The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Of peculiar importance for the understanding of the history of the West in its relation to the East is the period that lies between three or four hundred years before, and three or four hundred years after, the Mystery of Golgotha. The real significance of the events we have been considering, events that culminated in the rise of Aristotelianism and in the expeditions of Alexander to Asia, is contained in the fact that they form, as it were, the last Act in that civilisation of the East which was still immersed in the impulses derived from the Mysteries.

A final end was put to the genuine and pure Mystery impulse of the East by the criminal burning of Ephesus. After that we find only traditions of the Mysteries, traditions and shadow-pictures,—the remains, so to speak, that were left over for Europe and especially for Greece, of the old divinely-inspired civilisation. And four hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha another great event took place, which serves to show what was still left of the ruins—for so we might call them—of the Mysteries.

Let us look at the figure of Julian the Apostate.¹ Julian the Apostate, Emperor of Rome, was initiated, in the 4th century, as far as initiation was then possible, by one of the last of the hierophants of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This means that he entered into an experience of the old Divine secrets of the East, in so far as such an experience could still be gained in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

At the beginning of the period we are considering, stands the burning of Ephesus; and the day of the burning of Ephesus is also the day on which Alexander the Great was born. At the end of the period, in 363, we have the day of the death—the terrible and significant death—of Julian the Apostate far away in Asia. Midway between these two days stands the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now let us examine a little this period of time as it appears in the setting of the whole history of human evolution. If we want to look back beyond this period into the earlier evolution of mankind, we have first to bring about a change in our power of vision and perception, a change that is very similar to one of which we hear in another connection. Only we do not often bring the things together in thought.

You will remember how in my book Theosophy I had to describe the different worlds that come under consideration for man. I described them as the physical world; a transition world bordering on it, namely, the Soul-world; and then the world into which only the highest part of our nature can find entrance, the Spirit-land. Leaving out of account the special qualities of this Spirit-land, through which present-day man passes between death and a new birth, and looking only at its more general qualities and characteristics, we find that we have to give a new orientation to our whole thought and feeling, before we can comprehend the Land of the Spirits. And the remarkable thing is that we have to change and re-orientate our inner life of thought and feeling in just the same way when we want to comprehend what lies beyond the period I have defined. We shall do wrong to imagine that we can understand what came before the burning of Ephesus with the conceptions and ideas that suffice for the world of to-day. We need to form other concepts and other ideas to enable us to look across the years to human beings who still knew that as surely as man is united through breathing with the air outside him, so surely is he in constant union through his soul with the Gods.

Starting then from this world, the world that is a kind of earthly Devachan, earthly Spirit-land,—for the physical world fails us when we want to picture it,—we came into the interim period, lasting from about 356 B.C. to 363 A.D. And now what follows? Over in Europe we find the world from out of which present-day humanity is on the point of emerging into something new, even as the humanity of olden times came forth from the Oriental world, passed through the Greek world, and then into the realm of Rome.

Setting aside for the moment what went on in the inner places of the Mysteries, we have to see in the civilisation that has grown up through the centuries of the Middle Ages and developed on into our own time, a civilisation that has been formed on the basis of what the human being himself can produce with the help of his own conceptions and ideas. We may see a beginning in this direction in Greece, from the time of Herodotus onward. Herodotus describes the facts of history in an external way, he makes no allusion, or at most very slight allusion, to the spiritual. And others after him go further in the same direction. Nevertheless in Greece we always feel a last breath, as it were, from those shadow-pictures that were there to remind man of the spiritual life. With Rome on the other hand begins the period to which man to-day may still feel himself related, the period that has an altogether new way of thought and feeling, different even from what we have observed in Greece. Only here and there in the Roman world do we find a personality such as Julian the Apostate who feels something like an irresistible longing after the old world, and evinces a certain honesty in getting himself initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What Julian, however, is able to receive in these Mysteries has no longer the force of knowledge. And what is more, he belongs to a world where men are no longer able to grasp in their soul the traditions from the Mysteries of the East.

Present-day mankind would never have come into being if Asia had not been followed first by Greece and then by Rome. Present-day mankind is built up upon personality, upon the personality of the individual. Eastern mankind was not so built up. The individual of the East felt himself part of a continuous divine process. The Gods had their purposes in Earth evolution. The Gods willed this or that, and this or that came to pass on the Earth below. The Gods worked on the will of men, inspiring them. Those powerful and great personalities in the East of whom I spoke to you—all that they did was inspired from the Gods. Gods willed: men carried it into effect. And the Mysteries were ordered and arranged in olden times to this end,—to bring Divine will and human action into line.

In Ephesus we first find a difference. There the pupils in the Mysteries, as I have told you, had to be watchful for their own condition of ripeness and no longer to observe seasons and times of year. There the first sign of personality makes its appearance. There in earlier incarnations Aristotle and Alexander the Great had received the impulse towards personality.

But now comes a new period. It is in the early dawn of this new period when Julian the Apostate experiences as it were the last longing of man to partake, even in that late age, in the Mysteries of the East. Now the soul of man begins to grow different again from what it was in Greece.

Picture to yourselves once more a man who has received some training in the Ephesian Mysteries. His constitution of soul is not derived from these Mysteries: he owes it to the simple fact that he is living in that age. When to-day a man recollects, when, as we say, he bethinks himself, what can he call to mind? He can call to mind something that he himself experienced in person during his present life, perhaps something that he experienced 20 or 30 years ago. This inward recollection in thought does not of course go further back than his own personal life. With the man who belonged, for instance, to the Ephesian civilisation it was otherwise. If he had received, even in a small degree, the training that could be had in Ephesus, then it was so with him that when he bethought himself in recollection, there emerged in his soul, instead of the memories that are limited to personal life, events of pre-earthly existence, events that preceded the Earth period of evolution. He beheld the Moon evolution, the Sun evolution, beholding them in the several kingdoms of Nature. He was able, too, to look within himself, and see the union of man with the Cosmic All; he saw how man depends on and is linked with the Cosmos. And all this that lived in his soul was true, ‘own’ memory, it was the cosmic memory of man.

We may therefore say that we are here dealing with a period when in Ephesus man was able to experience the secrets of the Universe. The human soul had memory of the far-past ages of the Cosmos.

This remembering was preceded in evolution by something else: it was preceded by an actual living within those earlier times. What remained was a looking back. In the time, however, of which the Gilgamesh Epic relates, we cannot speak of a memory of past ages in the Cosmos, we must speak of a present experience of what is past.

After the time of cosmic memory came what I have called the interim time between Alexander and Julian the Apostate. For the moment we will pass by this period. Then follows the age that gave birth to the western civilisation of the Middle Ages and of modern times. Here there is no longer a memory of the cosmic past, still less an experience in the present of the past; nothing is left but tradition.

1. Memory of the Cosmic Past.
2. Present Experience of the Past.
3. Tradition.

Men can now write down what has happened. History begins. History makes its first appearance in the Roman period. Think, my dear friends, what a tremendous change we have here! Think how the pupils in the Ephesian Mysteries lived with time. They needed no history books. To write down what happened would have been to them laughable. One only needed to ponder and meditate deeply enough, and what had happened would rise up before one from out of the depths of consciousness. Here was no demonstration of psycho-analysis such as a modern doctor might make: the human soul took the greatest delight in fetching up in this way out of a living memory that which had been in the past. In the time that followed, however, mankind as such had forgotten, and the necessity arose of writing down what happened. But all the while that man had to let his ancient power of cosmic memory crumble away, and begin in a clumsy manner to write down the great events of the world,—all this time personal memory, personal recollection was evolving in his inner being. For every age has its own mission, every age its own task.

Here you have the other side of that which I set before you in the very first lectures of this course, when I described the rise of what we designated ‘memory in time.’ This memory in time, or temporal memory, had, so to say, its cradle in Greece, grew up through the Roman culture into the Middle Ages and on into modern times. In the time of Julian the Apostate the seed was already sown for the civilisation based on personality, as is testified by the fact that Julian the Apostate found it, after all, of no avail to let himself be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

We have now come to the period when the man of the West, beginning from the 3rd or 4th century after Christ and continuing down to our own time, lives his life on Earth entirely outside the spiritual world, lives in concepts and ideas, in mere abstractions. In Rome the very Gods themselves became abstractions. We have reached a time when mankind has no longer any knowledge of a living connection with the spiritual world. The Earth is no longer Asia, the lowest of the Heavens, the Earth is a world for itself, and the Heavens are far away, dim and darkened for man's view. Now is the time when man evolves personality, under the influence of the Roman culture that is spread abroad over the lands of the West. As we had to speak of a soul-world bordering on the spiritual world, on the land of the Spirits that is above,—so, bordering on this spiritual oriental world is the civilisation of the West; we may call it a kind of soul-world in time. This is the world that reaches right down to our own day. And now, in our time, although most men are not at all alive to the fact, another stupendous change is again taking place.

Some of you who often listen to my lectures will know that I do not readily call any period a period of transition, for in truth every period is such,—every period marks a transition from what comes earlier to what comes later. The point is that we should recognise for each period the nature of the transition.

What I have said will already have suggested that in this case it is as though, having passed from the Spirit-land into the Soul-world one were to come thence into the physical world. In modern civilisation as it has evolved up till now, we have been able to catch again and again echoes of the spiritual. Materialism itself has not been without its echoes of the spirit. True and genuine materialism in all domains has only been with us since the middle of the 19th century, and is still understood by very few in its full significance. It is there, however, with gigantic force, and to-day we are going through a transition to a third world, that is in reality as different from the preceding Roman world as this latter was different from the oriental.

Now there is one period of time that has had to be left out in tracing this evolution: the period between Alexander and Julian. In the middle of this period fell the Mystery of Golgotha. Those to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was brought did not receive it as men who understood the Mysteries, otherwise they would have had quite different ideas of the Christ Who lived in the man Jesus of Nazareth. A few there were, a few contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, who had been initiated in the Mysteries, and these were still able to have such ideas of Him. But by far the greater part of Western humanity had no ideas with which to comprehend spiritually the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the first way by which the Mystery of Golgotha found place on Earth was the way of external tradition. Only in the very earliest centuries were there those who were able to comprehend spiritually, from their connection with the Mysteries, what took place at the Mystery of Golgotha.

Nor is this all. There is something else, of which I have told you in recent lectures,² and we must return to it here. Over in Hibernia, in Ireland, were still the echoes of the ancient Atlantean wisdom. In the Mysteries of Hibernia, of which I have given you a brief description, were two Statues that worked suggestively on men, making it possible for them to behold the world exactly as the men of ancient Atlantis had seen it. Strictly guarded were these Mysteries of Hibernia, hidden in an atmosphere of intense earnestness. There they stood in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and there they remained at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Over in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha took place; in Jerusalem the events came to pass that were later made known to men in the Gospels by the way of tradition. But in the moment when the tragedy of the Mystery of Golgotha was being enacted in Palestine, in that very moment it was known and beheld clairvoyantly in the Mysteries of Hibernia. No report was brought by word of mouth, no communication whatever was possible; but in the Mysteries of Hibernia the event was fulfilled in a symbol, in a picture, at the same time that it was fulfilled in actual fact in Jerusalem. Men came to know of it, not through tradition but by a spiritual path. Whilst in Palestine that most majestic and sublime event was being enacted in concrete physical reality,—over in Hibernia, in the Mysteries, the way had been so prepared through the performance of certain rites that at the very time when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled, a living picture of it was present in the astral light.

The events in human evolution are closely linked together; there is, as it were, a kind of valley or chasm moving at this time over the world, into which man's old nearness with the Gods gradually disappears.

In the East the ancient vision of the Gods fell into decay after the burning of Ephesus. In Hibernia it remained on until some centuries after Christ, but even there too the time came when it had to depart. Tradition developed in its stead, the Mystery of Golgotha was transmitted by the way of oral tradition; and we find growing up in the West a civilisation that rests wholly on oral tradition. Later it comes to rely rather on external observation of Nature, on an investigation of Nature with the senses; but this after all is only what corresponds in the realm of Nature to tradition, written or oral, in the realm of history.

Here then we have the civilisation of personality. And in that civilisation the Mystery of Golgotha, with all that pertains to the spirit, is no longer perceived by man, it is merely handed down as history.

We must place this picture in all clearness before us, the picture of a civilisation from which the spiritual is excluded. It begins from the time that followed Julian the Apostate, and not until towards the end of the 19th century, beginning from the end of the seventies, did there come, as it were, a new call to humanity from the spiritual heights. Then began the age that I have often described as the Age of Michael. To-day I want to characterise it as the age when man, if he wishes to remain at the old materialism—and a great part of mankind does wish so to remain—will inevitably fall into a terrible abyss; he has absolutely no alternative but to go under and become sub-human, he simply cannot maintain himself on the human level. If man would keep on the human level, he must open his senses to the spiritual revelations that have again been made accessible since the end of the 19th century. That is now an absolute necessity.

For you must know that great spiritual forces were at work in Herostratus. He was, so to speak, the last #8224 stretched out by certain spiritual powers from Asia. When he flung the burning torch into the Temple of Ephesus, demonic beings were behind him, holding him as one holds a sword,—or as it might be, a torch; he was but the sword or torch in their hands. For these demonic beings had determined to let nothing of the Spirit go over into the coming European civilisation; the spiritual was to be absolutely debarred entry there.

Aristotle and Alexander the Great placed themselves in direct opposition to the working of these beings. For what was it they accomplished in history? Through the expeditions of Alexander, the Nature knowledge of Aristotle was carried over into Asia; a pure knowledge of Nature was spread abroad. Not in Egypt alone, but all over Asia Alexander founded academies, and in these academies made a home for the ancient wisdom, where the study of it could still continue. Here too, the wise men of Greece were ever and again able to find a refuge. Alexander brought it about that a true understanding of Nature was carried into Asia.

Into Europe it could not find entrance in the same way. Europe could not in all honesty receive it. She wanted only external knowledge, external culture, external civilisation. Therefore did Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus take out of Aristotelianism what the West could accept and bring that over. It was the more logical writings that the West received. But that meant a great deal. For Aristotle's works have a character all their own; they read differently from the works of other authors, and his more abstract and logical writings are no exception. Do but make the experiment of reading first Plato and then Aristotle with inner concentration and in a meditative spirit, and you will find that each gives you quite a different experience.

When a modern man reads Plato with true spiritual feeling and in an attitude of meditation, after a time he begins to feel as though his head were a littler higher than his physical head actually is, as though he had, so to speak, grown out beyond his physical organism. That is absolutely the experience of anyone who reads Plato, provided he does not read him in an altogether dry manner.

With Aristotle it is different. With Aristotle you never have the feeling that you are coming out of your body. When you read Aristotle after having prepared yourself by meditation, you will find that he works right into the physical man. Your physical man makes a step forward through the reading of Aristotle. His logic works; it is not a logic that one merely observes and considers, it is a logic that works in the inner being. Aristotle himself is a stage higher than all the pedants who came after him, and who developed logic from him. In a certain sense we may say with truth that Aristotle's works are only rightly comprehended when they are taken as books for meditation. Think what would have happened if the Natural Scientific writings of Aristotle had gone over to the West as they were and come into Middle and Southern Europe. Men would, no doubt, have received a great deal from them, but in a way that did them harm. For the Natural Science that Aristotle was able to pass on to Alexander needed for its comprehension souls that were still touched with the spirit of the Ephesian age, the time that preceded the burning of Ephesus. Such souls could only be found over in Asia or in Egypt; and it was into these parts that this knowledge of Nature and insight into the Being of Nature were brought, by means of the expeditions of Alexander. Only later in a diluted form did they come over into Europe by many and diverse ways—especially, for example, by way of Spain,—but always in a very diluted or, as we might say, sifted form.

The writings of Aristotle that came over into Europe direct were his writings on logic and philosophy. These lived on, and found fresh life again in medieval scholasticism.

We have therefore these two streams. On the one hand we have always there a stream of wisdom that spreads far and wide, unobtrusively, among simple folk,—the secret source of much of medieval thought and insight. Long ago, through the expeditions of Alexander, it had made its way into Asia, and now it came back again into Europe by diverse channels, through Arabia, for instance, and later on following the path of the returning Crusaders. We find it in every corner of Europe,—inconspicuous, flowing silently in hidden places. To these places came men like Jacob Boehme,³ Paracelsus⁴ and a number more, to receive that which had come thither by many a roundabout path and was preserved in these scattered primitive circles of European life. We have had amongst us in Europe far more folk-wisdom than is generally supposed. The stream continues even now. It has poured its flood of wisdom into reservoirs like Valentine Wiegel⁵ or Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme,—and many more, whose names are less known. And sometimes it met there,—as for example, in Basil Valentine⁶—new in-pourings that came over later into Europe. In the Cloisters of the Middle Ages lived a true alchemistic wisdom, not an alchemy that demonstrates changes in matter merely, but an alchemy that demonstrates the inner nature of the changes in the human being himself in the Universe. The recognised scholars meanwhile were occupying themselves with the other Aristotle, with a misstated, sifted, ‘logicised’ Aristotle. This Aristotelian philosophy, however, which the scholiasts and subsequently the scientists studied, brought none the less a blessing to the West. For only in the 19th century, when men could no longer understand Aristotle and simply studied him as if he were a book to be read like any other and not a book whereon to exercise oneself in meditation—only in the 19th century has it come about that men no longer receive anything from Aristotle because he no longer lives and works in them. Until the 19th century Aristotle was a book for the exercise of meditation; but in the 19th century the whole tendency has been to change what was once exercise, work, active power into abstract knowledge,—to change ‘do’ and ‘can’ into ‘know.’

Let us look now at the line of development, that leads from Greece through Rome to the West. It will illustrate for us from another angle the great change we are considering. In Greece there was still the confident assurance that insight and understanding proceed from the whole human being. The teacher is the gymnast.⁷ From out of the whole human being in movement—for the Gods themselves work in the bodily movements of man—something is born that then comes forth and shows itself as human understanding. The gymnast is the teacher.

In Rome the rhetorician.⁸ steps into the place of the gymnast. Already something has been taken away from the human being in his entirety; nevertheless we have at least still a connection with a deed that is done by the human being in a part of his organism. What movement there is in our whole being when we speak! We speak with our heart and with our lungs, we speak right down to our diaphragm and below it! We cannot say that speaking lives as intensely in the whole human being as do the movements of the gymnast, but it lives in a great part of him. (As for thoughts, they of course are but an extract of what lives in speech). The rhetorician steps into the place of the gymnast. The gymnast has to do with the whole human being. The rhetorician shuts off the limbs, and has only to do with a part of the human being and with that which is sent up from this part into the head, and there becomes insight and understanding.

The third stage appears only in modern times and that is the stage of the professor.⁹ who trains nothing but the head of his pupils, who cares for nothing but thoughts. Professors of Eloquence were still appointed in some universities even as late as the 19th century, but these universities had no use for them, because it was no longer the custom to set any store by the art of speaking; thinking was all that mattered. The rhetorician died out. The doctors and professors, who looked after the least part of the human being, namely his head,—these became the leaders in education.

As long as the genuine Aristotle was still there, it was training, discipline, exercise that men gained from their study of him. The two streams remained side by side. And those of us who are not very young and who shared in the development of thought during the later decades of the 19th century, know well, if we have gone about among the country folk in the way that Paracelsus did, that a last remains of the medieval folk-knowledge, from which Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus drew, was still to be found in Europe even as late as the sixties and seventies of the last century. Moreover, it is also true that within certain orders and in the life of a certain narrow circle a kind of inner discipline in Aristotle was cultivated right up to the last decades of the 19th century. So that it has been possible in recent years still to meet here and there the last ramifications, as it were, of the Aristotelian wisdom that Alexander carried over into Asia and that returned to Europe through Asia Minor, Africa and Spain. It was the same wisdom that had come to new life in such men as Basil Valentine and those who came after him, and from which Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus and countless others had drawn. It was brought back to Europe also by yet another path, namely through the Crusaders. This Aristotelian wisdom lived on, scattered far and wide among the common people. In the later decades of the 19th century, one is thankful to say, the last echoes of the ancient Nature knowledge carried over into Asia by the expeditions of Alexander were still to be heard, even if sadly diminished and scarcely recognisable. In the old alchemy, in the old knowledge of the connections between the forces and substances of Nature that persisted so remarkably among simple country folk, we may discover again its last lingering echoes. To-day they have died away; to-day they are gone, they are no longer to be heard.

Similarly in these years one could still find isolated individuals who gave evidence of Aristotelian spiritual training; though to-day they too are gone. And thus what was carried east as well as what was carried west was preserved,—for that which was carried east came back again to the west. And it was possible in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century for one who could do so with new direct spiritual perception, to make contact with what was still living in these last and youngest children of the great events we have been describing.

There is, in truth, a wonderful interworking in all these things. For we can see how the expeditions of Alexander and the teachings of Aristotle had this end in view, to keep unbroken the threads that unite man with the ancient spirituality, to weave them as it were into the material civilisation that was to come, that so they might endure until such time as new spiritual revelations should be given.

From this point of view, we may gain a true understanding of the events of history, for it is often so that seemingly fruitless undertakings are fraught with deep significance for the historical evolution of mankind. It is easy enough to say that the expeditions of Alexander to Asia and to Egypt have been swept away and submerged. It is not so. It is easy to say that Aristotle ceased to be in the 19th century. But he did not. Both streams have lasted up to the very moment when it is possible to begin a renewed life of the Spirit.

I have told you on many occasions how the new life of the Spirit was able to begin at the end of the seventies, and how from the turn of the century onwards, it has been able to grow more and more. It is our task to receive in all its fullness the stream of spiritual life that is poured down to us from the heights.

And so to-day we find ourselves in a period that marks a genuine transition in the spiritual unfolding of man. And if we are not conscious of these wonderful connections and of how deeply the present is linked with the past, then we are in very truth asleep to important events that are taking place in the spiritual life of our time. And numbers of people are fast asleep to-day in regard to the most important events of all. But Anthroposophy is there for that very purpose,—to awaken man from sleep.

You who have come here for this Christmas Meeting,—I believe that all of you have felt an impulse that calls you to awaken. We are nearing the day—as this Meeting goes on, we shall have to pass the actual hour of the anniversary—we are coming to the day when the terrible flames burst forth that destroyed the Goetheanum. Let the world think what it will of the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, in the evolution of the Anthroposophical movement the event of the fire has a tremendous significance.

We shall not however be able to judge of its full significance until we look beyond it to something more. We behold again the physical flames of fire flaring up on that night, we see the marvellous way in which the fusing metal of the organ-pipes and other metallic parts sent up a glow that caused that wonderful play of colour in the flames. And then we carry our memory over the year that has intervened. But in this memory must live the fact that the physical is Maya, that we have to seek the truth of the burning flames in the spiritual fire that it is ours now to kindle in our hearts and souls. In the midst of the physically burning Goetheanum shall arise for us a spiritually living Goetheanum.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that this can come to pass in the full, world-historic sense unless we can on the one hand look upon the flames mounting up in terrible tongues of fire from the Goetheanum that we have grown to love so dearly, and behold at the same time in the background that other treacherous burning of Ephesus, when Herostratus, guided by demonic powers, flung the flaming brand into the Temple. When we bring these two events together, setting one in the background and one in the foreground of our thought, we shall then have a picture that will perhaps have power to write deeply enough in our hearts what we have lost and what we must strive our utmost to build again.

• 1. Flavius Claudius Julianus, called the Apostate by the Christians, was Roman Emperor from 361–363.
• 2. See the 8th and 9th lectures in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 3. (1575–1624), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
• 4. Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), physician. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 5. (1533–1588), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 6. Alchemist and Benedictine monk, lived from 1413 onwards in the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. His writings were not discovered or printed till the beginning of the seventeenth century. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.

For a long time we have been speaking of the karmic facts and conditions connected with the Anthroposophical Movement, with the Anthroposophical Society and with the individuals who feel impelled out of an inner sincerity, to choose their path of life within this Movement. Much will remain to be said on these karmic questions after my return from England, but today, in our last lecture before my departure which will take me away for the rest of August,¹ today I would like to bring to a kind of conclusion what I have said. Thus in today's lecture we will to some extent round off the thoughts I have been able to communicate to you in these our studies upon karma.

You will all have observed, my dear friends, how manifold are the forms through which the karma of the individual anthroposophist has passed in former lives on earth and between death and a new birth. Especially in the last two lectures we have been able to hint at the great significance which these things may have for the individual anthroposophist in his karma. We have seen how the karma of anthroposophists is connected with the evolution of the Michael principle through long, long epochs of time. To begin with, we saw in a more abstract form how the rulership of the Cosmic Intelligence—for so we called it—fell from the dominion of Michael. For as I said, in ancient times it was so indeed, that men could not ascribe to themselves the essence of Intelligence. They ascribed to the inspiration of higher Powers all that they could express in forms of Intelligence. And those who had knowledge of these matters knew that the higher Powers here concerned were the ones who afterwards, in Christian terminology, were designated as the Powers of Michael. I also spoke to you of the 8th or 9th century A.D. as the point of time in the evolution of civilised mankind when the Cosmic Intelligence gradually moved down to the earth, took shape as it were in many single drops which then lived on as personal Intelligence in single human souls. And I told you, my dear friends, how the perception and understanding of the Cosmic Intelligence—that is to say, of the old rulership by Michael,—lived on traditionally, with a certain reality of insight. We turn our gaze for instance to those, in many respects excellent, scholars who were connected with Arabism and with the Aristotelianism that had lived on in Asia since the campaigns of Alexander. This Aristotelianism had also permeated the mysticism of the East, filling it, as it were, with Intelligence. All this was carried across through Africa to Spain and went on working there, in the wisdom of the Moors, in such outstanding individualities as Averroes; and in the teachings of these Moorish, Spanish scholars we find a very real reflection of those old perceptions which had still looked upward to the Cosmic Intelligence.

Let us try to gain a vivid idea of how the Cosmic Intelligence had been conceived. I will give you a rough sketch of what these Moorish, Spanish scholars taught to their pupils in Spain in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, in the time when in other parts of Europe such things were prevailing as the School of Chartres, of which I have told you so much. In Spain it was taught by the Moorish scholars and above all by such an individuality as Averroes, that the Intelligence holds sway everywhere. The whole world, the whole cosmos is filled with the all-pervading Intelligence. Human beings down here on earth have many different properties, but they do not possess a personal intelligence of their own. On the contrary, every time a human being is active on the earth, a drop of Intelligence, a ray of Intelligence proceeds from the universal Intelligence, and descends as it were into the head, into the body of the single human being. So that the human being as he walks about on earth, shares in the universal Cosmic Intelligence which is common to all. And when he dies, when he passes through the gate of death, the Intelligence that was his returns to the universal Intelligence, flows back again. Thus all the thoughts, conceptions and ideas which man possesses in the life between birth and death flow back into the common reservoir of the universal Intelligence. One cannot therefore say that the thing of outstanding value in man's soul, namely his Intelligence, is subject to personal immortality. Indeed it was actually taught by the Spanish, Moorish scholars that man does not possess personal immortality. True, he lives on, but, said these scholars, the most important thing about him during his life is the fact that he can unfold intelligent knowledge, and this does not remain with his own being. We cannot therefore say that the intelligent being possesses personal immortality. You see, this was the very point in the fury of the battle which was waged by the Schoolmen of the Dominican Order. It was to maintain and uphold the personal immortality of man. And in that time, such a striving could appear in no other way than it did when the Dominicans declared: Man is personally immortal, and the teaching of Averroes on this subject is heresy, absolute heresy. Today we have to put it differently, but for that time one can understand that a man like Averroes in Spain, who did not assume the personal immortality of man, was declared a heretic. Today we have to study the matter in its reality. We have to say: In the sense in which man has become immortal, as to his Spiritual Soul, he has indeed attained immortality—the continued consciousness of personality after passing through the gate of death—but he has attained this only since the time when a Spiritual Soul took up its abode in earthly man. If therefore we had asked Aristotle or Alexander what were their thoughts about immortality, what would have been their answer? The words of course are not the point. But if, being asked, they had answered in our Christian terminology, they would have said: Our soul is received by Michael and we live on in the communion of Michael. Or they would have expressed it cosmologically. Above all in a community such as that of Alexander or Aristotle, they would have spoken thus in cosmic terms, and indeed they did speak thus: The soul of man is intelligent on earth, but this Intelligence is a drop out of the fulness of what Michael pours forth like a rain of Intelligence, flowing out over mankind. This rain proceeds from the Sun, and the Sun receives the human soul back again into its own being. The human soul as it exists between birth and death is rayed down to Earth from the Sun. Thus on the Sun they would have looked for the dominion of Michael, and such would have been their answer, cosmologically speaking.

