hence it could not have the experience of freedom, in the sense in which we know it to-day. It was quite possible, either for a spiritual Being who had never incarnated on Earth to work through the will of an earthly personality, or, as was the case here, for a human personality who had passed through death and was living an after-death existence, to speak and act through the will of a personality on Earth. So it was with Gilgamesh. And from what resulted in this way through the flowing together of the two wills, Gilgamesh was able to recognise with considerable clearness at what point he himself stood in the history of mankind. Through the influence of the spirit that inspired him, he began to know that the Ego had sunk down into the physical body and etheric body,—which are mortal; and from that moment the problem of immortality began to play an intensely strong part in his life. His whole longing was set on finding his way by some means or other into the very heart of this problem. The Mysteries, wherein was preserved what there was to say on Earth in those days concerning immortality, did not readily reveal their secrets to Gilgamesh. The Mysteries had still their tradition, and in their tradition was preserved also in great measure the living knowledge that was present on Earth in Atlantean times, when the ancient original wisdom ruled among men.

The bearers of this original wisdom, however, who once went about on Earth as Spiritual Beings, had long ago withdrawn and founded the cosmic colony of the Moon. For it is pure childishness to suppose that the Moon is the dead frozen body that modern physics describes. The Moon is, before all, the cosmic world of those Spiritual Beings Who were the first great teachers of earthly humanity, the Beings Who once brought to earthly humanity the primeval wisdom and Who, when the Moon had left the Earth and sought a place for itself in the planetary system, withdrew also and took up their abode on this Moon.

He who to-day through Imaginative cognition is able to attain to a true knowledge of the Moon, gains knowledge too of the Spiritual Beings in this cosmic colony, Who were once the teachers of the ancient wisdom to humanity on Earth. What they had taught was preserved in the Mysteries, and also the impulses whereby man himself is able to come into a certain relationship with this ancient wisdom.

The personality who is called Gilgamesh in the Epic had, however, no living connection with these Mysteries of Asia Minor. But through the super-sensible influence of the friend who, in the after-death existence, was still united with him, there arose in Gilgamesh an inner impulse to seek out paths in the world whereby he might be able to come to an experience concerning the immortality of the soul. Later on, in the Middle Ages, when man desired to learn something concerning the spiritual world, he would sink down into his own inner being. In more modern times one could say that a still more inward process is followed. In those olden times, however, of which we are speaking, it was a matter of clear and exact knowledge to man that the Earth is not the mere lump of rock which the geology books would lead one to imagine, but that the Earth is a living being,—a living being, moreover, endowed with soul and spirit. As a tiny insect that runs over a human being may learn something of that human being as it passes over his nose and forehead, or through his hair, as the insect acquires its knowledge in this way by making a journey over the human being, so in those times it was by setting forth upon journeys over the Earth and by learning to know the Earth with its different configurations in different places, that man gained insight into the spiritual world. And this he was able to do, whether access to the Mysteries were permitted to him or no. It is in truth no mere superficial account that relates how Pythagoras and others wandered far and wide in order to attain their knowledge. Men went about the Earth in order to receive what was revealed in its manifold configurations, in all that they could observe from the different forms and shapes of the Earth in different places; and not of the Earth in its physical aspect alone, but of the Earth too as soul and spirit.

To-day men may travel to Africa, to Italy,—and yet, with the exception of external details, at which they gape and stare, their experience in these places may be very little different from their experience at home. For man's sensitiveness to the deep differences that subsist between different places of the Earth has gone.

In the period with which we are now dealing, it had not died out. Thus the impulse to wander over the Earth and thereby receive something that should help to the solution of the problem of immortality, betokened something full of meaning for Gilgamesh.

So he set forth upon his wanderings. And they had for him a result that was of very great significance. He came to a region that is nearly the same as we now call Burgenland, a district much talked of in recent times and concerning which there has been a good deal of contention as to whether it should belong to Hungary or not. The whole social conditions of the country have of course greatly changed since those far off times. Gilgamesh came thither and found there an ancient Mystery—the High Priest of the Mystery is called Xisuthros⁵ in the Epic—an ancient Mystery that was a genuine successor, as it were, of the old Atlantean Mysteries; only, of course, in a changed form, as must of necessity be the case after so long a time had elapsed.

