The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Welcome: First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Steiner on behalf of everyone for the meeting that he has granted us despite his many commitments. The suggestions that Dr. Steiner gave us at Easter have continued to work in us in the meantime. We have not heard much from each other in the meantime, but when we came together again and talked, we realized that we had all made some progress. Some things that were still a problem at Easter are no longer a problem today. We have already come to specific things today. We believe that special tasks arise for us from our special position between anthroposophy and the youth movement, tasks on two sides: towards the youth movement and towards the anthroposophical movement. We want to bring anthroposophy to the youth movement. This is probably best done on a person-to-person basis. However, this work should be supported and promoted by more “official” work from the community. Therefore, a network of trusted people should be set up throughout Germany, with a center in Tübingen. The task of the trusted people should be to connect with young anthroposophists in their area, to attend conferences of the youth movement, to distribute writings by taking advantage of personal relationships. An article on the youth movement and anthroposophy can be published in an anthroposophical journal for this purpose. The work should be carried out in close contact with the main association. We regard the Catholic youth movement as our most determined opponent. We would ask Doctor to perhaps elaborate on this. We see our work in the Anthroposophical Movement as follows: we know that we have to become richer in knowledge. But we see our particular task as being to work to build community. We want to continue our community life as before with evenings together, hikes, festivals and so on. But we want to gradually let it be permeated and transformed by the Anthroposophical spirit. Here we ask the doctor for some specific suggestions. We are thinking of inviting younger members of the Anthroposophical Society, students and others, to our communities first. I would like to add one more practical question here: is it possible for a young person from the youth movement to also be a sponsor for admission to the Anthroposophical Society?

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps I may first deal with the last point, the question of how to bring Anthroposophy into the youth movement. To do that, you need to have a real insight into the conditions that prevail there, not only externally but also internally. You see, the anthroposophical movement – you are familiar with most of its history – could not work any differently than to consider the real possibilities from the very beginning. At the beginning of the formation of the Anthroposophical Society, humanity was not yet ripe for the anthroposophical movement. But one could not wait for general maturity to get the movement off the ground at all. There were certain people who had been searching for something for a long time, something from the depths of their souls. People who had not yet found theosophy and mysticism were there, and some of them did not even know that there was such a thing as anthroposophy. People who had a certain longing for something deeper than life offered.

I was invited, for example, to an association where the most diverse people in terms of talent and education were united and had such a longing. And I went because I had more time then than I do now. Among these people, I found something curious. At the time, I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School in Berlin and had my audience there. There, in that place, I was really only invited and a newcomer, but to my surprise I found a small number of my listeners from the Workers' Education School. You see, this longing I spoke of was everywhere, and one had to take it into account, otherwise the anthroposophical movement would not have progressed at all. What one can do today could not be done at all back then. The difficulty was to make those who had this longing understand the things. Many could not go along, they wanted something different. But nevertheless there were always individuals who joined in, and so the movement grew. But as a result, the movement still has the consequences of its teething troubles: unclear, mystical striving, all sorts of things of this kind, as you could also notice here.

Now, for example, the most diverse people want to hear something about what suits them. So someone makes the acquaintance of an anthroposophist. He may ask for an answer to a medical question and end up with someone who says: “You have to read such and such a saying from Dr. Steiner's ‘Calendar of the Soul’. It is true that Steiner has a habit of always giving you something other than what you are looking for, but what you are looking for you would find anyway; it would then pass over into you from the saying.

This had to be reckoned with. And we should not forget that the anthroposophical movement, in its starting point, has something almost edgy and angular about it, which can come across as highly unappealing. But all this had to be reckoned with. You can't go charging headlong into anything. That is part of it, and you should have no illusions about it. You had to reckon with this longing that is in today's youth. But you must not lose sight of the fact, especially at the moment when you want to approach the anthroposophical movement, that the anthroposophical movement has come so far as to break with all old prejudices itself. It will of course work without the prejudices; it is quite possible to break with all philistinism.

That is what I wanted to say at the outset, so that you do not come from your point of view and say that anthroposophists are such terrible people.

The other thing is that community building, hiking together, is by no means excluded; on the contrary, it should be encouraged. Community building, if it is supported by the anthroposophical spirit, can take all kinds of forms. You must not forget that when you talk about the fact that community building is something completely new today, you must not forget that we old people were also young once, and that back then there were always people who formed such communities. I still remember a circle that we had formed in Berlin, which was perhaps nothing more than a clique, in doctrinal terms. But even cliques had good intentions, because every community is, of course, based on such a clique. Of course, the formation of the community also had all kinds of add-ons that were related to the character of the individual people. Even the title of our community in Berlin was actually intended to annoy the philistines. I say this in quotation marks: this community was called “Der Verbrechertisch” (The Criminal Table). Otto Erich Hartleben was also one of them. This is not to say that we broke in and so on. I am only telling you this so that you can get a complete picture that today's youth movement is not the first community to be formed. You have already expressed that.

But then there is absolutely no objection to members of the youth movement being able to act as guarantors for those in the youth movement who want to become members of the Anthroposophical Society. That is something that can absolutely be realized. And that brings me to the other question.

The question of the Catholic youth movement has just been thrown into the debate, and quite rightly so. You must be extremely careful with regard to this youth movement and not lose sight of the possibility of being influenced in one direction or another. There are a great many people in the Catholic youth movement who are hopeful and hardworking. On the other hand, it would be a serious mistake if you were to fall prey to the Catholic youth movement as a Catholic youth movement. Your youth movement arises from the needs of young people themselves. What I would like to mention briefly is that the whole difficulty lies in the following. The entire youth movement has arisen from the needs of the individual, and it is held together only by the cement that resides in the hearts of individuals. This is not the case with the Catholic youth movement. All movements that really want to move towards the future do not have the same opportunities as the Catholic youth movement, which guards something that has been established through the development of humanity, through tradition and so on, with tremendous purpose. The youth movement must be decentralized. The Catholic youth movement is thoroughly centralized. And the greatest danger that exists is falling into the Catholic fundamentals. You must not imagine this to be so easy! Do you think a movement is emerging that says: We want to be good Catholics, we want to do everything to lead people back to a living Christianity, we want nothing to do with the Jesuits. — To the one who hears this, it might seem tolerable. But only those who know that such a movement can be well set up with all the programs against the Jesuits can gain a point of view, but that all of this can be done well by a Jesuit priest. Because it is absolutely in the program of the Jesuits that they set up their opponents themselves. You will hardly believe that many fall for it. But look at the young Catholic movement, which was formed against Jesuitism many years ago, and after only fifteen years it was taken in. This is something that does not need to be left out of the program.

If you do not pay attention to the fact that the Jesuit is reckoning with the most powerful of his opponents and is thus, in a sense, generous, you will never be able to see clearly. Otherwise you would see that one cannot be careful enough against the Catholic youth movement as such, so as not to slip into it. I had good acquaintances who were on the same ground as me at the time. But when I meet someone from them again today, I can see that a large part of them has fallen under the spell of the Catholic Church. The spell of the Catholic Church is so great, and the Catholic Church has an enormous power of attraction. And when you consider all this, you always have to be on your guard against a trap. Therefore, I think that you will only make progress if you maintain the absolute independence of the Catholic youth movement. You must be aware that all strength depends on your finding absolutely uninfluenceable people, of whom you are sure that they have nothing in ambush. You will not find any Jesuit stamp on them; you will not find that they keep everything straight with you. I am telling you this only to characterize the matter and to make you aware that you could get into trouble if you were to give in to the Catholic youth movement, which is now also crying out against Jesuitism. But you have to look at people again in fifteen years, and then you will see which side they have ended up on.

And with the essay on the anthroposophical youth movement, one would achieve even more. It is something very important that emerges from what I have often spoken to you about, that much of what emerges from the youth movement lies deep in the soul. Most of it can only be understood if one grasps what the youth movement is. I can well imagine that such an essay can have a very favorable effect, and it would certainly be good if this were done by young people. If this were to come about, then of course one would have to be prepared for the special opposition that can be connected with individuality in a favorable or unfavorable way. One must necessarily take this into account, even if it does not appear so on the surface. Although many say that anthroposophists only do what they are told, in practice the individuality is nowhere as pronounced as in the Anthroposophical Society. There, everyone only does what they really want. This actually has its disadvantages.

It is true that something must be present uniformly where one is dealing with a movement. And if you now elect representatives, it is necessary that you take care that they do not start disputes, but that they really are people who put the whole above the personal. This will always be necessary in the youth movement. So I think you have to look at your people, because you have to know your people if you want to have confidence in them. That is all I wanted to say in response to your questions.

Question: How should community be cultivated?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, once you have grasped the spirit of anthroposophy, you will think that the way in which the individual community is to be formed comes into consideration only in the second instance. It may well be that the individual communities that already exist will continue to be cultivated entirely out of their own nature and will do what they have always done. It is not a matter of now making a programmatic decision to do this or that. Anthroposophy can only work in such a way that it can be incorporated into every form. It is best if you do not approach it from the outside, changing the existing arrangements, but rather you should think of carrying Anthroposophy into it as such. Anthroposophy is a secret power that could gradually enter everything.

A participant: Anthroposophists always say that hiking will lead to enthusiasm.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, that is not true, the walks as such do not belong to the areas that promote enthusiasm. Walks are enthusiastic when the members are enthusiastic.

A participant: One is always reproached, especially from the anthroposophical side, that the youth movement can do nothing but walk and celebrate festivals.

Rudolf Steiner: That is connected with what I have assumed, which also applies to the Anthroposophical Movement. It also came into being among human beings, and the people who have proven themselves in it from the beginning are naturally more of the kind that are not so attuned to hiking, but are involved in completely different types of work. Therefore, you cannot expect them to have much time for the migratory birds. I think it is natural to understand that you are confronted with all sorts of things. Now you can keep the migrations quiet. All this is something you don't need to worry about. The anthroposophical movement could just as easily have been created among migratory birds. In all these matters, one must speak in such a way that one really has to consider the whole breadth and comprehensiveness of anthroposophy and not limit oneself to some little details. One cannot demand of the anthroposophical movement that it accommodate every wild fanaticism. I can imagine that one could say that one does not need to think at all, but only to wander. This is not to say that all community-building must take on this wild form, but it is the case with many. The anthroposophical movement was brought to fruition by people who naturally had very different feelings from those of today's youth; it did not arise from youth. It will be appropriate when it can be cultivated by young people. But it arose somewhat decrepitly; from the beginning it had nothing youthful about it. I always had to take this old age into account. What confronted me in the first lectures is characteristic of old age. I spoke as I am accustomed to speaking, and an old man approached me and said: If you speak so loudly, you drive away the spiritual essence. You must not talk so loudly, you must also say occult science. Incidentally, this man was later one of the most loyal supporters of anthroposophy until his death. It is best not to be offended by this old man. There is no need to be offended, just stick to the matter at hand.

Question: What do you think of summer solstice celebrations? Could you perhaps say something about them?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, I have already said at Easter that you have to stick to what is a fact for those who are involved in anthroposophy, but which can be experienced everywhere. I said that something is emerging in the development of humanity at the end of the 1980s that is particularly shaping the background of today's youth movement, that is emerging as a longing and so on, as something that is actually emerging from the deeper layers of the soul, and that we can see in its effect.

People of earlier times regarded things that existed as very real powers, and these powers were such that they worked in people until the year: effects that were set at the summer solstice. You will understand what I have said fully if you imagine yourself in ancient times. Man was then quite differently connected with the laws of nature. Man was so connected with the whole of nature, that the thoughts conceived at the summer solstice were the most fruitful for the assimilation of the laws. One must resort to somewhat radical expressions if one wants to form one's own thoughts about what then lived in man. People said to themselves, just as the bull is brought out to fertilize at certain times of the year, so the human soul must expose itself to be fertilized at certain times of the year. Now there is the fact that the earth sleeps in summer, that is, the earth is in a state like that of man when he sleeps. The earth sleeps in summer and wakes in winter. And just as the etheric body is most active during sleep, so is the earth in this state. In the past, people felt most connected to it then. You know how they held their greatest festivals around the summer solstice. In contrast, in the south, in Africa and so on, it was the winter solstice that people regarded as the greatest festival. They wanted to come into contact with what emanated from the awakening etheric body of the earth; this is based on a polar contrast in the human spirit. And ultimately, all customs of the time can be traced back to this.

All this emerged as a feeling in people at that time. For him, it all comes down to the fact that it contains a certain lawfulness. It is absolutely right that things come up again. I suffered pain when a professor came up with the idea that Easter should no longer take place after the sky, should no longer be based on the sky, but should always be moved to April 1st. He thought this was such a clever idea that one should no longer have a movable festival, but that it should always be celebrated on April 1. However, this completely tears man and his feelings out of the whole process in the universe. This human feeling would indeed be corrupted if it were to be removed from the process in the universe, whereas this coexistence in the universe has something in it that also keeps man alive and young. If there is an inclination to experience the spirit of the solstice, so that one knows that one acted out of the highest feelings at that time, then it would be good to promote that. But one should be immersed in concrete life, so that one knows that there is something different about the summer solstice than about the winter solstice. This thinking should be cultivated on such occasions.

Question about the way of life.

