The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What I have to say to you to-day will be expressed in the form of pictures drawn from the imaginative life, which is the expression, the revelation, of the spiritual world. The human being is woven with his whole existence and activity into the spiritual world. We know from the many and varied descriptions of it that have been given here, that an abstract manner of speaking, such as is applied to external, sense-perceptible nature, cannot be used in speaking of the spiritual world, if actual manifestations of that world are in question. We know too, however, that the manner of speaking we must then adopt is no unreal one, but, on the contrary, one far more realistic than the logical, abstract speech we employ to express merely natural truths. This I wanted to say about the attitude to be adopted in what I shall now put before you.

When man finds, with spiritual vision, the way out beyond the physically sense-perceptible world, there reveals itself to him a world of spirit. In that world he feels led to make use of the phenomena of the physical world as pictures, with which to express what is spiritually revealed to him. So let me now put a picture at the centre of our considerations; a picture which is in truth a deep reality. Mankind, throughout its evolutionary history, has always been guided by impulses from the spiritual world. Those who could see so far found these impulses written as it were in brazen letters in a spiritual light, indicating the direction they should take. What is thus found in the spiritual world might be compared with the signposts of the physical world; not those that have just a pointing hand perhaps, and the name of some place or other, but signposts on which is expressed in powerful words—or at least in powerfully sounding words—what changes are due to take place in human thinking, feeling, willing. I am speaking of spiritual signposts. Such directions in the spiritual world, however, are usually drawn up for human beings in a remarkable manner, and have been so in all epochs—namely, in a kind of riddle-language. One has in a certain way to make an effort to get behind the riddle. In order that one of these signposts in the riddle-language may become a real impulse for life, a great deal of what one knows has to be brought together. And so just at the present time, as something suited to our immediate present and the near future, one finds in the astral light, as I may call it, such directing words as can become impulses for mankind. On the most varied occasions—I might say in the most varied places—there comes before one to-day, if one has the faculties needed to behold it, something that is like a warning, having moreover the quality of a riddle, and it calls forth in man the feeling that he should be guided by it, should take it as a strong impulse into his will, into his whole life of soul. What thus shines out to meet us in the astral light, as one such spiritual milestone, consists approximately of the following words:—

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

First of all there is a challenge to discover what is actually meant. Some sort of impulse is referred to, something which is already present, something known to man, since otherwise one could not reckon on his finding an answer:

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing,
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

The explanation of these words, which, as has been said, how themselves in the astral light like a directing impulse or human beings, will be the purpose of to-day's lecture.

Let us recall a number of things that I have already explained here. Let us recall how the year's course, in its regular sequence through Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, has a spiritual content; how spiritual occurrences, superensible occurrences, are revealed in what happens in the course of the year just as a man's super-sensible soul and super-sensible spirit are revealed in what happens in his bodily life between birth and death. Let us reflect how, in what appears outwardly during the year's course, in Winter's snow, Spring's sprouting, waxing life, in Summer's life of blossoming and Autumn's life of ripening and fruiting—how in all this which discloses itself physically to men something spiritual is hidden, something spiritual sustains it. And so let us turn our gaze first to what takes place in this yearly course, from spring to summer and on towards the autumn.

In all that Earth reveals, in stone and plant, in everything that has being, spiritual beings live; not a mere washed-out spirituality, but separate spirit-beings, Nature-spirits. These Nature-spirits hide during the winter in the bosom of the Earth; they are breathed in, as it were, by the Earth; they are within the Earth. When spring comes, Earth breathes out, as it were, her spirituality; these Nature-spirits strive upwards. They aspire upwards with the forces of springing, sprouting life; they are active in the life which is felt in the light-radiant, sun-warmed air; within this they aspire upwards. And as we approach St. John's Day and the time of midsummer, then in the heights above us, if we look up to them, we have a picture revealed there, embodied in the forms of clouds, embodied mightily in lightning, too, and thunder, embodied in all the meteoric element above us, all that lived in the form of Nature-spirits during winter in the Earth's dark bosom. During winter we must look down to the Earth and feel, or behold how, hidden beneath the covering of snow, Nature-spirits are working, so that out of winter shall come spring again, and summer, from the productive Earth. But if in summer we look down to the Earth, then the Earth is as if impoverished by the loss of those Nature-spirits. The Nature-spirits have gone out into the wide universe; they have united themselves with the cloud-structures and everything that human sight encounters in the heights above. In all the ways I have mentioned they have streamed up to the heights, these Nature-spirits, and with them they have taken, in an extremely subtle form, extremely fine dilution, that which manifests outwardly as crude and lifeless sulphur. And in fact these Nature-spirits, as they billow and surge in cloud-forms and the like, during summer's height, weave and live pre-eminently in sulphur, the sulphur that is then present there in an extraordinarily subtle way, in the heights of the earthly realm. If we could speed through these high reaches of our earthly world during the height of summer with a sort of tasting-feeling sense, we should be aware of a sulphurous taste and even of a sulphurous smell, though in an extraordinarily dilute, subtle and intimate form. What develops up there, however, under the influence of the Sun's warmth and light, is akin to the process that goes on in the human organism when cravings, wishes, emotions and so on come welling up. Anyone who has the faculty for beholding and feeling such things knows that the Nature-spirits in the heights during midsummer live in an element which is as much saturated with desire as is the desire-life that is bound up with the animal nature of man—that animal part of man wherein he, too, is sulphurised, is permeated with sulphur in a very diluted form. We see, as it were, man's lower aspect, that which is animalised in him, arched as Nature's formation above us at the height of summer, filled with the life of Nature-spirits. What we thus recognise in its sulphurous quality when it weaves and lives in human nature, we call the Ahrimanic; in it the Ahrimanic actually lives. So we can also say: when in high summer-time we turn spiritual vision towards the heights, then in the cosmic sulphurous desires the Ahrimanic is revealed to us. So if we conceive of man in relation to this whole world nexus, we must say to ourselves: the Earth takes up in winter what exists in man as his lower nature and spreads over it crystalline snow, and in so doing the Earth receives the Ahrimanic from it. When in high summer the Ahrimanic is free, it works as cosmic desires out in the wide spaces of the world and is, indeed, subject to laws which proceed from the planetary neighbours of the Earth and are effective on them. And now we see how against this Ahrimanic desire-element, against this animal desire-nature of man turned inside out, as it were, in the cosmos, an opposing force is present. The force which brings the human being into subjection through his emotions, dragging him down below the human to the animal level, and is revealed in full summer high above us—against this a counter-force is provided in the cosmos. This counter-force is seen in those remarkable products which from time to time fall on to the Earth as products of the cosmos and contain meteoric iron. If you look at a piece of meteoric iron, you have in it a remarkable witness of the iron dispersed in the cosmos. In the shooting stars which come so frequently in August and bring iron into special activity, as it were, in the cosmos, we see revealed this counter-force of Nature acting against the desire-element which by that time is out there in the cosmos. And in this cosmic iron, condensed to meteoric stones, we have the arrows which the cosmos sends out against the animal desire element which, as I have just described, is cosmically manifest.