And it was so that in this ancient Mystery centre they knew how to judge and appraise the faculty of knowledge that Gilgamesh possessed. He was met with understanding. A test was imposed upon him, one that in those days was often imposed on pupils of the Mysteries. He had to go through certain exercises, wide-awake, for seven days and seven nights. It was too much for him, so he submitted himself only to the substitute or alternative for the test. Certain substances were made ready for him, of which he then partook, and by means of them received a certain enlightenment; although, as is always the case when certain exceptional conditions are not assured, the enlightenment might be doubtful in some respects. Nevertheless a degree of enlightenment was there, a certain insight into the great connections in the Universe, into the spiritual structure of the Universe. And so, when Gilgamesh had ended his wandering and was returning home again, he did in fact possess a high spiritual insight.

He travelled along the Danube, following the river on its northern bank, until he came again to his home, to the home of his choice. But before he reached home, because he did not receive the initiation into the Post-Atlantean Mystery in the other way that I described, but instead in a somewhat uncertain way, he succumbed to the first temptation that assailed him and fell into a terrible fit of anger over an event that came to his notice,—something, in effect, which he heard had taken place in the city. He heard of the event before he reached the city, and burst out into a storm of anger; and in consequence, the enlightenment he had received was almost entirely darkened, so that he arrived home without it.

Nevertheless,—and this is the peculiar characteristic of this personality—he still had the possibility, through the connection with the spirit of his dead friend, of looking into the spiritual world, or at least of receiving information thence.

It is, however, one thing by means of an initiation to acquire direct vision into the spiritual world, and another thing to receive information from a personality who is in the after-death condition. Still, we may say with truth that something of an insight into the nature of immortality did remain with Gilgamesh. I am setting aside just now the experiences that are undergone by man after death; these do not yet play very strongly into the consciousness of the next incarnation, nor did they in those days;—into the life, into the inner constitution they do work very strongly, but not into the consciousness.

You now have before you these two personalities whom I have described and who together bring to expression the mental and spiritual constitution of man in the third Post-Atlantean period of civilisation at about the middle point of its development,—two personalities who still lived in such a way that the whole manner of their life was in itself strong evidence of the duality in man's nature. The one—Gilgamesh—was conscious of this duality; he was one of the first to experience the descent of the Ego-consciousness, the descent of the Ego into the physical and etheric nature in man. The other, inasmuch as he had passed through but few incarnations on Earth, had a clairvoyant knowledge, by means of which he was able to know that there is no such thing as matter, but that everything is spiritual and the so-called material only another form of the spiritual.

Now you can imagine that, if a man's being were so constituted, he could certainly not think and feel what we think and feel to-day. His whole thinking and feeling was indeed totally different from ours. And what such personalities could receive in the way of instruction was of course quite unlike what is taught to-day at school or in the universities. Everything of a spiritual or cultural nature that men received in those days came to them from the Mysteries, whence it was spread abroad as widely as possible among men by all manner of channels. It was the wise men, the priests, in the Mysteries, who were the true teachers of humanity.

Now it was characteristic of these two personalities that in the incarnation that we have described they were unable just because of their special constitution of soul, to approach the Mysteries of their own land. The one who is named Eabani in the Epic stood near the Mysteries through his sojourn in the extra-earthly regions of the Cosmos; the one who is named Gilgamesh experienced a kind of initiation in a Post-Atlantean Mystery, which however only bore half fruit in him. The result of all this was that both felt in their own being, as it were, something that made them kin to the primeval times of earthly humanity. Both were able to put the question to themselves: How have we become what we are? What share have we had in the evolution of the Earth? We have become what we are through the evolution of the Earth; what part have we played in its evolution?

The question of immortality that was the occasion of such suffering and conflict to Gilgamesh, was connected in those days with a necessary vision into the evolution of the Earth in primeval times. One could not think or feel—using the words in the sense of those times—about the immortality of the soul unless one had at the same time some vision of how human souls who were already there in very early phases of the Earth's evolution, during the Ancient Sun and Ancient Moon embodiments, saw approaching them, that which later has become what we call earthly. Men felt they belonged to the Earth. They felt that to know himself, man must behold and recognise his connection with the Earth.