Rudolf Steiner: This can only be done if the anthroposophical movement as such is lucky with what is to intervene in the whole of social life. Of course, as long as the anthroposophical movement still has something sectarian in it, it will always be called a sect.

Anthroposophy has found healing methods today. People will come and want to be healed; but then people stand up in the name of a party and rail against the law that something like the anthroposophical movement allows at all. I am giving a specific example! People want to cultivate Anthroposophy in secret, but they shrink from public appearances. But anthroposophy can and must work on a large scale; only then can it prevail. But people must also have the courage to bring the anthroposophical spirit to the general public. From the very beginning, I always tried to realize that we founded a therapeutic institute, a research institute and so on. Work must be done in such a way that it is truly based on anthroposophy. If things continue as they are, this will not be possible. Of course, the effectiveness of the matter always depends on the will of those who work in the public sphere on anthroposophical principles. And of course, if you always speak in abstract terms, you can say that this is not possible in the next few years.

When I presented my threefold social order idea, people said: It could take another hundred years for that to happen, the time frame is poorly chosen. — I can only say that if people thought this through in everything they did, nothing would get done. That is not the right attitude. Instead, the question for me is: What should one do? I must say that the anthroposophical movement would not have come as far as it has if I had not repeatedly asked myself this question. If you stand on anthroposophical ground, it is also a matter of developing the will. The more people we have who unreservedly stand on this ground, the better it is. Our task now is not to reflect on how long it will take for people to be ready for our ideas, but to work on making people ready. Therefore, we must do everything possible as if readiness already existed. We must act as if readiness were already a reality. People always think: Can one do that? This is a certain fear. One is afraid to do it, as if then, when one reflects, whether one can approach the “thing in itself” with thinking. I can imagine it like this: there is a plate of soup and next to it is a spoon. The spoon is thinking, the plate of soup is the thing in itself. If you now think about whether the spoon that was brought to you is now in a real relationship to the soup, or if you wonder what will happen if I now take the spoon in my hand and eat? Then you will not be satisfied, but you just have to grab it!

Question about the adult education movement.

Rudolf Steiner: I have been able to convince myself that improvement cannot be expected from adult education centers. Teachers accept everything that has developed from the older culture without reservation, and then it is taught in adult education centers. Will it be better if adult education centers are founded with the content of contemporary culture? Of course one can only say and think that one should do it in a similar way to the way I have done it when I have been called upon. One should bring into it as much of the living element as one can. But it is a waste of energy. It is true that one cannot withdraw completely. But one must realize that one is not working into a movement of ascent but into one of descent.

I did not just object to this because the lecturers themselves choose a topic for their lectures that is not sustainable. It was important to me to show that we must overcome the method by which it is taught. The spirit that must be behind it is more important than one might think. One can say that the adult education efforts also have high principles. But principles have no effect. People believe that if ten or twelve people get together and work out an ideal school program, something good will come of it. These people are all clever, terribly clever. The most beautiful programs are made of how the adult education center can become a reality. But, you see, that is not what is important. When someone founds something, it is not a program that is important, but rather achieving the greatest possible success with the people involved. Don't you think so? People come to me with ideal programs all the time. But in a school, you have to start with the people who are in it, with whom you can't stick to the program. We have to see that we get out of this way of thinking and get down to the real world.

Now one can say: Yes, fine, I just want to work somewhere. I have a mission area, and I want to bring that to people with whom I can achieve a level of culture, let's say, A. Now, however, everyone can see that A is not the highest that one can achieve, but one must achieve A and B. But now one does not have the people with whom one can achieve that. Then it is better, so they say, to achieve only A. If you reason in this way, you not only fail to achieve A, but you achieve A minus B.

A sense of the real in life must be taken from spiritual science. One must not live in programmatic concepts. One must express oneself in concepts, but the concepts are not what matters. What matters is that what life is, is really carried into everything, not that what is dead is brought into the adult education center.

Question about Muck-Lamberty.

Rudolf Steiner: These things recur in all places. I need only remind you of the Häußer who is up to his tricks here. This man has been wandering around here to the horror of various people, appearing in the Siegle House and also saying all sorts of fierce things in front of people. But I would like to warn against this, especially against those who do not work in a healthy way through their minds, but who work in a suggestive way. These people have a strong power, but it cannot come from a healthy person, but from a madman. And that must not be overlooked. Things must be healthy if they are to embrace broader areas. And if the youth movement is to serve humanity, it must remain healthy. Here we come to things that develop power. But this one is a power of the mad that animals also have. It is not the power that counts, but rather what is expressed through this power. The fact of the matter is that we can only truly penetrate into a matter from an anthroposophical spirit if we eliminate all suggestion. One must not let oneself be overcome by this power. Because I must say, I have seen that very limited people have done colossal things out of this power. One must be careful of spiritual drunkenness, especially in a youth movement. One should behave in this way towards these things.

You see, I believe that there is something that, as simple as it may seem, can give you a great deal of protection, and I would like to point this out to you. In all movements, including the anthroposophical movement, there are people who are terribly mystical. An old Roman friend of mine once said to me: Oh, anthroposophists are all so “sublime”, they all have a face “all the way to the stomach”. — And there are people of that ilk everywhere. That is one extreme. The other is the boundless superficiality with which many people pass over everything. But not true, in order not to be unjust, it is a matter of not placing oneself too strongly in the power of others, but of keeping one's humanity together. And for that there is only one remedy, but it is necessary for everyone, and that is humor. All faces up to the belly and all superficiality are harmful. What is needed to arrive at the right opinion is humor. One can judge such phenomena correctly if one can laugh at them. This is not meant to be ironic, but to allow what they have to have its effect. Humor is needed everywhere for judgment. The youth movement should not become like the one with the face up to the belly, but should really cultivate a healthy sense of humor. I know a strangely large number of pessimists in the youth movement who, because of their pessimism, are exposed to everything. The present generation is so clever that it does not even notice how the whole culture is going crazy. If you ask real “mystics”, they describe the influence of the external world on man as dangerous, as man is dependent on every breath of air. If that were really the case, all human beings would be the most terrible hysterics. If human beings were really so dependent, only hysterical people would live. They would be powerless in the hands of every breath of air. But thank God that is not the case with human beings. There you have it. So it really is important to educate ourselves in such a way that we can also feel more highly, that we can feel every breath and that it does not knock us over.

Question about Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz.

Rudolf Steiner: People write books and go out into the world without any real experience. Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz are the archetypal phenomena for this. Such people know absolutely everything. For example, they also know what it is like to be a true anthroposophist. They are simply the type of intellectual of the present time. Gertrud Prellwitz is no different from the rest, so you have to take the matter with humor.

Likewise, the other thing, that one has experienced that people come every moment and say: Oh, something terrible has happened! My child is developing quite unnatural sexuality. — If you then ask about the age of the child, you learn that it is only five years old. Do you believe that sexuality only comes out when you are mature and that it really makes no difference whether a child tickles its nose or scratches itself elsewhere. Don't interpret eroticism into everything, so that you don't pour out terrible theories. If you look at a five-year-old child for eroticism, that's nonsense. In this question, it is much more important to think healthily than to come up with many theories. Because most of what is being developed about it now is simply nonsense. Really, people just need to consider how terribly short-sighted these things are. There have been cultures where eating was accompanied by feelings of shame. Similar theories about eating could now arise from this. You will learn: If you really concern yourself with the comprehensive questions of life, then you will have no time left for such theorizing. |

A participant: These things should be grasped more seriously.

Rudolf Steiner: You asked the question as a question, which one must say: It is asked as if one wanted to build a house and does not yet have the ground for it.

A participant: Muck-Lamberty brings the ground into his craft with art and so on. And then they - the “new crowd” - want to transform life from the ground up.

Rudolf Steiner: But reality is what matters. You can't grow backwards in the world, only forwards. You can't move forward by thinking about eroticism. If you develop healthy foundations, the erotic life will become healthy by itself. The erotic life is such that it must be properly placed in life. As it appears in a person and at a certain age, it also develops in a certain cultural context. You can only let it emerge. If the other things develop healthily, a healthy eroticism will also develop. The greatest harm is done by taking a programmatic approach in this area. In social life, too, things will develop as they must under healthy conditions. Healthy conditions are needed everywhere. Countless people have come to me and asked me about prenatal education. The theories that have been put forward about this are something terrible. Because it is a very hothouse kind of thinking that comes to light. What is needed is for the mother to be healthy and to live properly. The child's organism is dependent on the mother. If the mother keeps herself healthy, the child will automatically be born in good order. There are certain questions that it makes no sense to ask. Just because we live today in an age of intellectual abundance, these questions are asked out of season. People need to have topics. They do not want to await experience. They write, and as a result movements can arise that lead nowhere.

A participant: The movement did not come about through thinking, but quite unconsciously. People live together in small circles and seek a certain naturalness.

Rudolf Steiner: What do you mean by a certain naturalness? — Suppose you have a circle here, a circle there, and a circle there; here a circle of peasant boys, here decadent aristocrats, here healthy people. Each circle lives out itself in a completely different way. You can't say that some theory is useful! — It is really a matter of certain things only being able to develop when a foundation is there. I do not want to be ironic about this. We cannot reflect on how a newborn child cultivates its sexuality. We must have the courage to find the right thing at the right moment. Therefore, we must try to develop humor in this area, to really walk the middle road between philistinism and licentiousness, as already pointed out by Aristotle.

A participant: There must be a strict distinction, because Muck-Lamberty and Gertrud Prellwitz are quite different. What humanity has learned about this, it has learned from older people. Stammler and Fidus have spread false things about Muck. Muck sought young people with whom he wanted to show that there is something between people that is equal. They brought dance, folk dance, as one of the external forms. People flocked to it, but left just as quickly. The suggestive effect quickly faded. Those who remained represent a real spiritual power. The artisan community is one of the healthiest movements. The people of Naumburg are trying to build up all economic activities in a fraternal way and want to be independent of what they negate. In doing so, an erotic life has developed that was healthy until Gertrud Preilwitz introduced her theories into it. But the crisis has now been overcome. The people there have now moved beyond Gertrud Prellwitz. Their spiritual movement is now merging with anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: Things are such that everything can be treated from its good side, and that need not be doubted. But it is important to have the necessary perspective here. For example, it is indisputable that some of the people who supported the anthroposophical movement came from spiritualist circles, and yet something substantial came of it later. But that is no defense of spiritualism. Regarding the events in Naumburg, one must consider how it came about that the matter developed in Naumburg as it did. There were always movements in Naumburg that went backwards at any time. A strong one-sidedness can be brought into something like this. The Naumburg case is no more conclusive than the fact that the people ended up in a student movement. Although I am not going to defend spiritualism, capable people have emerged from it. Of course, something can arise from anything. So you can't take the material for an opinion from such factors. Muck-Lamberty wanted to make humanity happy; he stood up for purity and craftsmanship, and so on. The traveling teachers he set up had a circle of boys around them with whom they lived. He stood up for purity and had two illegitimate [but wanted] children.

[There follows a confusion of voices that could not be written down. ]

Rudolf Steiner: It is therefore certainly necessary that we pursue anthroposophy as such, and that we cannot then expect that something like this is to be feared. The beginnings, of which was spoken today, will have to be the beginnings.

Question: A pedagogical question. How does anthroposophy and the Waldorf school relate to existing independent school communities and country boarding schools where teachers act as friends and human beings? I got the answer from anthroposophists: These schools should be avoided because they want to realize an outdated educational ideal, because they are snobbish.

Rudolf Steiner: The matter is this. The Waldorf School is based on a pedagogy that emerges entirely from the anthroposophical understanding of the human being, in that it places the main emphasis on the fact that the human being is only treated as he wants it in the deepest interior. The Waldorf school is based on this, without programs being made. It is built on knowledge of human nature and the child is not asked, but in a certain sense it is asked what it wants. The main thing is that the Waldorf school is truly a democratic school. It puts proletarian children next to children from the highest levels. It fulfills to a high degree what can be called a democratic comprehensive school. Otherwise, one takes the view that we live in a world that can only recover by absorbing great, comprehensive cultural impulses, but that cannot be acquired through antidotes that remain exceptions. So it is a matter of accepting what exists. I adapt my approach to the educational situation as it arises from the circumstances of the place in question, for example a city. If I have the opportunity to found an anthroposophical school in a city, I found it based on the realities of that city.

As for the educational method, it goes without saying that one cannot say anything against a country education institute that introduces this pedagogy. On the other hand, I believe that this does not represent a social act because young people are led away from the life in which they are placed; they are educated away from it. This is not taken into account. I know an excellent medical practitioner who came to me and said: This person's heart is not normal, something must be done. I said: If you make the man's heart healthy, he can no longer live because his whole organism is attuned to it. Because you always have to have an eye for the whole. Taking young people to the country may well foster a good sense of community, which can be cultivated in seclusion, but these institutions would only prove their worth if these people later proved themselves in the entire social organism. I have certain reservations about this. It is important to make the whole organism healthy. It cannot be a matter of discussing how one discusses in general on anthroposophical ground; that cannot be our concern. I have appointed an excellent teacher from a landerziehungsheim (a land-based school) to Stuttgart. He likes it better here; he must find something here that goes beyond that; the man must be able to compare the two. From this you can see at the same time that one is not one-sided, because otherwise I would not have appointed the teacher. The point is to find the good everywhere. You must not think that you have to push through your program everywhere.