These conceptions found their way into Asia, returned from Asia and flourished among the Moors in Spain at the very time when the Scholastic Philosophy rose up in defence of personal immortality. We must not say with the Schoolmen that this conception was an error, but we must say: The evolution of mankind brought with it the individual and personal immortality of man. And it was by the Dominican Schoolmen that this personal immortality was first emphasised, while on the other hand an ancient truth—one that was no longer true for that age in the evolution of the human race—was put forward in the Academies conducted by the Moors in Spain. For we today must not only be tolerant of our contemporaries. We must be tolerant of those who went on propagating ancient teachings. Such tolerance was not possible in that time. Hence it is important for us to repeat this to ourselves again and again: The personal immortality maintained by Dominican Schoolmen has only been true since the time when the Spiritual Soul slowly and gradually entered into mankind.

We can also describe these things in a fully Imaginative form. When a man dies in our time—a man who was really able, during his earthly life, to permeate his soul with true Intelligence—having gone through the gate of death, he looks back upon his past earthly life and sees it as an independent life on earth. In former centuries, man having passed through the gate of death, and looking back upon his earthly life, saw how the etheric body became dissolved in the cosmos. Then he passed through the realm of souls, living through the events again in backward order. Then he could say to himself: ‘Thus Michael, through the Sun, administers what was mine before.’ This is the great difference. But we can only understand such developments in evolution when we look behind the scenes of existence, perceiving the Spiritual behind the Material. We must see the outer events in mankind even as they are shaped and formed out of the spiritual world.

At this point, my dear friends, you must enter once more into all that I have now told you. Remember that with the 9th century A.D. the great crisis was accomplished: the Cosmic Intelligence came down among earthly men. This was the objective fact, this was actually taking place. And now transplant yourselves into the Sun-sphere, where Michael and his hosts were holding sway as I have described. For they had perceived the departure of Christ from the Sun and His passage to the earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, and after that, they had experienced how the Cosmic Intelligence descended more and more, to become individual human knowledge. Now there was one important event which made a deep impression, above all, on those who belong to Michael—whom in our last lecture I called the ‘Michaelites.’ It was an altogether outstanding event, which I have often described in other connections, showing the part it played in the unfolding of civilisation on the earth. Now, however, we must describe it as it appeared from the aspect of the Michaelites themselves, namely from the Sun. We must describe it as it is seen from that perspective—when one looks down from the realm of Michael on to the earth. This most significant event took place in the year 869 A.D. At the 8th Ecumenical Council held in that year at Constantinople, it was declared dogmatically that the old conception of Trichotomy, saying that man consists of body, soul and Spirit, is heretical. It was declared: Man has only body and soul, save that his soul possesses certain spiritual qualities. While in the sphere of objective realities the passage of the Intelligence into the single human beings was being accomplished, it was decreed on earth: Trichotomy is a false heresy. It was decreed in such a final and decisive form that no one within European civilisation could venture henceforth to contradict it. Henceforth one was forbidden to say that man has body, soul and Spirit. One might only speak of body and soul, ascribing spiritual qualities and forces to the soul. Something had thus taken place on earth, of which in the realms of Michael they could only say: Now there will enter into the souls of men the conviction that the Spiritual is but a quality of the soul, and not the Divine which holds sway in the great process of mankind's evolution. ‘Look down upon the earth’—such was the language of Michael—‘Look down upon the earth, behold the consciousness of the Spirit vanishing away.’ But you must see, my dear friends, this vanishing of the consciousness of the Spirit was bound up with the main subject of which we wish to speak today.

As I said just now, hitherto I have only described in abstract terms how the evolution of the Michael realm has taken place behind the scenes of earth-existence. I have said: the Cosmic Intelligence came down to the single men. But this, my dear friends, is only an abstraction. For what is Intelligence? Needless to say we must not conceive that when we ascend into the higher regions we shall be able to take hold of the Intelligence there as we take hold of trees and shrubs here in the physical world. What is Intelligence? These abstract generalisations do not of course exist in reality. ‘Intelligence’ means the mutual relationships of conduct among the higher Hierarchies. What they do, how they relate themselves to one another, what they are to one another,—this is the Cosmic Intelligence. And since as human beings we must first consider the kingdom that is nearest to us, concretely speaking the Cosmic Intelligence will be for us the sum-total of the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi. If we are speaking concretely we cannot say ‘so much Intelligence,’ but rather ‘so many Angeloi.’ This is the reality.

When the Church Fathers were discussing in the year 869 A.D. whether man should speak henceforth of the Spirit, it was a consequence of the fact that a number of Angel Beings were separating from the realm of Michael where they had been before, and were assuming that they would henceforth have to do with earthly Powers only;—that the guidance of human beings would be achieved henceforth through earthly powers alone. You must see clearly what kind of an event this was. Angels are the Beings who guide men from earthly life to earthly life. They are the Beings next above us in the spiritual world, who lead us along our path in the life between death and a new birth and show us the way to our returning earthly life. They make of our several earthly lives a connected chain, a totality of human life. Now a number of Angel Beings—Beings who have this task and who had been united formerly with the Michael kingdom—went out and left the kingdom of Michael. Such being the conduct of these Angel Beings, the destiny of human beings could not possibly remain untouched. Who is it partakes in the very first place in the unfolding of human karma—in the way the earthly thoughts, the earthly deeds and earthly feelings are transformed and elaborated between death and a new birth? It is the Beings of the Angeloi. If now these Angel Beings come to an entirely different position in the cosmos—if, so to speak, they leave the kingdom of the Sun and become no longer celestial Angels but terrestrial—what then must happen? Here we come upon a secret, permeating the whole evolution and history of Europe, hidden behind the external facts. Certain Angeloi remained in the kingdom of Michael. In that great School in the beginning of the 15th century we find also the Angel Beings belonging to the human beings who were then in the kingdom of Michael. To all the souls of human beings who lived in the kingdom of Michael and of whom I have spoken to you, belong Angel Beings who have remained in Michael's kingdom. But there were others who left it and identified themselves with that which was in essence earthly.

Now you will say: How is it possible that it suddenly occurs to a number of Michael Angels to leave the kingdom of Michael? It does not occur to the others to leave.—This, my dear friends, I must admit, is one of the most difficult questions that can possibly be raised in connection with the modern evolution of mankind. It is a question such that as we enter into it all the inner forces of the human being are called into play. It is a question deeply and intimately connected with the whole life of man. For you see, at the foundation of it there lies a cosmic fact. You know, from lectures I have given here, that what is commonly referred to as a mere physical planet is in reality a gathering of Spiritual Beings. When we look up to a star, that which appears to us physically is but the external aspect. In reality we have to do with a gathering of Spiritual Beings. Now there is a certain contrast. Since the very beginning of earthly evolution, this contrast has existed. It is the contrast between the Intelligences of all the planets and the Intelligence of the Sun. There is indeed on the one hand the Sun Intelligence, while on the other there are the Intelligences of the several planets. And it was always so, that the Sun Intelligence stood paramountly under the dominion of Michael, while the other Planetary Intelligences were subject to the other Archangels. Thus we may say:

SUN INTELLIGENCE. PLANETARY INTELLIGENCES.

Sun ... ... MICHAEL

Mercury ... ... RAPHAEL

Venus ... ... ANAEL

Mars ... ... SAMAEL

Jupiter ... ... ZACHARIEL

Moon ... ... GABRIEL

Saturn ... ... ORIPHIEL

On the other hand it was always so that one might not say, Michael administers the Sun Intelligence alone, but rather, Michael administers the whole Cosmic Intelligence, differentiated as it is into the Sun Intelligence and the Planetary Intelligences, Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc. The several Beings of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi partake in its administration. But over all of them together Michael holds sway ever and again. Thus the whole Cosmic Intelligence is administered by Michael. Now of course, every human being was a human being even before, when Michael administered the Cosmic Intelligence from which only a ray descended into the human individual. And it was due to the Sun that man on earth could yet feel himself as man; could feel himself as single man and not as a mere vehicle for the common Cosmic Intelligence. All human Intelligence comes from Michael in the Sun.

But when these centuries approached—the 8th, the 9th, the 10th century A.D.—it happened that the Planetary Intelligences began to reckon with the fact that the earth had changed, and that the Sun too had changed.

My dear friends, that which goes on externally, which the astronomers describe, is after all only the outer side. You know that approximately every 11 years we have a period of Sun-spots, when in the shining of the Sun upon the earth certain places are darkened, covered with spots or blotches. This was not always so. In very ancient times the Sun shone down as a uniform disc of light. There were no Sun-spots. Moreover, after some thousands of years the Sun will have very many more spots than it has today. The Sun is growing ever more spotted. This again is the outer manifestation of the fact that the Michael Power, the Cosmic Power of Intelligence is still decreasing. In the increase of the Sun-spots in the course of Cosmic Evolution is revealed the Sun's decay; the Sun within the cosmos grows increasingly dim and old. And at the appearance of a sufficiently large number of Sun-spots, the other Planetary Intelligences recognised that they would now no longer be ruled by the Sun. They resolved no longer to allow the earth to be dependent on the Sun, but to make it dependent henceforth on the entire cosmos directly. This took place through the planetary Counsels of the Archangels. Notably under the leadership of Oriphiel, this emancipation of the Planetary Intelligences from the Sun-Intelligence took place. It was a complete separation of Cosmic Powers that had hitherto belonged together. The Sun-Intelligence of Michael and the Planetary Intelligences gradually came into cosmic opposition one with another.

Yes, my dear friends, though we do ascribe an entirely different kind of inner nature—of soul-faculty and soul-condition—to the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, nevertheless we must ascribe decisions, weighty reflections on that which is taking place, even to them. For we human beings also make our decisions in no other way. We observe the things that are taking place externally before us, we let the facts speak for themselves and then, under the influence of the facts, we act accordingly. Only the determining factors for us between birth and death are earthly facts, whereas for the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi they are cosmic facts, as when a split takes place in the planetary life.

Thus the one host of Beings turned to the Earth-Intelligence and therewith at the same time to the Planetary Intelligence. The other host remained true to the sphere of Michael in order to carry into all the future what Michael administers as the Eternal. And this is the decisive question today. Now that all the power is among men, will Michael be able to carry into all the future that which is Eternal in his working,—now that that which appears in the physical Sun grows darker and vanishes slowly away?

Thus we see, as an outcome of cosmic events, a split among the Angeloi who were formerly united with Michael. But these Beings themselves partake in the karmic evolution. Consider the whole of this as it takes place in the life between death and a new birth. Here it is not so that every human soul can run his course alone, nor can every Angel who guides the human being run his course alone, but the Hierarchy of Angeloi work together; and in their working together karma lives and is worked out. If in an earthly life I become connected with another human being and we work this out karmically in our next life, then, needless to say, the Angel of the one human being must come together with the Angel of the other. A co-operation must take place. But in many cases this was what happened (and this is the overwhelming, shattering experience). In the Ecumenical Council that took place on earth in 869 A.D. the signal was given for an overwhelming event in the spiritual world above. It would almost shatter one to pieces, when one holds oneself entirely upright with the true use of the Cosmic Intelligence, face to face with such overpowering relationships. It is a thing of untold significance that has already happened and is happening more and more: the Angel of the one human being, of the one human soul who was karmically connected with another human soul, did not go on with the Angel of that other soul. Of two human souls karmically united with one another, the one Angel remained with Michael while the other went down to earth. What was bound to happen as a result? In the time between the founding of Christianity and the age of the Spiritual Soul, which is signalised above all by the 9th century and the year 869 A.D., the karma of human beings came into disorder. This is to pronounce one of the deepest and most important words that can possibly be uttered with regard to the modern history of mankind. Disorder came into the karma of present-day humanity. In the following lives on earth the experiences of men were no longer all of them rightly co-ordinated with their karma. This is the chaotic element in the history of recent times. This has brought into the history of recent times more and more social chaos, chaos of civilisation; and the disorder that has come into human karma can find no end. For a split has taken place in the Hierarchy of Angeloi belonging to Michael.

And now we may express something that is deeply connected with the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. It is a thing of immense significance, and, if I may say so, it is only here that we come to the right shade of feeling. For with all that we can describe by choosing comparisons from the conditions that surround us, we cannot exhaustively characterise what is taking place behind the scenes in spiritual worlds. Whatever thoughts we may select from the earthly conditions that surround us, they are but dim and feeble. Having made all these preparations, we must have recourse to the pure description of things spiritual.

Thus we must say: All that has led the souls together into the Anthroposophical Society, all that has brought them into this community through a sincere and inward impulse of their souls, holds good, needless to say. Yet how does it come about? How are the forces really there, which lead these human beings in our time to find their way together under purely spiritual principles, when in the ordinary world of today they are complete strangers to one another? Where do the forces lie, that lead them together? My dear friends, they lie in this: Through the entry of Michael's dominion in the Michael age in which we live—with the penetration of Michael to earthly rulership, replacing the rulership of Gabriel—Michael himself is bringing the power which is to bring order again into the karma of those who have gone with him. Thus we may say: What is it in the last resort that unites the Members of the Anthroposophical Society? It is that they are to bring order again into their karma. This unites them. And if any one of them notices in the course of his life that he is entering here or there into relationships that do not conform to his inmost impulse,—relationships, perhaps, diverging in one way or another from what we may call the true harmony in man as between good and evil,—if he has this on the one hand, while on the other hand he has constant impulse to press forward in the Anthroposophical life,—the fact is that such a man is striving back again to his real karma. He is striving once more to live and express the real karma. This is the cosmic ray that pours through the Anthroposophical Movement, clearly perceptible to him who knows. It is the restoration of the truth in karma.

In this connection we can understand very much, both of the destiny of individuals in the Anthroposophical Society and of the destiny of the whole Society. For these, of course, merge into one another.

We must also realise the following: For the human beings who are connected with those Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi who remained in the kingdom of Michael, it is difficult to find the forms of Intelligence adequate to that which they are now to understand. They are striving to maintain even the personal Intelligence in keeping with the true reverence for Michael. These souls, who as I told you partook in those spiritual preparations in the 15th and 19th centuries, come down to earth, devoted still, with their deepest inner striving, to Michael and to his sphere. And yet, in accordance with the principles of human evolution, they must receive the personal and individual Intelligence. The result is a split, a division which must however be solved by spiritual development. They, in their individual affinity, must come together with what the spiritual worlds are bringing down to them in the present age of Intelligence. Those on the other hand whose Angels fell away (which is of course connected with their karma, for the Angel falls if he is connected with a human karma that is according to this)—they receive their personal Intelligence as a complete matter of course. This means that it works in them automatically, through their bodily nature. It works in such a way that they think, think cleverly, but are not fully and deeply and humanly concerned in what they think. This indeed was the great conflict which lasted so long, between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans could not evolve the principle of personal Intelligence otherwise than in the greatest possible faithfulness to the sphere of Michael. But the Franciscans, the followers of Duns Scotus (not Scotus Erigena) became complete Nominalists. They said: Intelligence in any case is only so many words. All that happened in these discussions and arguments between men was in reality an image of mighty conflicts that took place between the one host of Angeloi and the other.

You see, it is so, that the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi who have now united themselves with the earth-principle, have been living on the earth, in a manner of speaking, since about the 9th or 10th century. This again is the shattering tragedy, my dear friends. Here upon earth, materialism is increasing. The human beings—and above all the most advanced, the cleverest among them—are of such a kind as to deny the Spiritual. They begin to laugh in scorn at the idea that Spiritual Beings should be in their environment no less than physical human beings. During this time in which materialism has been expanding on the earth, more and more Angels are descending and living on the earth. They themselves join in; for it was they who at certain times, when a human consciousness became impaired and dull, incorporated themselves and worked on earth. A large number of Angeloi-Beings refrain and hold themselves aloof; but those who by their karma as Angeloi stand nearest to the Ahrimanic powers, do not hold back; at certain times they incorporate themselves in men; they dive down into human beings.

Then there arises what I described in our last lecture, when I said: Here now is such a man on earth. He has great human talent, human Intelligence, which he expresses, maybe, with genius. But for a certain time when his consciousness is dimmed, an Ahrimanic Angeloi-Intelligence takes up his abode in him. At such a time, this may occur: There is the human being; he seems as though he were an ordinary human being, writing this or that out of his own humanity. (Now Ahriman can approach the human being most easily through the very things which the men of today receive in the forms of Intelligence. One must assert one's personality fully, if one is not to be engulfed today in all those things that I have indicated in the course of the last lectures). Hence it is that Ahriman can appear as an author. He makes use, of course, of an Angelos-Being. He can write like an author. And as we are now united in the sign of our Christmas Foundation Meeting, we will not be silent on these things. Therefore I will now add the following.

A very different attitude was possible to one of the most brilliant authors of recent times, one of the greatest authors—a very different attitude was possible before his last works appeared. When I wrote my book Nietzsche, a Wrestler with his Time, all that had come before the public was Nietzsche the brilliant writer, a man who had carried human faculties to the highest point of eminence. It was only afterwards that one became acquainted with what Nietzsche wrote in the period of his decay. There are above all the two works Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo. These two works were written by Ahriman and not by Nietzsche. It was an Ahrimanic spirit incorporated in Nietzsche. Here it was, for the first time, that Ahriman appeared as an author upon earth. He will continue to do so. Nietzsche broke down over it. He went to pieces. We must understand the true nature of the impulses we are confronting when we stand face to face with the ideas that lived in Nietzsche in the time when he wrote the brilliant but devilish works Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo,—intelligent works indeed. I have spoken of the great and all-embracing Intelligence of Ahriman. For greatness, majesty and brilliance, we do not decry a work in calling it Ahrimanic. Only simpletons could think so, who do not know the greatness there can be in Ahriman. We do not blame when we speak of Ahriman. Very much on earth depends on him. I can truly say that in my soul I bled, when for the first time I read Nietzsche's writing on the ‘Will to Power,’ which was then published in such a way that men could gain no right conception of it. But if at the same time one is able to look into those kingdoms which since the dominion of Michael, since the eighties of last century, were severed by the thinnest of thin walls from the earth-kingdom; if one knows how immediately this kingdom adjoins the physical, so that we may say: ‘It is a kingdom similar to that which man passes through after his death’; if one can gaze into these things and see how great the strivings are in this direction, then too one knows with what impulsive power they are coming to expression in such a thing as the Ecce Homo and the Anti-Christ. We need only consider how Ahrimanic are the remarks that occur in the Anti-Christ. I do not know whether the passage is still in the same form in the more recent editions. There is a passage where he is writing on Jesus. (I am not quoting verbatim). He says: Renan describes Jesus as a genius. Nietzsche does not see him as a genius, for he goes on to say: Speaking with the strict accuracy of a psychologist we should use a very different word. ... In my edition of Nietzsche's works there are three dots at this point. I do not know whether it is so in the newer editions too, but in the manuscript there stands at this point the word ‘idiot,’ written in full. That Jesus is described as an ‘idiot,’ this is the hand of Ahriman. And many other things of this kind stand written there. We must remember that at the very time when he was writing these things, there were tendencies in Nietzsche's soul towards Catholicism. We must not forget that these things went parallel with one another. Who, knowing this, could fail to think that a deep riddle lies hidden there? And what are the concluding words of the Anti-Christ? They are somewhat as follows, though again I am not quoting verbatim: ‘I would like to write it on every wall and I have the materials to write it in radiant letters shining far and wide; I would fain write what Christianity is. It is the greatest curse of mankind.’—Thus ends the book. Surely here lies a problem. We must see indeed, how that kingdom which was separated by a thin wall only from our own, and where all the spiritual battles took place towards the end and a little beyond the end of Kali Yuga—we must see how that kingdom is striving to penetrate into the physical domain of earth.

To these things we must look if we would understand what can be the position of mankind today, towards the things that must emerge in civilisation through the dawn of the age of Michael. At the transition of the Kali Yuga—the transition from the dark to the light age—one did indeed have to see things clearly, graphically, in the spiritual and in the physical together, if one would describe (as I did in the Introduction to my Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Spiritual Life) the necessary feeling at that time towards the Spiritual and the Material. From all directions one would like to gather the means of expression to describe the mighty transition that takes place at the dawn of the Michael age. And with all that the Anthroposophical Movement is, we must feel ourselves within these things. For all these mighty, overwhelming facts express themselves to begin with in the human karma which has now come into disorder. We must think of the great and universal truth that lies inherent in the karmic relationships. Yet the world today is such that even into these general karmic laws and relationships, exceptions could enter through the course of many centuries. And now the requirement is to bring these cosmic exceptions back into their true course. If we think of these things—for this is the task, the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement,—we shall feel something of the great and far-reaching significance of this Movement.

This, my dear friends, shall now rest in your souls. You must say to yourselves: Those who out of these great decisions feel in themselves the impulse to come to the anthroposophical life today, will be called again at the end of the 20th century, when at the culminating point the greatest possible expansion of the Anthroposophical Movement will be attained. But it will only happen if these things can really live in us,—if there can live in us the perception of what penetrates cosmically, spiritually, into the earthly physical domain. It will only be so if there penetrates even into the earthly Intelligence, into the perceptions of men, the knowledge of the significance of Michael.

This impulse must be the very soul of our anthroposophical striving. The soul itself must have the will to stand fully in the midst of the Anthroposophical Movement. Thus we shall find it possible, my dear friends, for a certain time to come, to carry in our souls thoughts of a great and far-reaching nature. But we shall not only preserve them, we shall make them living in our souls. And through these thoughts our souls will grow and develop anthroposophically, so that the soul will become what it was intended to become through its own unconscious impulse to come to Anthroposophy. I say again: So that the soul may be taken hold of by the mission of Anthroposophy. I have spoken these earnest words to you in this last hour, so that you may let them work in you quietly and in silence for a time: that the soul shall really be taken hold of by the mission of Anthroposophy. We shall continue these lessons when we come together again,—that will be in the first days of September. For the intervening time I would like to have laid on all your hearts what I have had to say this evening in connection with the karma of individual anthroposophists and of the Anthroposophical Society.

• 1. The twenty-seven lectures given by Dr. Steiner in England (11th–30th August) were as follows:
  
  In Torquay: True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation. A course of eleven lectures published in English translation under this title: published in German under the title, Das Initiaten-Bewusstsein.
  
  Course of seven lectures on Education.
  
  Three lectures to Members of the Anthroposophical Society, published in English translation, together with those given in London, in the volume entitle, Cosmic Christianity: Karma in the life of Individuals, and in the Evolution of the World.
  
  In London: Three lectures to Members (see above).
  
  Two lectures for doctors and medical students: The Art of Healing from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.
  
  Public lecture on Education (arranged by the Educational Union for the Realisation of Spiritual Values).

If we wish our human thought and action to be permeated once more by spiritual life, it will be necessary to receive again in full earnestness such conceptions of the spiritual world as have passed through our souls in these last lectures. For many centuries these conceptions have in reality been lacking to mankind and notably to civilised mankind.

Looking back into various epochs of human history we shall find how in earlier ages human action upon earth was everywhere connected with what was taking place in the super-sensible. It is not that a consciousness of the super-sensible—a certain abstract consciousness of it—has been lacking to the greater part of mankind in recent times. No—but the courage has been lacking to attach the concrete deeds and happenings in the earthly sphere to the equally real forms of life and movement in spiritual worlds.

With our recent studies we are coming to do this once more. And we do so especially when we bring the earthly life of men, as we have been doing here, into connection with the life between death and a new birth, when we connect what is taking place in one earthly life with that which is accomplished in the successive lives of man.

We have begun to consider that spiritual, super-sensible stream of which I was allowed to say that it is connected with our present stream of Michael in the service of which Anthroposophy has placed itself. We have thus entered upon the path which in a certain sense is to approach the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement itself, and at the same time, the karma of the individuals who unite the life of their soul and spirit sincerely, out of a straightforward inner impulse, with the Anthroposophical Movement.

I told you of a super-sensible event which took place under the aegis as it were of the Michael Power at the very time when the Council of 869 was taking place on earth. We know how deeply the whole life and civilisation of the Middle Ages was influenced by that Council. We need only watch the deep reserve with which enlightened spirits in the Middle Ages avoid speaking of the threefold human being, of body, soul and spirit. For the 8th Œcumenical Council at Constantinople had declared the doctrine of the threefold man heretical. Considering the power of such edicts in the Middle Ages it is quite clear that the whole of the spiritual life here on earth then had to take its course as it were under the shadow of this declaration which condemned Trichotomy as heretical.

But all the more intense was that spiritual life which has been working for a long time preparing the Michael stream for the 20th century, the Michael stream in which we stand since the last third of the 19th century and in which mankind will be for three or four centuries to come.

To-day we will speak of the course of this stream of Michael to which we have already begun to turn attention. Then, next Sunday, we shall approach more nearly matters connected on the one hand with the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement, and on the other hand karmically with the spiritual and intellectual life of the present time.

I told you of a kind of super-sensible Council which took place in spiritual regions over the earth at the same time as the 8th Œcumenical Council in Constantinople. In that spiritual council there met together the individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of his wise counsellor, and also the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle. Moreover there were also gathered there the individualities from the time of the spiritual service of King Arthur; and as I explained, all this took place under the aegis of Michael.

Then I told you how Haroun al Raschid appeared again, bringing with him into Europe an oriental spiritual life with an Aristotelian doctrine that had become unchristian. I told you how he appeared again as Bacon, Lord Bacon of Verulam, who had a great influence on the spiritual life of Europe, but an influence of an essentially materialistic tendency. Moreover I told you how the counsellor of Haroun al Raschid whom I had described, appeared again as Amos Comenius. Much is said, and justly, in praise of Amos Comenius. Nevertheless, in one aspect, in his striving to introduce clear pictorial representations into the methods of teaching, he worked powerfully for materialism. For in effect, he laid the greatest stress upon the immediate perception of things with the physical senses.

Thus we see bursting in upon this earthly life at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, a stream which lies not in the straightforward line of Christian development, but which brings a foreign element, foreign to Christianity, into the spiritual and intellectual evolution of Europe. On the other hand the individualities of Aristotle and Alexander who remained united with the true stream of Michael worked on and on with all those who belonged to them. They went on working in the spiritual worlds.

Moreover other personalities were working within the same stream, partly in the spiritual worlds and partly on the earth itself. There were individualities connected with these spiritual streams and living between death and a new birth. There were others who appeared as personalities on earth in the course of the centuries. These were the individualities connected with Platonism rather than with Aristotelianism, connected also with all that the Platonic conception had since become.