Now the secret knowledge that was cultivated in all Mysteries of Asia, was first and foremost cosmic knowledge; its wisdom and its teachings unfolded the origin of the evolution of the Earth in connection with the Cosmos. So that in these Mysteries there appeared before men in a living way, in such a way that it could become living Ideas in them, a far-spread vision, showing them how the Earth evolved, and how in the heave and surge of the substances and forces of the Earth, all through the Sun, Moon and Earth periods of evolution, man has been evolving together with all these substances. All this was set before men in a most vivid manner.

One of the Mysteries where such things were taught, was continued on into much later times. It was the Mystery centre of Ephesus.⁶ This Mystery had in the very middle of its sanctuary the image of the Goddess Artemis. When we look to-day at pictures of the goddess Artemis, we have perhaps only the grotesque impression of a female form with many breasts. This is because we have no idea how such things were experienced in olden times; and it was the inner experience evoked by these things that was all-important. The pupils of the Mysteries had to go through a certain preparation before they were conducted to the true centre of the Mysteries. In the Ephesian Mysteries the centre was this image of the Goddess Artemis. When the pupil was led up to the centre, he became one with such an image. As he stood before the image, he lost the consciousness that he was there in front of it, enclosed in his skin. He acquired the consciousness that he himself is what the image is. He identified himself with the image. This identification of himself in consciousness with the divine image at Ephesus had the following effect. The pupil no longer merely looked out upon the kingdoms of the Earth that were round about him—the stones, trees, rivers, clouds and so forth—but when he felt himself one with the image, when he entered as it were into the image of Artemis, he received an inner vision of his connection with the kingdoms of the Ether. He felt himself one with the world of the stars, one with the processes in the world of the stars. He did not feel himself as earthly substance within a human skin, he felt his cosmic existence. He felt himself in the etheric. And as he did so, there rose before him earlier conditions of Earth-experience and of man's experience on Earth. He began to see what these earlier conditions had been. To-day we look upon the Earth as a great piece of rock or stone, covered with water over a large part of its surface and surrounded by a sphere of air containing oxygen and nitrogen and other substances,—containing, in fact, what the human being requires for breathing. And so on and so on. And when men begin to explain and speculate on what passes to-day for scientific knowledge, then we get a fine result indeed! For only by means of spiritual vision can one penetrate to the conditions that prevailed in the earliest primeval times. Such a spiritual vision, however, concerning primeval conditions of the Earth⁷ and of mankind was attained by the pupils of Ephesus, when they identified themselves with the divine image; they beheld and understood how formerly what surrounds the Earth to-day as atmosphere was not as it now is; surrounding the Earth, in the place where the atmosphere is to-day, was an extraordinarily fine albumen, a volatile, fluid albumenous substance. And they saw how everything that lived on the Earth required for its own genesis the forces of this volatile, fluid albumenous substance, that was spread over the Earth, and how everything also lived in it. They saw too how that which was in a certain sense already within this substance—finely distributed but everywhere with a tendency to crystallisation—how that which was present in a finely distributed condition as silicic acid was in reality a kind of sense-organ for the Earth and could take up into itself from all sides the Imaginations and influences from the surrounding Cosmos. And thus in the silicic acid contained in the earthly albumenous atmosphere were everywhere Imaginations, concretely, externally present.

These Imaginations had the form of gigantic, plant-like organisms, and out of that which was, so to speak, ‘imagined’ into the Earth in this way, there developed later, through absorption of the atmospheric substance,—the plant; everything that is of a plant-like nature. At first it was in the environment of the Earth, in volatile, fluid form; only later did it sink down into the soil and become what is known to us as the plant.

Besides the silicic acid, there was imbedded also in this albumen-atmosphere another substance, lime, in a finely-divided condition. Again, out of the lime substance, under the influence of the congelation of the albumen there arose the animal kingdom. And the human being felt himself within all this. He felt one with the whole Earth. He lived in that which formed itself as plant in the Earth through Imagination, he lived too in that which was developing on Earth as animal, in the way I have described. Each single human being felt himself spread out over the whole Earth, felt himself one with the Earth. So that the human beings were all—as I have described it for the Platonic teaching in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, in reference to the human capacity for ideas—were all each within the other.