A participant: In these schools, where young people live together, a life should develop that is not unworldly.

Rudolf Steiner: But an individual! The individuals must later work as individuals again. If you were to pursue this, you would find that selfish natures easily develop in the country education homes, and they think it should be like that everywhere. They become terrible critics, terrible busybodies, for whom nothing in the world is right. There is something in it, like a social eccentric spirit. You have to see that you are not asking for the impossible.

What should I have done? If I had started with an abstraction, I would never have founded the Waldorf School. Residential schools in the sense of Wyneken and Lietz, where everything can be created, are basically easy to implement. A landerziehungsheim can basically only be created on the basis of what is taken out of society. Besides, not many proletarian children will be in landerziehungsheims.

A participant: I myself taught at an independent school that has now closed. But we had more free places than others. The rich paid a surplus in school fees, which meant that places could be given to poor children.

Rudolf Steiner: But that is the unsocial thing about it, even with the Waldorf School. It also has to be capitalized. This can only be improved if we implement the threefold social order.

A participant: In boarding schools, a family life is led, while the form of the present-day family is not always the most favorable.

Rudolf Steiner: These are realistic judgments. For example, boarding school life has always existed in English circles. There, boarding school life with its light and dark sides is well known.

Rudolf Steiner concludes the discussion.

Today I would like to insert certain things which will afterwards make it possible for us to understand more closely the karmic connections of the Anthroposophical Movement itself. What I wish to say today will take its start from the fact that there are two groups of human beings in the Anthroposophical Movement. In general terms I have already described how the Anthroposophical Movement is composed of the individuals within it. What I shall say today must of course be taken in broad outline and as a whole; but there are the two groups of human beings in the Anthroposophical Movement. The things which I shall characterise do not lie so obviously spread out ‘on the palm of the hand,’ as we say. They are by no means such that crude and simple observation would enable us to say: in the case of this or that member, it is so or so. Much of what I shall characterise today lies not in the full everyday consciousness of the personality, but, like most karmic things, in the instincts—in the sub-consciousness. Nevertheless, it does thoroughly impress itself on the character and temperament, the mode of action and indeed the real action of the human being.

We have to distinguish the one group, who are related to Christianity in such a way that those who belong to it feel their attachment to Christianity nearest and dearest to their hearts. There lives in these souls the longing, as anthroposophists, to be able to call themselves Christians in the true sense of the word, as they conceive it.

This group derives great comfort from the fact that it can be said in the widest and fullest sense: The Anthroposophical Movement is one that recognises and bears the Christ Impulse within it. Indeed, for this group, pangs of conscience would arise if it were not so.

Now as to the other group:—In the manifestations of their life, those who belong to it are indeed no less sincerely Christian. And yet, they come to Christianity from rather a different angle. To begin with they find great satisfaction in the anthroposophical cosmology—the evolution of the earth from the other planetary forms, and so forth. They find satisfaction in all that Anthroposophy has to say about Man in general. From this point they are then led naturally to Christianity. But they do not feel in the same measure an inward need of the heart, to place Christ in the central point at all costs.

As I said, these things work themselves out to a large extent in the subconsciousness. But whoever is able to practice true observation of souls will be able to judge the different individuals in the right way in every single case.

Now the origins of this grouping go back into very ancient times. You know, my dear friends, from my Occult Science that at a certain period of earthly evolution the souls took their departure as it were from the continued evolution of the Earth and came to dwell on other planets of our system. Then, during a certain time—during the Lemurian and Atlantean times—they came down again to Earth. Thus the souls came down again from the various planets—not only from Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc., but also from the Sun—to take on an earthly form. And we know how there arose, under the influence of these facts, what I described in Occult Science as the Oracles.

Now there were many among these souls who tended through a very ancient karma to come into that stream which afterwards became the Christian stream. We must remember, after all, that less than a third of the population of the earth are professing Christians to this day. Thus only a certain number of the individual souls who came down to earth unfolded the tendency, the impulse, to evolve towards the Christian stream.

The human souls came down at different times. There were those who came down comparatively soon, in the first periods of Atlantean civilisation. But there were also those who came down relatively late—whose sojourn, so to speak, in the pre-earthly, planetary life was long. When we look back into the life of such a soul—beginning with the present incarnation—we come perhaps to a former Christian incarnation and maybe to yet another Christian incarnation. Then we come to the pre-Christian incarnations. But we reach comparatively soon the earliest incarnation of such a soul, whereat we must say: Tracing the life still farther back from this point, it goes up into the planetary realms. Before this point, these souls were not yet present in earthly incarnations.

In the case of other souls, who have also found their way into Christianity, it is different. We can go very far back; we find many incarnations. It was after many incarnations, pre-Christian and Atlantean too, that these other souls dived down at length into the Christian stream.

For intellectualistic thought, such a thing as I have just mentioned is exceedingly misleading. For one might easily be led to suppose that those who by the judgment of present-day civilisation would be considered as particularly able minds, are the very ones who have had many incarnations. But this need not by any means be the case. On the contrary, people who have excellent faculties in the present-day sense of the word—people who are well able to enter into modern life may often be the very ones for whom we find comparatively few past incarnations on the earth.

Perhaps I may here remind you of what I said at the time when the anthroposophical stream which we now have in the Anthroposophical Movement was inaugurated. I may remind you of what I said at the Christmas Foundation Meeting, when I spoke of those individualities with whom the Epic of Gilgamesh is connected.¹ I explained certain things about such individualities. We find, as we look backward, that they had had comparatively few incarnations. But there were other individualities again who had many incarnations

Now, my dear friends, for those human souls who come to Anthroposophy today—no matter whether there are still other, intermediate incarnations or not—that incarnation is important, which falls roughly into the 3rd or 4th or 5th century after Christ. (We find it nearly always, spread out over a fairly long period,—two to three centuries. Sometimes it is later—even as late as the 7th or 8th century). Above all things, we must look into the experiences of these souls in that early Christian time. We then find a subsequent incarnation when all these experiences were fastened or confirmed. But I will connect what now I have to say today most definitely with what we may describe as the first Christian incarnation.

Now in the case of all these souls, the important thing is: According to all their past conditions, their former lives on earth, how were they to relate themselves to Christianity? You see, my dear friends, this is a very important karmic question. Later on we shall have to consider other, more subsidiary karmic questions; but this question is so to speak a cardinal question of karma, because, passing over many other subsidiary things, it is through their deepest, innermost experiences in former incarnations—through what they underwent with respect to world-conceptions, religious beliefs and the like—that human beings come into the Anthroposophical Society. With respect to the karma of the Anthroposophical Society, this must therefore be placed into the foreground. What have the souls in this Society experienced, in matters of Knowledge, World-conception and Religion?

Now in those early centuries of Christian evolution, one could still take one's start from traditions of knowledge—which had existed ever since the founding of Christianity—about the Being of Christ Himself. In these traditions, He who lived as Christ in the personality of Jesus was regarded as a Dweller on the Sun, a Being of the Sun, before He entered into this earthly life. We must not imagine that the attitude of the Christian world to these truths was always as negative as it is today. In the first centuries of Christianity they still understood the Gospels, certain passages of which speak so distinctly of this Mystery. They understood that the Being who is called Christ had come down into a human body from the Sun. How they conceived it in detail is less important for the moment; the point is that this conception was still theirs. It certainly went as far as I have just described.

At the same time, in the epoch of which I am now speaking, the possibility of really understanding such a conception had dwindled very much. It was hard to understand that a Being coming from the Sun descends on to the Earth. Above all, many of the souls who had come into Christianity having a large number of earthly incarnations behind them—far back into Atlantean times—could no longer fully understand how Christ can be called a Being of the Sun. The very souls who in their old beliefs had felt themselves attached to the Sun-Oracles, and who thus revered the Christ even in Atlantean times inasmuch as they looked upward to the Sun—the souls therefore who according to the saying of St. Augustine were ‘Christians before Christianity was founded upon Earth,’² Christians as it were of the Sun—these very souls, by the whole character of their spiritual life, could find no real understanding of the saying that Christ was a Sun-Hero. Therefore they preferred to hold fast to that belief which—without such interpretation, without this cosmic Christology—simply regarded Christ as a God, a God from unknown realms, who had united Himself with the body of Jesus. Under these conditions, they accepted what is related in the Gospels. They could no longer turn their gaze upward to the cosmic worlds in order to understand the Being of the Christ. They had learned to know Him only in the worlds beyond the Earth. For even the Mysteries on Earth—the Sun-Oracles—had always spoken to them of Christ as a Sun-Being. Thus they could not find their way into the idea that Christ—this Christ beyond the Earth—had really become an earthly Being.

These Christian souls, when they afterwards passed through the gate of death, came into a strange position, which I may describe—somewhat tritely perhaps—as follows. These Christians, in their life after death, came into the position of a man who knows the name of another man and has heard many things about him; but he has never made his acquaintance in person. To such a man it may happen, at a moment when all the support which served him as long as he merely knew of the name are taken away, that he is suddenly expected to know the real person, and his inner life completely fails him in face of this new situation. So it was with the souls of whom I have now spoken: those who in ancient times had felt themselves belonging especially to the Sun-Oracles. In their life after death, they came into a situation in which they had to say, ‘Where, then, is the Christ? We are now among the Beings of the Sun, where we had always found Him, but now we find Him not.’ That He was on Earth, this they had not really received into the thoughts and feelings which remained to them when they passed through the gate of death. So after death they found themselves in a state of great uncertainty about the Christ and they lived on in this uncertainty about Him. They remained in many respects in this uncertainty. Thus, if in the intervening time another incarnation followed, they tended easily to join those groups of men who are described to us in the religious history of Europe as the various heretical societies.

Then, no matter whether they had passed through such another incarnation or not, they found themselves together again in that great gathering above the earth, which I described here the other morning, placing it at the time of the first half of the 19th century. Then it was that these souls among others found themselves face to face with a great super-sensible cult or ritual, consisting in mighty Imaginations. And in the sublime Imaginations of that super-sensible ritual there was enacted before their spiritual vision, above all other things, the great Sun-Mystery of Christ. These souls, as I explained, had as it were come to a blind alley with their Christianity. And the object was, before they should descend to earthly life again, to bring them, in picture-form, at least, face to face with Christ, whom they had lost—though not entirely—yet to such extent that in their souls He had become involved in currents of uncertainty and doubt.

Now these souls responded in a peculiar way. Not that they found themselves in a still greater uncertainty through the fact that all this was enacted before them. On the contrary it gave them a certain satisfaction in their life between death and a new birth—a feeling of salvation from many doubts. But it also gave them a kind of memory of what they had received about the Christ—albeit in a form that had not yet been permeated in the true cosmic sense by the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus there remained in their inmost being an immense warmth and devotion of feeling towards Christianity, and at the same time a subconscious dawning of those sublime Imaginations.

All this was concentrated into a great longing, that they might now at last be able to be Christians in the true way. Then when they descended—when they became young again, returning to the earth at the end of the 19th or at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries—having received the Christ by way of inner feeling though without cosmic understanding in their early Christian incarnation, they could do no other than feel themselves impelled towards Him. But the impressions they had received in the Imaginations to which they had been drawn in their pre-earthly life, remained in them only as an undefined longing. Thus it was difficult for them to find their way into the anthroposophical world-conception, inasmuch as the latter studies the cosmos to begin with and leaves the consideration of Christ until a later point.

Why did they have such difficulty? For the simple reason, my dear friends, that they had their own peculiar relationship to the question ‘What is Anthroposophy?’ Let us ask: What is Anthroposophy in its reality? My dear friends, if you gaze into all those wonderful, majestic Imaginations that stood there as a super-sensible spiritual action in the first half of the 19th century, and if you translate all these into human concepts, then you have Anthroposophy. For the next higher level of experience—for the adjoining spiritual world whence man descends into this earthly life—Anthroposophy was already there in the first half of the 19th century. It was not on the earth, but it was there. And if Anthroposophy is seen today it is seen indeed in that direction: towards the first half of the 19th century. Quite as a matter of course one sees it there. Nay, even at the end of the 18th century one sees it.

For example, one may have the following experience. There was a certain man who was once in a peculiar position. Through a friend, the great riddle of human earthly life was raised before him. But this his friend was not altogether free of the angular thinking of Kant (“das kantige Kant'sche Denken”), and thus it came to expression in a rather abstract philosophic way. He himself—the one of whom I am now speaking—could not find his way into the ‘angular thinking of Kant.’ Yet everything in his soul stirred up the same great riddle, the great question of life. How are the reason and the sensuous nature of man connected with one another? And lo, there were opened to him—not merely the doors but the very flood-gates, which for a moment let radiate into his soul those regions of the World in which the mighty Imaginations were being enacted. And all this—entering not through windows or doors but through wide-open flood-gates into his soul—translated as it were into little miniatures, came forth as the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. For the man of whom I speak was Goethe.

Miniatures—tiny reflected images, translated even into a fairy-like prettiness—descended thus in Goethe's Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. We need not therefore wonder that when it became necessary to give Anthroposophy in artistic scenes or pictures, (where we too must naturally have recourse to the great Imaginations), my first Mystery Play, ‘The Portal of Initiation’ became alike in structure—albeit different in content—alike in structure to the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

You see it is possible to look into the deeper connection even through the actual things that have taken place among us. Everyone who has had anything to do with occult matters, knows that that which happens on earth is the downward reflection of something that has taken place long, long before in the spiritual world, though in a somewhat different way, inasmuch as certain spirits of hindrance are not mingled in it there.