Especially in the centuries following the 9th, we see Platonic spirits descending on to the earth, spirits of a Platonic trend and orientation. It was they who continued through the Middle Ages a Christian teaching regarded as heretical by official Christianity, official Catholicism, but which was nevertheless the truer Christian teaching. Meanwhile the individualities who continued the stream of Christian Aristotelianism remained, to begin with, in the spiritual worlds. For with the given conditions of evolution there was no real point of attachment for their stream down on the earth in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. On the other hand, those who were more Platonic in character could unfold their spiritual life with remarkable intensity in isolated places, in isolated provinces as it were of the spirit. Interspersed with the Roman Catholic kind of Christianity which asserted itself more and more officially, we find individuals gathered in schools here and there, carrying on traditions of the ancient Mysteries and illuminating Christianity from these ancient sources. And there was one place where all these streams of old tradition seemed to flow together. I mean, of course, the School of Chartres, to which I have so often referred in recent lectures, a school which was spiritual through and through and in which there worked such great spirits as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others. Now what kind of a spiritual life was it which having thus evolved, flowed at length into the wonderful School of Chartres, only the external aspects of which have really become known to mankind? It was a spiritual life which has been completely silted up in modern times, a spiritual life in which the ancient traditions of the Mysteries were handed down.

Above all within that spiritual life we find a deep and spiritually penetrated conception of Nature, altogether different from that abstract conception of Nature which was afterwards made so much of, which knows only natural laws expressed in abstract thought. The spiritual stream to which I now refer received something spiritual from Nature into the human soul. So that in all Nature, not only abstract, dead, conceptual natural laws were recognised, but living creative activity. Men did not look so much to our present day chemical elements which have since commanded so much admiration, but they looked all the more deeply at what were called the Elements in the ancient sense: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. It was not a question of knowing them in words by mere tradition. The tradition was impregnated still with the most ancient of the Mysteries. And when this is so, we see in the Elements what is indeed not present in our seventy to eighty chemical elements, the world of elemental spirituality the world of certain elemental beings into which we penetrate when we enter livingly into the four Elements.

Then we see how man himself in his outer bodily nature partakes in the life and movement of the Earth, Water, Air, Fire which become in him the organic form and figure. They who thus looked into the life and movement of the Elements, of Earth, Water, Air and Fire did not see mere natural laws, but behind all this life and movement they saw a great and living Being, the Goddess Natura. And from their vision they had an immediate feeling that this Goddess Natura shows only one side of her being to man to begin with, while the other side remains hidden in the world in which man spends the time of sleep between falling asleep and reawakening. For then the ego and astral body are in a spiritual environment which lies at the foundation of Nature. The ego and astral body are with the elemental beings who underlie the Elements. Everywhere in the scattered schools and spiritual centres to which I have referred we find the teachers speaking to larger or smaller groups of pupils, and telling them how in the outer phenomena of Nature as they appear to men in waking life, the Goddess Natura shows only one part of her living and creative being. While on the other hand, in all the working in the Elements in wind and weather, in all that surrounds the human being and constitutes him, there also works what the human being cannot see, what is hidden from him in the darkness of sleep.

These scholars of the Middle Ages felt the great Goddess Natura as the Goddess who ascends for half of the time, revealing herself in the outer movement and activity of physical sense Nature and who on the other hand descends nightly and yearly to live and work in fields of creation hidden from man by the dark consciousness of sleep.

Now this was the direct continuation of the old conception of Proserpina as it existed in the ancient Mysteries. We must consider what this signifies. We to-day have a conception of Nature woven out of abstract thought, consisting of natural laws, speaking and thinking in abstract terms, containing nothing that is alive. But in that old conception of nature they still contemplated Nature as men had once contemplated the very active Goddess Proserpina, the daughter of Demeter. And in the ideas in which the pupils of those schools were instructed, proceeding as they did from a still living tradition, there were many sayings and expressions which were in reality an exact continuation of what had been said of Proserpina in the ancient Mysteries.

Then the teachers would lead the human being from a conception of his bodily life to an understanding of his life of soul. They made it clear to him: With respect to your bodily nature you consist of the Elements in which the elemental beings are working with you. But you also bear the soul within you. This is not subject to the influence of the Elements alone. On the contrary it rules over the organisation of the Elements within you and this your soul stands under the influence of the planetary world, of Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, of Sun and Moon, Saturn and Mars. Thus if psychology were to be studied, man's vision was directed upward to the secrets of the planetary world. The reality of the human being was extended from the bodily into the soul nature in such a way as to perceive always the living connection with the universe. From the working and weaving of the Elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire, it was expanded to all that the planets do in the soul-life of man—the planets in their circling, in their glory, in the actions of their light, in their mysterious occult influences. Thus from the Goddess Natura, the successor of Proserpina, they looked up to the Intelligences, to the Genii of the planets when they wished to understand the human life of soul.

Then when it was a question of understanding the spiritual life (for the teachers of these isolated schools had not let the dogma of the 8th Council of Constantinople deter them from studying the spirit in itself)—when it was a matter of considering the spiritual life, they turned their gaze upwards to the fixed stars, and their configurations. They looked up above all to what is represented in the Zodiac. And they regarded what man bears within him as the spirit in connection with the constellations, the glory of the fixed stars, the spiritual Powers whom they knew to be there in the stars.

Thus from the whole universe, from the cosmos, they understood the human being. Thus the macrocosm was there in reality, and the microcosm, man. Such was the doctrine of Nature in that time, taught with enthusiasm in isolated schools and also offered to mankind by isolated individuals who were scattered here and there. And at length as in a kind of culmination, all these things were wonderfully reproduced by such individualities as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others in the School of Chartres.

Wonderful indeed was this School of Chartres. If we look at its writings to-day they seem, as I already said, like catalogues of names. But in that time it was not customary to write in any other way of things which one wished to have before one in full living spirituality. One simply catalogued them as it were. He however who can read such things, he above all who can read the order in which they are placed, can very well perceive how permeated by ancient spirituality are the writings that come to us from the teachers of Chartres. But the deep spirituality of the school worked not only in the teaching that was given, nor in the fact that there were many pupils who carried out again into the world what they had learnt there. No, it also worked in a direct spiritual way. The living spirituality that was present in that School radiated out even in an occult way into the spiritual atmosphere of mankind. We see the spiritual rays of the School of Chartres passing through France even into Italy. And in many schools whose outer name has been handed down to history, a teaching about Nature was given such as I have here indicated. Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante, returning from his post as an Ambassador in Spain suffered at the same time a slight sunstroke and a great shock as he came near to Florence, the city of his fathers. At that moment he was really touched by the occult radiations of the School of Chartres and underwent an experience which he himself describes as follows.—He said that as he came near the city of Florence he entered a deep forest. There he first met three animals and then he met the Goddess Natura who built up the kingdoms of Nature in the very way in which this had been taught for centuries as I have indicated. He, however, beheld it directly. In the semi-pathological condition which soon passed, what had been taught in the School became immediate vision to him. Then, having seen the Goddess Natura, the successor of Proserpina, in her creative work, he beheld how man is built up out of the Elements and how the soul lives and moves in the forces of the planets. Then with his thought he was uplifted even into the heaven of the fixed stars. Thus in his own person he experienced the whole of this majestic, medieval science. And he was the teacher of Dante. Had he not been so, had he not given to his pupil Dante what he had received in this majestic vision, we should not have the Divina Commedia, for the Divina Commedia is the reflection of Brunetto Latini's teaching in the soul of Dante.

Now you must see that in that time there was no other possibility than to work with such things within the institutions of the Church, and these indeed were much freer than they afterwards became. In effect, all these teachers of Chartres belonged to Monastic Orders. We see them wearing the garment of Cistercians. We see them connected with the good tendencies within the life of the Christian Monastic Orders.

Then came a strange phase of development. During the whole of this period, when the Platonists had been active in the way just described, the Aristotelians could not work on earth. The conditions were not there. But instead, they were preparing for the Michael stream in the super-sensible world, maintaining a continuous connection with those who were working on earth in the same direction and who then found their way to Chartres. The School of Chartres was in full flower from the end of the 11th and throughout the 12th century, and then a kind of super-sensible exchange of ideas took place between the Platonic souls from the School of Chartres who were now coming up into the spiritual world through the gate of death and the Aristotelian souls who had remained above. It was an exchange of ideas which took place in the Middle Ages at the turn of the 12th and 13th century, as to the manner of working in the future. (Earthly terms have to be used for these things, although naturally they are not really in keeping and can easily make one appear ridiculous.)

The outcome of this exchange of ideas—since different conditions now prevailed in the spiritual life of European humanity—was that the Platonists who had been so active in Chartres and were now coming up into the super-sensible world, passed on their mission to the Aristotelians. And these Aristotelian souls now descended into the physical world in order to carry forward in the way that conditions allowed, what I will call the cosmic service of Michael.

Within the Dominican Order, where they were active in the most manifold ways, we find again those souls who worked more in the Aristotelian sense. For the work on earth, the Platonic souls were replaced, so to speak, by the Aristotelian souls. And now there developed that system of thought which in truth can be rightly appraised to-day only within the Anthroposophical Movement—I once gave lectures here on the true form and background of Scholasticism [ The Redemption of Thinking. A Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Three lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1920. Translated and edited with an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendices, by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicholl (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1956).]—there developed medieval Scholasticism, the teaching which in an age already hastening towards materialism strove to preserve as much spirituality in human concepts as it is possible to preserve.

Before Bacon of Verulam and Comenius appeared on earth, Scholasticism had been carrying forward the service of Michael. We see how Scholasticism, the so-called realistic school of philosophy, strove to rescue the source of spirituality which man bears in his thoughts. The Scholastics ascribe reality to that which man grasps through his thoughts. It is a thin, attenuated spirituality that could there be rescued, but it is spirituality.

Thus is the spiritual life carried forward in the evolution of the worlds. Seeing it in its reality, possessing the science of Initiation, we can do no other: we must always perceive the physical, or that which takes place in physical history upon earth, together with the spiritual that permeates it, coming from spiritual worlds. Thus we reach a united and harmonious conception. First, until the time of Chartres, the Platonic souls are working, and then the Aristotelian. We first behold the Aristotelian souls influencing with inspiration from the super-sensible worlds the teachers who, as Platonic souls, are dwelling upon earth, teaching and unfolding science upon earth in earthly forms of understanding. We gaze into this living interplay; we see the teacher of Chartres sitting there on this earthly ground, unfolding his studies that are permeated by spiritual vision, while there penetrates into this earthly scene the inspiring ray from the Aristotelian soul above, bringing the Platonically coloured teachings into the right channels. It is a very different conception of life from what is usual to-day. For in external life men are so fond of contrasting and dividing Platonists from Aristotelians. But in reality it is not so. The times and epochs of the earth require teachings to be given, now in Platonic, now in Aristotelian terms. But if our wisdom includes the super-sensible life in the background, we perceive the one fructifying the other, the one enclosed within the other.

Then again, when the Aristotelians were teaching in the Dominican Order, the Platonic souls, who were now once more in the spiritual world, were the inspiring genii. They had already come to an understanding in the spiritual worlds with these Aristotelian souls who afterwards descended to the earth. Life was altogether different in those times. One may believe it or not, but it was so. Looking back spiritually into those Middle Ages we find such a spirit as Alanus ab Insulis sitting in his lonely cell, given up to his studies, and receiving from the super-sensible world, like a spirit-visitor who comes to him as a companion, an Aristotelian soul. Nay, even afterwards, when the Aristotelians appear in the Dominican Order, there is still a powerful consciousness of belonging to the spiritual world. We can see it in such an instance as the following. One of the Dominican teachers descends into the physical earth-life earlier than another soul with whom he is united. The other soul remains behind in the spiritual world to begin with, in order to accomplish something there which he will afterwards carry down to his companion who went before him. And at length the two are working together again on the earth. All this takes place with consciousness. In their work and activity they know themselves to be in living connection with the spiritual world.

Subsequent history has left no trace of these things. But, my dear friends, to know the truth about historical life we must not seek to derive it alone from the documents of modern time. Moreover, we must see life with open-minded vision. It may be that it unfolds in circles with which perhaps we can have little sympathy. Yet we must see it as something which is placed by karma into these very circles, and the inner significance of which is altogether different.

The task and possibility of thus reading in the real events has come to me in many remarkable ways during my life. Only now do I perceive and penetrate many an experience that I have met with in the course of my life, clear and distinct like an occult writing. Indeed for the most significant of our experiences karma works and weaves in deep and mysterious ways. And if I may say so, there is a very strong karma underlying the fact that to-day and in recent times, at many places, I have been speaking of such things as the School of Chartres, and what preceded and what came after it. For the greatest of those who taught in the School of Chartres belonged to the Cistercian Order. Now the Cistercian Order, like the other Orders in the Catholic stream of development, has become decadent, but in this growing decadence there is also much illusion of appearance. For individualities occasionally find themselves in outer life-connections to which they do not properly belong, while in reality they are carrying forward old threads of spiritual life which are indeed of the greatest value for Anthroposophy itself. But life and karma brings them into these outer connections. Thus I have always been struck by the fact that from my earliest youth, until a certain period of life, something of the Cistercian Order again and again approached me. Having gone through the elementary school, I narrowly escaped—for reasons which I explained in my autobiography The Story of My Life—becoming a pupil in gymnasium or grammar school conducted by the Cistercian Order. Everything seemed to be leading in this direction; but my parents, as I have explained, eventually decided to send me to the modern school instead. Thus I did not become a pupil in the grammar school connected with the Cistercians, and, needless to say, this was also for very good karmic reasons.

But the modern school which I attended was only five steps away from the Cistercian grammar school. Thus we made the acquaintance of all those excellent Cistercian teachers whose work was indeed of a high quality at that time. I need not speak of the Order itself; it is the individuals to whom I refer. To this day I think with profound appreciation of one of those Cistercian priests who taught German literature at that grammar school with deep enthusiasm. And I see the Cistercian priest before me in many other individualities, in the Alleegasse in Wiener Neustadt, where the teachers used to walk up and down before the school hours began—Cistercian priests in civilian costume, eminently gifted men. At that time I was far more concerned to read the essays of the teachers in the school year-book at the end of the year, than the ordinary text-books during the year. I read with keen devotion what these Cistercians wrote of their own wisdom in the year-book of the grammar school in Wiener Neustadt.

In short, the Cistercian Order was near to me. And without a doubt (though these of course are hypotheses such as one uses only for purposes of illustration), if I had gone to the Cistercian school I should, as a matter of course, have become a Cistercian.

Then I came to Vienna. (All these things are described in The Story of My Life). After a time I came into the circle around Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, where many professors of the theological faculty in Vienna used to gather. I learned to know some of them intimately. All those professors were members of the Cistercian Order. Thus once again I came together with Cistercians, and through the currents which flow through the Cistercian Order to-day, I have been able to follow many things back into the past.

To show how karma works I will refer to one event. I had to give a lecture. Now through the afternoon teas at delle Grazie's I had grown well acquainted with the Cistercian professors of theology who frequented her house. I gave a lecture. A priest of the Cistercian Order was there—a remarkable and excellent man. When I had finished my lecture he made a very peculiar remark, the nature of which I will only indicate by saying: he uttered words in which was contained his memory of having been together with me in a

Such things do indeed educate us for life. It was in the year 1889. In Das Goetheanum, former life on earth.

Thus I have shown how the Platonic stream and the Aristotelian worked together. Then the Aristotelians too went once more through the gate of death. And as we know, with the age of the Spiritual Soul, materialism became more and more predominant on earth. But at the very time when materialism took its start on earth there was founded in the super-sensible worlds a kind of Michael School. As I said, we can refer to these things only with our everyday terminology. It was a far-spread School of Michael in which spirits like Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis were united after death. And with them once more Alexander and Aristotle. These and other human souls who were not in earthly incarnation at that time, were united here with spiritual beings who, though they spend their lives without ever being incarnated on the earth, are yet connected with earthly souls. Michael himself was a Teacher, gazing back over all that had been the great teachings of the ancient Mysteries, comprehending in a marvellous sweep of vision the secrets of the ancient Mysteries, and opening out at the same time a mighty panorama of what was to come.

In one form or another we find certain souls who took part in that super-sensible school in the 14th/15th century. They had been connected together in many lives on earth. We find them among the hosts which strive towards the stream of Michael, receiving into the impulses of their will what we may call: The will to be united with the stream of Michael.

We gaze upon these souls. Very few of them were on earth. Most of them were in the life between death and a new birth, partaking in that super-sensible gathering, in that spiritual school. We find them there, these souls, we find them there, harkening to the teachings of Michael, and we find them again to-day in the souls who, connected on the earth, unfold a sincere and upright striving of their inner life towards the Anthroposophical Movement.

In the karma of those who tend with inner sincerity towards the Anthroposophical Movement, there lie the deep impulses, the karmic significance of which must again be studied in the spiritual worlds themselves. Of course the fact that those souls were driven by their karma to such a heavenly community at that time, is due again to the fact that in former earthly lives they had shaped their karma accordingly, so that it led them there. Nevertheless one cannot recognise the karma of human souls without looking, not only at what happens at any given time on earth, but also at what happens between death and a new birth.

Our outlook on the world is infinitely enriched by this. Contemplating the souls who labour in the world—and in the last resort this applies to all men—we no longer have to begin at the point where they enter earthly existence, or cease at the point where they die; for in effect they neither then begin to work, nor do they cease. And in all that takes place spiritually, not only the souls that are incarnated on the earth to-day are working, but other souls, who are now between death and a new birth, and who send their rays of influence in upon the earth. In our own actions their impulses are contained. For all these things work together, even as the deeds on earth penetrate into the heavenly regions, and continue working there, as I indicated pictorially, for instance, in the characters of Capesius and Strader in the first Mystery Play.

Brunetto Latini, Dante's teacher, he is there. He died. He went through the gate of death, but death itself is a transformation of life. He is still there. He works on, and we find him if we seek him spiritually.

The picture of the spiritual evolution of mankind is made complete if we are able to include the so-called dead. Nay, in reality, they are far more living than the so-called living. In very many things that happen on the earth we find Brunetto Latini living and working to-day, although he is not incarnate on the earth. Thus you will see how intimately united the earthly life is with the super-sensible. We cannot speak at all of a super-sensible world separated from the earthly world of sense. For everything that is of the senses is permeated at the same time supersensibly, and everything that is super-sensible is revealed somewhere and sometime in the world of sense. Moreover we can only truly receive and understand the earthly life if we recognise that these things are behind it.

This, my dear friends, is to be the future of the Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must treat of the super-sensible facts openly and without reserve, confessing them in fullness of knowledge. This should be the esoteric trait permeating the Anthroposophical Movement. Thus alone will it be possible to give it its real spiritual content.

For you see, all that I described to you as the stream of Michael has gone on into our time. But individualities appearing again on earth have to make use, in the first place, of the physical bodies that are possible in a given age. They must find their way into the impulses of education which a given age provides. In the materialistic age all these things become their external garment. And our materialistic age offers the greatest imaginable hindrances to souls who had a rich spirituality in former lives on earth. To pour this spirituality into the bodies of this age, especially when they have to be prepared by modern educational methods, is extraordinarily difficult. Thus you need not wonder when I say: The souls which strive earnestly towards Anthroposophy are to be found in this way in former epochs of evolution. We cannot lay the foundations of true knowledge unless we can perceive the real interplay of all that lives and works in the world. For spiritual research itself depends on the spiritual life and requires us to seek the spiritual along its own true path. The paths of the spirit are different in every age. In our age they are possible only if we have beneath our feet the firm ground of a spiritual knowledge of external Nature.

The former age which I described within the stream of Michael was followed by one which here on the earth shows an altogether materialistic aspect, an age in which all things are developed materialistically. In the super-sensible evolution of this age there is the most intensive work of preparation for the impulses of Michael, which have now been carried down, so to speak, from heaven to the earth. But this new age to-day cannot take its start from what has gone before in the last few centuries. We must indeed be familiar with the things that have unfolded upon earth in the last few centuries, but we cannot take our start from them. With the consciousness of this modern age we must take our start from what has taken place in the super-sensible during the last few centuries. In saying this we touch upon ground which must become the basis of anthroposophical life and work in this present time. Conceptions such as I have explained in the last few lectures must not merely be received with cold intellect and indifferent hearts. They must be received by the full human being, by the whole compass of the human heart and mind. Anthroposophy can mean something for mankind only if it is received with the whole compass of the human heart and soul.

Such is the foundation of the will of the Anthroposophical Movement, which is united since the Foundation Meeting with the Anthroposophical Society. We long that this should enter deeply into the souls of human beings who are united with this Movement, that they should grow conscious of what is truly connected with their karma in the depths of their own souls.

Thus we have laid a kind of foundation, and from this point we will proceed next Sunday when we will study the further course of the stream of Michael, so as to perceive its resulting tasks for Anthroposophy and for the whole spiritual life of the present time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inherent in soul the powers of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This lecture, the 9th of 12 lectures published under is: A Living Knowledge of Nature, the Fall of the Intellect into Sin, the Spiritual Resurrection.

You have seen from these lectures that I feel duty bound to speak at this time about a consciousness that must be attained if we are to accomplish one of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society. And to begin with today, let me point to the fact that this consciousness can only be acquired if the whole task of culture and civilization is really understood today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I have taken the most varied opportunities to try, from this point of view, to characterize what is meant by the fall of man, to which all religions refer. The religions speak of this fall of man as lying at the starting point of the historical development of mankind; and in various ways through the years we have seen how this fall of man—which I do not need to characterize in more detail today—is an expression of something that once occurred in the course of human evolution: man's becoming independent of the divine spiritual powers that guided him.

We know in fact that the consciousness of this independence first arose as the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution in the first half of the fifteenth century. We have spoken again and again in recent lectures about this point in time. But basically the whole human evolution depicted in myths and history is a kind of preparation for this significant moment of growing awareness of our freedom and independence.

This moment is a preparation for the fact that earthly humanity is meant to acquire a decision-making ability that is independent of the divine spiritual powers. And so the religions point to a cosmic-earthly event that replaces the soul-spiritual instincts—which alone were determinative in what humanity did in very early times—with just this kind of human decision making. As I said, we do not want to speak in more detail about this now, but the religions did see the matter in this way: With respect to his moral impulses the human being has placed himself in a certain opposition to his guiding spiritual powers, to the Yahweh or Jehovah powers, let us say, speaking in Old Testament terms. If we look at this interpretation, therefore, we can present the matter as though, from a definite point in his evolution, man no longer felt that divine spiritual powers were active in him and that now he himself was active.

Consequently, with respect to his overall moral view of himself, man felt that he was sinful and that he would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers. Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers. And then there arose in humanity this consciousness of sin: As a human being I am sinless only when I find my way back again to the divine spiritual powers. What I myself decide for myself is sinful per se, and I can attain a sinless state only by finding my way back again: to the divine spiritual powers.

This consciousness of sin then arose most strongly in the Middle Ages. And then human intellectuality, which previously had not yet been a separate faculty, began to develop. And so, in a certain way, what man developed as his intellect, as an intellectual content, also became infected—in a certain sense rightly—with this consciousness of sin. It is only that one did not say to oneself that the intellect, arising in human evolution since the third or fourth century A.D., was also now infected by the consciousness of sin. In the Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages, there evolved, to begin with, an ‘unobserved’ consciousness of sin in the intellect.

This Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages said to itself: No matter how effectively one may develop the intellect as a human being, one can still only grasp outer physical nature with it. Through mere intellect one can at best prove that divine spiritual powers exist; but one can know nothing of these divine spiritual powers; one can only have faith in these divine spiritual powers. One can have faith in what they themselves have revealed either through the Old or the New Testament.

So the human being, who earlier had felt himself to be sinful in his moral life—‘sinful’ meaning separated from the divine spiritual powers—this human being, who had always felt morally sinful, now in his Scholastic wisdom felt himself to be intellectually sinful, as it were. He attributed to himself an intellectual ability that was effective only in the physical, sense-perceptible world. He said to himself: As a human being I am too base to be able to ascent through my own power into those regions of knowledge where I can also grasp the spirit.

We do not notice how connected this intellectual fall of man is to his general moral fall. But what plays into our view of human intellectuality is the direct continuation of his moral fall.

When the Scholastic wisdom passes over then into the modern scientific view of the world, the connection with the old moral fall of man is completely forgotten. And, as I have often emphasized, the strong connection actually present between modern natural-scientific concepts and the old Scholasticism is in fact denied altogether. In modern natural science one states that man has limits to his knowledge, that he must be content to extend his view of things only out upon the sense-perceptible physical world. A Dubois-Reymond, for example, and others state that the human being has limits to what he can investigate, has limits to his whole thinking, in fact.

But that is a direct continuation of Scholasticism. The only difference is that Scholasticism believed that because the human intellect is limited, one must raise oneself to something different from the intellect—to revelation, in fact—when one wants to know something about the spiritual world.

The modern natural-scientific view takes half, not the whole; it lets revelation stay where it is, but then places itself completely upon a standpoint that is possible only if one presupposes revelation. This standpoint is that the human ability to know is too base to ascend into the divine spiritual worlds.

But at the time of Scholasticism, especially at the high point of Scholasticism in the middle of the Middle Ages, the same attitude of soul was not present as that of today. One assumed then that when the human being used his intellect he could gain knowledge of the sense-perceptible world; and he sensed that he still experienced something of a flowing together of himself with the sense-perceptible world when he employed his intellect. And one believed then that if one wanted to know something about the spiritual one must ascend to revelation, which in fact could no longer be understood, i.e., could no longer be grasped intellectually. But the fact remained unnoticed—and this is where we must direct our attention!—that spirituality flowed into the concepts that the Schoolmen, set up about the sense world. The concepts of the Schoolmen were not as unspiritual as ours are today. The Schoolmen still approached the human being with the concepts that they formed for themselves about nature, so that the human being was not yet completely excluded from knowledge. For, at least in the Realist stream, the Schoolmen totally believed that thoughts are given us from outside, that they are not fabricated from within. Today we believe that thoughts are not given from outside but are fabricated from within. Through this fact we have gradually arrived at a point in our evolution where we have dropped everything that does not relate to the outer sense world.

And, you see, the Darwinian theory of evolution is the final consequence of this dropping of everything unrelated to the outer sense world. Goethe made a beginning for a real evolutionary teaching that extended as far as man. When you take up his writing in this direction, you will see that he only stumbled when he tried to take up the human being. He wrote excellent botanical studies. He wrote many correct things about animals. But something always went wrong when he tried to take up the human being. The intellect that is trained only upon the sense world is not adequate to the study of man. Precisely Goethe shows this to a high degree. Even Goethe can say nothing about the human being. His teaching on metamorphosis does not extend as far as the human being. You know how, within the anthroposophical world view, we have had to broaden this teaching on metamorphosis, entirely in a Goethean sense, but going much further.

What has modern intellectualism actually achieved in natural science? It has only come as far as grasping the evolution of animals up to the apes, and then added on the human being without being able inwardly to encompass him. The closer people came to the higher animals, so to speak, the less able their concepts became to grasp anything. And it is absolutely untrue to say, for example, that they even understand the higher animals. They only believe that they understand them.

And so our understanding of the human being gradually dropped completely out of our understanding of the world, because understanding dropped out of our concepts. Our concepts became less and less spiritual, and the unspiritual concepts that regard the human being as the mere endpoint of the animal kingdom represent the content of all our thinking today. These concepts are already instilled into our children in the early grades, and our inability to look at the essential being of man thus becomes part of the general culture.