So we can look with understanding and reverence upon the wisdom-filled guidance of the cosmos. We know, of course, that man needs this animal desire nature, precisely because in overcoming it, and not otherwise, he can develop the forces that first make him fully human. And man could not have this desire nature, this animalising element, if the same animal desire element were not a part also of the cosmos. The sulphur, then, the sulphurous Ahrimanic element is, as it were, one pole out in the cosmos, and the arrows discharged by the Cosmos through space to combat this sulphurous element are concentrated in meteoric iron—in the meteoric projectiles, so to say, of the universe.

Now man is a true microcosm, really a little world. Everything that manifests in the great world outside in gigantic and majestic phenomena such as the phenomena of meteors, manifests also within, in the inward nature of what he is himself as physical being. For this physical being is only an expression, a manifestation, of his spiritual being. And so in a certain way we bear within ourselves, starting from the animal lower nature, the sulphurous element. We must say to ourselves: this sulphurous Ahrimanic element storms through the human organism, stirs up his desire-nature, stirs up his emotions. We feel it within us; we behold it at high summer-time in the cosmic desire-covering above our heads. But we also behold how into this over-arching cosmic desire-covering there shoot the iron arrows of the meteoric phenomena, cleansing and clarifying it, acting as an opposite pole to the animal-like desire-nature. For through this shooting in of the meteoric iron arrows from the cosmos, the animal desire-covering of high summer time above us is purified. And what takes place in majesty and grandeur out there in the great cosmos, goes on continually also in us. We produce tiny iron particles in our blood, in combination with other substances, and while, on the one hand, there pulses through our blood the sulphurising process, there works against it inwardly, meteorically, as the other pole, the iron inside us, bringing about the same process as is effected outside in the cosmos by the meteoric iron. We can then so picture man's relationship to the cosmos that in the flashing meteoric element we find the cosmic counterpart of what within us is a million upon million-fold flashing forth of the meteoric element that sets us free by means of the iron in our blood, cleansing and clarifying us from the sulphurising process which is also active in the blood itself.

Thus we are inwardly a copy of the cosmos. In the cosmos this process is accomplished during the height of summer; man, because he stands within Nature as one emancipated from her in regard to time, has continually midsummer as well as the other seasons in himself, just as he has within him in the continuity of memory his former experiences. Outwardly they have vanished, but inwardly they remain. So is it too with what is present in Man as Microcosm in relation to the Macrocosm. What he thus carries in his physical body, however, he must grasp in soul and spirit, must become able to experience it within himself; he must learn to experience this meteoric shag of the blood-iron into the blood-sulphur as freedom, or initiative, as the strength of his will. Otherwise it remains an animal or vegetative process in him at the best. What precisely constitutes our becoming [a] human being in soul and spirit is that we grasp the processes which go on in us, such as this iron-sulphur process, with our soul and spirit, that we send the soul and spirit into them as an impulse. Just as when we have made an instrument and know how to handle it properly, we are able to perform something by means of it, so can we turn to the service of our will what works and lives in us as does this process of iron and sulphur, when once we know how to handle it; when, as human beings, we can handle and make use of what goes on as living processes within our body.

Let us now turn again to the cosmos and away from man. You can realise that what takes place out there in the cosmos is an earnest admonition to men. For this meteoric iron-process in the cosmos truly brings to mind our inner physical nature; this nature, however, can be placed at the service of our spiritual inner being. So now we come to the meaning which has to be ascribed to that brazen writing in the astral light:—

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.