These souls now, who were preparing to descend into earthly existence at the end of the 19th or at the beginning of the 20th century, brought with them—albeit in their subconsciousness—a longing also to know something of cosmology, etc., i.e. to look out upon the world in the anthroposophical way. But above all things, their heart and mind were strongly inflamed for Christ. They would have felt pangs of conscience if this whole conception of Anthroposophy—to which they found themselves attracted as an outcome of their pre-earthly life—had not been permeated by the Christ Impulse. Such was the one group, taken of course ‘as a whole.’

The other group lived differently. If I may put it so, the other group, when they emerged in their present incarnation, had not yet reached that weariness in Paganism which the souls whom I described just now had reached. Compared to those others, they had indeed spent a relatively short time on earth—they had had fewer incarnations; and in these incarnations they had filled themselves with the mighty impulses which a man may have, if through his lives on earth he has stood in a living connection with the many Pagan Gods, and if this connection echoes strongly in his later incarnations. Thus they were not yet weary of the old Paganism. Even in the first centuries of Christianity the old Pagan impulses had still been working in them strongly, although they did incline more or less to Christianity, which, as we know, only gradually worked its way forth from Paganism.

At that time they received Christianity chiefly through their intellect. Though indeed it was intellect permeated with inner feeling, still they received it with their intellect. They thought a great deal about Christianity. Nor must you imagine this a very learned kind of thinking. They may indeed have been relatively simple men and women, in simple circumstances; but they thought much.

Once again it matters not whether there was a subsequent incarnation in the meantime. Such an incarnation will of course have wrought some changes; but the essential thing is this: When they had passed through the gate of death, these souls looked back upon the earth in such a way that Christianity appeared to them as something into which they had not yet really grown. They were less weary of the old Paganism; they still bore within their souls strong impulses from the old Pagan life. Thus they were still waiting, as it were, for the time when they should become true Christians.

The very people of whom I spoke to you a week ago, describing how they battled against Paganism on the side of Christianity—they themselves were among the souls who in reality still bore much Paganism, many Pagan impulses within them. They were still waiting to become real Christians. These souls, then, passed through the gate of death. They arrived in the spiritual world. They passed through the life between death and a new birth, and in the time which I have indicated—in the first half of the 19th century or a little earlier—they came before that sublime and glorious Imagination; and in these Imaginations they beheld so many impulses to fire their work and their activity. They received these impulses paramountly into their will.

And, if I may say so, when we now look with occult vision at all that these souls are carrying today, especially within their will, we find—above all in their life of will—the frequent impress of those mighty spiritual Imaginations.

Now the souls who enter their earthly life in such condition feel the need, to begin with, to experience again here upon earth—in the way that is possible on earth—what they experienced in their pre-earthly life as a determining factor for their karmic work. For the former kind, for the former group of souls, the life in the first half of the 19^th century took its course in such a way that they felt themselves impelled by a deep longing to partake in that super-sensible cult or ritual. Yet they came to it—if I may so describe it—in a vague and mystic mood, so that when they afterwards descended to the earth, only dim recollections remained to them; albeit Anthroposophy, transformed into its earthly shape, could make itself intelligible to them through these recollections. But with the second group it was different. It was as though they found themselves together again in the living after-effect of the resolve that they had made. For they, even then, had not been quite weary of Paganism. They still stood in expectation of being able to become Christians in a true way of evolution. And now it was as though they remembered a resolve that they had made during that first half of the 19^th century: a resolve to carry down on to the earth all that had stood before them in such mighty pictures, and to translate it into an earthly form.

When we look at many an anthroposophist who bears within him the impulse above all to work and co-operate with Anthroposophy most actively, we find among such anthroposophists souls of the kind that I have now described. The two types can be distinguished very clearly.

Now, my dear friends, perhaps you will say: All that you have here told us may explain many things in the karma of the Anthroposophical Society; but one may well grow anxious: ‘What is coming next?’—seeing that so many things are being explained about which one might well prefer not to be torn away from blissful ignorance. Are we now to set to work and think, whether we belong to the one type or the other? My dear friends, to this I must give a very definite answer. If the Anthroposophical Society were merely to contain a theoretic teaching or a confession of belief in such and such ideas of cosmology, Christology, etc.—if such were the character of this Society—it would certainly not be what it is intended to be by those who stand at its fountain-head. Anthroposophy shall be something which for a true anthroposophist has power to change and transform his life, to carry into the Spiritual what is experienced nowadays only in unspiritual forms of expression.

I will ask you this: Has it a very bad effect upon a child when at a certain age certain things are explained to him or her? Until a certain age is reached, the children do not know whether they are French or Germans, Norwegians,—Belgians or Italians. At any rate this whole way of thinking has little meaning for them until a certain age. One may say, they know nothing of it in reality. We need only put it radically:—You will surely not have met many Chauvinist babies, or even three-year old Chauvinists! ... It is only at a certain age that we become aware: I am German, I am a Frenchman, I am an Englishman, I am a Dutchman and so on. Yet in accepting these things, do we not grow into them quite naturally? Do we say it is a thing unbearable, to discover at a certain age of childhood that we are a Pole or a Frenchman, or a German or a Russian or a Dutchman? We are used to these things, we take them as a matter of course. But this, my dear friends, is in the external realm of the senses. Anthroposophy is to raise the whole life of man to a higher level. We must learn to bear different things, things which will only shock us in the life of the senses if we misunderstand them. And among the things we are to learn to recognise there is this too:—We must grow just as naturally and simply into the self-knowledge which is to realise that we belong to the one type or the other.

By this means too, the foundation will be created for a right estimation of the other karmic impulses in our lives. Hence it was necessary, as a kind of first direction, to show how the individual—according to the special manner of his pre-destination—stands in relation to this Anthroposophy, to this Christology, and in relation to the greater degree of activity or passivity within the Anthroposophical Movement.

Of course there are transitions too, between the one type and the other. These however are due to the fact that that which comes over from the previous incarnation into the present is still irradiated by a yet earlier incarnation. Especially with the souls of the second group, this is often the case. Many things still shine over from their genuinely heathen incarnations. For this reason they have a very definite pre-disposition to take the Christ in the sense in which He must truly be taken, namely as a Cosmic Being. But what I am now saying shows itself not so very much in the ideal considerations; it shows itself far more in the practical things of life. The two types can be recognised far better by the way in which they tackle the detailed situations of life than by their thoughts. Thoughts indeed have no great significance—I mean, the abstract thoughts have no such great significance for man. So, for instance (needless to say, the personal element is always to be excluded here) we shall frequently find the transition types from the one to the other among those who somehow cannot help carrying over the habits of non-anthroposophical life into the Anthroposophical Movement. I mean, those who are not even inclined to take the Anthroposophical Movement so very seriously, and those above all who are always grumbling in the Anthroposophical Movement, finding fault with the anthroposophists. Precisely among those who are always finding fault with the conditions in the Anthroposophical Movement, especially with the personalities and all the little petty things, we find the transition types, flickering from the one into the other. For in such cases the intensity of neither of the two impulses is very strong.

Therefore, my dear friends, at all costs—even though it may sometimes mean a searching of conscience and character—we must somehow find it possible, each one of us, to deepen the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction, approaching such realities as these and thinking a little earnestly on this: How do we, according to our own super-sensible nature, belong to the Anthroposophical Movement? If we do this, there will arise a purer conception of the Anthroposophical Movement; it will become in course of time an ever more spiritual conception. What we have hitherto maintained in theory—and it need not go so very deep, when we merely stand for it as a theory—this we shall now apply to real life. It is indeed an intense application to life, when we learn to place ourselves, our own life, into connection with these things. To talk a lot of karma, saying that such and such things are punished or rewarded thus and thus from one life to the next, need not strike so very deep; it need not hurt us. But when it reaches so to speak into our own flesh and blood—when it is a question of placing our own present incarnation, with the perfectly definite super-sensible quality that underlies it—then indeed it goes far nearer to our being. And it is this deepening of the human being which we must bring into all earthly life, into all earthly civilisation through Anthroposophy.

This, my dear friends, was a kind of Intermezzo in our studies, and we will continue from this point next Friday.

• 1. See World History in the Light of Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977.
• 2. St. Augustine: Retractationes. I.xiii.3. “When I said (in his book De Vera Religione) ‘That is in our times the Christian religion, to know which, is the most secure and certain salvation,’ it was said in relation to the name, not in relation to the thing itself, of which it is the name. For the thing itself, which is now called the Christian religion, was there among the people of antiquity, and was not wanting from the beginning of the human race, down to the time when Christ came in the flesh; whereafter the true religion, which was always there, began to be called Christian. For when the Apostles began to preach Him after the resurrection and ascension into heaven, and very many believed, first of all at Antioch, as it is written, they were called Christian disciples (Acts X1, 26). Therefore I said: ‘This is in our times the Christian religion,’ not because it was not there in earlier times, but because in later times it received this name.” (Tr. from the Latin text).

Today I want to point once again to an ideal associated with the Goetheanum, which we have just had the great misfortune of losing. My purpose in referring to it again is to make sure that correct thinking prevails on the score of a step about to be taken in Stuttgart in the next few days, a step in the direction of making a new life in the Anthroposophical Society. Whatever anthroposophy brings forth must be built on a solid foundation of enthusiasm, and we can create the right enthusiasm only by keeping oriented to that ideal that every anthroposophical heart should be cherishing and that is great enough to unite all the Society's members in its warmth.

It cannot be denied that enthusiasm for this ideal of anthroposophical cooperation has dwindled somewhat during the three successive phases of anthroposophical development, though the ideal itself remains. As we stand grieving beside the ruins of the building that brought that anthroposophical ideal to eloquent external expression, it becomes the more important that we join forces in the right common feeling toward it. Shared feeling will lead to shared thoughts and beget a strength much needed in view of the constantly increasing enmity that confronts us. Therefore, instead of continuing to discuss matters that have been the focus of my lectures of the past several weeks, you will perhaps allow me to recall an outstanding memory that has a connection with the Goetheanum and is well-suited to restoring the kind of relationships between members that we need in the Anthroposophical Society. For to hold common ideals enkindles the love that every single anthroposophist should be feeling for his fellow members and that can be relied on to dissipate any hard feelings that members of the Society could be harboring against any others, even if only in their thoughts about them.

You may remember that when we started the first High School course at the Goetheanum, I gave a short introductory talk stressing the fact that what people were accomplishing there represented a new kind of striving whereby art, science and religion were to be united in a truly universal sense.

What was being striven for at the Goetheanum, what its forms and colors were meant to convey, was an ideal, a scientific, artistic and religious ideal. It should be the more deeply graven on our hearts now that it can no longer speak to us through outer forms and colors. That will perhaps be brought about if we continue to do as we have been doing these past few weeks in regard to other subjects under study and enquire how earlier periods of human evolution went about pursuing a scientific, artistic and religious ideal.

If we look back at the tremendous, lofty spiritual life of the ancient Orient, we come to a time when the spiritual content of everything revered by these Oriental peoples was immediate revelation to them—a time when they had no doubt whatsoever that the things their senses perceived were mere tracings in matter of divine realities that had been revealed to a visionary capacity none the less real to them for its dreamlike quality.

That way of beholding, instinctive though it was, was at one time such that people in certain specific states of consciousness could perceive spiritual beings in the universe in all their immediate reality, just as with their bodily senses they perceived things and creatures of the three natural kingdoms. The Oriental of an older time was just as convinced by immediate perception of the existence of the divine-spiritual beings connected with the human race as he was of the existence of his fellow men.

This was the source of his inner religious certainty, which differed in no way from his certainty concerning things in nature round about him. He saw his god, and could therefore believe in his existence just as firmly as he believed in the existence of a stone, a plant, clouds or rivers. What modern science dubs animism, picturing the ancients relying on poetic fantasy to endow nature with a living spiritual element, is an invention of childish dilettantism. The fact is that people beheld spiritual beings in the same way they beheld the world of nature and the senses.

This was, as I said, the source of the certainty in their religious life. But it was equally the source they drew on for artistic creation. The spiritual appeared to them in concrete form. They were familiar with the shapes and colors assumed by spiritual elements. They could bring their perception of the spiritual to material expression. They took such building materials as were available, the materials of sculpture and of the other arts, and applied such techniques as they had to express what was spiritually revealed to them.

The reverence they felt in inner soul relationships to their gods was the content of their religious life. When they imprinted on matter what they had beheld in the spirit, that was felt to be their art. But the techniques and the physical materials at their disposal for expressing what they thus beheld fell far short of their actual visions.

We come upon a period in the evolution of the ancient Orient when the divine-spiritual—or, as Goethe called it, the sensible-super-sensible—that man beheld was exceedingly lofty and gloriously beautiful. People's feelings and fantasy were powerfully stirred by their perception of it. But because techniques for dealing with material media were still so rudimentary, artistic creations of the period were but primitive symbolical or allegorical expressions of the far greater beauty human beings perceived with spiritual eyes. An artist of those ancient times describing his work with the feeling-nuance we have today would have said, “What the spirit reveals to me is beautiful, but I can bring only a weak reflection of it to expression in my clay or wood or other media.”