Now you know that I once attempted to grasp the whole matter of knowledge at another point. This was when I wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and its prelude Truth and Science although the first references are present already in my The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View written in the 1880's. I tried to turn the matter in a completely different direction. I tried to show what the modern person can raise himself to, when—not in a traditional sense, but out of free inner activity—he attains pure thinking, when he, attains this pure, willed thinking which is something positive and real, when this thinking works in him. And in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I sought, in fact, to find our moral impulses in this purified thinking.

So that our evolution proceeded formerly in such a way that we more and more viewed man as being too base to act morally, and we extended this baseness also into our intellectuality.

Expressing this graphically, one could say: The human being developed in such a way that what he knew about himself became less and less substantial. It grew thinner and thinner (light color). But below the surface, something continued to develop (red) that lives, not in abstract thinking, but in real thinking.

Now, at the end of the 19th century, we had arrived at the point of no longer noticing at all what I have drawn here in red; and through what I have drawn here in a light color, we no longer believed ourselves connected with anything of a divine spiritual nature. Man's consciousness of sin had torn him out of the divine spiritual element; the historical forces that were emerging could not take him back. But with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I wanted to say: Just look for once into the depths of the human soul and you will find that something has remained with us: pure thinking, namely, the real, energetic thinking that originates from man himself, that is no longer mere thinking, that is filled with experience, filled with feeling, and that ultimately expresses itself in the will. I wanted to say that this thinking can become the impulse for moral action. And for this reason I spoke of the moral intuition which is the ultimate outcome of what otherwise is only moral imagination. But what is actually intended by The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity can become really alive only if we can reverse the path that we took as we split ourselves off more and more from the divine spiritual content of the world, split ourselves off all the way down to intellectuality. When we again find the spirituality in nature, then we will also find the human being again.

I therefore once expressed in a lecture that I held many years ago in Mannheim that mankind, in fact, in its present development, is on the point of reversing the fall of man. What I said was hardly noticed, but consisted in the following: The fall of man was understood to be a moral fall, which ultimately influenced the intellect also. The intellect felt itself to be at the limits of its knowledge. And it is basically one and the same thing—only in a somewhat different form—if the old theology speaks of sin or if Dubois-Reymond speaks of the limits of our ability to know nature. I indicated how one must grasp the spiritual—which, to be sure, has been filtered down into pure thinking—and how, from there, one can reverse the fall of man. I showed how, through spiritualizing the intellect, one can work one's way back up to the divine spiritual.

Whereas in earlier ages one pointed to the moral fall of man and thought about the development of mankind in terms of this moral fall of man, we today must think about an ideal of mankind: about the rectifying of the fall of man along a path of the spiritualization of our knowing activity, along a path of knowing the spiritual content of the world again. Through the moral fall of man, the human being distanced himself from the gods. Through the path of knowledge he must find again the pathway of the gods. Man must turn his descent into an ascent. Out of the purely grasped spirit of his own being, man must understand, with inner energy and power, the goal, the ideal, of again taking the fall of man seriously. For, the fall of man should be taken seriously. It extends right into what natural science says today. We must find the courage to add to the fall of man, through the power of our knowing activity, a raising of man out of sin. We must find the courage to work out a way to raise ourselves out of sin, using what can come to us through a real and genuine spiritual-scientific knowledge of modern times.

One could say, therefore: If we look back into the development of mankind, we see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. But the fall must be made right again at some point: It must be opposed by a raising of man. And this raising of man can only go forth out of the age of the consciousness soul. In our day, therefore, the historic moment has arrived when the highest ideal of mankind must be the spiritual raising of ourselves out of sin. Without this, the development of mankind can proceed no further.

That is what I once discussed in that lecture in Mannheim. I said that, in modern times, especially in natural-scientific views, an intellectual fall of man has occurred, in addition to the moral fall of man. And this intellectual fall is the great historical sign that a spiritual raising of man must begin.

But what does this spiritual raising of man mean? It means nothing other, in fact, than really understanding Christ. Those who still understood something about him, who had not—like modern theology—lost Christ completely, said of Christ that he came to earth, that he incarnated into an earthly body as a being of a higher kind. They took up what was proclaimed about Christ in written traditions. They spoke, in fact, about the mystery of Golgotha.

Today the time has come when Christ must be understood. But we resist this understanding of Christ, and the form this resistance takes is extraordinarily characteristic. You see, if even a spark of what Christ really is still lived in those who say that they understand Christ, what would happen? They would have to be clear about the fact that Christ, as a heavenly being, descended to earth; he therefore did not speak to man in an earthly language, but in a heavenly one. We must therefore make an effort to understand him. We must make an effort to speak a cosmic, extraterrestrial language. That means that we must not limit our knowledge merely to the earth, for, the earth was in fact a new land for Christ. We must extend our knowledge out into the cosmos. We must learn to understand the elements. We must learn to understand the movements of the planets. We must learn to understand the star constellations, and their influence on what happens on earth. Then we draw near to the language that Christ spoke.

That is something, however, that coincides with our spiritual raising of man. For why was man reduced to understanding only what lives on earth? Because he was conscious of sin, in fact, because he considered himself too base to be able to grasp the world in its extraterrestrial spirituality. And that is actually why people speak as though man can know nothing except the earthly. I characterized this yesterday by saying: We understand a fish only in a bowl, and a bird only in a cage. Certainly there is no consciousness present in our civilized natural science that the human being can raise himself above this purely earthly knowledge; for, this science mocks any effort to go beyond the earthly. If one even begins to speak about the stars, the terrible mockery sets in right away, as a matter of course, from the natural-scientific side.

If we want to hear correct statements about the relation of man to the animals, we must already turn our eye to the extraterrestrial world, for only the plants are still explainable in earthly terms; the animals are not. Therefore I had to say earlier that we do not even understand the apes correctly, that we can no longer explain the animals. If one wants to understand the animals, one must take recourse to the extraterrestrial, for the animals are ruled by forces that are extraterrestrial. I showed you this yesterday with respect to the fish. I told you how moon and sun forces work into the water and shape him out of the water, if I may put it so. And in the same way, the bird out of the air. As soon as one turns to the elements, one also meets the extraterrestrial. The whole animal world is explainable in terms of the extraterrestrial. And even more so the human being. But when one begins to speak of the extraterrestrial, then the mockery sets in at once.

The courage to speak again about the extraterrestrial must grow within a truly spiritual-scientific view; for, to be a spiritual scientist today is actually more a matter of courage than of intellectuality. Basically it is a moral issue, because what must be opposed is something moral: the moral fall of man, in fact.

And so we must say that we must in fact first learn the language of Christ, the language ton ouranon, the language of the heavens, in Greek terms. We must relearn this language in order to make sense out of what Christ wanted to do on earth.

Whereas up till now one has spoken about Christianity and described the history of Christianity, the point now is to understand Christ, to understand him as an extraterrestrial being. And that is identical with what we can call the ideal of raising ourselves from sin.

Now, to be sure, there is something very problematical about formulating this ideal, for you know in fact that the consciousness of sin once made people humble. But in modern times they are hardly ever humble. Often those who think themselves the most humble are the most proud of all. The greatest pride today is evident in those who strive for a so-called ‘simplicity’ in life. They set themselves above everything that is sought by the humble soul that lifts itself inwardly to real, spiritual truths, and they say: Everything must be sought in utter simplicity. Such naive natures—and they also regard themselves as naive natures—are often the most proud of all today. But nevertheless, during the time of real consciousness of sin there once were humble people; humility was still regarded as something that mattered in human affairs. And so, without justification, pride has arisen. Why? Yes, I can answer that in the same words I used here recently. Why has pride arisen? It has arisen because one has not heard the words “Huckle, get up!” [From the Oberufer Christmas plays.] One simply fell asleep. Whereas earlier one felt oneself, with full intensity and wakefulness, to be a sinner, one now fell into a gentle sleep and only dreamed still of a consciousness of sin. Formerly one was awake in one's consciousness of sin; one said to oneself: Man is sinful if he does not undertake actions that will again bring him onto the path to the divine spiritual powers. One was awake then. One may have different views about this today, but the fact is that one was awake in one's acknowledgment of sinfulness. But then one dozed off, and the dreams arrived, and. the dreams murmured: Causality rules in the world; one event always causes the following one. And so finally we pursue what we see in the starry heavens as attraction and repulsion of the heavenly bodies; we take this all the way down into the molecule; and then we imagine a kind of little cosmos of molecules and atoms.

And the dreaming went further. And then the dream concluded by saying: We can know nothing except what outer sense experience gives us. And it was labeled ‘supernaturalism’ if anyone went beyond sense experiences. But where supernaturalism begins, science ends.

And then, at gatherings of natural scientists, these dreams were delivered in croaking tirades like Dubois-Reymond's Limits of Knowledge. And then, when the dream's last notes were sounded—a dream does not always resound so agreeably; sometimes it is a real nightmare—when the dream concluded with “Where supernaturalism begins, science ends,” then not only the speaker but the whole natural-scientific public sank down from the dream into blessed sleep. One no longer needed any inner impulse for active inner knowledge. One could console oneself by accepting that there are limits, in fact, to what we can know about nature, and that we cannot transcend these limits. The time had arrived when one could now say: “Huckle, get up! The sky is cracking!” But our modern civilization replies: “Let it crack! It's old enough to have cracked before!” Yes, this is how things really are. We have arrived at a total sleepiness, in our knowing activity.

But into this sleepiness there must sound what is now being declared by spiritual-scientific anthroposophical knowledge. To begin with, there must arise in knowledge the realization that man is in a position to set up the ideal within himself that we can raise ourselves from sin. And that in turn is connected with the fact that along with a possible waking up, pride—which up till now has only been present, to be sure, in a dreamlike way—will grow more than ever. And (I say this of course without making any insinuations) it has sometimes been the case that in anthroposophical circles the raising of man has not yet come to full fruition. Sometimes, in fact, this pride has reached—I will not say a respectable—a quite unrespectable size. For, it simply lies in human nature for pride to flourish rather than the positive side.

And so, along with the recognition that the raising of man is a necessity, we must also see that we now need to take up into ourselves in full consciousness the training in humility which we once exercised. And we can do that. For, when pride arises out of knowledge, that is always a sign that something in one's knowledge is indeed terribly wrong. For when knowledge is truly present, it makes one humble in a completely natural way. It is out of pride that one sets up a program of reform today, when in some social movement, let's say, or in the woman's movement one knows ahead of time what is possible, right, necessary, and best, and then sets up a program, point by point. One knows everything about the matter. One does not think of oneself at all as proud when each person declares himself to know it all. But in true knowledge, one remains pretty humble, for one knows that true knowledge is acquired only in the course of time, to use a trivial expression.

If one lives in knowledge, one knows, with what difficulty—sometimes over decades—one has attained the simplest truths. There, quite inwardly through the matter itself, one does not become proud. But nevertheless, because a full consciousness is being demanded precisely of the Anthroposophical Society for humanity's great ideal today of raising ourselves from sin, watchfulness—not Hucklism, but watchfulness—must also be awakened against any pride that might arise.

We need today a strong inclination to truly grasp the essential being of knowledge so that, by virtue of a few anthroposophical catchwords like ‘physical body,’ ‘etheric body,’ ‘reincarnation,’ et cetera, we do not immediately become paragons of pride. This watchfulness with respect to ordinary pride must really be cultivated as a new moral content. This must be taken up into our meditation. For if the raising of man is actually to occur, then the experiences we have with the physical world must lead us over into the spiritual world. For, these experiences must lead us to offer ourselves devotedly, with the innermost powers of our soul. They must not lead us, however, to dictate program truths. Above all, they must penetrate into a feeling of responsibility for every single word that one utters about the spiritual world. Then the striving must reign to truly carry up into the realm of spiritual knowledge the truthfulness that, to begin with, one acquired for oneself in dealing with external, sense-perceptible facts. Whoever has not accustomed himself to remaining with the facts in the physical sense world and to basing himself upon them also does not accustom himself to truthfulness when speaking about the spirit. For in the spiritual world, one can no longer accustom oneself to truthfulness; one must bring it with one.

But you see, on the one hand today, due to the state of consciousness in our civilization, facts are hardly taken into account, and, on the other hand, science simply suppresses those facts that lead onto the right path. Let us take just one out of many such facts: There are insects that are themselves vegetarian when fully grown. They eat no meat, not even other insects. When the mother insect is ready to lay her fertilized eggs, she lays them into the body of another insect, that is then filled with the eggs that the insect mother has inserted into it. The eggs are now in a separate insect. Now the eggs do not hatch out into mature adults, but as little worms. But at first they are in the other insect. These little worms, that will only later metamorphose into adult insects, are not vegetarian. They could not be vegetarian. They must devour the flesh of the other insect. Only when they emerge and transform themselves are they able to do without the flesh of other insects. Picture that: the insect mother is herself a vegetarian. She knows nothing in her consciousness about eating meat, but she lays her eggs for the next generation into another insect. And furthermore; if these insects were now, for example, to eat away the stomach of the host insect, they would soon have nothing more to eat, because the host insect would die. If they ate away any vital organ, the insect could not live. So what do these insects do when they hatch out? They avoid all the vital organs and eat only what the host insect can do without and still live. Then, when these little insects mature, they crawl out, become vegetarian, and proceed to do what their mother did.

Yes, one must acknowledge that intelligence holds sway in nature. And if you really study nature, you can find this intelligence holding sway everywhere. And you will then think more humbly about your own intelligence, for first of all, it is not as great as the intelligence ruling in nature, and secondly, it is only like a little bit of water that one has drawn from a lake and put into a water jug. The human being, in fact, is just such a water jug, that has drawn intelligence from nature. Intelligence is everywhere in nature; everything, everywhere is wisdom. A person who ascribes intelligence exclusively to himself is about as clever as someone who declares: You're saying that there is water out there in the lake or in the brook? Nonsense! There is no water in them. Only in my jug is there any water. The jug created the water.

So, the human being thinks that he creates intelligence, whereas he only draws intelligence from the universal sea of intelligence.

It is necessary, therefore, to truly keep our eye on the facts of nature. But facts are left out when the Darwinian theory is promoted, when today's materialistic views are being formulated; for, the facts contradict the modern materialistic view at every point. Therefore one suppresses these facts. One recounts them, to be sure, but actually aside from science, anecdotally. Therefore they do not gain the validity in our general education that they must have. And so one not only does not truly present the facts that one has, but adds a further dishonesty by leaving out the decisive facts, i.e., by suppressing them.

But if the raising of man is to be accomplished, then we must educate ourselves in truthfulness in the sense world first of all and then carry this education, this habitude, with us into the spiritual world. Then we will also be able to be truthful in the spiritual world. Otherwise we will tell people the most unbelievable stories about the spiritual world. If we are accustomed in the physical world to being imprecise, untrue, and inexact, then we will recount nothing but untruths about the spiritual world.

. You see, if one grasps in this way the ideal whose reality can become conscious to the Anthroposophical Society, and if what arises from this consciousness becomes a force in our Society, then, even in people who wish us the worst, the opinion that the Anthroposophical Society could be a sect will disappear. Now of course our opponents will say all kinds of things that are untrue. But as long as we are giving cause for what they say, it cannot be a matter of indifference to us whether their statements are true or not.

Now, through its very nature, the Anthroposophical Society has thoroughly worked its way out of the sectarianism in which it certainly was caught up at first, especially while it was still connected to the Theosophical Society. It is only that many members to this day have not noticed this fact and love sectarianism. And so it has come about that even older anthroposophical members who were beside themselves when the Anthroposophical Society was transformed from a sectarian one into one that was conscious of its world task, even those who were beside themselves have quite recently gone aside again. The Movement for Religious Renewal, when it follows its essential nature, may be ever so far removed from sectarianism. But this Movement for Religious Renewal has given even a number of older anthroposophists cause to say to themselves: Yes, the sectarian element is being eradicated more and more from the Anthroposophical Society. But we can cultivate it again here! And so precisely through anthroposophists, the Movement for Religious Renewal is being turned into the crassest sectarianism, which truly does not need to be the case.

One can see how, therefore, if the Anthroposophical Society wants to become a reality, we must positively develop the courage to raise ourselves again into the spiritual world. Then art and religion will flourish in the Anthroposophical Society. Although for now even our artistic forms have been taken from us [through the burning of the Goetheanum building on the night of December 31, 1922], these forms live on, in fact, in the being of the anthroposophical movement itself and must continually be found again, and ever again.

In the same way, a true religious deepening lives in those who find their way back into the spiritual world, who take seriously the raising of man. But what we must eradicate in ourselves is the inclination to sectarianism, for this inclination is always egotistical. It always wants to avoid the trouble of penetrating into the reality of the spirit and wants to settle for a mystical reveling that basically is an egotistical voluptuousness. And all the talk about the Anthroposophical Society becoming much too intellectual is actually based on the fact that those who say this want, indeed, to avoid the thoroughgoing experience of a spiritual content, and would much rather enjoy the egotistical voluptuousness of soulful reveling in a mystical, nebulous indefiniteness. Selflessness is necessary for true anthroposophy. It is mere egotism of soul when this true anthroposophy is opposed by anthroposophical members themselves who then all the more drive anthroposophy into something sectarian that is only meant, in fact, to satisfy a voluptuousness of soul that is egotistical through and through.

You see those are the things, with respect to our tasks, to which we should turn our attention. By doing so, we lose nothing of the warmth, the artistic sense, or the religious inwardness of our anthroposophical striving. But that will be avoided which must be avoided: the inclination to sectarianism. And this inclination to sectarianism, even though it often arrived in a roundabout way through pure cliquishness, has brought so much into the Society that splits it apart. But cliquishness also arose in the anthroposophical movement only because of its kinship—a distant one to be sure—with the sectarian inclination. We must return to the cultivation of a certain world consciousness so that only our opponents, who mean to tell untruths, can still call the Anthroposophical Society a sect. We must arrive at the point of being able to strictly banish the sectarian character trait from the anthroposophical movement. But we should banish it in such a way that when something arises like the Movement for Religious Renewal, which is not meant to be sectarian, it is not gripped right away by sectarianism just because one can more easily give it a sectarian direction than one can the Anthroposophical Society itself.

Those are the things that we must think about keenly today. From the innermost being of anthroposophy, we must understand the extent to which anthroposophy can give us, not a sectarian consciousness, but rather a world consciousness. Therefore I had to speak these days precisely about the more intimate tasks of the Anthroposophical Society.

We will turn our attention to-day to manifestations of the life of soul able to lead us to a kind of self-observation in which a vista of our personal karma, our personal destiny, flashes into life like lightning. When we reflect upon the nature of the life of soul even with more or less superficial self-knowledge, we realise that sense-impressions and the thoughts we form about them are the only clear and definite experiences in the life of soul in which, with ordinary consciousness, we are completely awake. As well as these thoughts, sense-impressions, sense-perceptions, we also have, of course, the life of feeling. But just think how indeterminately our feelings surge through us, how little we can speak of inner, wide-awake clarity in connection with our life of feeling. Anyone who faces these facts with an open mind will certainly admit that as compared with thoughts, his feelings are indeterminate, lacking in definition. True, the life of feeling concerns us in a more intimate, personal way than does the life of thought, but for all that there is something undefined in it and also in the way it functions. We shall not so readily allow our thoughts to deviate from those of other people when it is a question of reflecting about something that is alleged to be true. We shall feel that our thoughts, our sense-impressions must somehow tally with those of others. With our feelings it is different. We allow ourselves the right to feel in a more intimate, more personal way. And if we compare feelings with dreams, we shall say: dreams arise from the night-life, feelings from the depths of soul into the light of day-consciousness. But again, in respect of their pictures, feelings are as indeterminate as dreams. Anyone who makes the comparison, even with such dreams as enter quite distinctly into his consciousness, will realise that their lack of definition is just as great as that of feelings. Therefore we can say: it is only in our sense-impressions and thoughts that we are really awake; in our feelings we dream—even during waking life. In ordinary waking life, too, our feelings make us into dreamers.

And still more so the will! When we say: ‘Now I am going to do this, or that’—how much of the subsequent process is actually in our consciousness? Suppose I want to take hold of something. The mental picture comes first, then this picture completely fades away and in my ordinary consciousness I know nothing of how the impulse contained in the ‘I want’ finds its way into my nerves, into my muscles, into my bones. When I conceive the idea, ‘I want to get hold of the clock,’ does my ordinary consciousness know anything at all of how this impulse penetrates into my arm which then reaches out for the clock? It is only through another sense-impression, another mental picture, that I perceive what has actually happened. With my ordinary consciousness I sleep through what has happened intermediately, just as in the night I sleep through what I experience in the spiritual world. I am as unconscious of the one as of the other. In waking life, therefore, there are three different and distinct states of consciousness. In the activity of thinking we are awake, completely awake; in the activity of feeling we dream; in the activity of willing we are asleep. We are in a state of perpetual sleep as far as the essential core of the will is concerned, for it lies deep, deep down in the region of the subconscious.

Now there is something that in waking life too, is always rising up from the depths of the soul, namely, remembrance, memory. When we contact immediate reality, we have thoughts. This immediate reality makes a definite impression upon us. But the past of this earthly life plays all the time into present reality in the form of thoughts and memories, of recollected thoughts. As you know, these recollected thoughts are much dimmer, much less distinct than the impressions of present reality. Nevertheless they do well up and make their way into ordinary waking life. And when we give memory free play, letting it recall all that we have passed through in life, we realise: here is our own life of soul, rising up once again. We feel that in this earthly life we are that which we can remember. Think only what becomes of a man who cannot remember some period of his life, whose memory of that period is completely obliterated. We may come across such cases and I will give just one example.—There was a man in a respectable position who while his life was pursuing its normal course, remembered his past, what he had done in childhood and during his education, what he had experienced as a student, and then in his profession. But one day his memory was suddenly blotted out. He no longer knew who he was.—I am telling you of an actual case.—Strangely enough it was not the reasoning faculty, not the mental grasp of immediate reality that failed; the memory was completely blotted out. The man no longer knew who he was as a boy, as a youth, as a grown-up; his mind could grasp only what was making an impression upon him at the moment. And because he no longer knew who he was in boyhood, youth or maturity, he could not link his present with his past life; this was impossible from the moment his memory faded.

A case like this makes it easy for us to realise just why we do one thing or another at a particular time; it is not because of the pressure of immediate circumstances but because of certain experiences we have had in the past—primarily in the past of our earthly life. Just think of all that you might do or leave undone if memory played no part in your actions! Man is dependent upon memory to a far greater extent than he imagines. The misfortune that befell the man of whom I told you, was that after the sudden obliteration of his memory he was guided only by the impulses of the present moment, not by any promptings of memory. He put on his outdoor clothes and left his home and family. He was tied to them only through memory—and now this memory was blotted out. Impulses worked in him that had nothing whatever to do with memories of his family. His reason and intelligence remained; and so—because it would have been senseless to do these things while other people were there—he waited until they happened to be absent. He had lived with his family as a sensible, rational individual, but his memory had gone. He went to the railway station and took a ticket for a place a long way off. His mind was absolutely clear in a matter where reason came into play. He got into the train and went off; but the memory of what had happened, even the memory of having taken the ticket was blotted out. He was aware only of the immediate present. The extinction of memory was a pathological condition. But he was so intensely engrossed with the present that he knew when he had arrived at his destination; he could compare this with the timetable. The ability to read—something that had already become habit and was therefore no longer a matter of memory—that too had remained. He alighted and took another ticket to a distant destination. And so he went on, travelling about the world without knowing who he was. One day his memory returned, but he knew nothing of what he had been doing since buying the first railway ticket. When his memory returned and he was himself again, he found himself in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was only the things that had happened in the trains and the places where he had been that were blotted out, for they did not belong to the present. Just think what a state of confusion! How utterly uncertain of himself such a man must be! You will realise from this how closely our ‘I,’ our Ego, is bound up with our store of memories. We know nothing of the self within us if we are bereft of the store of memories.

What is the nature of these memories? Memories are of the nature of soul. But in the whole range of man's life and being they are present in another form as well. They work purely as soul-forces only in a human being who has reached the age of twenty one or twenty two, and continues living. Before then the memories do not work purely as forces of soul. We must be very conscious of what I have said in these lectures, namely that during the first seven years of earthly existence our physical corporality is an inheritance from our parents. At the change of teeth it is not only the first, milk teeth that are expelled—that is only the final act; the whole of the first body is discarded. We build up the second body—the body we bear until the onset of puberty—out of the soul-and-spirit we brought with us when we came down from the spiritual world to physical existence on the Earth. But from birth until the change of teeth we have received a host of impressions from the environment; Our being was absorbed in what flowed into us through having learnt to speak. Think of all the wonders that stream into us together with the power of speech! Any unprejudiced observer will agree in this respect with the statement made by Jean Paul to the effect that he had learnt more in the first three years of his life than in the three academic years. The meaning of this is clear. For even if the academic years are extended to five or six—not, presumably, because one learns too much but because one learns too little—even if this period is considerably extended we learn only the merest trifle in comparison with what we assimilate during the first three years of life, and thereafter through the years following the first three until the change of teeth. After a certain time all this remains in the form of hazy, indefinite memory. But just think how pale and indistinct are these memories of our first seven years compared with the events of later life. Just try to make the comparison. The memories often seem to loom up like erratic boulders without any obvious connection. And why? What we take in during the first seven years of life and what we take in later on have entirely different tasks to fulfil. What we take in during the first seven years works with intense activity at the plastic moulding of the brain, passes into the very organism. There is a great difference between the relatively undeveloped brain we possess when we come into earthly existence and the beautifully developed brain that is ours by the time of the change of teeth. And the result of this work penetrates from the brain into the whole of the rest of the body. This inner artist we bring with us from pre-earthly existence works in a most wonderful way upon our physical body during the first seven years of life. It is miraculous to see the facial expression, the look, the mobility of the features, the purposeful movements of arms and limbs beginning to appear in a child after the lack of definition characterising early babyhood. We see how spirit begins to permeate the child's being and the impressions he absorbs. The way in which spirit permeates the child during the first seven years of life is one of the most wonderful sights imaginable. When we observe how the physiognomy and gestures of the child develop from birth until the change of teeth, when we read and decipher it all just as we decipher something in a book from the single letters, when we know how to connect the forms of the gestures and the facial expressions appearing in succession just as we can connect the letters of a word and so read the word—then we are gazing at the workings of the brain which has been kindled into activity by the impressions received; these can form themselves only into sparse and scattered memories, because the plastic development of the brain and therewith of the physiognomy has primarily to be provided for.

As life continues its course from the time of the change of teeth to the onset of puberty, the forces working in this way are more or less lost to sight. As I said, until the beginning of the twenty-first year, work continues upon the shaping and elaboration of the organism; but from the seventh year onwards this work is less concerned with the bodily nature—and still less from puberty until the beginning of the twenties. But something else comes to our help. If we have any aptitude for this kind of observation and mellow it by contemplating the marvellous phenomenon of the child's physiognomy which reveals itself month by month, year by year in greater clarity, above all if we can perceive what the child's gestures reveal, how the awkward, unskilful movements of the limbs turn in a most wonderful way into movements filled with intelligence and purpose—this sensitive perception can be deepened and finer organs of sense will develop. Then, when we have before us a child between the ages of seven and fourteen, that is to say between the second dentition and puberty, when the changes in the physiognomy and the gestures are less marked and the development less obvious, it is possible through inner feeling which has all the certainty of an eye of soul to perceive how the child's development is proceeding in a more hidden way. And from this delicate, intimate observation of the bodily development of a child between the seventh and fourteenth years, there can arise the faculty to gaze into the life preceding the descent to earthly existence, the life between death and a new birth.