If we look round us at modern life, as it has developed in the course of recent centuries, we can see that the chief feature of this materialistic culture is the use of iron in the realm of earthly life. Look in any direction where our form of civilisation has flowered in recent times; it is iron that has planted in the physical world everything which has led to the culmination of this materialistic culture. We look for what it was that in so unparalleled a way has brought people together, and has laid down the paths for the various branches of materialistic culture and made them smooth; and everywhere we see it was iron and what can be developed out of it. When we speak of materialism in the life of thought it is true that the essence of materialism consists in the idea that everything is matter, and Spirit is a kind of vaporous result of the activities of matter. But the materialism of mankind in the last four centuries is shown not merely in the fact that people think materialistically; materialism is manifest also in the way we handle outer things. Out of the cultural impulses of recent times man has applied iron to this material culture, while the meteoric iron which falls from heaven is treated merely as a rarity, or as something one seeks to explain by means of a science that cannot grasp much about it. This meteoric iron, however, which falls to earth from out of the cosmos, which purifies and clarifies the animal-like life, is actually an admonition to us that we should look up from using iron materially for earthly purposes, and see what heavenly service iron performs in its meteoric aspect up above us, and, more especially, within us. For these meteoric processes within us go on all the time.

And so the first part of this warning speech, shining forth to meet us in the astral light, takes on the likeness of a word written in brazen letters, saying: O Man, thou hast put iron to thine earthly service.

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing,
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

It is not merely that we should look up in our thoughts from the materialistic world-conception to a spiritual world-conception, but that we should also look up from what we use in the service of material culture to the spiritual and cosmic aspects of what serves us in material form. And so precisely through these words, which have first to be unravelled like a riddle, we are directed to that Spiritual Being who lives in the universe in the revelation of meteoric phenomena, especially in what is revealed by meteoric phenomena at the height of summer. For at that time the Ahrimanic sulphurising process, which is otherwise present only within man, is there as a cosmic process, and the meteoric process is a counter-process to it; we have here the arrows which the cosmos discharges into the animalised cravings in the heights.

If one lets all this work upon the soul, one feels how truly man is connected with all that surrounds him in the world, and, within, one feels how one's very blood is permeated with soul, saturated with spirit. One feels in it this opposition between the Ahrimanic and that which purifies the Ahrimanic element, the iron in the blood; one feels the inner meteoric process. One looks up with comprehension to what is accomplished outside when the cosmic spirit-forces send the iron arrows into the animalised desire-world of the cosmos; one feels oneself entirely bound up with the cosmos and surrendered to it. Precisely in these particular phenomena, one feels entirely surrendered to the cosmos.

When one feels all this in full earnestness, then from this feeling there takes form a cosmic Imagination; one can indeed do no other than form and picture this cosmic Imagination. Just as animals have a different attitude towards outer Nature, being unable to form concepts or ideas of it, but only general impressions, whereas man forms pictures and ideas, so, when the soul has risen to exact clairvoyance, it is not possible for it to do otherwise, when it experiences such things as this—when its feeling turns inwardly towards its own meteoric process, and when looking outward it beholds in the cosmic meteor-process that rich fullness of life which is thus revealed—than to bring it all together in a comprehensive, inwardly saturated picture form, an Imagination in which is displayed how the human being, the Microcosm, and the Macrocosm are grown together. This does not mean that such an Imagination is merely built up out of fantasy; rather is it a real and true expression of a living process permeating the world and the human being; in this case, of a process that lives in the phenomena of the yearly course.

The Imagination which comes before man out of this experience is one that springs out of a living together with the natural processes of the year's course from midsummer on towards autumn, as far as the end of summer, the beginning of the autumn; And from this experience there arises, coming before the soul in living actuality, the figure of Michael. Out of what I have described to you is revealed the figure of Michael in his fight with the Dragon, with the animal nature of Man, the sulphurising process. And when one understands what is actually going on there, then the soul, which takes its own form and origin from the interweaving life forces of the cosmos, cannot but bring forth the fight of Michael with the Dragon. There appears as the outward expression of what is working out there in the cosmos in battle with the animalised desire nature, Michael himself. But he appears with a pointing sword, pointing it towards the higher nature of man. He shines forth with this pointing sword, and we picture Michael rightly when we find in his sword the iron that has been cosmically smelted and forged for this purpose. Thus there comes forth, one might say, out of the spiritual cloud-formations the figure of Michael with positive, searching and directing gaze, his eye like a guiding sign, its gaze sent outwards, never drawn back into himself; and the arm of Michael appears to us in the midst of a sparkling shower of meteor-iron, as though this were molten in cosmic desire forces and fused together again to form the flaming sword of Michael. Rightly do we picture Michael then, quite in accord with reality, when we think of his countenance as woven from the golden light of summer, with a positive gaze which is like a sign, as it were pointing outwards; like a ray of light from within which is sent actively out. We picture Michael rightly when his outstretched arm is flaming with flashing sprays of meteor iron, molten and fused together into the sword wherewith he shows humanity the way from the animal-like to man's higher nature, pointing the way from the summer season, when man most makes himself one with outer Nature, most nearly comes to a Nature-consciousness, to that other season, the time of autumn, when man, were he to continue to live united with Nature, could share only in her dying in the death she brings on herself. But it would be terrible for man, if he could only share with Nature, as autumn comes, this natural path to death, this self-destruction. When we experience Spring, then if we are really fully man, we yield ourselves to Nature in her sprouting, waxing, flourishing. If we are fully man, we blossom with each blossom, sprout with every leaf: with every seed we grow ripe ourselves. It is then that we give ourselves over to Nature's mounting, springing, sprouting life. For it is then her will to live, and we feel this impulse of life in experiencing hers. And we do well to devote ourselves to Nature at this season. But in autumn we cannot unfold this nature-consciousness in ourselves, for if we did that onesidedly we should have to share in the experience of the paralysis and death which she makes her own. Man dare not go with her in that direction; in the face of that he must rather increase his strength. Just as he must accompany living Nature in his own life, so must he set against dying Nature, against death, the Self. Nature-consciousness must be transformed into self-consciousness.