Artists in those days were people who beheld the spiritual in all its beauty and passed on their vision in sense perceptible form to others who could not behold it for themselves. These latter were convinced that when an artist embodied what he saw spiritually in his symbolical or allegorical forms, these forms enabled them, too, to find their way into the world beyond the earth, a world that a person had to enter to experience his full dignity as a human being.

This relationship to the divine-spiritual was so immediate, so real, so concrete that people felt that the thoughts they had were a gift of the gods, who were as present to them as their fellow men. They expressed it thus, “When I talk with human beings, we speak words that sound on the air. When I talk with the gods, they tell me thoughts that I hear only inside me. Words expressed in sounds are human words. Words expressed in thoughts are communications from the gods.”

When human beings had thoughts, they did not believe them to be products of their own soul activity. They believed that they were hearing thoughts whispered to them by divinities. When they perceived with their ears, they said they heard people. When they heard with their souls, when their perception was of thoughts, they said they heard spiritual beings. Knowledge that lived in idea form was thus communication from divine sources in the experiencing of ancient peoples, perception of the Logos as it spoke directly through the gods to men.

We can say, then, that men's beholding of the gods became the inner life of the religious ideal. Their symbolical-allegorical expression of divine forms through the various media was the life underlying the ideal of art. In their re-telling of what the gods had told them lived the ideal of science. These three ideals merged into one in ancient Oriental times, for they were at bottom one and the same.

In the first ideal, men looked up to divine revelation. Their whole soul life was completely suffused with religious feeling. Science and art were the two realms in which the gods shared mankind's life on earth. The artist engaged in creative activity felt that his god was guiding his hand, poets felt their utterance being formed by gods. “Sing to me, Muse, of the anger of the great Peleid, Achilles.” It was not the poet speaking; it was, he felt, the Muse speaking in him, and that was the fact. The abstract modern view, which attributes such statements to poetic license, is a grotesque piece of the childish nonsense so rampant today. Those who adopt it do not know how truly Goethe spoke when he said, “What you call the spirit of the times is just your own spirit with the times reflected in it.”

If we now turn our attention from the way the threefold ideal of religion, art and science lived in ancient Oriental man to consider how it was expressed by the Greeks and the Romans who were such a bare, prosaic copy of them, we find these three ideals in a further form of development. The divine-spiritual that had revealed itself to man from shining heights above was felt by the Greeks to be speaking directly through human beings. Religious life attached itself much more closely to the human, in the sense that a Greek not only experienced his inner life, but his very form, as god-permeated, god-suffused. He no longer looked up to shining heights above him; he looked at the marvellous shape of man. He no longer had the ancient Oriental's direct contemplation of divinity; his beholding was only a weak shadow of it. But anyone who can really enter into Greek poetry, art and philosophy perceives the basic feeling the Greek had, which led him to say that earthly man was more than just a composite of the material elements that his senses perceived in the external world; he saw in him a proof of the existence of divinity. This man of earth whom the Greek could not regard as of earthly origin was for him living proof that Zeus, that Athene ruled in spiritual worlds.

So we see the Greeks looking upon the human form and man's developing inner life as sublime proof of the gods' governance. They could picture their gods as human because they still had such a profound experience of the divine in man.

It was one thing for the Greek to picture his gods as human beings and quite another for modern man to conceive a divine man under the influence of a degraded anthropomorphism. For to the Greek, man was still a living proof of his divine origin. The Greeks felt that no such thing as man could exist if the world were not permeated through and through by the divine.

Religion played a vital part in conceiving man. A person was revered not for what he had made of himself, but just because he was a human being. It was not his everyday achievements or an ambitious earthly striving to excel that inspired reverence; it was what had come with him as his humanness into life on earth. The reverence accorded him enlarged to reverence for the divine-spiritual world.

The artistic ideal entertained by the Greeks was, on the one hand, a product of their feeling for the divine-spiritual element they embodied and to which their presence on earth testified. On the other hand, they had a strong sense—unknown to the ancient Oriental—of the laws governing the physical world of nature, the laws of consonance and dissonance, of volume, of the inertia or the supporting capacity of various earth materials. Where the Oriental handled his media awkwardly and was unable to go beyond a crudely symbolical-allegorical treatment of the spiritual reality that overwhelmed and overflowed him, so that the spiritual fact he was trying to give expression to in some work of art was always far more glorious and grand than the awkward representation of it, the Greek's striving was to embody all the fulness of his spiritual experience in the physical medium he had by this time learned to handle.

The Greeks never allowed a column to be any thicker than it had to be to carry the weight it was intended to support. They would not have permitted themselves to represent anything of a spiritual nature in the awkward manner characteristic of ancient Oriental art; the physical laws involved had to have been perfectly mastered. Spirit and matter had to be united in a balanced union. There is as much of spirit as of material lawfulness in a Greek temple, and a statue embodies as much of the spiritual element as the expressiveness of the material allows. Homer's verses flow in a way that directly manifests the flowing of divine speech in the human. The poet felt as he shaped his words that he had to let the laws of language itself be his guide to the achieving of perfect control over every aspect of his utterance. Nothing could be left in the awkward, stammering form typical of ancient Oriental hymns. It had to be expressed in a way that did full justice to the spirit. The goal, in other words, was so fully to master the physical laws inherent in the artistic medium employed that every last vestige of what the spirit had revealed was made manifest in sense perceptible form.

The Greeks' feeling that man was evidence of divine creation was matched by their feeling that works of art, like temples and statues, also had to bear witness to divine governance, though that was now conceived as acting through the agency of human fantasy. Looking at a temple, one could see that its builder had so mastered all the laws of his medium that every least detail of their application reflected what he had experienced in his intercourse with the gods.

The earliest Greek tragedies were plays in which the dramatis personae represented spiritual beings such as Apollo and Dionysos, with the chorus an echo of sorts, an echo of the divine that ruled in nature. Tragedies were intended to bring to expression through human beings as an adequate medium events transpiring in the spiritual world. But this was not conceived as in ancient Oriental times, when man had, as it were, to look up into a higher realm than that where the work of art stood. Instead, it was thought of as taking place on the level on which the tragedy was being enacted, making it possible to experience in every gesture, every word, every recitativ of the chorus how a spiritual element was pouring itself into sense perceptible forms beautifully adapted to it. This constituted the Greek ideal of art.

And the scientific ideal? The Greek no longer felt as livingly as the Oriental had that the gods were speaking to him in ideas and thoughts. He already had some inkling of the fact that effort was attached to thinking. But he still felt thoughts to be as real as sense perceptions, just as he felt earthly human beings with their human forms and inner life to be walking evidence of divinity. He perceived his thoughts in the same way that he perceived red or blue, C # or G, and he perceived them in the outer world in the same way that eyes and ears receive sense impressions. This meant that he no longer experienced the speaking of the Logos quite as concretely as the Oriental did. The Greeks did not compose Vedas, of which the Orientals had felt that the gods gave them the ideas they expressed. The Greek knew that he had to work out his thoughts, just as someone knows that he has to use his eyes and look about him if he wants to see the surrounding world. But he still knew that the thoughts he developed were divine thoughts impressed into nature. A thought was therefore earthly proof of the gods' speaking. Whereas the Oriental still heard that speaking, the Greek discerned the human quality of language, but saw in it direct earthly proof of the existence of divine speech.

To the Greeks, science was thus also like a divine gift, something obviously despatched to earth by the spirit, exactly as man with his divine outer form and inner experiencing had been sent here. So we see how the religious, artistic and scientific ideal changed in the course of humanity's evolution from the Oriental to the Greek culture.

In our epoch, which, as I have often explained, began in the first third of the fifteenth century, Western man's development has again reached a point where he is confronted with the necessity of bringing forth new forms of the venerable, sacred ideals of religion, art and science. This development was what I had in mind when we were launching the first High School course at the Goetheanum. I wanted to make it clear that the Goetheanum stood there because the inner laws of human evolution require that the religious, artistic and scientific ideals be clothed in magnificent new forms transcending even those of Greece.

That is why one feels so overwhelmed by grief as one's eye falls on ruins where a building should be standing and indicating in its every form and line and color the new shape that the three great ideals should be assuming as they emerge from the innermost soul of an evolving humanity. Grief and sorrow are the only emotions left to us as we contemplate the site that was meant to speak so eloquently of the renewal of man's three great ideals. Ruins occupy it, leaving us only one possibility, that of cherishing in our hearts everything we hoped to realize there. For while another building might conceivably be erected in its place, it would certainly not be the one we have lost. In other words, it will never again be possible for a building to express what the old Goetheanum expressed.

That is why everything the Goetheanum was intended to contribute to the three great ideals of the human race should be the more deeply graven on our hearts. In our day we cannot say with the clairvoyant Oriental of an older time that the divine-spiritual confronts us in all its shining immediacy as do the creatures of the sense world, or that the deeds of the gods are as present to our soul perception as any sense perceptible acts that may be performed in the external world in everyday living. But when we quicken our inquiry into man and nature with the living quality with which anthroposophical thinking and feeling endow such studies, we see the world for the cosmos, or the universe clothed in a different form than that in which the Greeks beheld it.

When a Greek made nature the object of his study or contemplated human beings moving about in the world of the senses, he had the feeling that where a spring welled up or a mountain thrust its cloud-crowned peak into the sky, when the sun came up in the rosy brilliance of the dawn or a rainbow spanned the heavens, there the spirit spoke in these phenomena. The Greeks beheld nature in a way that enabled them to feel the presence of the spirit in it. Their contemplation of nature really satisfied them; what they saw there satisfied every facet of their beings.

I have often emphasized how justifiably people speak of an advance in natural science, and anthroposophy is in a unique position to recognize the real significance of the scientific progress of recent centuries. I have often stressed this. Anthroposophy is far from wanting to denigrate or to criticize science and scientific inquiry; it honors all truly sincere study. In the course of recent centuries, my dear friends, people have indeed learned an enormous amount about nature. If one goes more deeply into what has been learned, the study of nature leads, as I have often stated from this platform, to insight into man's repeated earth lives, insight into the transformation of nature. One gets a preview of the future, when man will bring to new forms of life what his senses and his soul and spirit are experiencing in the present moment.

If one undertakes a suitably deeper study of nature, one's total outlook on it becomes different from that that the Greeks had. It might be said that they saw nature as a fully matured being from which the glory of the spiritual worlds shone out. Modern man is no longer able to look upon nature in this light. If we survey everything we have come to know and feel about nature's creations as a result of making use of our many excellent devices and instruments, we see nature rather as harboring seed forces, as bearing in its womb something that can come to maturity only in a distant future.

The Greek saw every plant as an organism that had already reached a perfect stage for the reason that the god of the species lived in each single specimen. Nowadays we regard plants as something that nature has to bring to still higher stages. Everywhere we look we see seed elements. Every phenomenon we encounter in this unfinished nature, so pregnant with future possibilities, causes us to feel that a divine element reigns over nature and must continue to do so to ensure its progressing from an embryonic to an eventually perfect stage.

We have learned to look much more precisely at nature. The Greek saw the bird where we see the egg. He saw the finished stage of things; we, their beginnings. The person who feels his whole heart and soul thrill to the seed aspects, the seed possibilities in nature, is the man who has the right outlook on it.

That is the other side of modern natural science. Anyone who starts looking through microscopes and telescopes with a religious attitude will find seed stages everywhere. The exactness characteristic of the modern way of studying nature allows us to see it as everywhere creative, everywhere hastening toward the future. That creates the new religious idea.

Of course, only a person with a feeling for the seed potentialities that each individual will live out in other, quite different earthly and cosmic lives to come can develop the religious ideal I am describing.

The Greeks saw in man the composite of everything there was in the cosmos of his own period. The ancient Orientals saw in man the composite of the whole cosmic past. Today, we sense seeds of the future in human beings. That gives the new religious ideal its modern coloring.

Now let us go on to consider the new ideal of art. What do we find when we subject nature and its forms to a deeper, life-attuned study, refusing to call a halt at externalities and abstract ideas? My dear friends, you saw what we find before your very eyes in the capitals of our Goetheanum pillars and in the architrave motifs that crowned them. None of this was the result of observing nature; it was the product of experiencing with it. Nature brings forth forms, but these could just as well be others. Nature is always challenging us to change, to metamorphose its forms. A person who merely observes nature from the outside copies its forms and falls into naturalism. A person who experiences nature, who doesn't just look at the shapes and colors of plants, who really has an inner experience of them, finds a different form slipping out of every plant and stone and animal for him to embody in his medium. The Greek method, which aimed at completely expressing the spirit through a masterly handling of the medium, is not our method. Our way is to enter so deeply into nature's forms that one can bring them to further, independent metamorphosis. We do not resort to the symbolical-allegorical Oriental treatment or strive for the Greek's technical mastery of a medium. Our method is so to handle every line and color in the work of art that it strives toward the divine. The Oriental employed symbolism and allegory to express the divine, which rayed out like an aura from his works, rayed out and welled over and submerged them, speaking much more eloquently than the forms did. We moderns must create works where in the form element speaks more eloquently than nature itself does, yet speaks in a manner so akin to it that every line and color becomes nature's prayer to the divine. In our coming to grips with nature we develop forms wherein nature itself worships divinity. We speak to nature in artistic terms.