These things must again be within our reach, enabling us to affirm of a child between the ages of seven and fourteen: around you there is not only the sense-world of nature; in everything that is revealed in sense-perceptions, in colours, in forms, lives the spirit! It is truly wonderful to see the spirit becoming articulate in all things and then, as it were in a mirror-image, to perceive a reflection of this in the way in which spirituality reveals itself more and more distinctly in the physiognomy of a child. If we feel this deeply and inwardly and with a certain reverence make the experience a living power in the soul, then, as we observe the child between the ages of seven and fourteen, this reverence will lead to an understanding of how the pre-earthly existence of a human being between death and a new birth works into him here on Earth. And we shall feel that this bodily development is governed, not by the forces of the earthly environment but by the second physical organism which we ourselves mould according to the model provided by the first.

This can be of great importance in life. Humanity will have to learn to perceive the essential nature of Man. Life will then undergo the deepening without which the further progress of civilisation is simply no longer possible. Our civilisation has become totally abstract! In our ordinary consciousness we are no longer able to think in the real sense; we can only think what has been inculcated into us. We are no longer capable of perceptions as delicate as those of which I have been speaking. Hence men to-day pass each other by in ignorance. They learn a great deal about animals, plants, minerals, but nothing whatever about the subtle, impalpable processes of the development of the human being. The whole life of soul must become more intimate, more delicate, purer, and then we shall again perceive something of the real nature of human development itself; and this will lead us eventually to a vista of pre-earthly existence.

Next comes the period immediately following puberty, the period between the onset of puberty and the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Just think of all that a human being reveals to us in this phase of his life! Even with our ordinary consciousness we see evidence of a complete change in his life, but it takes a crude form. We speak of the hobbledehoy years, of the ‘awkward’ years and this in itself indicates our awareness that a change is taking place. What is actually happening is that the inner being is now emerging more clearly. But if we can acquire sensitive perception of the first two life-periods, what emerges after puberty will appear as a ‘second man,’ actually as a second man, who becomes visible through the physical man standing there before us. And what expresses itself in the awkwardness, but also in very much that is admirable, appears like a second, cloudlike man within the physical man. It is important to detect this second, shadowy being, for questions on the subject are being asked on all sides to-day. But our civilisation gives no answer.

The turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century was accompanied by momentous changes in the spiritual and physical evolution of the Earth. Men of the ancient East had divined this and said that Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, would come to an end at the close of the nineteenth century when an Age of Light would begin. This Age of Light has begun in very truth but men are still unaware of it because in their minds they are still living in the nineteenth century and their ideas flow on lethargically. Nevertheless around us there is clear, radiant light and if we pay heed to what will reveal itself from the spiritual world, we can become aware of this light. And because youth is peculiarly sensitive, with the turn of the century an undefined longing arose in the hearts of the young for a more intimate knowledge, a much more intimate perception of Man. Human beings born about this time—at the turn of the nineteenth century—have the instinctive feeling: we need to know a great deal more about Man than people are able to tell us. Nobody tells us what we long to know! There was this striving, this urgent, insistent striving for an understanding of Man. Children and young people were ill at ease with their elders for they longed to hear from them something about Man, and these elders knew nothing. Modern civilisation can say nothing, knows nothing about the spirit of Man. But in earlier epochs people were able, speaking with real warmth of heart, to tell the young very much about Man. When thoughts were still quick with life, the old had a very great deal to say—but now they knew nothing. And so there came an urge to run, run no matter where, in order to learn something about Man. The young became wanderers, path-finders; they ran away from people who had nothing to tell them, seeking here, there and everywhere for something that could tell them something about Man.

There you have the real origin of the Youth Movement of the twentieth century. What is this Youth Movement really seeking? It is seeking to find the reality of this second, cloudlike man who comes into evidence after puberty and who is actually there within the human being. The Youth Movement wants to be educated in a way that will enable it to apprehend this second man.—But who is this second man? What does he actually represent? What is it that emerges as it were from this human body in which one has observed the gradual maturing of physiognomy and gesture, in connection with which one is also able to feel how in the second period of life from the change of teeth to puberty, pre-earthly existence is coming to definite expression? What is making its appearance here, like a stranger? What is it that now comes forth when, after puberty, the human being begins to be conscious of his own freedom, when he turns to other individuals, seeking to form bonds with them out of an inner impulse which neither he nor the others can explain but which underlies this very definite urge. Who is this ‘second man?’ He is the being who lived in the earlier incarnation and is now making his way like a shadow, into this present earthly life. From what breaks in upon human life so mysteriously at about the age of puberty, mankind will gradually learn to take account of karma. At the time of life when a human being becomes capable of propagating his kind, impulses to which he gave expression in earlier earthly lives also make their appearance in him. But a great deal must happen in human hearts and feelings before there can be any clear recognition, any clear perception of what I have just been describing to you.

Think of the great difference there is in the ordinary consciousness between self-love and love of others. People know well what self-love is, for every individual holds himself in high esteem—of that there is no doubt! Self-love is present even in those who imagine that they are entirely free from it. There are very few indeed—and a close investigation of karma would be called for in such cases—who would dream of saying that they have no self-love in them. Love of others is rather more difficult to fathom. Such love may of course be absolutely genuine, but it is very often coloured by an element of self-love. We may love another human being because he does something for us, because he is by our side; we love him for many reasons closely connected with self-love. Nevertheless there is such a thing as selfless love and it is within our reach. We can learn little by little to expel from love every vestige of self-interest, and then we come to know what it means to give ourselves to others in the true and real sense. It is from this self-giving, this giving of ourselves to others, this selfless love, that we can kindle the feeling that must arise if we are to glimpse earlier earthly lives. Suppose you are a person who was born, let us say, in the year 1881; you are alive now; once upon a time, in an earlier earthly life, you were born, say, in the year 737 and died in 799. The man, personality B, is living, now, in the nineteenth/twentieth century; formerly this personality—you yourself—lived in the eighth century. The two personalities are linked by the life stretching between death and the new birth. But before even so much as an inkling can come to you of the personality who lived in the eighth century, you must be capable of loving your own self exactly as if you were loving another human being. For although the being who lived in the eighth century is there within you, he is really a stranger, exactly as another person may be a stranger to you now. You must be able to relate yourself to your preceding incarnation in the way you relate yourself now to some other human being; otherwise no inkling of the earlier incarnation is possible. Neither will you be able to form an objective conception of what appears in a human being after puberty as a second, shadowy man. But love that is truly selfless becomes a power of knowledge, and when love of self becomes so completely objective that a man can observe himself exactly as he observes other human beings, this is the means whereby a vista of earlier earthly lives will disclose itself—at first as a kind of dim inkling. This experience must be combined with the kind of observation I have been describing, whereby we become aware of the essential, fundamental nature of man. The urge to apprehend the truth of repeated earthly lives has been present in humanity since the end of Kali Yuga and is already unmistakably evident. The only reason why people do not speak about it is because it is not sufficiently clear or defined. But let us suppose that a thoroughly sincere member of the modern Youth Movement were to wake up one morning and for a quarter of an hour be vividly conscious of what he had experienced during sleep—and suppose one were to ask him during this quarter of an hour: what is it that you are really seeking?—he would answer: ‘I am striving to apprehend the whole man, the being who has passed through many earthly lives. I am striving to know what it is within me that has come from earlier stages of existence. But you know nothing about it; you have nothing to tell me!’

In human hearts to-day there is a longing to understand karma. Therefore this is the time when the impulse must be given to study history in the way I have illustrated by certain examples; it is this kind of study which, if earnestly and actively pursued, will lead human beings to an understanding of their own lives in the light of reincarnation and karma. That is why in these lectures I am combining studies of historical personages with indications that will gradually lead to perception of man's own individual karma. By the time we come to the last lecture we shall have gained a clear idea of how man can begin to glimpse his own karma. But the only way to achieve this is to observe things first of all in the great setting and structure of world-history. The primary aim of this lecture was to shed light on the inner nature and being of man and it has also been possible to elucidate the inner aspect of the strivings of a promising Movement of the times.—And now let me conclude with a picture drawn from world-history.

Study of history in the future must be concerned with the whole man, must realise that man himself carries over from one epoch into the next the impulses that work in history, in the development of world-history. Let us think of the days when Charlemagne was reigning in Europe—it was from 768 to 814 A.D.. Just recall for a moment everything you know about Charlemagne and what he accomplished. As so much about him is taught in school, I am sure that countless details will come into the minds of my listeners! At the same time as Charlemagne, a very important personage was living in the East, namely, Haroun al Raschid. He was a product of the scholarship associated in those days with Mohammedanism and he was fired with the will to foster and promote this oriental scholarship at a centre of learning and culture. Extraordinary results were achieved at his Court, for the highest attainments of the physical sciences, of astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, geography, as they were in those days, converged, so to speak, in him. Art, literature, history, pedagogy—all these branches of culture flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. When one can perceive what was actually accomplished at this Court, the spectacle is far grander, far more impressive than that of the achievements of Charlemagne's Court, above all in respect of spiritual culture. Moreover there is a great deal in the campaigns of Charlemagne that the modern mind will not exactly admire! Living at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was another personality, one who in those days was simply a very wise man, but who in a much earlier incarnation, a long time previously, had been an Initiate. I have told you that the results of Initiation in an earlier incarnation may recede into the background in a later epoch. A most wonderful academy was established over in the East at that time and this other personality of whom I am speaking possessed real genius as an organiser. Scholarship, art, poetry, architecture, sculpture, the sciences—all were organised and brought together by this man at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. Both Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed in due course through the gate of death and their evolution proceeded. This was the time when Arabism was spreading over Europe. The spread of Arabism came to a halt, but Haroun al Raschid himself, as well as his Counsellor, continued to be associated with its influence. Whereas the gaze of Haroun al Raschid in his life between death and rebirth was directed to Arabism as it swept through the North of Africa, across to Spain and further upwards to Western Europe, the attention of the other, the wise Counsellor, was directed from the East across the regions North of the Black Sea and from thence towards Middle Europe. It is strange that in following the life of a man between death and a new birth, one can also follow those things upon which his gaze is directed as he looks downwards. As I have told you, what he is actually beholding are the deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones whose workings are connected with what is happening on the Earth. In the life between death and a new birth we look downwards to the Earth, just as on the Earth we look upwards to the Heavens. The work of these two souls continued long after the close of their physical lives. Outwardly, they were reborn as men of very different characters. Haroun al Raschid appeared again as Lord Bacon of Verulam, the originator of the modern scientific mentality. Those who are capable of unprejudiced observation can see in everything that was forced upon the world by Bacon, a new edition of what was once cultivated over in the East. In the East men had turned away from Christianity. Bacon was outwardly a Christian, but inwardly, in his real aims, unchristian. The other man, the one who had once been the wise Counsellor, followed the path which led across to Middle Europe via the regions North of the Black Sea. It was he who as Amos Comenius brought Arabism over in a quite different form—a much deeper, more inward form than that in which it was introduced by Bacon—but who did, nevertheless, bear Arabism into the modern age.

And so at the dawn of modern spiritual life, two streams intermingled. We can perceive this development of history quite clearly—it is a phase when Christianity is temporarily forgotten, when on the one side scientific culture is externalised, but on the other becomes all the more inward. In his incarnation which had its roots in the East and then ran its course amid the deeper spiritual life of Middle Europe, much of the Eastern element persisted. It is not by casually opening some book ... in a certain dialect there is an expression ‘ochsen’ (to ‘swot’) and I can think of no other word at the moment ... and then swotting up Bacon and Amos Comenius, that we can discern the inner evolution of the human race; we must rather begin to perceive how the development of the several epochs is brought about by men themselves, how the impulses are carried over from earlier into later times. Try for a moment to picture quite clearly what happened here. Christianity has spread, has taken a certain hold in the regions of Middle and Northern Europe. But through men like Bacon of Verulam, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor, something creeps in that is not genuine Christianity, but merges nevertheless with all that is working like so many spiritual streams in world-evolution. Only in this way is it possible to grasp what is really happening and to understand the great world-processes in which man is rooted.

If we go back to the time preceding Haroun al Raschid, to a man who was an immediate disciple of Mohammed, we must be quite clear about what it was that had been indoctrinated into oriental spiritual life through Mohammedanism. Study of original Christianity reveals the deep significance of the fact that it has the Trinity. When we think of the Spiritual in nature, the Spiritual Power which places us in the world as physical human beings and operates in the laws of nature, namely, the Father Being, we may ask ourselves: What should we be if the Father Being alone worked in us? Through the whole of life from birth till death, we should be under the same sway of necessity as prevails in the world around us. But in point of fact, at a certain age in life we become free beings, not in any way losing our manhood but awakening to a higher form of it. The principle that is working in us when we attain our freedom, when we release ourselves altogether from the sway of nature, this principle is the Son Being, the Christ—the Second Form of the Godhead. But it is the Power of the Holy Spirit that quickens within us the recognition that we live not in the body alone but having been associated with the body through its phases of development, we awaken, we are awakened as beings of Spirit. Man in the fullness of his being can be understood only through the Trinity; it is there that we perceive the concrete reality. But over against the Trinity, Mohammedanism proclaims an abstraction: There is no other Divine Being save the Father God, the one and only God. The Father is all; it is not lawful to speak of a threefold Godhead. In Mohammed himself, and in his followers, this doctrine of the one Father God was personified.

In an epoch when the highest human faculty capable of development was that of thinking in cold, barren abstractions, when men knew only the one, abstract God, they began more and more to identify this God with thinking, to deify the life of thought and the human intellect—forgetting that real thinking has an essentially altruistic tendency. In Mohammed's followers, this talent for thinking about the world in pure abstractions was expressed with a certain originality and grandeur. One of these followers was Muawija. I wish you could look him up in history. You would find there a strange mental configuration, the prototype, as it were, of men who think in pure abstractions, who want to shape the world according to tenets contained in a few simple paragraphs. Muawija, one of Mohammed's followers, appeared again in our time as Woodrow Wilson. A revival of the abstract thinking of Mohammedanism gave rise to the view that it is possible to shape a whole world by applying the principles set forth in fourteen prosaic, abstract paragraphs, void of any real substance. Truth to tell, there has been no greater illusion than this in all world-history; no other illusion has proved such a pitfall for well-nigh the whole of mankind. Before the war, when I spoke in the Helsingfors Lecture Course¹ of Woodrow Wilson's shortcomings—his fame was then just beginning—people were unwilling to understand when over and over again, wherever I had the opportunity of speaking, I indicated that the calamity looming ahead was by no means unconnected with the idolisation of Woodrow Wilson then going on in the world. Now, since the impulse of our Christmas Foundation, the time has come when such things will be spoken of openly and without reserve, when our studies of history will also be connected with matters that are potent impulses at this very time. Esotericism must permeate the whole Anthroposophical Movement in order that what lies hidden beneath the shroud of external history may be brought into the light of day. Men will not be equal to the task of coping with world-events nor of doing what needs to be done until they begin to study karma and until individuals learn to observe their own being, as well as world-history, in the light of karma.

• 1. The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad Gita. 28th May–5th June, 1913.

Emil Bock opened the discussion hour and formulated the following questions:

1. Out of the previous lecture this morning, how can we take the power of formative speech to which we still need to gain access, and accomplish a new speech technique, perhaps new forms and a new gestural technique?
2. How do we actually now really speak of a new understanding of the Bible, of a new Bible text? Furthermore, we ask Dr Steiner on occasion to discuss in more detail the two chapters from the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 13 and Mark 13.
3. What is the reality behind the Apostolic succession, the tradition and the ordination of priests in the technical sense, and how can such a reality be made more accessible again in the future?

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: With regards to the first question: You would already have seen, my dear friends, that out of what I said this morning, that in the illustration, the soul contents related to the supersensible and also what leads to the power of formative speech, must be searched for. Regarding the power of speech formation: we actually have no direct understanding of sound anymore today; we basically have no more understanding for words, so our words remain signs. Naturally our starting point needs to be out of the spiritual milieu of our time. Man must be responsible for these intimate things out of what currently is available. Precisely such a question brings us naturally into the area of the purely technical. First of all one has to make the understanding for the sound active again, within oneself. One doesn't easily manage the free use of speech when one isn't able to allow the sound as such, to stir within oneself. I would like to continue in such a way that I first draw your attention to certain examples.

[ 2 ] You see, when we say "head" (Kopf) in German, we hardly have anything else in mind than the total perception of what reaches us through the ear, which indicates the head. When we say "foot" (Fuss) it is hardly any different to what we experience in the tonality and sound content in relation to some foot. Now we only need, for instance, to refer to the Romance languages where head is testa, tête, foot is pedum, pied, and we get the feeling at the same time that the term is taken from something completely different. When we say the word Kopf in German, the term has come out of the form, from looking at the form. We are not aware of this any longer, yet it is so. When we say Fuss, it is taken from walking where furrows are drawn in the ground. Thus, it has come into existence out of a certain soul content and coined in a word. When we take a word formation like, let's say, "testament" and all other word formations which refer in Romance language terms to head, testa, then we will feel that the term Kopf in the Romantic languages originate through the substantiation and thus not out of the form, but through the human soul with the help of the head, and particularly activating the mouth organs. Pied didn't originate from walking or drawing furrows but from standing, pressing down while standing. Today we no longer question the motives which have come out of the soul and into speech formation. We can only discover what can be called, in the real sense, a feeling for the language when we follow the route of making language far more representational than it is currently, abstraction at most. When someone uses a Latin expression in terminology, some Latin expressions are even more representational, but some people use them to denote even more. For example, today one can hardly find the connection between "substance" and "subsist" while the concept of "subsist" has basically been lost. Someone who still has the original feeling for substance and subsistence would say of the Father-God, not that He "exists" but that he "subsists."

[ 3 ] Researching language in this way and in another way which I want to mention right now, in order to develop a lively feeling for language again, leads then to something I would like to call a linguistic conscience (Sprachgewissen). We need a linguistic conscience. We speak really so directly these days because as human beings we act more as automatons towards language than we do as living beings. Until we are capable of connecting language in a living way to ourselves, like our skin is connected to us, we will not come to the right symbolization. The skin experiences pain when it is pricked. Language even tolerates being maltreated. One must develop a feeling regarding language that it can be maltreated because it is a closed organism, just like our skin. We can gain much in this area, when we have a lively experience in some or other dialect.

Consider how often we have performed the Christmas Plays, and in these plays there is a sentence spoken by one or more of the innkeepers. When Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem in search of lodging, they are refused by three innkeepers. Each one of the three innkeepers says: Ich als a wirt von meiner gstalt, hab in mein haus und ligament gwalt.—Just imagine what this means to a person today. He could hear: "I as a host of my stature ..."—and think that what the host is saying means he is an attractive man, or something like that, or a strong man who has stature within his hostel, in his house. This is certainly not meant. If we want to translate that into High German we'll have to say: "I as a host, who is placed in such a way as to have abundant comfort, I am not dependent on such poor people finding lodgings within, with me." This means: "I as a host in my social position, in my disposition." This shows them it is necessary not only to listen to him—words one often enough hears in speech—but to enter into the spirit of the language. We say Blitz" (lightening) in High German. In Styria a certain form of lightening is called 'heaven's lashers' (Himmlatzer). In the word "Blitz" there is quite another meaning than in the word Himmlatzer.

[ 4 ] So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which Faust, written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of Faust had for 60 years been clear "from the beginning" (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his Faust and in the 60 years of his life—since he was twenty or about eighteen—he used this plan, he had "from the start," to work from.

In Weimar I met August Fresenius who bemoaned the fact that it was a great misfortune, if I could use such an expression, which had entered into the entire Goethe research, and at the time I had urged an unusually thoughtful and slow philologist to publish this thing as soon as possible in order that it doesn't continue, otherwise one would have a few dozen more such Goethe commentaries. It is important to note that Goethe used the expression "from the start" in no other way than in a descriptive way, not in the sense of a priori but "from the beginning" in a very descriptive manner so that in the strictest sense one could refer to Goethe not having an overall plan, but that "at the beginning" he only wrote down the first pages (i.e. to begin with) and of the further sections, only single sentences. There can be no argument of an overall plan. It very much depends on how one really experiences words. Many people have, when they hear the word vornherein totally have no conscience that it has a vorn (in front) and a herein (in) and that one sees something spiritual when one pronounces it. This simple dismissal of a word without contemplation is something upon which a tremendous amount depends, if one wants to attain a symbolic manner of speech. Precisely about this direction there would be extraordinarily much to say.

[ 5 ] You see, we have the remarkable appearance of the Fritz Mauthner speaking technique where all knowledge and all wisdom is questioned, because all knowledge and wisdom is expressed though speech, and so Fritz Mauthner finds nothing expressed in speech because it does not point to some or other reality. [ 6 ] How harsh my little publication "The spiritual guidance of man and of mankind" has been judged in which I mention that in earlier times, all vowel formation expressed people's inner experiences, and all consonant unfolding comes from outer observed or seen events. All that man perceives is expressed in consonants, while vowels are formed by inner experiences, feelings, emotions and so on. With this is connected the peculiar manner in which the consonants are written differently to the vowels in Hebrew. This is also connected to areas where more primitive people used to dwell, where they have not strongly developed their inner life, so predominantly consonant languages occur, not languages based on vowels. This extends very far, this kind of in-consonant-action of language. Only think what African languages have from consonants to click sounds.

[ 7 ] So you see, in this way we gain an understanding for what sounds within language. One would be brought beyond the mere sign, which the word is today. Only with today's feeling for language which Fritz Mauthner believes in, can you believe that all knowledge actually depends on language and that language has no connection to some or other reality. A great deal can be accomplished when one enters into one's mother tongue and try to go back into the vernacular. In the vernacular one finds much, very much if you really behave like a human being, that is, respond to what you feel connected to the language. In the vernacular one has the rich opportunity to feel in speech and experience in sound, but also the tendency towards the descriptive, and you have to push it so far that you really, one could say, get into a kind of state of renunciation in regard to expressions that are supposed to phrase something completely separate from human experiences.

Something which thoroughly ruins our sense of language is physics, and in physics, as it is today, it only aspires to study objective processes and refrains from all subjective experience, there it should no longer be spoken at all. According to physics, when one body presses (stoßen) against another, for example in the theory of elasticity, then you are anthropomorphising, because the experience of pressure as soon as you sense sound, means you're only affected by the same kind of pressure as the pressure your own hand makes. Above all, one gets the feeling with the S-sound that nothing other can be described as something like this (a waved line is drawn on the blackboard). The word Stoß" (push/impacts—ß is the symbol for ss—translator) has two s's, at the end and beginning; it gives the entire word its colouring; so when the word Stoß or stoßen (to push/thrust) is pronounced one actually can feel how, when your ether body would move, it would not only move but be shoved forwards and continuously be kept up.

[ 8 ] Thus, there are already methods through which one comes to the power of speech formation, which is then no longer far from symbolizing, for the symbolum must be hacked out of the way so that one experiences language as a living organism, because much is to be experienced within language. Someone recently told me that there are certain things in language which only need to be pronounced and one is surprised at how they reveal themselves as self-evident.

The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I've already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it's actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.

[ 9 ] In relation to writing, there are two kinds of people. The majority learn to write as if it's a habit of staking out words. People are used to move their hands in a certain way and write like this: in the majority. The writing lesson is very often given in such a way that one just comes to it. The minority actually don't write in the sense of reality, but they draw (a word is written on the blackboard: Kann [meaning can; be able to]). They look at the signs of the letters simultaneously as being written, and as an artistic treatment of writing, it is far more an intimate involvement. I have met people who have been formally trained to write. For instance, once there was a writing method which consisted in people being trained to make circles and curves, to turn them and thus acquire a feeling of connecting them and so form letters out of them. Only in this way, out of these curves, could the letters come about. With a large number of them I have seen that they, before they start writing, make movements in the air with their pen. This is what brings writing into the unconsciousness of the body. However, our language comes out of the totality of the human being and when one spoils oneself by writing you also spoil yourself for the language. Precisely the one who is dependent on handling the language needs to get used to the meditation that writing should not be allowed to just flow out of his hand, but he should look at it, really look at what he is writing, when he writes.

[ 10 ] My dear friends, this is something which is extraordinarily important in our current culture, because we are on our way to dehumanizing ourselves. I have already received a large number of letters which have not been written with a pen but with the typewriter. Now you can imagine the difference between a letter written with a typewriter or written with a pen. I'm not campaigning against the typewriter, I consider it as an obvious necessity in civilization, but we do also need the counter pole. By us dehumanizing ourselves in this way, by us changing our relationship towards the outer world in an absolute mechanistic and dead manner, we need in turn to take up strong vital forces again. Today we need far greater vital forces than in the time in which man knew nothing yet about the typewriter.

[ 11 ] Therefore, for someone who handles words, he must also acquire an understanding for the continuous observation, while he is writing, that what he is writing pleases him, that he gets the impression that something hasn't just flowed out of a subject but that, by looking simultaneously at it, this thing lives as a totality in him. Mostly, the thing that is needed for the development of some capability is not arrived at in a direct but in an indirect way. I must explain this route because I have been asked how one establishes the power for speech formation. This is the way, as I have mentioned, which comes first of all. As an aside I stress that language originates in the totality of mankind, and the more mankind still senses the language, so much more will there be movement in his speech. It is extraordinary, how for instance in England, where the process of withdrawal of a connection with the surroundings is most advanced, it is regarded as a good custom to speak with their hands in their trouser pockets, held firmly inside so they don't enter the danger of movement. I have seen many English people talk in this way. Since then I've never had my pockets made in front again, but always at the back, for I have developed such disgust from this quite inhuman non-participation in what is being said. It is simply a materialistic criticism that speech only comes from the head; it originates out of the entire human being, above all from the arms, and we are—I say it here in one sentence which is obviously restricted—we are on this basis no ape or animal which needs its hands to climb or hold on to something, but we have them as free because with these free hands and arms we handle speech.

In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I've often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I've just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.

The great importance given to teaching through recitation and that kind of thing, only supports the element of a materialistic world view. You see, just as one would in a school for sculpture or a school of painting not really get instructions of the hand movements but corrects them by life forces coming into them, so speech techniques must not be pedantically taught with all kinds of nose-, chest- and stomach resonances. These things may only be developed though living speech. When a person speaks, he might at most be made aware of one or the other element. In this respect extraordinary atrocities are being committed today and the various vocal and language schools can actually be disgusting, because it shows how little lives within the human being. The formation of speech happens when those things are considered which I mentioned. Now if the question needs to be answered even more precisely, I ask you to please call my attention to it.

[ 12 ] Now there is a question about new commentary regarding the Bible, in fact, how one can arrive at a new Bible text.

[ 13 ] You see, the thing is like this, one will first have to penetrate into an understanding of the Bible. Much needs to precede this. If you take everything which I have said about language, and then consider that the Bible text has originated out of quite another kind of experience of language than we have today, and also as it was experienced centuries before in Luther's time, you can hardly hope to somehow discover an understanding of the Bible through some small outer adjustment. To understand the Bible, a real penetration of Christianity is needed above all, and actually this can only emerge from a Bible text as something similar for us as the Gospels had once appeared for the first Christians. In the time of the first Christians one certainly had the feeling of sound and some of what can be experienced in the words in the beginning of St John's Gospel which was of course experienced quite differently in the first Christian centuries as one would be able to do today. "In the primal beginnings was the Word"—you see, today there doesn't seem to be much more than a sign in this line, I'd say. We come closer to an understanding when we substitute "Word," which is very obscure and abstract, with "Verb" and also really develop our sense of the verb as opposed to the noun. In the ancient beginnings it was a verb and not the noun. I would like to say something about this abstraction.