This is the great and powerful picture given us in the approach of autumn, so that from out of what happens in the cosmos we read the admonition: Nature consciousness must change in man into consciousness of self. But for this he needs the strength to overcome with his qualities of soul and spirit the inwardly death-bringing quality of animal-like Nature. For this he is given guidance when he looks out into the phenomena of the cosmos; to this he is guided by what is revealed in the figure of Michael, with his positive gaze and the flaming meteor-sword in his right hand. And Michael appears to us in that fight with the animalised desire-nature of which, also, a picture emerges from the loom of life. If we wish to paint this whole Imagination, we cannot paint it in any humanly arbitrary way; it can be painted only out of what is given by the cosmos. And the only way to picture the sulphurous element in it, rising into the heights with the elemental spirits in yellowish reddish shades, is in the figure of the Dragon, which takes shape from out of the sulphur. So that above the sulphurous Dragon, in whose burning head, as I might call it, is exhibited the desire-like process, above this Ahrimanised and sulphurised Dragon, we have Michael in the form I have described to you.

He who understands the world can describe it in Imaginations. And whosoever believes that one can paint the fight of Michael with the Dragon in any way one chooses, sins against the inner reality of the world. For the interplay of forces in the world has a definite ordering in relation to human beings. And all the great paintings and other works of art in the world have not come into existence out of arbitrary human choice. If that were so, they would scarcely have continued to appeal to man for centuries, even thousands of years. They have sprung from a real understanding of what weaves and lives out there in the cosmos, and also within the human being. And when out of the living and weaving in Nature and in man, in their mutual connection, there is created the substance of Imaginations, with all that is revealed from the mysteries of Nature, even to the colours and the way the colours gleam and shine, and the details of the forms—when all this is given artistic form, then it is that the great, genuine works of art arise, the great works that were created by the seers, that are imitated by the imitators and are decked out by the bunglers with all kinds of frippery till the real greatness that should go forth from these works, born out of the creative weaving of the cosmos, is no longer recognised. This is what gives these works of art the power to influence humanity through long periods of time. The great artistic motifs of painting and sculpture never would have become what they are had they not been created out of impulses seen to arise from the life of Nature and the life of man.

So we are able to direct our vision to what appears if Michael and the Dragon are painted in the spiritual sense of to-day (for older ways of apprehending it had to paint it according to their own knowledge); the countenance pictured in golden sun-gleam, the gaze positive, outward-looking, the sword of flame, molten and shaped anew out of the meteor-iron of the cosmos; and below, the Dragon, tormentor of human nature, the Dragon who manifests at high summertime, the sulphurous Dragon revealed in the weaving of flames rising up and at once fading again. This Dragon moving below in his own sulphurous element, taking form as the tormentor of humanity and the opponent of the higher hierarchies—this gives the necessary contrast over against the war-waging Michael, who compels the meteoric iron to his spiritual service.

Here you have an example of how the true iron passes over into art, must always pass over into art, since with abstract concepts one cannot compass the whole of reality. And this is the admonition to our times—that we should grasp just such a picture as this, for the awakening of strength, for the awakening of mankind. Therefore one would like to inscribe this picture in particular, this modernised picture of the fight of Michael with the Dragon, deep, deep into the human soul, the human heart, so that it may exert its influence in human forces of will and thought in the present time and in the future. And one can know that if a part of mankind were to take this picture in earnest, if a part of mankind were to understand how this picture takes shape from Nature's very self, and from the directive admonitions in the astral light, then to the material use of iron in the last few centuries, especially the 19th century, there would be added a spiritual element penetrated with the meaning and sense of iron. Then this picturing would kindle in man the force of soul and spirit which makes him able to take hold of the purpose of the meteoric iron within him, the iron that shoots into his blood, warring against sulphur. We must learn not to let this process go on in the subconsciousness, merely shaping the lower nature of Man; we must learn to place this process, this iron process in human blood, in the service of the soul-and-spiritual. That it is, that Michael wills in us.

This is what calls on us from the astral light—to celebrate worthily once more the Michael Festival when autumn is beginning. When now we speak of this Michael Festival which should take its place with the Easter and Christmas festivals and that of St. John, it must truly not be understood as meaning that here or there one celebrates a festival in an external way; the point is that we can celebrate such a festival only when we know how to link it with something really significant. The festival of Christmas has not arisen through any arbitrary convenient resolve, but because it is linked with the birth of Christ Jesus; the Easter Festival is linked with the Mystery of Golgotha; and these are very important events in the historical life of mankind. The Michael Festival must be linked with a great and sustaining inner experience of man, with that inner force which summons him to develop self-consciousness out of Nature-consciousness through the strength of his thoughts, the strength of his will, so that he may be able to master the meteoric iron process in his blood, the opponent of the sulphurising process.