In reality, every plant, every tree has the desire to look up in prayer to the divine. This can be seen in a plant's or a tree's physiognomy. But plants and trees do not dispose over a sufficient capacity to express this. It is there as a potential, however, and if we bring it out, if we embody in our architectural and sculptural media the inner life of trees and plants and clouds and stones as that life lives in their lines and colors, then nature speaks to the gods through our works of art. We discover the Logos in the world of nature. A higher nature than that surrounding us reveals itself in art, a higher nature that, in its own entirely natural way, releases the Logos to stream upward to divine-spiritual worlds.

In Oriental works of art the Logos streamed downward, finding only stammering expression in human media. Our art forms must be true speech forms, voicing what nature itself would say if it could live out its potential. That is the new artistic ideal that comes to stand beside the religious ideal that looks at nature from the standpoint of its seed endowment.

The third is our scientific ideal. That is no longer based on the feeling the Orientals had that thoughts are something whispered straight into human souls by gods. Nor can it have kinship with the Greek ideal, which felt thoughts to be inner witnesses to the divine. Nowadays we have to exert purely human forces, work in a purely human way, to develop thoughts. But once we have made the effort and achieved thoughts free of any taint of egotism, self-seeking, subjective emotionality or partisan spirit such as colors thoughts with prejudiced opinions, once we have exerted ourselves as human beings to experience thoughts in the form they themselves want to assume, we no longer regard ourselves as the creators and shapers of our thoughts, but merely as the inner scene of action where they live out their own nature. Then we feel the largeness of these sefless and unprejudiced thoughts that seem to be our own creations, and are surprised to find that they are worthy of depicting the divine; we discover afterwards that thoughts that take shape in our own hearts are worthy of depicting the divine. First, we discover the thought, and afterwards we find that the thought is nothing less than the Logos! While you were selflessly letting the thought form itself in you, your selflessness made it possible for a god to be the creator of that thought. Where the Oriental felt thought to be revelation and where the Greek found it proof of divine reality, we feel it to be living discovery: we have the thought, and afterwards it tells us that it was permitted to express divinity. That is our scientific ideal.

Here we stand, then, in the ongoing evolution of the human race, realizing what point we have reached in it. We know, as we look at the human head with the ears at the side, at the larynx and the distorted shoulder blades, that we must be able to do more than just contemplate them. If we succeed in transforming these shapes of nature, a single form emerges from a further development of the shoulder blades and a growing-together of the ears and larynx: a Luciferic form, composed of chest and head, wings, larynx and ears.

We reach the point of perceiving the artistic element in nature, the element that endows its forms with life, allowing a higher life of form to emerge than that found in nature itself.

But this also puts us in the position of being able to trace nature's own activity in the metamorphoses whereby it transforms the human being, and we are able to apply this same artistry in the pedagogical-didactic field. We bring this same creative artistry to pedagogical work with children, who are constantly changing. For we have learned it at hand of an art that we recognize to be the Logos-producing nature-beyond-nature. We learn it from springs that are more than springs, for they commune with the gods. We learn it from trees that are more than trees; for where the latter achieve only a stammering movement of their branches, the former disclose themselves to modern artistic fantasy in forms that point to the gods with gesturings of branch and crown. We learn it from the cosmos as we metamorphose its forms and re-shape them, as we tried to do in our Goetheanum. All these studies teach us how to work from day to day with children to help support the process that daily re-shapes, re-creates them. This enables us to bring artistry into the schooling of the human race, and the same holds true in other areas.

That is the light in which the three great ideals of humanity—the religious ideal, the artistic ideal, the scientific ideal—appear, re-enlivened, to the contemplating soul of the anthroposophist. The forms of the Goetheanum were intended to fill him with enthusiasm for experiencing these lofty ideals in their new aspect. Now we must quietly engrave them on our hearts. But they must be made a source of enthusiasm in us. As we acquire that enthusiasm and are lifted toward the divine in our experiencing of the three ideals, earth's highest ideal develops in us. The Gospel says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself, and God above all.” Another way of putting it is, “If one looks upon the divine in the light of the present day aspect of the three ideals, as a modern human being must, one learns to love the divine.” For one feels that one's humanness depends on devoting oneself with all the love at one's command to the three ideals. But then one feels oneself united with every other individual who is able to do likewise and offer up the same love. One learns to love the divine above all else, and, in loving God, to love one's neighbor as oneself. That keeps any hard feelings from developing.

That is what can unite and make a single entity of the separate members of the Society. That is the present need. We have had the experience of going through a phase in the Society in which anthroposophy was poured into separate channels, such as pedagogy and other practical concerns, into artistic activities, and so on. Now we need to pull together. We have first-rate Waldorf School teachers and other professionals. Everyone who is giving of his best at a special post needs to find a way to bring the sources of anthroposophical life to ever fresh flowing. That is what is needed now.

Since that is our need, since the leading anthroposophists need to prove their awareness of the present necessity of re-enlivening the Anthroposophical Society, we have arranged a meeting on these matters. It is to take place in Stuttgart in the next few days. Those who mean well by the Society should be cherishing the warmest hopes for what will come of that occasion. For only if the individuals present there can develop the right tone, a tone ringing with true, energetic enthusiasm for the three great love-engendering ideals, only if the energy and content of the words they speak guarantee this, can there be hope of the Anthroposophical Society achieving its goal. For what eventuates there will set the tone for the turn things will take in wider circles of the Society.

I will know, too, what my own course must be after seeing what comes of the Stuttgart conference. Great expectations hang on it. I ask all of you who cannot make the journey to Stuttgart to be with us in supporting thoughts. It is a momentous occasion that calls for participation and wholesomely based, energetic effort on behalf of the great ideals so essential to modern humanity. We are informed of them not by any arbitrary account set down by human hand, but in that script graven by the whole course of evolution, the whole import of man's earthly development, which declares itself to us every bit as plainly as does the sun to waking human beings.

Let us set about kindling this enthusiasm in our souls; then it will become deeds. And deeds are essential.

These lectures give a fresh and exceptionally clear approach to the anthroposophical path of knowledge. Imagination is described as a widening of our experience of memory to cosmic dimensions; Inspiration is described as an extension of forgetting; and Intuition is shown to be the means by which the spiritual world bears fruit for the future of human evolution. The description is particularly helpful in distinguishing the right path from the wrong.

The lectures originally formed the second half of a series of eight entitled ‘Anthroposophy: its roots in knowledge and its fruits in life; with a description of agnosticism as the true enemy of mankind’. The roots are shown to lie in German culture, but full appreciation of this requires a knowledge of that culture which those who do not read German are unlikely to possess. The opportunity has therefore been taken to reprint a very clear report of the first four lectures which was made by Elisabeth Vreede, one of those chosen by Rudolf Steiner to be a member of the original Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society in 1923, and translated by George Adams for the English journal Anthroposophy in 1921 (Vol. l, pp.87–88 and 105–107).

R.G. Seddon

To the members of the Anthroposophical Society

It seems that all kinds of rumors are being spread from certain quarters in connection with the current failure of my physical strength. It would have been a pleasant feeling for me if, on this occasion, the spreading of rumors had not found a place in anthroposophical circles. But since that does not seem to be the case, I am unfortunately obliged to say a few words about the present failure of my physical strength. Recently there have been many courses in very rapid succession. Finally, here in Dornach, a series of parallel courses that have led to me giving more than 60 lectures in a relatively short time. I was able to do all this quite well, without fear of failing strength, although I have been obliged to watch the measure of my strength for a long time. Through Dr. Wegman's devoted collaboration, it was always possible to calculate the forces for the courses.

However, when calculating the possible achievements, the demands that otherwise come from the members go beyond our strength. And such excessive demands could not be avoided, especially during the last September events. They finally overstrained my physical strength. I do not want to speak disparagingly about the demands in question. It is quite understandable that one or the other comes to me with his or her questions. But the bow has been stretched too far for once.

But for now I ask the members to take it as a twist of fate that I am deprived of my beloved lecturing activity for some time; I ask you to agree with me that I am in the very best care with Dr. Wegman, who has a loyal helper in Dr. Noll, and to counter rumours that only create bad blood.

To all the warmest thoughts
Rudolf Steiner

In the presence of ¹ Dr. Steiner's first point of discussion was the plan of the building on the Waldorf School grounds. He declared that the “Free Anthroposophical Society” could not under any circumstances build accommodation there. Its members were already spending far too much time in the Waldorf School, where their influence on the pupils had already led to the introduction of manners more in keeping with those of a grammar school, which he would not tolerate under any circumstances.

Afterwards, the Völker-Unger affair was discussed. Miss Völker was besieged from all sides to put an end to the matter, including by Dr. Steiner, who attacked her with fierce words. But she remained obstinate, so much so that I doubted her goodwill and insight. She believes that it is not in her power to bring the matter to a conclusion, which Dr. Steiner seemed to confirm afterwards. Rittelmeyer suggested that she declare in her branch that she would leave it if the matter was not settled.

There was more back and forth talk until Dr. Steiner declared that he could no longer attend these meetings if only non-substantive matters were discussed.

• 1. The meetings of 14 and 25 July and 1 August, see Appendix II

For his present life on Earth man is beholden partly to the external world, including in the wider sense not only the several kingdoms of Nature immediately around him but also the influences coming from the stars and the cosmic expanse. But this is only one part of the world to which he is beholden for his present earthly life. He is beholden above all to his previous lives on Earth, the results and effects of which he brings with him inwardly. As you know from anthroposophical literature, man is a fourfold being. Every time he goes to sleep his astral body and ‘I’ separate from his physical and etheric bodies. Of these members only the physical and etheric bodies owe their character and composition to the external world lying visibly—or also, as etheric world, invisibly—around man. On the other hand, everything that he bears within him in his astral body and Ego in his present earthly existence, he owes entirely to what he experienced in the past, in earlier lives on Earth.

In the outer physical world there are two portals, two gates, through which the life of man, taken in its entirety, reaches out beyond this world. We will begin to-day by considering this cosmic aspect and conclude with a study very directly concerned with human life. For inhabitants of the Earth, these two gates are the Moon and the Sun.

The fact is that modern science knows very little indeed about the heavenly bodies—actually only what can be determined by calculation or observed by means of instruments. Just think what an inhabitant of Mars would know about the Earth if, from Mars or from some other star, he were to acquire his knowledge by employing the same methods as those employed by the inhabitants of the Earth! He would know no more than that the Earth is a luminous body radiating into cosmic space the light it reflects from the Sun. He might form all kinds of hypotheses, just as men do about Mars—as to whether beings do or do not exist on the Earth. But an inhabitant of the Earth knows that beings of his own rank and beings of other kingdoms share his dwelling-place; and those whose knowledge is derived from the inner, spiritual destinies of earthly humanity, will be able to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of the other heavenly bodies, for example, of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us think about what may be said of this physical, psychic and spiritual aspect of Moon existence. I must here remind you of many things to be found in the book Occult Science—an Outline, and in several of the printed lecture-courses. From this literature you know that the Moon was once united with the Earth. It is accepted by orthodox modern science, at any rate by its most important representatives, that the physical Moon once separated from the Earth and, if I may put it so, chose its own position in cosmic space.

But Spiritual Science discloses that not only did the physical Moon separate from the Earth but that certain Beings went with it, Beings who had once inhabited the Earth together with men. They were of a much higher spiritual rank than man in his physical embodiment; but they were in close intercourse with men, although this intercourse was altogether different from the relationships between human beings to-day.

Anyone who devotes even cursory study to the early history of the Earth and its spiritual achievements will feel deep reverence for the different civilisations. Certainly, our forefathers—that is to say, we ourselves in earlier incarnations—were not as ‘clever’ in the modern sense as we imagine ourselves to be to-day, but in point of fact they knew a great deal more. Knowledge, after all, is not acquired through cleverness only. Cleverness comes from intellect, and intellect is only one of the human faculties, although nowadays it is prized, especially by science, more highly than all the others. Yet when we see how the world has developed in a moral and social respect in this enlightened twentieth century, there is really no cause to be so very proud of our intellectual culture—which has come into being only in the course of time. Even if with no other aid than external history we go back and consider, for example, what originates from the ancient East, we cannot but feel great reverence. The same may apply even to certain achievements of so-called ‘uncivilised’ peoples, but we will think now only of ancient India and Persia, of the wonderful wisdom contained in the Vedas, in Vedanta or Yoga philosophy. If we let these things work upon us, not superficially but with all their deep intensity we shall feel an ever-increasing reverence for what past ages created—not through cleverness as we know it, but in a quite different way.

Spiritual Science makes it clear that what has been preserved in documentary records is only the residue of a wonderful, primeval wisdom of mankind. It was expressed in a much more poetic, artistic language than is used for our modern knowledge, but it was nevertheless wonderful wisdom, imparted to men by Beings at a stage of evolution far higher than that of humanity on Earth. Intellectual thinking takes place, after all, through the instrumentality of the physical body, and these Beings had no physical body. This accounts for the fact that they conveyed their primordial wisdom to mankind in an essentially poetic, artistic form.