The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in "the primal beginning." It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun.—We call it "Word" which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can't be so in the case of St John's Gospel.

[ 14 ] In even further times in the past, things were even more different. They were so that for certain beings, for certain perceptions of beings one had the feeling that they should be treated with holy reserve, one couldn't just put them in your mouth and say them. For this reason, a different way had to be found regarding expression, and this detour I can express by saying something like the following. Think about a group of children living with their parents somewhere in an isolated house. Every couple of weeks the uncle comes, but the children don't say the uncle comes, but the "man" comes. They mean it is the uncle, but they generalise and say it is "the man." The father is not the "man"; they know him too well to call him "man." In this way earlier religious use of language hid some things which they didn't want to express outwardly because one had the inner reaction of profanity, and so it was stated as a generalization, like also in the first line of St John's Gospel, "in the beginning was the Word." However, one doesn't mean the word which actually stands there but one calls it something which has been picked out, a singular "Word." It was after all something extraordinary, this "Word." There are as many words as there are men, but children said, "the man," and so one didn't say what was meant in St John's Gospel, but instead one said, "the Word." The word in this case was Jahveh, so that St John's Gospel would say: "In the primal beginnings was Jahveh," so one doesn't say "God," but "the Word."

[ 15 ] Such things must be acquired again by living within Christianity and what Christianity has derived from the ritual practice of the Old Testament. There is no shortcut to understanding the Gospels; a lively participation in the ancient Christian times is necessary for Gospel understanding. Basically, this is what has again become enlivened through Anthroposophy, while such things have in fact only risen out of Anthroposophic research. We then have the following: In the primordial times was he word—in primordial time was Jahveh—and the word was with God—and Jahveh was with God. In the third line: And Jahveh was one of the Elohim.—This is actually the origin, the start of the St John Gospel which refers to the multiplicity of the Elohim, and Jahveh as one of them—in fact there were seven—as lifted out of the row of the Elohim. Further to this lies the basis of the relationship between Christ and Jahveh.

Take sunlight—moonlight is the same, it is also sunlight but only reflected by the moon—it doesn't come from some ancient being, it is a reflection. In primordial Christianity an understanding existed for the Christ-word, where Christ refers to his own being by saying: "Before Abraham was, I am" and many others. There certainly was an understanding for the following: Just as the sunlight streams out of itself and the moon reflects it back, so the Christ-being who only appeared later, streamed out in the Jahveh being. We have a fulfilment in the Jahveh-being preceding the Christ-being in time. Through this St John's Gospel becomes deepened through feeling from the first line to the line which says: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." Even today we don't believe a childlike understanding suffices for the words of the Bible, when we research the Bible by translating it out of an ancient language until we penetrate what lies in the words. Of course, one can say, only through long, very long spiritual scientific studies can one approach the Bible text. That finally, is also my conviction.

[ 16 ] Basically, the Bible no longer exists; we have a derivative which we have put together more and more from our abstract language. We need a new starting point in order to try and find what really, in an enlivened way, is in the Bible. For this I have suggested an approach which I will speak about tomorrow, in the interpretation of Mathew 13 and Mark 13. You will have to state in any case that even commenting on the Bible makes it necessary to deal with the Bible impartially. If it is stated that something is mentioned which had only taken place in the year 70, therefore the relevant place could not have been mentioned before other than what had happened after this event, this could be said only if it is announced at the beginning of the Bible explanation that the Bible will be explained completely from a materialistic point of view; then it may be done like this. The Bible itself does not follow the idea that it should be explained materialistically. The Bible itself makes it necessary that the foreseeing of coming events is first and foremost ascribed to Christ Jesus himself, and also ascribed to the apostles. Thus, as I've said, this outlook is what I want to enter into tomorrow on the basis of Mathew 13 and Mark 13, by giving a little interpretation as it has been asked for.

[ 17 ] Another question asks about the reality behind the apostolic succession and the priest ordination. This question can hardly be answered briefly because it relates deeply to the abyss which exists between today's evangelist-protestant religious understanding and all nuances of Catholic understanding. It is important that in the moment when these things are spoken about, one must try to acquire a real understanding beyond the rational or rationalistic and beyond the intellectualistic. This is acquired even by those who have little right to live in the sense of such an understanding. In the past I have become acquainted with a large number of outstanding theosophical luminaries, Leadbeater also among them, about whom you would have heard, and some other people, who worked in the Theosophical Society. I have recently had the opportunity—otherwise I would not have worried about it again—to experience, that some of these people are Catholic bishops; it struck me as extraordinary that a part of them were Catholic priests. Leadbeater in any case had, after various things became known about him, not exactly the qualification to become a Catholic bishop. Still this interested me about how people become Catholic priests. One thing is observed with utmost severity, which is the succession. In order for me to see which people have the right to be Catholic bishops, I was given a document which revealed that in a certain year a Catholic bishop left the Catholic church, but one who was ordained, and he then ordained others—right up to Mr Leadbeater—and ordination proceeds in an actual continuation, in an absolutely correct progress; they actually have created a "family tree" by it. I don't want to talk about the start of the "family tree" but you must accept that if it would be a natural progression that there once was an ordained bishop in Rome who dropped away, who then however ordained all the others, so all these Theosophical luminaries would refer back to a real descent of their priesthood to that which once existed. Therefore, awareness of this succession is everywhere present and such things are, according to their understanding, taken completely as the reality.

[ 18 ] Something like this must be taken as a reality within the Roman Catholic Church. The old Catholic church more or less didn't have the feeling—but within the Roman Catholic church it is certain accepted this way—that the moment the priest crosses the stole he no longer represents a single personality or attitude but he is then only a member of the church and speaks as a representative, as a member of the church. The Roman Catholic Church considered itself certainly as a closed organism, where the individual loses his individuality through ordination; they see it this way increasingly.

[ 19 ] Now something else is in contrast to this. You may think about what I've said as you wish, but I can only speak from my point of view, from the viewpoint of my experience. I have seen much within the transubstantiation. Today in the Catholic Church there is quite a strict difference according to which priest would perform the transubstantiation, yet I have always seen how during the transformation, during the transubstantiation, the host takes on an aura. Therefore, I have come to recognise within the objective process, that when it is worthily accomplished, it is certainly fulfilled. I said, you may think about this as you wish, I say it to you as something which can be looked at from one hand, and on the other hand also as a basic conviction of the church being valid while it was still Catholic, when the evangelist church hadn't become a splintering off. We very soon come back to reality when we look at these things and it must even be said within the sacrament of mass being celebrated there is something like a true activity, which is not merely an outer sign but a real act. If you now take all the sacraments of mass together which had been celebrated, you will create an entirety, a whole, and this is something which stands there as a fact. It is something which certainly touches things, where the evangelical mind would say: Yes, there is something magical in the Catholic Mass.—This it does contain. It also contained within it the magical part, one can experience in the evangelist mind as something perhaps heathen. Good, talk to one another about this. In any case this underscores it as being a reality, which one can't without further ado, without approaching the bearer of this reality, celebrate a mass. I say celebrate; it can be demonstrated, one can show everything possible, but one can't celebrate with the claim that through the mass what should happen at the altar will only happen when it is read without any personal imprint, in absolute application.

You see, it is ever present there where one works with the mysteries; it is simply so, when one works with the mysteries. Just as no Masonic ceremony may be carried out by a non-Mason in the consciousness of the Freemason, nor may a non-ordained person in true Catholicism work from out of Catholicism and perform with full validity the ceremony in consciousness.

[ 20 ] This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don't take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn't important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it's about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church—not at all what is today in Rome's mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest's excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.

[ 21 ] Isn't it true, if you have Catholic feeling, it is something as definite to you as two plus two making four? It is something definite according to religious feeling. When you don't have that then you as modern people must have a certain piety, which says to you the Catholic church has also just preserved the celebration of mass and if this is carried outside the circle to which it had been entrusted—other circles have not preserved the sacrifice of mass—if it is being performed in other circles it is pure theft. Real theft. These things must also be understood from such concepts. I believe to some it appears very difficult to understand what I am saying but in conclusion it has as such a certain validity which needs to be achieved through understanding. We don't have to worry about it here because you can experience the mass according to what there is to experience. As far as the training of a new ritual is concerned, it would not be disturbed at all by this, that the Catholic mass regards the mass to be something so real that it may certainly not to be removed from the field of Catholicism.

[ 22 ] This is firstly something which I wanted to say during our limited time. When I speak about the mass itself, and I will do so, I will still have a few things to add.

In the gathering held here just after the Christmas Course we turned our attention to things that can deepen medicine in an esoteric sense. And we tried—to the extent to which this is possible in such brief meetings—to penetrate into the esotericism of medicine, in the way that is suitable for younger medical aspirants today. In formulae for further contemplation and elaboration, we received things that can quicken the sense for medicine and emphasis was laid upon the necessity of having this sense for medicine.

I picture to myself that you have worked upon these things for a time, my dear friends. Naturally, my idea of this work is not that people sit down and ponder about such things theoretically, but that from time to time, when the inner need is felt, they let these things work upon and develop the soul. It was inevitable, from the very way in which these things came before us, that one perfectly definite fact should emerge—a fact which I believe to be of importance for our gathering now. Because of the very concentrated form in which the esoteric things were given at the first gathering, one or another, to a greater or lesser degree, must have realized that it was necessary to face certain inner difficulties. The purpose of esoteric teachings is not always to make life as easy as possible for us. In a certain respect the opposite is certainly the case. They are also there in order to make life more difficult, to make us realize the difficulties of understanding the world, of really getting to know the world and human beings. So that when we become alive to these difficulties, we take the opposite path of development from that which is so often taken in our civilization today. We take the opposite to a superficial path of development. It is only by becoming alive to the difficulties existing as between the outside world and the human being that a person can be deepened in soul. I think, therefore, the best way now will be if, bearing these inner difficulties in mind, you will bring them forward in the form of questions and we will then make matters that can really promote the development of our subject into the theme of our discussions. I would ask you, to begin with, to tell me what inner and outer difficulties have arisen in your own circle. Difficulties will have arisen both for the practitioner and for the student. There are a number among you who are now approaching the end of their studies; they will have found quite specific difficulties and we will try to find their solution. All of you have received the first circular letter and you will have realized that in connection with definite questions there is a very great deal to say. I would like to ask if any question, definite or indefinite, has arisen, for such questions will surely lead us further. In this way we shall get away more from theoretical study and reach matters which lie in the realm of actual experience.

Question: A participant asked about the course of the year, the Calendar of the Soul, definite constellations of the stars and whether one must be consciously aware of these.

That is not essential. You mean observation of the constellations as they are at a particular time. It is, of course, a help if one is able to look at the visible constellations. But if I have understood you aright you mean: How are things, really, if we allow the formulae we have been given to work upon the soul? These things work through their own inherent mantric power; orientation in the outer world according to the stars can, of course, be a help but you must remember the following. Take the most striking example of a human-cosmic relationship that can still be observed today, namely the menses. It is obvious that they are determined cosmically yet they are not so determined in the present epoch. They were cosmically determined in a much earlier phase of cosmic evolution in which our earth was also involved. Then, in the course of time, they became independent, were emancipated from the external cosmos, so that nowadays there is no direct dependence. Therefore, one cannot say nowadays that the phases of the moon are coincident with menstruation. This cannot be said. But it is certainly true to say that there was once a time when the one coincided with the other; then they separated. The moon phases exist on their own. Menstruation takes its own independent course. Here is one example of separation. The other that I will mention is not governed by the phases of the moon but by the daily phases of the moon. Ebb and flow were once coincident with certain influences of the moon. Again there was separation. The moon is on its own, ebb and flow on their own.

These things also hold good in the working of mantric power. Mantric power is certainly of such a nature that what happens in the human being as a result of it was at one time coincident with cosmic processes, but separation has now taken place, so that a proper orientation is necessary. If we want this help from the outside world we must say to ourselves first of all: What is to happen in the inner being is inscribed in the cosmos. But in contemplating this we must make ourselves inwardly independent and be able to experience inwardly and quite on our own, emancipated from the cosmic happenings. Therefore it is not unconditionally necessary to reckon with the constellations of the stars in the working of a mantram. Equally it cannot be a question of the menses being regulated according to the external phases of the moon, because the menses have become a process of the world of nature. Today it is the case that the whole of our inner life that is to be influenced by mantrams must take place in emancipation from the outer cosmos.

In connection with other subjects I have often had to speak of this as the difference between Eastern and Western esotericism. The whole standpoint of the oriental is this: the human being has come forth from the cosmos, he must return there, he must be united with the cosmos again. Think of the posture of the Buddha. It is a return to earlier conditions. This is shown by the Buddha's whole posture, the crossing of the legs one over the other, the elimination of the limb structures. The position of the arms, too, is such that the whole relationship to the earth is paralyzed. We see how the human being again members himself into the cosmos. He goes back again. So it is, in reality, with the whole of Eastern esotericism. It is a going backwards. Our Western esotericism can only be a going forward, an ever-increasing emancipation. For this reason it is not so inwardly comfortable and when applied in certain domains particularly it does not make for inner ease.

Of course, if you have some specific, pathological condition before you, and when you look at the constellations you find, for example, that the condition definitely set in when Saturn was in opposition to the moon, this naturally has a certain significance. For if you now come as a healer with Saturn and moon, that is to say, in earthly terms, with lead and silver, saying: I will apply the lead cosmically and the silver in the earthly form, trying to pulverize it, to dissolve it; I will change it into the earthly form, thereby producing the same constellation that is expressed in the heavens in the opposition to the moon, then you can heal in the sense of the cosmic forces. But at the same time you bring the human being into a condition which throws him back into earlier stages of evolution. Whereas if you take your start directly from the given earthly state—the connection of the human being with lead, with silver—then you are working in something that is in a process of emancipating itself within the human being and you are looking not into the past but into the future. In this case you will certainly be doing something similar, but you get at it from within, by getting to know the nature of the lead and the silver, realizing that the lead works as substance, the silver through what it actually becomes when it is broken into pieces, dissolved, resolved into atoms. But you are comparing it with the human nature that is already emancipated, not with the cosmos. This is the way in which one must proceed. Therefore it may certainly be a help to think about the actual constellations of the stars. But to begin with, we shall have to use all our power to lend ourselves to the inner activation of soul by the mantric formulae we have been given, and seek for everything more from within.

Question: What must I do out of the ego when I am meditating?

From out of the ego? Meditation consists, does it not, in the following. As a modern person you feel that you must understand every sentence. This is emphatically an activity of the ego in the present incarnation. Everything you do intellectually is an activity of the ego. In the present incarnation the intellect predominates and everything else is overshadowed by the ego, works upwards at the most like a dream, and is unconscious. In contrast with this, meditation means elimination of this intellectual striving and, to begin with, taking the content of the meditation just as it is given—purely according to the sounds of the words. When you approach the content of the meditation intellectually you bring your ego into movement before you absorb the meditation, for you think about the content; it is outside you. If you let the meditation be present in your consciousness just exactly as it is given, not cogitating over it at all but simply letting it be in your consciousness, then your ego is working in you not from the present incarnation but from the past. You hold the intellect still, simply transporting yourself into the word-content which you hear inwardly, not outwardly; you transport yourself into this word-content and as you do so your inner being works within the content of the meditation—the inner being which is not that of the present incarnation. But thereby the content of meditation becomes—not something for you to understand merely—but something that works within you in reality; so that finally you become aware of: Now I have experienced something I was unaware of earlier.

Take a simple meditation which I have often given: “Wisdom lives in the Light.” If we think about this we can extract many very clever things but equally frightfully stupid things from it. “Wisdom lives in the Light” is there in order to be heard inwardly. When you hear this inwardly that within you which listens does not come from your present incarnation but what you have brought with you from former earthly lives. It is this that thinks and experiences, and after some time there lights up within you something you did not know before, that you cannot think out with your own intellect. Inwardly you are much further than your intellect. Your intellect contains only a tiny extract of what is really there.

After all, you must take what is given in Anthroposophy absolutely concretely and objectively. Just think about the following: With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is

concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is a product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years—if we express it in figures—comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a body, too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here.

Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He would call forth quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his pre-earthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human being has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly man.

You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical man who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity.

There, you see, you have two, actually distinguishable entities of forces in the human being. How can you understand these force entities? Take, with the outlook and feeling of the physician, the book Occult Science and read where the earth's evolution is spoken of. At first there is a Saturn evolution, then a Sun evolution. If you follow the description of the Earth evolution you will find that until the separation of the sun, sun, moon and earth were one, combined together in one. Afterwards there is a separation of earth and sun, earth and moon. Up to the middle of this evolution, therefore, the human being lives in the cosmos. He lives in sun and moon just as he lives in the earth. After the separation of the sun he lives outside the sun; after the separation of the moon, outside the moon. Until the separation of the sun, therefore, the cosmic forces were working upon man's nature; those forces, too, which are today outside the earth in the moon and in the sun were working in the human being because he belonged to the world in which the sun and moon were still present. There followed for the human being an evolution during which sun and moon were outside.

There was a phase of evolution which contained within it all that today is both earthly and of the nature of sun and moon; later on, the extra-earthly emancipated itself from the earthly. The earthly went on along its own path, it dried up, hardened, became physical—and you find this today in the stream of heredity; it has densified within the stream of heredity. What the human being has received since the separation of the moon and sun lies in the forces working in from the cosmos. That is the point. So that in the model that is received in order that the second man may be elaborated, you have a model that really represents a primeval, artistic principle given by father and mother, originating when sun and moon were still united with the earth. It was then that the forces which really give the human being his earthly configuration were developed. For you will readily understand that the configuration of the human being is an earthly one. Try to think of the being of man entirely removed from the earth. What could be done with it? You would be extremely unhappy if after death you were to make use of anything like legs. Legs have purpose only when the earth's forces of attraction pass through them, when the legs are within the sphere of the earth's forces of attraction. Legs—and arms and hands, too—have meaning and purpose only on the earth. So that a whole section of the human organism, in the way it is developed, has purpose only when we are earthly man. What we are as Earthly man has no meaning so far as the cosmos is concerned. Therefore when we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second man in accordance with this model.

In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second man has tussles with the first. But within the second man there is the super-earthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner man, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willy nilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner man is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. Moreover, it is only possible to understand truly what comes later if these things can be properly reckoned with.

It is, of course, very easy for the materialists to say that all this is stupid, because children still retain a likeness to their parents after the change of teeth and not only up till that time. Such talk is nonsense. The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second man with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model. We have therefore simply to see these things in their right connection.

The following, too, must be remembered. Everything that has to be taken in must, in the first place, be taken in by the child and elaborated inwardly in such a way that the ego and astral body enter into intimate contact with the foodstuffs. Later on this need not be the case any longer. The human being is never afterwards in the position of being so strongly compelled to work out, according to a model, something that is independent as is the case during the first seven years of life. During those years he must work up in his ego and astral body everything he takes in; he must work it up in such a way that it can be molded in accordance with the model. This process must be helped; and the world has arranged for it, inasmuch as milk is able to bear a very great resemblance indeed to an etheric structure. Milk is a substance which really still has an etheric body and because this substance, when it is taken by the child, still works up into the etheric, the astral body is able at once to take hold of the milk and then there can arise the close inner contact between what is thus taken in and the astral body and ego organization. For this reason there is an inward, intimate connection in the child between the external foodstuffs and the inner organization of spirit and soul.

In the whole way in which the child drinks milk you can actually see how his astral body and his ego are taking hold of the milk you can see it with your very eyes. And now, as a physician, you must realize the remarkable process of working up what is going on. On the one side, meditate in mantrams, letting the mantram work upon you, freeing your forces of soul on the one hand; and on the other hand, meditate simply upon the child. Picture to yourself how the being of spirit and soul comes down and makes its way to the physical foodstuff, ignoring the model to begin with, and then picture what is going on between the being of spirit and soul and the foodstuff—a process that is now directed in accordance with the forms contained in the model. If you form a true picture of an excessively strong working of the spirit and soul, the picture crystallizes into that of scarlet fever. A picture of a too feeble working of the spirit and soul which wavers in the face of the model and becomes the picture of measles.If you picture these things in meditation you carry over ordinary meditation into medical meditation. It is dreadful that people today want to grasp everything with the intellect. In medicine really nothing can be grasped with the intellect. With the intellect one could at the very most grasp the diseases of the minerals—and there it is not a question of curing. Everything medical must be grasped by direct perception and the faculty for this has to be developed.

You cannot notice this process in a grown-up person. The digestive tract takes over the foodstuffs—it is a process transacted inwardly; whereas in the child, astral body and ego take over the foodstuffs. Unfinished forms of human nature have there to be directed and fashioned in accordance with the model. When you meditate upon the child, you see a mighty metamorphosis going on. You see the spirit and soul lighting up, as it were, and the in-taken foodstuffs cast into darkness and shadows; you see there how the second man is formed out of light and darkness, in colors, as it were. You see how the pre-earthly in man is a brightness and how the external foodstuffs are a darkening. In the child a brightness comes upon the darkness, a brightness that comes from the pre-earthly. The milk goes in as darkness. The brightness and the darkness together give rise to manifold colors. What is white in the physical is black in the spiritual; always the opposite.

These things make it possible for the ego to be active in quite another way than is usual in life. What a feeble effort it is that we make in the act of ordinary, intellectual thinking. Intellectual activity is man's greatest weakness. He simply carries one concept to another. But if you observe the child in the way now described you will meditate in such a manner that your ego organization is thoroughly involved in the effort.

These things, in their further course, must also be heeded in our pedagogy. In a school like the Waldorf School we have children between the ages of seven and fourteen. At this age things have changed. The second man has been developed. The child before us has been molded out of pre-earthly existence according to the model that has been cast off; forces of heredity, naturally, have remained in the child. They have been brought into the model, into the imitation of the model. The child is now much too unearthly. For now the forces that come from beyond the earth have worked on the child with special strength and the swing of the pendulum has gone to the opposite side. Formerly, this was externally visible in the human being; he was entirely the product of heredity. Now that which is to be seen externally has arisen entirely from within. It is the external world that has now to be mastered. What has hitherto worked without consideration for the earthly world, with consideration only for the human model, must direct itself to the outer world. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, astral body and ego organization must work in such a way that this super-earthly being is again adjusted to the external conditions of earth existence. This process has its culmination at puberty. At that age the human being is placed wholly within earthly conditions; he enters into his relationships with earthly conditions; the earthly is membered into his being. Therefore the element of greatest importance in the generation of the second man between the seventh and fourteenth years is what the human being brings with him from pre-earthly existence. For this reason his own specific karma only begins to work after puberty. Then the earthly works in. A culmination is reached at puberty and the third man now begins to develop.

The second man—so far as the substance is concerned—is thrown off and the third man is developed. The process does not reach so far as actual form, it only gets as far as life. If it were to get to form, we should get third teeth, because the human being is now governed by external conditions. Within these outer conditions it is the case that the human being again takes in what is extra-human. When he was being governed by the model he was directed entirely in accordance with the human. So long as he was governed by the model he was governed by something passed on by heredity. But in this there lies, in reality, something that is dried up. Since the separation of the sun it has really broken off from the root of his being and is dried up, withered. Therefore the forces of heredity contain the most pathological forces and when he is governed by the model the human being really absorbs innumerable causes of illness. He absorbs few such causes during the period after the change of teeth because then he is governed by the external world; climate, everything contained in the outer air, etc., are less harmful. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the human being is healthy; then again there begins a period when he is again susceptible.

All these conditions must be observed in such a way that you have the picture of man in your mind. If you have this picture of man in mind, then you also meditate rightly. Then you will be able to combine what you learn with what you meditate upon and what you have learned does not remain theory but becomes practice, because you uncover the power that enables you to perceive these things. This is what is so urgently needed today. It is impossible to achieve anything in medicine so long as we persist in thinking that evolution goes forward in a straight line. The human being is in reality constituted from separate streams of development which take their course in periods of seven years; what comes later is linked to what is earlier; it is not a one-sided continuation but different conditions are always intervening. Continuous evolution in this sense, where the earlier alone is the cause of the later, is only to be found in the mineral kingdom, less in the plant kingdom and least of all in the human kingdom.

Let us try to picture the plants. How do people proceed today when they picture the plants? There is the soil of the earth. The seed is pictured as being laid into the soil and then the plant grows out of this. People are naive enough to think as follows: Hydrogen is a very simple molecule, consisting of two atoms. All kinds of things are imagined to form combinations. Alcohol is certainly a very complicated molecule. Carbon is there combined with hydrogen and oxygen and then one has something more complex. And now there come still more complicated substances with more and more complicated molecules. There was a period during the eighties and nineties of the last century when the titles of these were very complicated, consisting of more than three lines in length. Yes, the molecule has become terribly complicated! And now still more so. Then it becomes a seed, and a seed is a most highly complicated combination. Then the plant grows out of the seed. But all this is nonsense. The basis of the seed formation is, in reality, that earthly matter tears itself away from the principle of structure and passes over into chaos, becomes chaotic, contains no more forces of matter in itself. Then, when no earthly structure is present, what is working out of the cosmos can assert itself. The cosmic declares its readiness to mirror the cosmic structure in the minute. In the seed formation the “nothingness” asserts itself over against the earthly and the cosmos works into the nothingness.

Frau Dr. Kolisko could tell you an interesting fact which entirely confirms this. During investigations into the function of the spleen we took small rabbits and excised the spleen. In spite of this the rabbits were quite well. They did not die of the operation, but a long time afterwards, from colds. It was quite possible to see how the rabbits live on without the spleen. When one of the rabbits died, we were able to see what had happened and in the place of the spleen there had appeared tissue which had assumed a decidedly spherical form. What had really happened? We had excised the physical spleen and by doing this had artificially driven earthly substance into chaos, made it accessible to the cosmic forces, and something resembling a seed formation had come into being. There had arisen, in an extremely primitive form, something that resembled the structure of a seed—an image of the cosmos. This quite harmless vivisection, therefore, confirmed a matter of great significance, for this is what appears to spiritual-scientific observation.

Take a quartz crystal. It is an earthly thing. Why? Why is the quartz crystal an earthly thing, retaining its form really in a very pedantic, rigid way? The quartz gets its form from an inner force and if you break it apart with a hammer the single parts always retain the tendency to be six-sided prisms, self-contained, six-sided pyramids. This tendency is present. You can as little rid the quartz of this tendency as you can get pedantry out of a man who is pedantic by nature. You may atomize a pedantic person, but he will still remain pedantic. The quartz does not allow itself to come to the point where the cosmos can do anything with its forces. Therefore the quartz has no life. If the quartz could be pulverized to such a degree that in the single fragments it no longer had the tendency to be governed, in the single fragment, by its own forces, something living and cosmic would grow out of the quartz. This is what happens in the formation of a seed. In the seed, matter is driven out to such a degree that the cosmos can intervene with its etheric forces. The world must be seen as a perpetual entering into chaos and again an emergence from chaos. What is contained in quartz also came at one time from the cosmos, but it remained at a standstill, has become Ahrimanic. It no longer exposes itself to the cosmic forces. As soon as anything enters into the realm of the living it must always pass through chaos.

This again is something which will help you to meditate in the sense of medicine. And you can also picture the developed plant—how it grows from leaf to leaf, and so on. You come to the formation of the seed in the fruit. Whereas you otherwise picture the seed plant as brightness it now becomes dark, quite dark. Then again comes the light, when the forces from outside take hold. In this way, too, you can make an imaginative picture from the being of the plant. When you are aware of an object which you call “plant”—then it is an imaginative meditation. You should not remain in the sphere of the intellectual but in the sphere of the concrete, inner picture. The intellectual element is merely there for the purpose of presenting what is known, in the form of thoughts.