Now destiny brought it about that the two personalities, of whom I spoke in Stuttgart and of whom I am speaking to you again here, reincarnated as adherents of the Mystery of Ephesus, and there received with deep devotion into their souls the things that I have here pictured to you in brief outline. Thereby their souls were, in a manner, inwardly established. Through the Mystery they now received as Earth-wisdom what had formerly been accessible to them only in experience,—for the most part unconscious experience.

Thus was the human experience of these personalities divided between two separate incarnations. And thereby did they bear within them a strong consciousness of man's connection with the higher, the spiritual world, and at the same time a strong, an intense capacity for feeling and experiencing all that belongs to the Earth.

For if you have two things that perpetually flow together, so that you cannot keep them apart, then they merge and lose themselves in each other. If, on the other hand, they show themselves clearly distinct, then you can judge the one by the other. And so these two personalities were able on the one hand to judge the spiritual of the higher world that came to them as a result of life-experience and that lived in them as an echo from their earlier incarnations. And now, as the origin of the kingdoms of nature was communicated to them in the Mystery of Ephesus under the influence of the Goddess Artemis, they were able, on the other hand, to judge how the things external to man on the Earth came into being, how gradually everything external to man on the Earth was formed out of a primeval substance, which substance also included man. And the life of these two personalities—it fell partly in the latter end of the time when Heraclitus⁸ was still living in Ephesus, and partly in the time that followed—became particularly rich inwardly and was powerfully lit up from within with the light of great cosmic secrets. There was in them moreover a strong consciousness of how man in his life of soul may be connected, not merely with that which lies spread out around him on the Earth, but with that too which extends upward,—when he himself reaches upward with his being. Such was the inner configuration of soul of these two personalities, who had worked together in the earlier Egypto-Chaldean epoch and then lived together at the time of Heraclitus and after, in connection with the Mystery of Ephesus. And now this working together was able to continue still further. The configuration of soul that had been developed in both, passed through death, through the spiritual world, and began to prepare itself for an Earth life that must needs again bring problems which will now of course present themselves in quite a different way. And when we observe in what manner these two personalities had to find their part later in the history of Earth evolution, we may see how through the experiences of the soul in earlier times—these experiences having their karmic continuation in the next life on Earth—things are prepared which afterwards appear in totally different form in the later life, when the personalities are once more incorporated into the evolution of humanity on Earth.

I have brought forward this example, because these two personalities make their appearance later in a period that was of extraordinary importance in the history of mankind. I indicated this in my lectures at Stuttgart thirteen years ago; in fact, I dealt with all these matters from a certain point of view. These personalities who had first in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch gone through what I may call a widely-extended cosmic life, and had then deepened this cosmic experience within them, thereby in a sense establishing their souls, now lived again in a later incarnation as Aristotle⁹ and Alexander the Great.¹⁰ When one understands the underlying depths in the souls of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, then one can begin to understand, as I explained in Stuttgart, all that was working so problematically in these two personalities, whose lives took their course in the time when Greek culture was falling into decay and Roman rule beginning to have dominion.

• 1. See Occult History. Historical Personalities and Events in the Light of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1957.
• 2. The Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered in the ruins of a palace of Assurbanipal written in cuneiform characters on twelve tablets. This text is based on older Sumerian documents of which fragments remain.
• 3. Called Erech in the Bible (1 Moses 10, 10), the city is named Uruk in the cuneiform text.
• 4. The cuneiform text has Enkidu or Engidu.
• 5. This is the Sumerian name Ziusudra used by Berossus, priest of Bel in Babylon, who wrote a history of Babylon and Chaldea in Greek around 280 B.C. based on the archives of the Temple in Babylon. In cuneiform script it is Utnapishtim.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this place in the 6th lecture of Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973.
• 7. See the 5th lecture in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 8. Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek philosopher. He lived around 500 B.C. and deposited his chief work in the Temple of Artemis. See Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972.
• 9. Greek philosopher from Stagira (384–322 B.C.). See Riddles of Philosophy by Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 10. (356-323 B.C.). From 336 King of Macedonia. Died in Babylon.