To be sure, sulphur and iron have flowed in human blood ever since there was a human race. What takes its course there between sulphur and iron determines the unconscious nature of man. It must be lifted into consciousness. We must learn to know this process as the expression of the inner conflict of Michael with the Dragon; we must learn to raise this process into consciousness. Something has then come about to which the Michael Festival may be linked. But it must first be there, be fully understood, inwardly, deeply understood. Then it will be possible to celebrate the Michael Festival in the way a festival drawn from the cosmos can be celebrated by men. Then we shall have the knowledge which is really able to see something in iron other than what the chemist of to-day or the mechanic sees in it. Then we shall have what teaches us how to take in hand the iron in our own organism, in the inner part of our human nature. Then we shall have the majestic picture of Michael in battle with the sulphurous Dragon, of Michael with the flaming sword of iron, as an inspiring impulse to what man must become, if he is to develop the forces of his evolution for progress and not for decline.

This it is, which shows itself to us as an admonition from the spiritual world in the brazen letters that grow into enigmatic words but that can be understood precisely out of the conditions of our present time:—

O Man,
Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing,
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

That is Iron. Let us learn to know iron, and equally all other substances, not merely in terms of material value; let us learn to know them in their majestic spirit power! Then there will be human progress once again, progress for the Earth; and that is what we must will, if we want to be man in the true sense of the word.

Report on the 14th General Assembly of the German Goethe Society

This year's Goethe Assembly took place on June 4 in the presence of the Grand Duke, the Hereditary Grand Duke and the Hereditary Grand Duchess and an impressive crowd. The following distinguished and well-known friends were present from Berlin: Professors Erich Schmidt and Carl Frenzel, bookseller Wilhelm Hertz, banker Meier-Cohn, Reichstag deputy Alexander Meyer, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Dr. Paetow as representative of the "Rundschau", Dr. Osborn and others. From Frankfurt a.M. were present: Professor Veit Valentin and the sculptor Rumpf. The University of Jena was represented by the curator Eggeling and Professor Michels. Friedrich Kluge came from Freiburg i. Br. Apart from Lewinsky, we noted the eternally young Carl Sonntag and Edward von Darmstadt among the important foreign stage artists. Privy Court Councillor Dr. Karl Ruland opened the meeting with a. He referred to the commemorative publication of the Goethe-Gesellschaft, which will be published at Christmas under the editorship of Bernhard Suphans and Erich Schmidt and on which Dr. Karl Schüddekopf (Weimar) and Dr. Walzel (Bern) are currently working. It will deal with Goethe's relationship to the Romantics and will gain particular interest through the publication of previously unknown or little-noticed letters by Schlegel, Arnim, Zacharias Werner and others. The Chairman also noted that a new translation of the first part of Goethe's Faust into English had recently been published by Mr. E. Webb and that several copies had been made available to members of the Society (published by Longmans Green & Co, 39 Paternoster Row, London). Mr. Ruland then drew attention to a new bust of Goethe from the studio of the well-known sculptor Rumpf in Frankfurt am Main, which was unveiled to the public for the first time today and which greeted the audience promisingly from the living green of the leafy plants behind the speaker's platform. The work, which was rightly admired by those present, depicts the young Goethe around the time he came to Weimar (1775).

Then Professor Dr. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf from the University of Berlin took to the stage and gave a perfectly formed lecture on Goethe's "Pandora" that was deeply thought-provoking. This last testimony to Goethe's strict classical style, the speaker began, had already been the subject of much in-depth research, but it had never become popular. Most of the readers today would probably still agree with Frau von Stein, who had said that only some parts were enjoyable. Goethe also admitted this in an amiable manner. But even if we take offense at the antique rhythm imposed on our language, we must not give up the attempt to get closer and closer to the core of the poetry. Whether Goethe portrays himself in Epimetheus, whether Frau von Levetzow's daughter and Minna Herzlieb are reflected in the daughters of Epimetheus, as is claimed, is of psychological value, but completely irrelevant to understanding the artistic organism. In the following summary, Redner points out some mysteries that seem unsolvable, such as the origin of Prometheus' son, Phileros, who symbolizes the impulse to higher things, to love. The love relationship between Phileros and Epimeleia, on whose realization Pamino and Pamina do not seem to have remained without influence, has been happily transformed by Goethe from the symbolic into the purely human. The scheme of the continuation of the poem does little to clarify this relationship; in any case, Pandora should appear with the olive branch, the symbol of peace, she herself as the representative of beauty. Art and science, represented by Phileros and Epimeleia, should be seen as the mediators between heaven and earth. Prometheus, reconciled, will wear the oil wreath and rejoice in his creations; and Elpore's appearance at the end inspires courage and hope. After the first step towards human culture through fire, the way seems to be paved for art and science. But Pandora's Ark is dark, incomprehensible. Could art and science suddenly fall into people's laps from heaven? That was a completely alien idea to Goethe, for man could only rise through his own work. In order to bring order and clarity to these feelings that arise through reading, one must firstly look at the poet's objective model, the mythological precipitation of the fable, and secondly consider the circumstances of the time and the mood of mind that influenced the poet in his work. Goethe was probably familiar with Hesiod's tradition, even if he deviated from it. He was probably also familiar with Plato's fable (Protagoras) about Prometheus' theft by fire, through which man becomes capable of existence, even if he initially remains raw. Aidos and Dike as goddesses are sent down, as are timidity and a sense of justice. Plato's school was focused on Eros, i.e. man's longing for infinity, the return of Pandora stimulates people to work, that is the main idea. On the other hand, it is important to remember how things looked in Weimar and in Goethe's soul after the Peace of Tilsit (1807). Anna Amalia was dead and the glorification of the prelude was dedicated to her: "To the opening of the Weimar Theater on 19 September 1807." Deep thoughts occupied the poet on November 19 in Jena, as the diaries reveal; he was studying ancient philosophy at the time, and the olive tree in Prometheus' garden also blossomed for him. Pandora points to the goods that cannot be lost: Freedom and ideals. Plato had founded his academy above a ruined state; the Ark of Pandora led up from the ruins of the German Empire. But who is Pandora? Epimetheus possessed her; he must therefore have known her. She is beauty in a thousand forms and the revelation of form to ennoble content. 'Iδ'εα is the best explanation of what form means; think of Schiller's "Ideals", and the combination of Phileros and Epimeleia demonstrates the maturity of humanity for art and science. Have our people, whose character traits also include the formless, the unbound, understood this admonition? What has not yet been achieved must bring forth the activity of future generations, the fire of the children of Titan must be preserved on the altar of beauty.