Suppose you write down the word Menschenkind. This word is taken from something that has been perceived. Very well. The word Menschenkind reminds you of a Menschenkind (a human child). But suppose you take the word and say: I like the i, so I will put that first, I like the n, so I will put that next, then the sch and so on. You can put the word together in a different way but nothing that you can make anything of will come out of it. This is what people are doing with concepts all the time. The concept is only the spiritual term for the perception. People separate and combine concepts and think in acts of thinking. They do this, too, when they are observing the external world. They cover up observation with thinking and so they live today outside reality. This is possible as long as one is working with the science that stands outside reality, with geometry and arithmetic. But if we want to go in for medicine we cannot stand outside reality. If we do, then we also stand outside reality in medical practice itself.

During this Winter we have prepared the ground in various ways in order to understand with greater exactitude than has hitherto been possible man's life between birth and death in the physical world on the one side and on the other between death and rebirth in the spiritual world. And there will be still more to say about this subject in the coming months.

Efforts will be needed to draw together a number of details that will contribute towards a thorough understanding of this subject and throw new light upon many topics we have already studied from a different point of view. Today, then, I will ask you to think, above all, of the course of man's physical life—about which something has also been said in my book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy—and of how it progresses in cycles: one from birth until about the seventh year, or until the change of teeth; a second cycle from the change of teeth until puberty at about the fourteenth year; then a third cycle, and so on in periods of seven years. Even to ordinary observation it will be clear that this systematic arrangement into periods of seven years is well founded, but on the other hand it will also be evident that in the actual life of the human being other facts of incisive significance cut across these seven-year periods. We ourselves have repeatedly considered a crucial occurrence in a man's life which eludes this division into cyclic periods. It is the point of time back to which a man's memory extends in later life, the moment when he begins to feel and know himself as an ‘I’, when Ego-consciousness dawns in him. This experience does not by any means occur at exactly the same point of time, but in most cases it may be said that Ego-consciousness flashes up in the human being at some point between birth and the seventh year. And something similar can be said to hold good in the later period of a man's life. Although with less abruptness than the sudden flashing-up of Ego-consciousness, there are other occurrences which as it were invalidate the regular seven-year cycle. We shall, however, always discover that whatever comes in this way into the life of man and cuts across the cyclic periods, occurs much more irregularly than the experiences connected with the actual seven-year cycles. You will hardly find two human beings whose memories go back to exactly the same point of time, that is to say who experienced the flashing up of consciousness of ‘I’ at the same age. Nor does the change of teeth occur at precisely the same age in different individuals. But why this is so in the latter case, we shall still have to consider.

When we study the cyclic periods already referred to and mentioned in my little book, Education of the Child, we shall notice that they begin in connection with the most physical, the most external member of man's being and are then concerned with the other, more inward members of his constitution. From birth until the seventh year development is connected primarily with the physical body, then for seven years with the etheric body, then for seven years with the astral body, the sentient soul, and so on. The evolutionary factors pass over more and more decisively from the external to the inner nature of man. That is essentially characteristic of the seven-year periods.

What, then, is there to be said about occurrences which cut across these seven-year periods? The flashing-up of ‘I’-consciousness during the first cycle is an emphatically inner event. For the sake of clarity, here let us consider something that seems to be in contrast with this flashing-up of Ego-consciousness. If we observe human life with discernment we shall find that the cessation of growth may be compared with some happening which cuts across the seven-year cycles of evolution. We will therefore think about the cessation of growth which after all occurs comparatively late in life, and study its implications.

The first seven-year period ends with the change of teeth. The appearance of the second teeth is, as it were, the final act of what may be called the formative principle. The last contribution made by the forces that give the human being his form is when they drive out the second teeth. That is the culmination of the formative process, for the principle which builds up the human form is no longer in action. With the seventh year the formative principle ceases to be active. What comes about later on is only an expansion of what has already been established as form. After the seventh year there is no more remodelling of the brain. All that happens is growth of what is already established as basic form. Therefore we can say that the principle of form unfolds its activity specifically in the first seven years of the life of a human being. The principle of form stems from the Spirits of Form; thus these Spirits of Form are active in the human being during the first seven years of his life. It can therefore be said that when the human being enters into life through birth, his actual form is not complete. What happens is that the Spirits of Form continue their active intervention during the first seven years of life; the human being has then reached the point when his form merely needs to grow. The basis for the form has been established by the seventh year, and the second teeth are what the formative principle still produces out of the human being. The formative principle has now come to its conclusion. Were its activity to continue, the second teeth would inevitably make their appearance later than is now the case.

Here we may ask: When these Spirits of Form have worked on the human being until the seventh year of his life, does everything they do for him come to an end?

The answer is ‘No’, for the human being goes on growing and the basic principles of his form develop still further. If nothing else intervened, growth would be able to continue without interruption. If we think only of the principles of form that are active in the human being until the seventh year there is no more reason in the case of man than in that of other beings why these forms should not continue to grow if nothing were to intervene. But something does intervene. When the human being stops growing, certain principles of form still have an effect upon him. They have already been drawing near to him but now they unite in the fullest sense with his organism, lay hold of it, but in such a way that they now act as a hindrance, and further growth is prevented. The formative principles that are active until the seventh year of life allow the human being a certain elasticity. But at that point other formative principles approach him; their nature is such that they capture and confine what is elastic in the demarcated form, thus preventing any further growth. That is why growth stops at some point. When growth stops, this means that formative forces approaching from outside are at work. Whenever formative principles are active, whenever forms grow larger, provision must be made for the stoppage of growth by the appearance of counter-formative principles which oppose the first category as its polar antithesis. When man's form has developed until about the seventh year of life (indicated in the shaded portion of the diagram) this form can continue to grow.

The formative principles have been at work until the seventh year; these principles work from within. Then different formative principles work in opposition from outside, so that the human being can grow only to the limit indicated by the line b–b. It is really as if until the seventh year of his life the human being were given an elastic garment which he can constantly stretch and enlarge. But at a specific point of time he is given one that is not elastic; he is obliged to put it on, and thenceforth cannot grow beyond its limits.

We can therefore say that in the human being a confrontation takes place between two kinds of formative principles, one working from within and the other from without. The formative principles belonging to the first category come from the Spirits of Form, from those Spirits of Form who have passed through a perfectly normal process of evolution in the Cosmos. The formative principles working from without are not of the same kind. They come from Spirits of Form whose development has been retarded and who have acquired a Luciferic character. They are the factor which works in the purely spiritual domain, whereas the forces working in the material sphere have had a normal development; having evolved through the stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, they then pass to the Earth in the regular way and shape the human form from within. The ‘irregular’ Spirits of Form take what is presented to them and hold back its further development. Thus the process of growth in the human being is brought to a halt by these backward Spirits of Form. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have the most varied tasks, among them the one that has been characterised today.

We have now been able to consider many different aspects of the work of the ‘regular’ Hierarchies and also of the work of the backward spiritual Beings belonging to the different Hierarchies. In the book Occult Science—an Outline¹ you can read how the human being reached the stage where through the Spirits of Form he could be endowed with the germinal foundation for the ‘I’, the Ego. We know that man received the germ of his physical body from the Thrones, of his etheric body from the Spirits of Wisdom, of his astral body from the Spirits of Movement, and the germinal foundation for the ‘I’ from the Spirits of Form. Bearing this in mind we can say that man, in his outer stature, has been organised by the regular Spirits of Form into an Ego-bearing being and that this comes into manifestation in the first seven-year cycle of his life. But then the backward Spirits of Form who are the opponents of the regular Spirits of Form, put a stop to his growth. This is actually the antithesis of the first, most deeply inward experience in the human being, namely, the kindling of the consciousness of ‘I’—the Ego. This happens in the early years of life, in the innermost realm of being. The outermost manifestation, the form, is checked at a later age, as a final act. Thus we perceive two evolutionary—but antithetical—processes in the human being. Of the one I have said that it comes from without and moves inward, taking hold of the sentient soul and so on, in the twenty-first year of life. Then there is another evolution proceeding from within outwards until the growth of the physical form is checked. The one evolution, the regular evolution, proceeds from the spiritual to the corporeal, from within outwards and is of interest especially for education. The other evolution—which is a much less regular and also more individual process—proceeds from without inwards and, when the human being has reached a certain age, it comes to expression in the completion of the outermost principle—the physical body.

It is very important that teachers should have knowledge of these two antithetical lines of evolution. Hence in the book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy it was right to call attention to the first process of evolution which proceeds from within outwards, because it is only there that education is possible. On the other line of evolution—from without inwards—which is the line of individual development, it is impossible to make any actual impression. This is something of which account can be taken but which cannot be halted; neither can much be achieved in the way of education. And to be able to distinguish between where education is possible and where it is not, is of fundamental importance.

Just as the cessation of growth is caused by the backward Spirits of Form, the first actual manifestation of the ‘I’ in the human being during early childhood is the work of the backward Spirits of Will (Thrones). Between these two extremes there are other happenings which are to be attributed to backward Spirits of Wisdom and backward Spirits of Movement.

No adequate characterisation of man's life as a whole, including the existence between death and the new birth, is possible unless we take account of all the factors which have an effect upon him, and recognise that even in everyday life the influences of Luciferic beings take effect in many different ways. This influence is evident in other spheres as well. And as our endeavour in these lectures is to acquire a really fundamental understanding of man's life as a whole, we will not hesitate to think about matters which seem to be somewhat remote.

Attention shall first of all be drawn to a phenomenon from which it is evident that on the physical plane too, between birth and death, man's life has undergone essential changes in the course of evolution. If we realise this, it will, become evident that the life between death and rebirth has also changed. Those who think intellectually, but superficially, about life today may readily believe that, in essentials, things were always the same as they are at present. By no means was it so! And in certain cases we need go back only a few hundred years to find that conditions were very different. Thus at the present time there is something that has a very great influence upon man's life of soul between birth and death but that simply did not exist in its present form only a few centuries ago. It is what we today mean by the expression ‘public opinion’. Even as recently as the thirteenth century it would have been nonsense to speak of public opinion as we do today. A great deal is said nowadays against belief in authority, although in actual fact it exists in a much more oppressive form in our time than it did in these earlier, often despised centuries. In earlier centuries there were, of course, defects, but there was no blind belief in authority such as exists at present. This blindness of belief in authority is usually revealed by the fact that the authority in question cannot be specified. A person today will readily be floored when he is told that science has proved this or that. In earlier centuries, however, people attached more weight to authorities whom they encountered physically. Reference to an intangible ‘something’ is implied when it is said: ‘There is scientific proof of it.’ Such a saying urges belief in authority when confronted with something incomprehensible. Such belief did not exist in earlier centuries. People belonging to our civilisation usually concern themselves very little with matters about which the simplest, most, primitive human being in earlier centuries endeavoured to have some knowledge—matters relating, for example, to health and illness. Why, it is asked today, should anyone need to know about health and illness? The doctors know about these matters and the problems concerned can be left to them. This is also an example of what comes into the category of intangible but sovereign authority. But countless other influences make their way into life; from earliest youth the human being becomes dependent upon them and his trends of judgement and feeling force themselves into our life! These living currents swirling around among human beings are usually referred to as ‘public opinion’—and prompted the saying from philosophers: ‘Public opinions are mostly private errors.’ To realise this, however, is not as important as it is to be aware that public opinions exert tremendous power upon the life of an individual. It would be a complete misconception of history to speak about the influence of public opinion upon the life of an individual living in the thirteenth century. In those days there were single personalities who admittedly exerted a great deal of authority either in affairs of Government or in practical life, and in these spheres it was obeyed. But at this time there was nothing resembling what impersonal public opinion has become today. Anyone who is unwilling to believe this on the basis of the occult facts should study the history of Florence during those centuries and in later times too—when the government of the city passed into the control of the Medici. The tremendous power of individual authorities will then be apparent, but there was no such thing as public opinion. It first arose in an epoch preceding our own by four or five centuries and one can speak of its actual beginning. Such things must be regarded as realities, for a world of swirling thoughts does indeed exist.

What is the origin of this public opinion which we often accept as something that cannot be verified? What is public opinion in reality? You may remember that I have spoken of certain spiritual Beings belonging to the Hierarchy immediately above man—Beings who participate in various ways in the guidance and leadership of humanity. In my little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, you will find a great deal on the subject of spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Now we know that the mightiest incision in the evolution of humanity was made by the Mystery of Golgotha. In that event there came to pass something that was most wonderfully expressed in the esoteric teaching of St. Paul. Paul spoke in simple language but the actual way in which he spoke was rooted in profound esotericism. It was not possible for him always to give out openly what he, as an Initiate, knew; for in the first place he wanted to speak to a wider circle of people and, secondly, it was not possible in his day to give out everything he knew in the way of which he would have been capable. Nevertheless his very presentation was based upon profound esoteric knowledge. We find, for example, that there is a deeply significant truth in the distinction he makes between the ‘first Adam’ and the ‘higher Adam’—the Christ. According to Paul, the various generations of human beings are to be traced back to Adam, that is to say, the bodies of men descend from Adam. Hence it can be said that the physical increase of humanity over the Earth during the different periods, leads back finally to the physical body of Adam—Adam and Eve, naturally. We can then ask: What lies at the basis of the physical evolution of mankind from Adam onwards? Naturally, the evolution of souls! The physical bodies which have descended from Adam are the habitations of living souls. These souls had descended from cosmic worlds and had brought with them to the Earth a certain spiritual heritage, a spiritual endowment. But in the course of time this spiritual endowment had undergone decline. Individuals who lived, say, six or seven thousand years before the founding of Christianity had within them much stronger, more extensive spiritual forces than those who lived a mere thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual heritage which once came to the Earth with human beings had gradually withered away in the soul. Now the life between death and rebirth is of particular significance for this spiritual heritage. If we go back to the epoch long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that after death men had an active, inwardly illumined life of soul; but then this life of soul became dimmer and dimmer, darker and darker. An ever-fading life of soul came with human beings when they passed through death. This was particularly the case among the Greeks although they were the most advanced peoples then on the Earth, and their sages had every reason to say, in view of the stage reached in evolution: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ We know that this saying was true when applied to the Greeks who lived a fully satisfying life on the physical plane; but as soon as they had passed through the gate of death their life became dim and shadowy.

In the fullest sense it is true that the spiritual life which men had brought with them to the Earth and which manifested after death as a somewhat dim clairvoyant consciousness, had become even dimmer. And especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the spiritual life had reached the stage of its greatest darkness.

The all-important purpose of the Baptism by John the Baptist was that some of those who sought to be baptised should be made conscious of the conditions just described. The individuals baptised by John were completely submerged in the water. As a result, the etheric body of these individuals was liberated from them and for a short time, while under the water, they became clairvoyant. John was able to reveal to them that there had been such deterioration in the life of soul in the course of time that a human being now possessed very little of the spiritual treasure that he had once been able to take with him through the gate of death and that could give him clairvoyant consciousness. A man whom John baptised in this way became aware that a revitalisation of the life of soul was essential, that something new must radiate into human souls in order that after death there might be a life in the real sense. This new impulse streamed into the souls of men through the Mystery of Golgotha. You need only read my lecture-course entitled From Jesus to Christ and you will realise that a rich and abundant spiritual life streams from the Mystery of Golgotha into the souls of individuals who develop a relationship to that Mystery.

Hence Paul could say: just as the physical bodies of men descend from Adam, so will the content of their souls in greater and greater measure ‘descend’ from the Christ who is the second Adam, the spiritual Adam. It is a profound truth that Paul uttered here, clothed in his simple words. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, men would have become progressively empty in soul and would either have developed a longing only to live outside the physical body or to live on Earth with no other wishes or desires than for a purely physical life, and so would have become more and more materialistic. Because all development is a slow and gradual process there are still some peoples on the Earth who have not yet wholly lost the original spiritual treasure, who still retain some measure of it in spite of having failed to establish any relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. Individuals belonging to the most advanced peoples, however, can become conscious after death only to the extent to which they have learnt ‘to die in Christ’, as the second line of the Rosicrucian formula expresses it. And so in actual fact the Mystery of Golgotha has acted as illumination in men's souls.

With this clearly in mind we shall understand the gist of a question relating to man's evolution. It is the question: How came it that understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha enabled the content of man's soul to be carried into the sphere of his ‘I’, his Ego? How did this soul-content differ from what existed before the Mystery of Golgotha as an ancient heritage? The difference is that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, in respect of the content of their souls men were far less independent. They were under the direct guidance of the Beings we know as the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men were under the leadership of the Beings of the nearest higher Hierarchies to a far greater extent than was the case after that event. Indeed the progress of these Beings themselves—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—consists in the fact that they have learnt to lead human beings in a way that respects their independence. Men were intended to live on the Earth in a state of greater and greater independence. The leading spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies have recognised this and therein consists their progress.

But it is possible for these Spirits too to remain behind in their evolution. Not all the Spirits who participated in the leadership of humanity have acquired through the Mystery of Golgotha the power to guide and lead men while ensuring their freedom. Among these Beings of the higher Hierarchies there are some who remained backward and have become Luciferic spirits. What we call ‘public opinion’ is an example of the way in which some of them are active. Public opinion is not created by human beings alone but also by a certain category of Luciferic spirits of the lowest rank—retarded Angeloi and Archangeloi. These spirits are only beginning their Luciferic career and have not yet risen very high in the ranks of the Luciferic spirits, but they are definitely Luciferic in character. With the eye of seership one can perceive how certain spirits of the higher Hierarchies did not keep pace with evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha, how they adhere rigidly to the old kind of leadership and therefore cannot make any direct approach to men. Those who have kept pace with evolution can make regular and direct contact with men; the other spirits are incapable of this and they manifest their activity in the muddled, turbulent thinking that comes to expression as public opinion. The function of public opinion is intelligible only when it is realised that this is how it has made its way into human life.

Thus we have among us beings who abandon the regular course of evolution and become Luciferic in character. It is important that this should be known. The work of the Luciferic beings of whom we have already spoken and who now have great power, also began on a small scale. Indeed this is true in the case of the whole host of Luciferic beings. Admittedly, on the Old Moon there was no public opinion as we know it but something that can be compared with it—a kind of guidance of men. Some among this host of Luciferic spirits of whom we have spoken are powerful and important beings, for example backward Spirits of Form who surge in upon the human being with such violence that they stop his growth. The others are merely the recruits; nevertheless this is the beginning of the career of the Luciferic spirits, a career which later on will assume a quite different dimension because the spirits become more and more powerful. Public opinion, which under the guidance and direction of certain Luciferic spirits of the lowest order, influences human beings because they absorb it between birth and death, must necessarily have its counterweight during the life between death and rebirth. That is to say, because a human being in his life between birth and death has been caught up into the current of public opinion described, he must experience the counterweight in his life between death and rebirth. Otherwise the following would ensue.

The backward spirits who are responsible for the creation of public opinion have no significance or power whatever in man's life between death and rebirth. They have relinquished all possibility of working in that sphere because they are active here, on the physical plane, in a spiritual way—indeed in a way that is only possible in the form of public opinion. A man can take no iota of anything like public opinion with him into the spiritual world and whatever element of it he might want to accompany him into the life after death would be entirely out of place. It must be said, although it will seem strange to many people, that life in Kamaloka becomes very difficult for one who clings to public opinion or has been caught in the coils of his own judgement very early in life. This applies particularly to persons who believe that within the world of public opinion there can still be independent judgement—which is an utter impossibility. For such people Kamaloka is admittedly difficult. But when the period of Kamaloka is over, public opinion has no weight or significance whatever, and after death it is irrelevant whether people adhered to nuances of it, such as liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. This has no significance whatever in the different groupings of human beings and moreover exists on Earth solely for the purpose of hindering men from making progress towards illumination of consciousness after death. The beings behind public opinion resolved to forgo the progress made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Mystery of Golgotha will become of greater and greater importance for the Earth's evolution. We must clearly understand that the future of the Earth's evolution cannot be assured simply by rectifying phenomena such as public opinion and the like which are inevitable in the course of evolution. Men can, however, become better in their own inner nature, therefore the process of evolution must take root more and more deeply in their inner life. In the future, men will be still more exposed to the pressure of public opinion, but inwardly they will have developed greater strength. This is possible only through Spiritual Science. But if man is gradually to become a match for those spirits who are now exerting their influence in public opinion as recruits of the Luciferic beings, this will be possible only if, between death and rebirth too, he undergoes something that strengthens him inwardly, strengthens the principle in him that is independent of life on Earth. Whereas through the influence of public opinion he becomes more and more dependent upon earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth he must receive into his very self something that in the next life on Earth will make him ever freer from the influence of public opinion.

Connected with this is the fact that at the time when public opinion began to assume importance, the Buddha-realm was established in the Mars sphere—as we heard in the lecture at Christmas. Consequently between death and rebirth man passes through this Buddha-realm on Mars. Christian Rosenkreutz had entrusted to Buddha a special mission in the Mars sphere. And what would be futile on Earth, namely the desire to flee from the conditions of terrestrial existence—this is an experience which man must undergo between death and rebirth during his passage through the Mars sphere. Among other things he strips off the incubus of public opinion which takes effect only on Earth. Many, even more overbearing influences will come in the future and it will be more than ever necessary to undergo the experience that is possible for man as a pupil of Buddha in the Mars sphere. Here on Earth, men can now be pupils of the Buddha in the orthodox sense only if they refuse to participate in the progress made by the most advanced people on Earth. But between death and rebirth Buddha unfolds what has developed from the teaching he gave on Earth, which was that man should free himself from the need for further incarnations. This has been developed into a doctrine that is inapplicable to the Earth, where life must progress from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the doctrine preached by Buddha on Earth contained the seed of what man must acquire in the disembodied state of existence. In this advanced form, Buddha's teaching is right for the period between death and rebirth. The Buddha himself appeared in the astral body of the Jesus-Child of St. Luke's Gospel² and Christ Himself leads men between death and rebirth through the Mars sphere, enabling them there to receive the Buddha's advanced teaching. Thus in the Mars sphere men can be emancipated from the tendency to uniformity resulting from the effects of public opinion which are detrimental for their further progress on Earth. Whereas in earlier times Mars was said to be the planet of warlike traits, it is now the Buddha's task gradually to transform these warlike traits in such a way that they become the foundation of the sense for freedom and independence needed in the present age. Whereas nowadays men have the tendency to surrender their sense of freedom and succumb to the fetters of public opinion, on Mars between death and rebirth they will strive to throw off these fetters and not bring them again into the life on Earth when they return to new incarnations.

It seems to me that here we have something that characterises most wonderfully how wisdom holds sway in the world, how everything that progresses or remains backward is manipulated in such a way that the final outcome is harmony in the evolution of worlds. Man cannot achieve progress by keeping as it were to the middle line, although there are many who realise the uselessness of adopting a one-sided standpoint. Admittedly, we come across idealists, materialists and other ‘-ists’ who swear by their own standpoint, but truly great individuals such as Goethe do no such thing. They try to grasp material conditions by means of material thinking. When men of less eminence imagine that they have understood this, they say: truth lies in the middle, between two different standpoints. But that would be the same as if someone in practical life wanted to sit between two chairs! The truth cannot be found by a one-sided adoption of this or that standpoint but by applying the modes of knowledge appropriate either for materialism or idealism, The world does not progress by undeviating adherence to a middle course: a middle course is appropriate when the opposing sides are also present and are recognised as forces. If something has to be weighed, the two scalepans are needed as well as the beam. Thus there must be a counterbalance to public opinion; and this is provided by Buddha's teaching in the Mars sphere—which would not be necessary if public opinion had never existed. Life needs antithesis; life progresses in and through polarity. Somebody might think that as the North and South Poles are antitheses, it would be better if neither existed! They are not, of course, antithetic in the sense implied by a certain Professor of whom it was said that because he had written his books in such haste he could not think about their contents and stated that civilisation could develop only in the middle zone of the Earth because at the North Pole people would freeze through cold and at the South Pole melt through heat! In another connection, of course, North and South Poles are genuine opposites and are necessary because progress is not achieved by adopting a neutral course but by the maintenance and harmonising of opposites. Thus what develops on Earth had to undergo a process that lies below the level of progress. Public opinion is of less value than the judgements which an individual can reach on a path of progress. Public opinion is sub-human and it is this sub-human influence that is counteracted by the Buddha-stream through which man passes between death and rebirth. Both influences are necessary and it is extremely important to bear this in mind in connection with evolution.

It can therefore be said with truth: yes, there are indeed backward spirits, but everything that remains behind on the one side and on the other outstrips the evolutionary process, is manipulated by the wisdom of the Universe in such a way that harmony is the final result. The backward spirits are utilised to constitute the opposite pole to the spirits who have progressed to further stages.

If we look at life in this way it will be clear to us that in the future course of Earth evolution the human being will bring into life more and more qualities which will have greater weight and influence than the purely physical qualities. And it will be increasingly apparent that qualities other than the purely physical will have to be taken into account. Physical qualities will be evident, which—although they become manifest only gradually—can be traced back to infancy; but there will be other qualities to which this does not apply and which show themselves in a marked form only comparatively late in life. A characteristic feature of evolution in the future will be the existence of an increasing number of individuals about whom it will inevitably be asked: What can have happened to that individual at a certain age in his life? He has completely changed; it is as though he has become a different being! Qualities that were completely absent in earlier life, that appear only when a certain age has been reached, will reveal themselves. This will happen in the case of souls who are the most highly developed and in whom a certain break in their life becomes evident. For the fact that an individual was a pupil of Buddha in the life between death and rebirth reveals itself only at a certain age. This would apply to persons of whom it can be said: Up to a particular point in their lives their individual qualities were in evidence; but then entirely new trends appeared and they were able to understand matters altogether different from those for which they had previously shown understanding. These will be individuals who in the future will be the vehicles of true spiritual progress although they may simply be regarded as late developers, manifesting these qualities only late in life. In truth, however, the reason why these individuals display these qualities only in later life is that in previous incarnations on the Earth they had established the causes which enabled them to experience the spiritual life in the Mars sphere with particular intensity and so to acquire qualities which enabled them to bring a new impulse into the evolution of humanity. True spiritual culture will more and more be in the hands of individuals of this kind, who in their youth showed little aptitude for the spiritual standpoint they adopt in later life.

We now see that this is the reason why a certain fact has always been stressed in the Rosicrucian line of thought of which we ourselves have heard in the past, although it could not then be substantiated because our studies were not as advanced as they now are. Representatives of the Rosicrucian principle of Initiation in the West have always emphasised that it is impossible to discover in their childhood those who are to become leading figures, because these are individuals who give evidence of that fundamental change in later life of which I have spoken. When a seer speaks of Buddha today, he knows that Buddha has faithfully adhered to what his teaching promised; he has continued to work for that in human nature which has no direct urge for physical embodiment and therefore does not appear at the beginning of life in a physical body but only when the physical body has undergone a certain development, when a certain stage towards spirituality has been reached. Then, at a later stage of life the gift of the Buddha to man becomes an effective influence.

All this must be borne in mind if we are to understand the whole process of man's development. What it signifies for each individual in his life between birth and death—of this we shall hear later.

• 1. See pp. 180 onwards in the Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition.
• 2. See the lecture-course, The Gospel of St. Luke given by Dr. Steiner in Basle, September 1909, particularly lectures four to nine.