These Beings did not remain with the Earth; the majority of them to-day actually inhabit the Moon in the heavens. What modern science can discover has to do only with the external properties of the Moon. The Moon is in truth the home of lofty spiritual Beings whose task once was to inspire earthly humanity with the primeval wisdom. They then withdrew to establish this Moon colony in the Cosmos. It is clear from what I have said about these Beings who now inhabit the Moon that our own human past is connected with them. In earlier lives we were their terrestrial companions. And our connection with them is immediately evident if we look beyond what external knowledge and external life can give to man. When we contemplate all the factors by which our existence is determined, which are not, however, dependent upon our intellect but transcend the intellect and are related to our deeper nature, we realise that these Moon Beings, although they no longer have their habitation on the Earth, are still deeply and inwardly connected with our very existence. For before descending to the Earth and receiving a physical body from our forefathers, we were in the spiritual world, in pre-earthly life; and there, even to-day, we are in close contact with these Beings who were our companions in Earth existence long ages ago. When we come down from the spiritual worlds into earthly existence, we pass through the Moon sphere, through the Moon existence. Once upon a time, when these Moon Beings were on the Earth, they had a profound effect upon mankind, and it is still so to-day, inasmuch as they impress into the descending Ego and astral body what is then carried over into the physical body on Earth.

Nobody can himself decide to be a man of talent, or a genius, or even a good man. Yet there are men of talent and genius and some who are innately good. These are qualities which the intellect cannot produce; they are connected with man's inmost nature, a great part of which comes with him when he passes from pre-earthly existence through birth into earthly life. To impress into his Ego and astral body what then makes its way into his nerves and blood as genius or talent or the will to do good or evil—this is the task of the Moon Beings during the time when in a man's pre-earthly existence he is passing through the Moon sphere. It is not only when, in poetic mood, lovers go walking in the moonlight that the Moon has an effect upon what is living and weaving in the deeper part of man's nature below the level of consciousness; this Moon influence is active in everything that rises from a level below that of the conscious intellect and makes man what he really is in earthly life. And so to-day these Moon Beings are still connected with our past, inasmuch as it is they who after our earlier incarnations give us in pre-earthly existence the stamp of individuality.

If we look back over our life to the point where it runs out beyond the earthly realm into the spiritual, whence our particular faculties, our temperament, our inmost, essential character, are derived, we find in the Moon the one gate which leads from the physical into the spiritual world. It is the gate through which the past makes its way into our life and gives us individuality.

The other gate is the Sun. We do not owe our individuality to the Sun. The Sun shines alike on the good and on the evil, on men of genius and on fools. As far as earthly life is concerned the Sun has no direct connection with our individuality. In one instance only has the Sun established connection with earthly individuality and this was possible because at a certain point of time in the Earth's evolution, a sublime Sun Being, the Christ, did not remain on the Sun but came down from the Sun to the Earth and became a Being of the Earth in the body of a man, thus uniting His own cosmic destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity. The other Sun Beings who remained in the Sun sphere have no access to the single human individuality but only to what is common to all mankind. Something of this remained in the Christ and is an infinite blessing for earthly humanity: what had remained in Him was and is that His power knows no differentiation among men. Christ is not the Christ of this or that nation, of this or that rank or class. He is the Christ for all men, without distinction of class, race or nation. Nor is He the Christ of particular individualities, inasmuch as His help is available alike to the genius and the fool. The Christ Impulse has access to the individuality of man, but to become effective it must take effect in the inmost depths of human nature. It is not the forces of the intellect but the deepest forces of the heart and soul which can receive the Christ Impulse; but once received this Impulse works not for the benefit of the individual-human but of the universal-human. This is because Christ is a Sun Being.

Looking back into the past we feel ourselves connected with the Moon existence and realise that we bear within us something not derived from the present but from the cosmic past—not merely from the earthly past. In our present Earth existence we unite this fragment of the past with the present. We do not, in the ordinary way, pay much attention to what is contained in this fragment of the past; but in point of fact we should not be of much account as human beings if it were not there within us. What we acquire at the time of descending from pre-earthly into earthly existence has something automatic about it—the automatic element in our physical and etheric bodies. What makes us into particular human individuals is inwardly connected with our past and thus with the Moon existence. But just as we are connected with the past through our Moon existence, so are we connected with our future through the Sun existence. We were ready for the Moon forces, especially in relation to the Beings who have withdrawn to the Moon, even in earlier times; for the Sun which works to-day as an impulse in the sphere of the universal-human only, we shall not be ready until a very distant future, when evolution has reached a much more advanced stage. The Sun to-day can reach only to our external being; not until distant future ages will it be able to reach our individuality, the inmost core of our being. When the Earth is no longer Earth, when it has passed into quite another metamorphosis, then and then only shall we be ready for the Sun existence. Man is so proud of his intellect—but the intellect in present humanity is purely a product of the Earth, since it is tied to the brain, and the brain—despite current belief—is the most physical structure in the human organism.

The Sun is perpetually wresting us away from this bondage to the earthly, for the Sun does not in reality work upon our brain ... if it did, we should produce much cleverer thoughts! From the physical aspect the Sun's influence is exerted on the heart, and what streams out from the heart is Sun-activity. Through the brain men are essentially egotistic, through the heart they become free from egoism and rise to the level of the universal-human. Thus through the Sun we are more than we should be if we were left to our own resources in our present Earth existence. Let me put it like this: if we can really find our way to the Christ, He enables us, because He is a Sun Being, to be more than we could otherwise be.

The Sun stands in the heavens personifying the future, whereas the Moon personifies the past. The Sun is the other gate into the spiritual world, the gate leading to the future. Just as we are impelled into earthly existence by the Moon Beings and Moon forces, so, through death, we are impelled out of it by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are connected with that part of our nature of which we are not yet master, which the gods have given us so that we may not wilt in earthly life but reach out beyond our own limitations. And so Moon and Sun are in truth the two gates in the universe into the spiritual life. The Moon is inhabited by Beings with whom we were once connected in the way I have indicated. The Sun is inhabited by Beings with whom—with the exception of the Christ—we shall be united only in our future cosmic existence. The Christ will lead us to those who were once His companions on the Sun. But this, as far as man is concerned, belongs to the future.

We have said that the influences of the Moon work upon us from the spiritual world; the same is true of the influences working from the Sun upon our physical and etheric bodies. Think, for example, of the temperaments. There are forces in the temperaments which play into the physical body, but more particularly into the etheric body. This is regulated by the interplay of Sun and Moon. A man with a strong vein of melancholy in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Moon. Similarly, a man with a markedly sanguine vein in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Sun. A man in whom the quality of Sun and Moon are in balance and neutralised, will be a phlegmatic type. When the physical element as such plays into a man and comes to expression in the life of soul, as in the temperaments, the Sun and Moon forces are in play in the whole of his being. But to begin with, man is aware of these forces only when they confront him in their external, physical manifestation, when the Moon—and similarly the Sun—announces its presence through the orb that is outwardly visible. Yet forces far transcending the physical are taking effect; we must always speak of the Sun and Moon as spiritual realities. And that is easy enough to realise.

Think of a human body. This body to-day no longer has within it the same substances as it had ten years ago. You are perpetually casting off these physical substances and replacing them by new. What endures is the spiritual form of man, the configuration of inner forces. Suppose you had been sitting in this room ten years ago; you do not bring with you now the flesh and blood that were within you then as material substance. The physical is involved in a perpetual stream from within outwards; it is being cast off all the time. Although this is a known fact it is not always remembered. It is a fact in the Cosmos too. People think that the Moon which shines down upon the Earth to-day is the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or Buddha. Spiritually, yes, it is the same Moon, but not in respect of physical substance. As for the Sun, the physicists and astrophysicists calculate how long it will be before it disintegrates in cosmic space. They know that it will disintegrate but they reckon in terms of millions of years. The same kind of results would be obtained if such calculations were applied to the human being. The calculations are absolutely correct and cannot be faulted—only they are not true! They are dead correct, but just think of this—if you examined a human heart today, then five days later and then again after a further five days, you could calculate from the minute changes what it was like three hundred years ago and what it will be like three hundred years hence. In the same way geology can calculate what the Earth looked like twenty million years ago and what it will look like twenty million years hence. The calculations may be perfectly correct, but the Earth was not in existence twenty million years ago and will not be in existence twenty million years from now. The calculations themselves are correct but they are not true! Not even for the shortest periods does the Cosmos differ from man in this respect. Although mineral substances last essentially longer in that form than the configuration of substance in living bodies, yet even the purely physical part of mineral substances is transient. As I have said, the Moon in the sky to-day is in its physical composition no longer the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or the Emperor Augustus, for its substance has changed, just as the substance of a man's physical body has changed. What endures out there in the Cosmos is the spiritual element, just as in the case of a human being what endures from birth to death is the spiritual entity, not the physical substance.

We shall therefore only be viewing the world rightly when we say of man that what endures between birth and death is his soul; what endures out yonder in the celestial bodies is a multiplicity of Beings. And when speaking of Moon and Sun we ought to be conscious that if we are to speak truly we must speak of Beings of the Moon and Beings of the Sun. The Beings of the Moon are connected with our past; the Beings of the Sun will be connected with our future, but even now they work into our present existence.

A sound basis for the study of human karma and destiny can be established only when man is given his real place within the Cosmos.

Try as we will, we can never alter the past. For this reason, in the Moon forces as they work into and lay hold of our human nature there is an element of immutable necessity. Everything that comes to us from the Moon has this character. In whatever comes from the Sun and points to the future, there is something in which our will, our freedom, can be a factor. So that we can say: when man again apprehends the Divine in the Cosmos, and instead of vague, sentimental generalisations is able to speak with precision and definition about the Divine as revealed in the several heavenly bodies, a special kind of language will take shape within him when he contemplates the heavenly bodies with heart-knowledge and true human understanding.

Now suppose a human being were standing in front of us and looking at his hands or his arms, his head, his chest, his legs, his feet, we were to ask in each case, ‘what is that?,’ and were told in reply, ‘that is something human.’ When no distinctions are made but everything is labelled with the generalisation ‘human,’ we are without bearings or direction. The same is true if we gaze out into the Cosmos, contemplate the Sun and Moon and the stars and speak of the Divine as a generalisation. We must acquire a definite, concretely real view of the Divine. And this we do when we recognise, for example, the deep connection of the Moon with our own past, indeed with the past of the whole Earth. Then, when we look at the Moon in the heavens, we can say: “Thou cosmic offspring of Necessity, when I contemplate that within me over which my will has no sway, I feel inwardly united with thee.” Our knowledge of the Moon then becomes feeling, for we realise that every experience arising perceptibly out of inner necessity is connected with the Moon.

If in the same way we contemplate the inmost nature of the Sun, not merely making calculations or observing it through instruments, we shall feel its kinship with everything that lives in us as freedom, with everything that we ourselves can achieve for the benefit of the future.

Such experiences would enable us to find a link with the instinctive wisdom of primeval humanity. For we cannot rightly understand what radiates with such poetic beauty from ancient civilisations unless we can still feel, when we gaze at the Moon, that there we are glimpsing the past with its element of necessity and when we gaze at the Sun that there we are glimpsing the freedom belonging to the future.

Necessity and freedom interweave in our destiny. In terms of the terrestrial and human we speak of Necessity and Freedom; in terms of the heavenly and cosmic we speak of Moon existence and Sun existence.

Now let us try to discover how the forces of the Sun and Moon work in the web of our destiny. We meet some human being. As a rule the fact that we have met him is enough in itself; we accept life as it comes without being very observant or giving it much thought. But deeper scrutiny of individual human life reveals that when two persons meet, their paths have been guided in a remarkable way. Think of two individuals, one aged twenty-five and the other aged twenty, who meet; they can look back over the course of their lives hitherto and it will be evident to each of them that every single happening in the life of the one, say the twenty-year-old, had impelled him from quite a different part of the world to this meeting, at this particular place, with the other. The same will be true of the twenty-five-year-old. In the forming of destiny very much depends upon the fact that human beings, starting from different parts of the world, meet as though guided by an iron necessity directly to the meeting-point. No thought is given to the wonders that can be revealed by studies of this kind but human life is infinitely enriched by insight into such situations and impoverished without it. If we begin to think about our relationship to some human being whom we seem to have met quite by accident, we shall have to say to ourselves that we had been looking for him, seeking for him, ever since we were born into this earthly existence ... and as a matter of fact, even before then. But I do not want to go into that at the moment. We need only remind ourselves that we should not have come across this individual if at some earlier point in earthly life we had taken only a slightly different direction to the left or to the right and had not gone the way we did. As I said, people do not give any thought to these matters. But it is sheer arrogance to believe that something to which one pays no attention is non-existent. It is a fact and will eventually reveal itself to observation. There is, however, a significant difference between what takes place before the actual meeting of two individuals and what takes place from that moment onwards. Before they met in earthly life, they had influenced each other without having any knowledge of the other's existence. After the meeting the mutual influence continues, but now they know each other. And this again is the beginning of something extremely significant.

Naturally, we also meet many individuals in life for whom we have not been seeking. I will not say that we meet a great many people of whom we might think that it would have been better not to have done so! I am not suggesting any such thing ... but at all events we do meet many individuals of whom we cannot say that we have deliberately set out to find them.