In the foregoing, it has only been possible to give a very brief sketch of the content of the important lecture, which will appear in the next volume of the Goethe Yearbook.

From the proceedings that followed the lecture, we should first mention the extremely witty cash report by the Society's treasurer, Kommerzienrat Dr. Moritz. The speaker emphasized that in the past year the Society had unfortunately not been able to fill the gaps in its membership caused by the natural course of events and various personal circumstances. Compared to the corresponding number of members in 1896, a loss of around 4o members was recorded in the past financial year 1897. However, given the solidity of the publications published each year alongside the yearbook, which could only have a stimulating effect, a renewed upswing was to be hoped for. On December 31, 1897, the Society consisted of 2635 members. There were no significant changes in the Society's income and expenditure compared to the previous year. - On the other hand, the construction of the building for the archive gave rise to extraordinary expenses (20,000 M.), which, however, were covered by ordinary income, except for a small remainder, without drawing on the reserve fund of around 66,000 M. As already mentioned, the report was interspersed with all kinds of delicious flowers of delightful humor. The speaker showed particular affection for the female members, who used to make up 23 percent of all members, but now only 15 percent. Among other things, the presentation of the reasons why some former members have recently decided to leave the Society was a source of great amusement. Before the Treasurer read out an authentic letter from these circles, no one would have dreamed that the pressure on the "ailing agricultural sector" could also have reduced the number of members. Mr. Redner concluded with a witty application of Goethe's words about "cold music, which is only able to capture the heart and mind five hours after listening to it". He hoped that his arguments would have a similar effect on the audience. Loud applause followed the delicious interlude by the witty speaker.

Then Privy Councillor Dr. B. Supban announced that not only was the library, which now amounted to more than 41,000 volumes, growing at a pleasing rate, but that the collection of manuscripts in particular had recently received very significant donations of great value. Thus, on June 3, the son of the late poet Viktor von Scheffel had presented the Grand Duke with the original manuscripts of "Trompeter von Säckingen", "Ekkehard", "Gaudeamus", "Juniperus" and the "Bergpsalmen" (some with illustrations), all "wonderfully composed". The Hereditary Grand Duchess had donated valuable and extensive original manuscripts of the former contributors to the "Tübingen-Stuttgarter Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände", which was edited by the poet Hauff's brother, to the Goethe-Schiller Archive. Dr. Suphan went on to explain how unjustified the occasional complaints about the slow progress in printing the edition of Goethe's works were. On the other hand, he had to declare loudly and publicly that work was being done honestly, but that due to the nature of the matter, some things could only progress slowly, and he gave a few examples, not lacking in humor, of how often the strength of the staff was put to the test by answering countless inquiries of all kinds. Then Dr. Suphan, referring to an essay by Herman Grimm on "The Future of the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive", which appeared in the last issue of the "Deutsche Rundschau" and was well worth reading, announced that a new work, a monumental Goethe-Schiller dictionary, was to be tackled soon. Preliminary work had already been done, such as a program by Otto Hoffmann in Steglitz on Herder's vocabulary, etc. Scholars of the first rank had promised their cooperation, and only the entire German people could participate. A giant sample postcard made by Dr. Suphan with a scheme for filling in materials for the dictionary on the open side caused much amusement. Finally, Privy Councillor Dr. Ruland, the director of the local museum, reported on the Goethe National Museum, where work was also continuing. Some time ago, Professor Dr. Furtwängler in Munich had carefully examined the cut stones collected by Goethe, and as a result of this examination some of the existing errors had to be corrected. The results of this examination would soon be made available to a wider audience through printing. Of the gifts recently received by the museum, the bust of the old Goethe from the studio of Professor Eberlein in Berlin, a gift from the Grand Duke, is to be kept in the garden room of the Goethe House in the future. Furthermore, a bust of Duchess Anna Amalia made of Fürstenburg pottery and a letter from Goethe to Count Gneisenau dated ı2 July 1829 should also be mentioned. Dr. Ruland concluded his remarks with the wish that the friendly attitude of all friends and patrons of the Society may continue to be preserved for the museum in the future.