It was my task yesterday to show how the special configuration of such mythologies as the Osiris Myth, the Greek mythology—and in a certain sense even the Old Testament teachings to which we will return presently—is connected with changes in the stages of human consciousness. We know of the development of consciousness in mankind, we know that we have to look back to earlier times of man's evolution in which there existed an old clairvoyance, a perceptibility of super-earthly things. It is well to look back at such things for this retrospection gives us orientation. Mankind is again to achieve vision directed to the super-sensible; it is to be achieved on the path of Spiritual Science, through spiritual scientific thinking. The realization of what each one can do, no matter where he stands in the world, can be helped by the will to orientate oneself for what is to come by considering what has been.

In a certain sense things take place in later times in connection with events of earlier times. We look back from our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, in the development of which we are standing, to the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin, and to the Third, the Egyptian; we come then already to the time in which it was natural for men to express in certain mythical pictures and imaginations what they thought and felt about cosmic mysteries. In another connection we have already stated that we in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have to recapitulate in a sort of inverted way what had happened in the Third, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, so that it emerges again differently. The booklet ‘The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind’, also refers, as you know, to this subject.

Now we saw yesterday that in the time of the Greco-Latin evolution, in the time that begins with the 7th or 8th century before our era, there was a kind of looking back of mankind, and this looking back to other states of consciousness in fact expressed in imaginative myths facts about the ruling spiritual beings, as we described yesterday. Men in the Fourth Epoch knew: when we look around us we see only the physical, on the other we can reflect. You know, moreover, if you have followed attentively what is said in my book The Riddles of Philosophy, that in Grecian times, and even much later, people saw Ideas—as it were—as Goethe still did, and that they could really say: we see them. Entirely abstract thinking has only come about in modern times. But at that time there was indeed a seeing of ideas, a seeing of spiritual realities, a living in spiritual realities.

In the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch this was no longer so in the full sense, but the people remembered that it had been so earlier. They said—and in fact this represented the truth:—there are, however, Beings in existence, who are not human beings, who live in super-sensible worlds and have still preserved life in the imaginative consciousness. The Greeks saw such Beings in the individuals of the Zeus-circle.

The Egyptians again said to themselves: that age in which men still lived directly with Imaginations was the age when Osiris wandered upon Earth. They meant of course not one Osiris, but it was believed that there had been a time in which men on earth lived in Imaginations. And this type of human soul which was able to live in Imaginations was described by saying: Osiris lived upon earth. Lost and slain had been this life-in-Imaginations. Osiris has been killed by his brother Typhon—that is, by that force of the human soul, which to be sure is still directed to the super-sensible, but will no longer evolve the Imaginative faculties. The ancient clairvoyance exists no more. The forces active in the old clairvoyance are now amidst the dead. Hence Osiris is the Judge of the dead; the human being meets him when he has passed through the portal of death. The figures of Osiris and Isis were brought into connection with the Death-Mystery by those people who set the Osiris myth into the centre of their thought. Moreover, in the details through which the Osiris myth has been elaborated there actually lies all that I have been stating. The point of time has also been specified in which according to the legend, Osiris was killed by Typhon.

And just as we could point to a quite definite heavenly constellation, which the Magi of the East knew as the constellation in which the new cosmic age was to approach (we have pointed out in the Christmas lectures that by a certain constellation of the ‘Virgin’ the Magi of the East knew that they were to bring their offerings to the new World-Saviour) so too have those whose thoughts centred on the Osiris myth looked back to quite definite star-constellations. They have said: Osiris was slain. They meant to say: the old life in the Imaginations vanished when the setting sun in autumn stood in seventeen degrees of Scorpio and in the opposite point of the heavens the full moon rose in Taurus or in the Pleiades. This constellation of the full moon rising in Taurus at a definite point of the year in connection with the Scorpio position of the Sun, this moment of evolution has been given by the followers of Osiris as that in which Osiris has vanished from the earth, that is, in which he was no longer there. These things naturally come about in such a way as to leave legacies behind. There have always been people, stragglers even up to recent centuries with Imaginative clairvoyance, but the point is to show when Imaginative clairvoyance disappeared from earth as a normal faculty of the human soul. And men were aware that in the ages when Imaginative clairvoyance prevailed on earth conditions were quite different from what they were later. And this too was plainly indicated in the Osiris-Isis myth. But it is just this that is so very little understood by those who explain the myth of Isis and Osiris.

It is related, as you know, that when Isis discovered that her spouse, Osiris, had been slain, she departed on a search for the dead body. She found it at last in Byblos in Phoenicia and brought the corpse of Osiris from Phoenicia back to Egypt. A deep wisdom is expressed in such a myth, a wisdom of humanity's physiology. What sort of conditions were there then during the Osiris-time? During the Osiris-time there was not yet such a script as the later script. What prevailed in Egypt during the age of Osiris was a picture-writing and this was considered sacred. And how actually was the picture-script brought about? It was brought about inasmuch as the most important signs were taken, not from animal or earthly forms, but from the star-constellations, in fact from what clairvoyance saw in the star-constellations. If I were to make a comparison from something lately in our minds, I might say: You have heard in the ‘Dream of Olaf &Åsteson’ how he experiences the spirit-snake, the spirit-dog and the spirit-bull; he describes what he feels about them. Imagine to yourselves such pictures, but in a far more perfect form, as signs—such signs then are images of Imaginations. Such signs as the signs of the earliest writing were held to be holy. In such signs was cosmic wisdom contained for ancient times, this cosmic wisdom which in fact was at the same time a heavenly wisdom, inasmuch as men read the cosmic mysteries in the star-script, as the dead alone are able to do now. The gift of possessing a writing which is really a reproduction of Imaginations only belonged to humanity at a certain period of time, and then vanished. And the ancients knew: this imaginative way of writing existed in the age of Osiris. Together with the dying away of the old life of the world in Imaginations, the ancient picture-script disappeared and there arose that which has become the abstract script. This no longer expresses mysteries, but gradually, since it has become abstract, only serves to express the sense world—namely, the ordinary letter-script. Just as Osiris was looked on in those ancient times as the hero, as the divine hero of the Imaginative script, so is Typhon, his brother but his opponent, the hero of the abstract script of letter, developed from it.

This is also indicated profoundly in the Osiris-Isis myth. Over to Phoenicia must Isis go to find the corpse; that means to find the picture-script transformed into the letter-script—to find the corpse of Osiris. The letter-script was ‘found’, invented, as we say, in Phoenicia. From Phoenicia back to Egypt the abstract-script has come, whereas the Egyptians in their old mysteries in the Osiris-time had a picture-writing reflecting Imaginations. Thus the transition from the old concrete conception in the Imaginative-script to the newer concept in the abstract script has also found expression in the Osiris-Isis myth.

All these things lie in the course of mankind's evolution. We are there looking back to an older experience in Imaginations. Real physiological wisdom is, in fact, expressed in the myths. Thinking gradually passed over to abstractions—not immediately to the quite empty abstractions of today but to the somewhat fuller abstractions of about the 6th and 5th-centuries B.C.—in the work of Thales, with whom one generally begins the history of philosophy. (You can read of it in my The Riddles of Philosophy.)

But you can see from this that humanity has to look back to earlier evolutionary periods with quite different conditions of soul. Certain Brotherhoods of modern times know, to be sure, about these entirely different conditions, but they hold that such things should still be kept under lock and key. That is not right for the present day, but it is a little dangerous to talk of these things beyond a certain degree. Up to a certain degree, however, it is not only a case of should, these things must be spoken of today, because the knowledge of ancient conditions of human consciousness helps to give orientation for what is to develop as the new. If we have knowledge of what once existed, that can help us to further the necessary new conditions of evolution, although of an entirely different kind.

Now today you find in boys who develop to the age of puberty a change of voice. It is as we know, the expression in the boys of an organic process, which occurs differently in the female sex, and which apparently makes greater inroads into the human being in the case of the female, since the process reaches more directly into the physical. But that is not true. The influence on boys is just as strong, though it lies in a different sphere, so to say, and though externally it only comes to expression physically in the change of voice.

This reaching maturity by the human being is today—in fact since the times when Osiris was dead for the outer world—almost a physical process. It was not merely a physical process in the ages when Osiris lived, no, it was a soul process. The boy of fourteen or fifteen years—as you know we have already spoken of other experiences at the time of puberty—experienced not only that his voice changed, but that what today only enters, presses into, the region of the voice, extending from the sexual essences of the organism, in those ancient times pressed also into the thoughts, the conceptual world of the young boy. We must deal with such things truthfully; the voice apparatus is simply pervaded with the sexual essences of the organism. Today the voice breaks; in those days the thoughts ‘broke’ too, since it was still the ancient Imaginative time. In those times the young boy before the age of puberty had certain Imaginations; it was a living process and all knew that the child up to nine or ten years of age had Imaginations—Imaginations of spiritual events in the atmosphere. (Today there are still slight remains of this in almost every child of tender age, it is only that people pay no attention to it, or talk the children out of it as being foolish nonsense.) In the air spiritual events are taking place around us all the time. The air is not only what physical science describes, but spiritual events are taking place. These spiritual events, essentially events of the etheric world, were perceived by children in full Imaginations up to the time of puberty. And when puberty entered—not only for the voice, but the life of concepts—the human being felt something in him (it was in fact that which shot up out of the forces which are usually called in physiology the sex forces), felt something in him of which he said: what I saw as a child through the Imaginations in the atmosphere, now comes to life in me again, it is perception, it lives in me. That took place. The man was aware that he had taken something into himself out of the atmosphere. Formerly he had seen it outside; now he felt it within him.

For woman too, in those ancient times, there had been, before puberty, a perception in Imaginations of what was outside in the atmosphere. But after puberty that which in the case of boys merely emerged in the feeling of an alteration in their mental life, in the case of the woman was like an ascent of still more inward Imaginations: it was the human image that the woman perceived within her again and again in Imagination. And then she said to herself: what I now perceive Imaginatively, is the same as I experienced in childhood before puberty, out in cosmic space, as Imaginative pictures. Both sexes, only in different ways, experienced the fact that they actually knew in the soul: in me something is born which cosmic space has fructified in me.

There you have a still more concrete form of the Osiris-Isis-myth: it is universal wisdom in so far as it is won from the atmosphere, but it is in organic connection with man, the deeper layers of the human spirit. You can get an idea of it if you seek it in the following way. You see, men think nowadays in an abstract way, inasmuch as they desire to know through the head what the world contains of laws and so on. In these old times men were clear that in this way, merely through head knowledge, one cannot know, but one knows through the whole human being. One knows what goes on outside in space, goes on etherically, by having perceived it formerly as it were, outside, and then after puberty pictured or felt it inwardly. How do you perceive then today, with the abstract perception that you have? You discover something which you see with the senses; then you think it over afterwards. That happens in rapid succession. With those mysteries, through which man in ancient times penetrated into the laws of the atmosphere present in Imaginations, it was a different matter. As child, up to puberty, he perceived, he only perceived; afterwards he worked this over inwardly. One might say it is only a perceptive process and a thinking process spread out in time; whereas today it is placed at man's own discretion to observe abstractly and to reflect, conceive abstractly. Over the whole life was spread what we now crowd together in a few moments as regards the outer physical world, perceive, conceive. That was something which in his relation to the world man thought of as spread out over the whole of human life between birth and death. To the age of puberty he perceived certain things, afterwards he reflected upon them. Such an age was once in existence.

But now think. People said to themselves: ‘this perceiving and reflecting, this is connected in a certain way with the day, with the rising and setting sun. With the rising sun, one wakes, gets up, begins to perceive and to think; with the setting sun this ceases, since one lies down to sleep.’ Thus people connected perceiving and thinking with the day; and what was spread out over the whole life between birth and death they brought into connection with more widely extended cosmic events in the heavens. Just as it depends on the sun, on the ordinary rising and setting of the sun, that I can perceive and think, so does it depend on greater, more extended star constellations which appear after centuries, after millennia, what man develops in perceiving and thinking of the kind that I have described. And as in those old times people connected the ordinary perception and thinking with the day, with sunrise and sunset—indeed as people do today though they don't think so and even believe they go by the clock—so they connected matters concerning more comprehensive cosmic mysteries with the other star-constellations, with the other events in the heavens.

You see, a deep logic, a deep wisdom lies in these things. With superficialities one cannot get at the facts. But something else too is bound up with it. These ancient peoples—and we could speak of others besides the Egyptians and the Greeks—these ancient peoples knew that the more inward-lying forces of human nature are connected with what come to expression in celestial happenings, in star-constellations. That decadence of man which is expressed in the modern attitude to the sex problem, and that greatest decadence which is expressed in the most modern attitude to sexual problems, of this nothing was yet known to those ancient peoples of the ages of which one must speak when one deals with these things. For them it was something very different when they had the feeling: it is the sexual essences which are suffused into the human being when the voice breaks and therewith the thoughts break too—or when the other appears of which I have spoken. That the divine was then pouring itself forth in man—that was the conviction of the ancients. Hence what is only viewed in a pernicious sense today is found in all old religious rites: the sex-symbols, the so-called sex-symbols, point thus to this connection—we can call it the connection between the atmosphere with its air-events and the human processes of knowledge which take place during the whole human life between birth and death.

‘Through my eye, through my ear’—so said these people—‘I am connected with what is brought by the day. Through the deeper, more inwardly lying forces, I am connected with something quite different, with the secrets of the air, which, however, are only perceived in Imaginative experience.’ And this Imaginative experience in its concrete form I have described for you with reference to these early times.

The Old Testament conception in these matters was different inasmuch as it put doctrine in the place of actual experience. The Egyptian of the Osiris-age, especially of the earlier Osiris-age, said as follows: ‘The true human being only enters me with puberty, for I then take in what formerly I saw in Imaginations. The air transmits to me the true man.’ In the doctrine of the Old Testament this was transformed into the conception: The Elohim or Jahve have breathed into man the living breath (Odem), the air. There the essence was lifted out of the direct living experience and became doctrine, theory. This was necessary, for only so could mankind be led—and that is the meaning of the Old Testament—be led from that living in union with the outer world, which still had an inner connection between the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the world, to their further evolution (of which I will speak later). As this connection gradually vanished, it was necessary to fall back on just such a doctrine as that of the Old Testament.

But now there came the time of the death of Osiris—and therewith the time too in which, while one thing became finer, the other thing, as it were, became coarser. How is that to be understood? Well, you can imagine it thus: When we go back into the old Osiris-time, then the human being saw or felt before puberty the Light-Imaginations within the outer air (see sketch)—if I speak for the one sex—

Thus he saw in his environment the Light-Imaginations in the air up to the time of puberty. Afterwards he had the feeling that they had entered into him, and the changes occurred of which we have spoken. For the child the air was everywhere filled with Light phenomena; for the grown man, the matured man, the air was certainly still there, but he knew that as child he had seen something else in it. He knew that the air was at the same time the bearer, the mother, of light. He knew that it was not true that when he looked out into the air there was nothing in it but what was shown physically. Beings live in it which are to be perceived in Imagination.

These Beings were for the Greeks the Being of the Zeus-circle. Thus man knew that there were Beings in the air. But all this—the fact that human states of consciousness became changed—all this is connected with the fact that even objective things became different in the finer substantiality. Naturally, for the modern clever man it is an outrage if one says such things. I know it is an outrage, but nevertheless it is true: the air has become different. Naturally it has not changed in a way that can be tested by chemical reagents; nevertheless the air has become different. The air has lost the strength to express the Light-Imaginations; the air has—one could say—become coarser. It has actually become different on earth since that ancient time. The air has become coarser. But not only the air, but man himself has become coarser. That which formerly lived spiritually in the essences which permeated the larynx and the rest of the organism, that has also grown coarser. So that in fact if one speaks today of the sexual-essences one speaks of what is different from what one would speak of in ancient times. Everyone in older times knew: ‘The perception of the day is connected with my personality; the other, which I experience from the atmosphere, experience with my whole life, that, however, is connected with mankind as such, that goes beyond the individual man.’ Hence they also sought to fathom the social mysteries under which men live together, through the link which bound them with the macrocosm, they sought for social wisdom through the star-wisdom. But what lived in man as social wisdom bound him in fact to the celestial. This came to expression in the most everyday concepts. A human pair before the death of Osiris would never have felt anything else than that they had received a child from heaven. That was a living consciousness and corresponded also with truth. And this living consciousness could develop because man knew that he received out of the air-filled space what he himself experienced.

Of all this the coarse dregs, so to say, have been left. As in the air the coarse sediment has remained behind of that power of the air that revealed itself to man in Imaginations in earlier ages, so in man himself are the coarse dregs left behind. This had to come about since otherwise men could not have attained freedom and a full consciousness of the ego. But it is the dregs that have remained. In this way, however, all that the ancients meant by the divine, which as you can now readily realize, they connected in a roundabout way with the sexual essences, all this has been coarsened, not only in idea but also in reality. But it is there nevertheless; naturally not only in the one way, but in the other way too. The reproduction of mankind was in those olden times thought to be in direct connection with the micro-macrocosmic bond of mankind, as you have seen, but the whole social life of man on earth was in fact also thought to be in connection with this micro-macrocosmic bond. Numa Pompilus went to the Nymph Egeria to receive information from her as to how he should arrange social conditions in the Roman Kingdom. This, however, means nothing else than that he had let the star wisdom be imparted to him, had let the star-wisdom tell him how social conditions should be organized.

That which men reproduce on earth, and which is connected with successive generations, was to be placed in the service of what the stars have to say. As the individual man directed his life with his ordinary perceiving and thinking, according to the rising and setting of the sun, so the interconnections of mankind which later became ‘States’, were to be placed under the star-constellations as expressions of cosmic relationships.

In our language—and languages often contain memories of old conditions—we still have a remembrance of this connection in the fact that the relation of male and female is described by the word ‘Geschlecht’ (sex) and also the successive generations as ‘Geschlechter’ (races). It is one and the same word: the ‘Geschlecht’—the family, interconnected, blood relations—and then the relation of man and woman. And so is it too in other languages, and it all points to how man sought to find a recognizable connection with the macrocosm for what lay in his nature, in the deeper strata of his being.

These things have become coarsened in the direction we have discussed. Among other things that have remained behind is the attachment in longing and feeling to nationality, the clinging to the national, the chauvinistic impulse for the national; that is the lingering relic of what in older times could be thought of in quite different connections. But only when one looks into such things does one know the truth contained in them. What is expressed by the nationalistic longing? When man develops to excess this national feeling, this sentiment for the nation, what is living in it? Exactly the same as lives in the sexual, in the sexual in one way, in national sentiment in another. It is the sexual human being that lives his life through these two different poles. To be Chauvinistic, is, nothing else really than developing a sort of group-sexuality. One could say that where the sexual essences, in what they have left behind, grip men more, there is present more national Chauvinism; for it is the very force living in reproduction that comes to manifestation too in national sentiment. Hence the battle-cry of the so-called ‘Freedom of the Peoples or of the Nations’ is really only to be understood in its more intimate connections if one said—in a most respectable sense of course—‘The Call for the Re-establishment of the National in the Light of the Sex-Problem’. It is necessary to realize as one of the secrets of the time-impulse, the fact that the sexual problem is proclaimed in quite a special form over the earth today, without people having any idea of how out of their subconsciousness the sexual clothes itself in the words: ‘Freedom of the Peoples.’ And far more than men imagine are sexual impulses present in the catastrophic events of today, far more than men imagine! For the impulses to what is happening today lie, in fact, very, very deep.

Such truths must no longer in our present age be kept under lock and key. Certain Brotherhoods have been able to keep them under lock and key, because in the strictest sense of the word they have excluded women. Although joint work with women can nevertheless lead to all sorts of bad things, as has indeed constantly been shown today, yet the time has come in which right views, general views, on these matters must be spread among humanity. Ideas are nevertheless spread abroad which are impure, foolish, empty, inasmuch as from certain directions, without knowledge of the more intimate connections, all sorts of things are treated today as sexual problems. But you see how what here is pure, genuine, honourable truth comes in contact, on the one hand, with what can be the most impure, lowest way of thinking, as is shown from time to time in the outgrowths of Psycho-Analysis or similar things. You will always find, however, that what on the one hand, rightly understood, is profound truth, needs hardly to be altered at all in words, but only to be permeated with a low-minded type of thought, and it is simply a pernicious, stupid, objectionable conception.

A former age could speak of ‘nations’, when one pictured ‘Nations’ in such a way that one nation had its guardian spirit in Orion, another in another star, and one knew that one's life was ruled from the star-constellations. One then appealed, as it were, to the ordering in the heavens. Today where there is no longer such ordering in the heavens, there is the appeal to the merely national, the Chauvinistic appeal to the merely national, that is to say, an asserting of an impulse, psycho-sexual in the most pronounced sense, a backward luciferic impulse.

If one would see clearly and plainly what is today, one must not shrink from the actual underlying truth. But one can also see from such things why people are so afraid of the truth. Just imagine if, in the outcry on the freedom of nations and so forth that is raised today, people were to hear ‘that comes from sexual impulses!’ One should just imagine that! One should picture for once the crowing cock ... I don't mean any special one, not simply Clemenceau ... one should picture all the declaimers on this theme ... and imagine that they had to realize that what they crow is after all the mating-voice of the cock, however finely it is decked out in national garments.

These are things which mankind must learn to know today, and which they do not want to hear, for, as you know, of things that are black it is asserted that they are white, and of those that are white, that they are black. The point is, that that ancient time of which I have spoken has come now to the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch in which abstraction has gradually developed. There where the boundary lies between the fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean epochs (you can read about this in my book The Riddles of Philosophy), there men strove with all their might over the intellectual value—so to say—of the abstract. Read afterwards in my The Riddles of Philosophy where I speak of the nominalism and realism of the Middle Ages. Abstraction had grown to such a pitch that they asked themselves: When I form a concept, has that any significance for the things outside, or is it only a name in my head? Today people no longer reflect on such things. Of what interest is it to people to know that men have tormented themselves in the Middle Ages, when the abstractive power of thought was felt, what role the so-called universals, the general ideas, play in the world! That one wrestled and strove about what role abstractions play! Nowadays one thinks no more about it; one has already become used to abstractions; one does not strive to get beyond the abstract impulse but, on the contrary, to get thoroughly within it. The conflict over ‘universals’—this ultimately came to the point where it was said: ‘Universals, General Ideas, are at first as certain Ideas in God: those are Universals ante rem; then the Ideas are in the objects: Universals in re; and then the Ideas are in our mind, our soul: post rem—Universals post rem.’ That was an expedient, in order to take up a stand on the question: is a man connected with reality when he thinks, when he only thinks ideas? They still felt something of how in ancient times men had been connected with reality. When they reached maturity they thought over, as it were, what as a child they had formerly perceived; they knew therefore that only then had the true human being entered in. One had to struggle desperately over the Universals, as to whether, when one thinks, there is still something of reality left in one's thought or whether it is entirely divorced from reality and has nothing to do with it. Since that time people have grown accustomed to take the universals, the abstractions, as abstractions, and are more or less completely cut off from reality in their consciousness.

Such a process is taking place continually on a small scale. Think for a moment: words which are the representatives of concepts, are originally in direct connection with what is seen. For instance, a small group of fighting men has one man at the head, they have this one man before them, they call him the foremost, the first, Fürst (Eng: Chief, Prince). There one has it linked directly with what is beheld, later it was set free, it became a word which denoted something without any sort of connection with a direct perception. Just think to how many words this applies! And the next step is that then certain words become privileged, that speech becomes monopolized, becomes the property of the State. Even in language certain things are developing in this direction, are they not? ... Take the simple case that someone has learnt a great deal, has become wise—let us say, without meaning anything foolish by it—he is a learned man. In a certain naive way one would then say: he is a ‘Doctor’. Here we have a connection with fact if we call someone ‘doctor’ who is seen to be learned. For it still has a certain significance when there is documentary evidence held by a Corporation which gives this recognition. But it loses the significance when it is monopolized ... Yet mankind is enthusiastic about such monopolizing nowadays. All possible words are to be monopolized. A man is not supposed merely through his gifts to be an ‘engineer’, but this must also become a recognized title from heaven knows where. And increasingly things are to be loosed from their connections. There you can see the abstraction-process on a small scale, but it is accomplished wholesale with infinite significance. A family has a father. What is the connection between the pater, who is the father of the family and the Pater, who is a priest? This tearing loose of what is contained in the word—I wanted to bring it forward as illustrating the abstraction-process taking place in humanity.

And in the case of ideas it is much more mischievous than in language; people often make use of concepts without having the least idea of their connection with what is perceived. Sometimes people then search for the real observation, become comic, frightfully comic in this search! Only remember how there is a whole literature today about the cross-sign, which is really a universal sign, spread over the world. Most amusing is all the learnedness applied to it! This sign

is traced back to this

That was supposed to have been the cross of former times.

Sometimes they then trace that back by saying: only the parts have been left, the swastika and so on. Yes, it is frightfully

clever what has been written about it, quite immensely clever, the way ‘cleverness’ has been applied to such things. I do not wish at all to go in for detailed criticism. But to know what is true, cleverness is not enough. One ought, of course, to know that the cross-sign means nothing else than that the human being takes his stand, stretches out his arms and then he is the cross. From above downwards goes a stream of existence that binds man with the macrocosm, and through the outstretched hands too. And the Cross is the sign for Man.

And when you find distinguishing marks of the Assyrian kings or of the Egyptian kings, medallions, for instance, then they are medallions with the cross-sign.

And two other signs (the cross on the medallion is one sign that ancient kings had) were, for instance, these.

The star in the sign is generally made in such a way that one does not immediately recognize the pentagram in it—or is it even a hexagram;—however, that is not the point.

Specially clever people have said: that is the Sun, that is the Cross, that is the moon, that is the star. But the deeper meaning lies precisely in the fact that it is man, the microcosm, who is compounded of sun and moon. You see from this ordinary cross-sign, how the concept has been separated from the real object. The direct perception is this, the sign is this: man in the form of a cross. People today know so little of how to connect the object with the sign, that, as I have said, an immensely clever literature exists which seeks to find out how this sign is connected with what it wants to express. And so one could write quite clever articles over the most everyday words without discovering how these things, these words, were connected with the realities.

Humanity had to go through the period of abstractions. We know that today we are no longer in the sign of Aries, in which the Sun stood at the beginning of Spring when the transition took place from the old Imaginative time, of which echoes still lingered, to the age of abstractions. We have entered the age of Pisces. A special characteristic of this age is that man receives the force for abstract ideas out of the macrocosm. Man receives this force today from the macrocosm. But in the meantime man does not know how he is to unite the abstract ideas again with reality. They must be united again with reality.

I said at the beginning of the lecture that in this fifth Post-Atlantean epoch there must be a kind of recapitulation of the time in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch when one looked back to the ancient Osiris-age, when Imaginations were in existence. The reverse, as it were, must take place: man must find the way back again to the Imaginations. One could say in another form: Osiris must become alive again, we must find ways and means to bring Osiris to life. I have spoken very concretely in these studies by saying that we must find forms of experience which are common to the dead and the living. Since Osiris was slain he has been with the dead; he will remain with the dead, but he will have to come again among the living, when there are concerns which are common to the dead and the living for the social life of men.

This brings us to the fact that people must understand something which it is above all necessary for our time to understand: how will Osiris be revivified? How can Osiris come to new life? How does man approach again life and experience in the Imaginative consciousness?

We will speak of this tomorrow—how he is to rise again, and how the resurrection is to be brought about. Tomorrow's considerations shall have then, as their subject, the Imaginative consciousness.