If what I have now been saying is viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, it becomes clear that what has been in operation between two human beings before they actually meet in earthly life is determined by the Moon, whereas everything that takes place between them after their meeting is determined by the Sun. Hence what occurs between two human beings before they become acquainted can only be regarded as the outcome of iron necessity and what happens afterwards as the expression of freedom, of mutually free relationship and behaviour. It is indeed true that when we get to know a human being our soul subconsciously looks back and forward: back to the spiritual Moon, forward to the spiritual Sun. And with this is connected the weaving of our karma, our destiny.

Very few people today have faculties for perceiving these things. But it is precisely because these faculties are beginning to develop that so much in our age is in a state of ferment. The faculties are already present in numbers of human beings, only they are unaware of it and ascribe the effects to all kinds of other causes. In reality these faculties of perception are striving to function so that when human beings become acquainted with one another they may realise how much is due to iron necessity, to the forces of the Moon, and how their relationship will go forward in the light of the Sun, in the light of freedom. To experience destiny in this way is itself part of the cosmic destiny of humanity today and on into the future. When we meet a human being in the world we can distinguish quite clearly between two kinds of relationship. In the case of one individual the relationship proceeds from the will, in the case of another, it proceeds more or less from the intellect, or even from the aesthetic sense.

Think of the subtle differences in the relationships between human beings even in childhood or youth. We may love an individual or perhaps we hate him. If our feelings do not reach this intensity, we shall feel sympathy or antipathy; our feelings in this case do not go very deep—we just pass him by or let him pass us by. It cannot be denied that this was how we felt about most of our teachers at school; and we should count ourselves fortunate if it was not so.

But a quite different kind of relationship is possible, even in childhood. It is when we are so inwardly affected by what we see a person do, that we say: we must do it too! The relationship between us makes us choose him as a hero, as one we must follow on the path to Olympus. In short, some human beings have an effect upon our intellect, or at best upon our aesthetic sympathy or antipathy; and others have a direct effect upon our will.

Or think of the other side of life. External circumstances may bring us into very close contact with certain individuals—yet we simply cannot dream about them. We may meet others only once, yet we never seem to be free of them, we are always dreaming about them. If a more intimate association is not vouchsafed to us in this present earthly life, this will have to be reserved for other incarnations. However that may be, our relationship to a human being is deeper if, as soon as we meet him, we begin to dream about him.

There is also a sort of waking dreaming, which in the case of most people to-day lacks clear definition. But as you know, there are also initiated human beings who experience life very differently. If we meet an individual who makes an impression upon our will, he will also have an effect upon our ‘inner speech:’ he will not only speak when he is face to face with us; he will also speak out of us. If we are initiated into the secret of cosmic existence we shall know that there is a double relationship between individuals when they meet: we may meet one person to whom we shall listen, and then go on our way; we need never listen to him any more. Others we may meet to whom we shall listen, but when we go away from them they still seem to be speaking—but out of our own inner being: they are there and they really do seem to speak in this way.

What happens in the case of an Initiate is as I have just described: he actually carries within him, in the very quality of his voice, those who have made this impression on him. In those who are not initiated this also takes place, but only in the realm of feeling; it is there all the same, but subconsciously. Let us suppose that we meet an individual and then come across other people who know him as well and will remark what a splendid fellow he is. This means that they have thought about the man and have formed a judgement based on the intellect. But we do not call everyone we meet a splendid fellow or a cad, as the case may be; there are individuals who have an effect upon our will—which as I have said, leads a kind of sleeping existence within us during our waking life. The effect is that we feel we simply must follow or oppose them. In one who is not initiated, these individuals, even if they do not speak within him, live in his will. What then exactly is the difference between these two kinds of relationship?

When we meet other human beings who have no effect upon our will, but of whom we do no more than form a judgement, then there is no strong karmic connection between us; we have had little to do with them in earlier earthly lives. Individuals who affect our very will, so that they seem to be always with us, whose form is so strongly impressed upon us that they are always in our thoughts, so that we dream of them even in our waking life—these are the individuals with whom we have had a great deal to do in our past earthly lives, with whom we are as it were cosmically connected through the gate of the Moon; whereas in our present life we are connected through the Sun with everything that lives in us without any element of the necessity belonging to Moon existence.

Thus is destiny woven. On the one side man has his isolated ‘head-existence’ which has considerable independence. Even physically this head-existence raises itself all the time above the general conditions of man's cosmic existence, and in the following way—the brain weighs on average 1,500 grammes, and with this weight it would crush all the underlying blood vessels. Just think of it—a weight of 1,500 grammes pressing on those delicate blood vessels! But this does not happen. Why not? Simply because the brain is embedded in the cerebral fluid. If you have learnt any physics, you will know that a body in water loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of water it displaces—this is the so-called principle of Archimedes. The actual weight of the brain is therefore about 20 grammes, because the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. Hence the brain in the body presses with a weight of only 20 grammes—certainly not with its actual weight of 1,500 grammes. The brain is isolated and has its own existence.

As we go about the world, the brain is like a man sitting in his motor-car. The man himself does not move; the car moves and he sits still. And our brain as the bearer of intellect has an isolated existence. That is why the intellect is so independent of our individuality. If each of us had our own separate and distinct intellect this would augur badly for any mutual understanding! We are able to understand one another only because we all possess the same principle of intellect, although naturally there are differences of degree. But intellect is a universal principle. Human beings can understand one another through the intellect which is independent of their individual qualities. Whatever appears in human destiny as something belonging to the immediate Present—such as the meeting of two people—works upon the intellect and impulses of feeling associated with the intellect. In these cases we speak of someone as a ‘splendid fellow’ in whom we have no further interest than that he has had an effect upon our intellect. Everything that is not part of our karma has an effect upon the intellect; everything that is part of our karma and links us with other human beings as a result of experiences once shared with the individuals we now meet—all this works through those depths of human nature which lie in the will. And so it is true that the will is working even before we actually meet a human being with whom we are karmically connected. The will is not always illumined by the intellect. Just think how much in the working of the will is shrouded in darkness! The karma which leads two human beings together is shrouded in the deepest obscurity of all; they become dimly aware that karma is working from the way in which their wills are involved. The moment they come face to face the intellect begins to work; and what is then woven by the intellect can become the basis for future karma. But in essentials—not wholly, but in essentials—it would be true to say that for two human beings who are karmically connected, their karma has worked itself out when the meeting has taken place. Only what they may do after that as a continuation of what lives in the unconscious—that and that alone becomes part of the stream of future karma. But a great deal is then woven into their destiny which has an effect only on the intellect and its sympathies and antipathies. Past and Future, Moon existence and Sun existence are here intermingled. The thread of karma that reaches into the past is interwoven with the thread that reaches into the future.

We can actually gaze into cosmic existence. For if we watch the Sun rising in the morning and look at the Moon at night, we can glimpse in their mutual relationships a picture of how Necessity and Freedom are interwoven in our own destiny. And if, with a concrete idea of the mingling of Necessity and Freedom in human destiny, we again contemplate the Sun and the Moon, they will begin to unveil their spirituality to us. Then we shall not speak like the unwitting physicists who when they look at the Moon merely say that it reflects the light of the Sun ... but when we see this light of the Moon which is the same as the light of the Sun, we shall rather speak of the weaving of cosmic destiny.

Thus contemplation of our own human destiny leads to a conception of cosmic destiny. Then and only then are we able in the real sense to knit our human existence with cosmic existence. Man must learn to feel himself a living member of the Cosmos. Just as a finger is a finger only while it is actually part of a human body—if it is amputated it is no longer really a finger—so man himself has real being only inasmuch as he is part of the Cosmos. But man is arrogant, and the finger would probably be humbler if it had the same kind of consciousness. ... Yet perhaps it would no longer be humble if it could at any moment tear itself free and move around the body... although it would have to remain in the sphere of a human being in order to remain a finger at all! And man, as earthly man, must remain in the Earth-sphere if he is to be man. He is a quite different being, he is a being of eternity when he is outside the Earth-sphere, either in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence. But again, we can gain knowledge of these spheres of existence only when we recognise that we ourselves are members of the Universe. This recognition will never be achieved by fanciful speculation about our connection with the Universe, but only when, as we have tried to do to-day, we learn gradually to feel its concrete reality. Then we feel that our destiny is in very truth an image of the world of stars, of the Sun-nature and the Moon-nature. We learn to look out into the Universe and read the scroll of our human life from the life of the great Universe. Again, we learn to look into our own soul and to understand the world through it. For nobody understands the Moon who does not understand the element of Necessity in human destiny; nobody understands the Sun who does not understand the element of Freedom in human nature. Such are the interconnections of Necessity and Freedom.

At the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum we tried to give the impulses which would help us to make these facts of true esoteric perception still more effective in the years to come. And I hope that our Members will become more and more conscious of what took place at Christmas. I would like particularly to draw your attention to the fact that every Member can now receive the News Sheet. Through this News Sheet and many other developments in the Anthroposophical Society, the whole Society should in future be able to share in that quickening life which can flow from Anthroposophy. The isolation which has hitherto existed between the Groups must as far as possible come to an end. The Anthroposophical Society can become a real whole only when those who are members of a Group in New Zealand know what is going on in a Group in Berne, and members of a Berne Group know what is going on in New Zealand or New York or Vienna. This should now be possible. And one of the many things we are doing, or at least that we want to do in connection with the Christmas Meeting is to make this News Sheet a medium for all anthroposophical work in the world. It will be necessary to pay some attention to the News Sheet, and then everyone will realise what he can do to promote its aims.

While I am speaking here the third number of the News Sheet is being issued in Dornach; in it I have shown how every Member can co-operate in making it a genuine reflection of anthroposophical achievements. Only because I believe that to this end it is necessary for Anthroposophy to be cultivated more intensively within the Society—I do not mean in the sense of more content, but with greater intensity, greater enthusiasm, greater love—only for these reasons, although in the ordinary way I should have every right at my age, to retire, I have decided, after having given up the personal leadership of the Society in 1912, to begin again and to imagine that I have regained my youth and am capable of the work. I want this to be understood as a desire to stimulate interest for a more active life in the Anthroposophical Society. My hope—and anyone who was not at Dornach can read about it in the Goetheanum Weekly and the News Sheet—is that whatever of spiritual value was achieved at the Christmas Meeting shall in some way reach every individual Member. Thereby the aim of bringing true esoteric life into the Society will be achieved. The High School for Spiritual Science was founded at Christmas with the aim that esoteric life shall again flow into the Anthroposophical Society.

I hope that the words I have spoken to you to-day will have expressed the desire that this esoteric life may again unfold among us in the way that will be made clearer and clearer to you. This aim can become reality through what can go out in future from Dornach as the centre where the General Anthroposophical Society was founded at Christmas. May the Members of this Berne Group be able to contribute effectively to what we should like to achieve in Dornach for the whole Movement, to the extent that our forces permit.

To our friends of Anthroposophy gathered at the Goetheanum

A year has passed since our conference during the last Christmas season, when a new life was to be given to the Anthroposophical Society and a spiritual foundation stone was laid for it.

This Christmas I cannot attend the gatherings of our friends, I cannot do anything in person to help with what has been organized. I was unable to assist Mrs. Marie Steiner in anything that needed to be prepared.

My physical strength collapsed during the fall events. It would probably have held despite the many courses; but only if no other efforts had been made beyond those of holding the courses, which were well calculated for this strength. Now that efforts have come, in a perfectly understandable way, that went beyond those of holding courses, it was too much after all that was incumbent upon me during this past year.

So now I am dependent on regaining physical strength with the help of the unparalleled, self-sacrificing care of my friend Dr. I. Wegman. (Dr. Noll is Dr. Wegman's loyal helper.

All this must be accepted as fate (karma). It would be sentimental to say much about how painful it is for me to be physically separated from the places where we work at the Goetheanum. I would just like to hope that none of this will weaken our dear friends, but rather make them stronger and more effective.

All I can do for these Christmas events is to send to the hall where I want to be with the friends spiritually, descriptions of the “Christ Mystery in the Context of World and Human Development” - which I developed following the messages about Michael's mission. Their lecture should awaken the consciousness that I want to participate as well as I can in this year's Christmas meetings. These messages about the mystery of Christ, which correspond to the Christmas festival mood, will also appear in the following numbers of the journal.

Christmas greetings and thoughts for Dr. I. Wegman, who is deprived of her membership by me.

With all my heart
Rudolf Steiner

During the war years Rudolf Steiner spoke the following commemorative words before every lecture he gave to the Anthroposophical Society of countries affected by the war:

My dear friends, let us think of the guardian spirits of all the people out on the battlefields:

Spirits ever watchful, guardians of your souls,
May your pinions carry
Our souls' imploring love
To the human beings upon earth committed to your care;
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may radiate with help
To the souls whom our love is seeking.

And let us turn to the guardian spirits of all those souls who have already passed through the portal of death because of the catastrophes of our time:

Spirits ever watchful, guardians of your souls,
May your pinions carry
Our souls' imploring love
To the human beings in the spheres committed to your care
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may radiate with help
To the souls whom our love is seeking.

And may the Spirit whom we have for many years sought to approach with our spiritual science, the Spirit who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha for the salvation of the earth and the freedom and progress of humanity, may that spirit be with you in your arduous tasks.