This was followed by a break of several hours, part of which was used to view the collection, and in the afternoon the banquet took place, which was spiced up by various witty speeches and consumed in the most comfortable atmosphere. Alexander Meyer's toast to the ladies was particularly witty, indeed of sparkling humor, in which the speaker expressed in an amiable, mischievous manner the personal benefit he had derived from the morning's festive lecture. In the evening, Joseph Lewinsky's recital of Schiller's and Goethe's ballads met with grateful applause in the packed court theater. After the theater there was a routine with the Hereditary Grand Duchess; only many of the guests woke up the next morning in the well-known Osteria near the court theater with singing and cheerful conversation.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

Delegates' conference ¹ in preparation for the founding of the International Anthroposophical Society

Stuttgart, September 13-17, 1923

Invitation in No. 6 of the “Mitteilungen, herausgegeben vom Vorstand der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft in Deutschland”, Stuttgart, July 1923

To the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany

We hereby invite all members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, in particular the members of the extended board and the trusted representatives, to a general meeting to be held in Stuttgart between September 10 and 15 of this year. We are not yet able to present you with a detailed program for this conference, but we have the great pleasure of informing you that Dr. Steiner has accepted an invitation to give a series of lectures from September 12 to 15.

Applications for this main conference can already be sent to the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, Stuttgart, Champignystraße 17.

Dear Friends!

Since the delegates' meeting, Dr. Steiner has spoken in various places, for example at the two general meetings of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland, about the fact that the Anthroposophical Society must set itself a new task that will also gain it the respect of the outside world. The question is most forcefully raised in the eight lectures he gave in Dornach from June 10 to 17. In this issue of the “Mitteilungen” we are bringing a summary report of these lectures and would like to draw particular attention to the passage at the end: “How to give the Anthroposophical Society a certain character should be discussed everywhere.”

Such discussions have been the focus of many circles since then, and what we have been able to learn from the letters we have received has been extremely valuable to us, and we are very grateful for them. Now it will certainly move hearts to an even greater extent, just as it has here in Stuttgart, and we are confident that we will succeed in gathering the fruits of this summer's work from all sides at the main conference, so that we can then approach the work of the coming winter, which will certainly be particularly difficult, from the new perspective.

We see the necessity of resuming public work as quickly as possible with powerful lectures on the essence of anthroposophy in all major centers. We have a new style in mind for such lectures, a new language, so to speak. The students of anthroposophy, who have been drawing on the living spirit for so long, should present themselves in such a way that no one can say that it is a copy of what Dr. Steiner has said or written. We have to throw a lot of our own power of persuasion into the balance to prove the power of anthroposophy on living human beings.

To appear in this way, each individual needs a society behind them, whose organization ensures uniformity of approach. Already today, the fruitful seeds of a natural structure are emerging spontaneously in different places. We hear, for example, from our friends in central Germany that they hold quarterly meetings so that a number of working groups can exchange experiences and report to each other through their representatives. The friends on the Rhine have achieved the same, despite the endless complications caused by the occupation. Here in Stuttgart, we can look back with great satisfaction on the meetings that have taken place every four weeks, with friends from all the surrounding towns coming here to work together.

If we consciously develop the tendencies that are present here, we will be able to achieve what we cannot achieve through correspondence or sending printed material. We have written and received countless letters at the Anthroposophical Society's office and can confidently say that, aside from purely “bureaucratic” matters, which are justified and necessary in their place, the best that we have to say and give each other cannot be expressed. But if we imagine that we are creating about six to eight centers throughout Germany that can be regularly reached by all members living in a larger district, then perhaps six to eight letters are enough to achieve regular and rapid communication with all friends. Travel would also become more feasible if mutual visits and, in particular, the participation of the local board were possible at such gatherings in the larger districts.

The main conference will be able to deal with such questions. Furthermore, we want to establish the extended board and the body of trusted individuals; and these matters will in turn point to the internal work of the individual working groups. For example, the important question of an introduction to anthroposophy should be mentioned: “We have to work our way through to the individual guidelines, which will then work as the self-evident.” This is how it says at the end of the seventh of the Dornach lectures.

Overcoming the “three points”, which in their fundamental nature are reminiscent of older occult societies, is perhaps the greatest task that the Dornach lectures present to us. We hope to be able to present you with a draft in the near future that is intended to emphasize three guidelines: 1. what those who approach from outside can see as the purpose of the society, 2. what the people united in the society want to set themselves as a task, 3. what the society wants to achieve in all areas of life.

If we can summon up the right self-reflection for what has led each of us to anthroposophy, then we will also find the right words that can be heard by the “homeless souls”.

Time is short and the tasks are great.

With warm regards,

The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany 1. A.: Dr.-Ing. Carl Unger. Dr. Walter Johannes Stein.

Circular letter from the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany to the working groups in Germany and Austria and to the trusted representatives:

Stuttgart, July 31, 1923

Champignystraße 17

Dear Friends,

Today we can give you more details about the main conference in September, to which you were invited in the June issue of the “Mitteilungen” (No. 6), although the program cannot yet be given its final form.

With regard to the date, there has been a slight postponement in that the conference will not take place between September 10 and 15, but from Thursday, September 13 to Monday, September 17, 1923. The conference is planned in such a way that the extended board, the trusted individuals, and the working group leaders will meet and deliberate from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. (based on special announcements to the participants).

The main lectures, in particular those by local co-workers, are planned for the afternoons from 4 to 6 o'clock. These will be followed by discussions.

In the evenings, lectures will be given by Dr. Steiner and possibly by other speakers, starting at 8 o'clock.

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The following topics will be discussed during the morning and afternoon sessions:

I. The Anthroposophical Society and its spiritual task internally and externally. The following topics are planned:

1. Confidential organization, extended board, etc.
2. Regional associations of working groups
3. Lecture system
4. “Introductory courses”
5. Lecture transcripts
6. Membership admission
7. Financial matters.

II. Combating opponents.

III. Formation of anthroposophical societies in individual countries and founding of the international society in Dornach.

IV. Rebuilding the Goetheanum.

We request that working groups register their reports (especially on I and II) and any presentations by September 1 at the latest, so that they can be taken into account when finalizing the agenda. We also request that any other requests regarding the program be communicated to us as soon as possible. Anthroposophical Society in Germany The Executive Council:

Dr. Carl Unger.
Dr. W.J. Stein

To the representatives of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany!

Dear Friends!

We hereby invite you to a meeting of representatives that will precede our conference. On Thursday, September 13, 1923, at 10 a.m., we want to meet at the Gustav-Siegle-Haus in Stuttgart to discuss the goal of the conference. Only if the guiding idea is nurtured and supported by all the trusted representatives at this meeting will we succeed in holding a conference in which social consciousness is stirred. In the future, the board and extended board, together with the trusted figures, will have a lot to actively shape.

At this preliminary meeting, we plan to first constitute the two bodies of the extended board and the trusted figures. Each of these two bodies must see itself as a body and become aware of its task.

To create an awareness of the Society, it is important that the extended board members, who are spread throughout Germany, feel that they are fully acting representatives of their body and also express this to the outside world. There should be an awareness that the working groups (branches) are divisions of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, and that they are responsible for the inner work. They should not appear in public. All public events should be organized by individual members of the extended board on behalf of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. Thus, the Society is representatively represented to the outside world by the board and extended board.

The trusted representatives accept the members. In doing so, they also develop an external effect. The person is accepted into the Anthroposophical Society (initially not into any branch). The Executive Council carries out the admission, and the person of trust proposes by signing the application for admission. So every member initially becomes a free-standing member, i.e. a member of the Society. Only then can they become a member of a branch, i.e. a member of an esoterically working group. This is just an example to show the nature of the person of trust's activity.

It is planned to have every membership card countersigned in Dornach (this suggestion comes from Dr. Steiner), so that ultimately every single member will feel that they are a member of the international society, which will have its center in Dornach. However, this will not be decided until the international society's conference at Christmas.

As you can see, it is important to prepare the national societies for this international merger. But these organizational matters, important though they are, will be of secondary importance. The most important goal of our conference is the discussion of the Society's goal and the revision of the three guiding principles contained in the draft principles.¹

These three guiding principles still contain some of the sectarianism of the Theosophical Society and are therefore not appropriate as guiding principles for a true world movement. If our Society is to expand in a way that is appropriate to its present task, then no one should be required to profess belief in the guiding principles. Instead, any person who has an interest in the existence of a Society that is legitimately seeking paths to the supersensible worlds in order to enrich life and its practical individual aspects through supersensible knowledge should be able to become a member. But there are many more people who want something like this than there are members of our society, and such a reorganization of society would therefore result in a very extraordinary expansion of it. In this expansion, however, everything will depend on the trust leaders' knowledge of human nature and on the help they receive from the entire membership. In the future, all kinds of sectarian measures for admitting members, such as demanding that they complete introductory courses, read certain books, etc., will have to be eliminated, and everything will depend on the knowledge of human nature. The trusted personalities will have to learn to seek and find people who belong to us by nature, not those who have belonged to a doctrine and now profess it. It will be necessary to overcome this tendency to develop the vestiges of a religious belief.

We will have to discuss all this and much more that the friends themselves will want to accomplish. But we hope that such a preliminary discussion can create a unity and warmth that will give the course of the whole conference anthroposophical warmth and youthful momentum.

Kind regards
I.A.: Dr. Walter Johannes Stein

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• 1. From Rudolf Steiner's announcement of his journey to this conference after his lecture in Dornach on September 10 and the documents reproduced below, it is clear that this conference was understood as a “delegates' conference”.
• 1. See references below.

Today I would like to follow up on the things I discussed a fortnight ago. In the near future, we may also have the opportunity to talk about our experiences in Amsterdam. But today I would like to talk about some specific things that reach into our physical plane – something we already started the other day.

I have often emphasized that the events that take place in our physical world are nothing more than a kind of shadow reflection of what is happening on the higher planes. It is clear to the occultist that he can only understand the events in the physical world if he knows what is happening on the supersensible planes. To the occultist who has insight into the higher planes, it appears as if people are pulled by threads that emanate from the higher planes. This could seem to be an infringement of human freedom. But today I would like to show that this is not the case. Some examples may show us how the higher planes affect us.

First of all, I must refer back to something I have already said earlier: that in principle there is no absolute good and absolute evil. Evil is only a kind of “displaced” good. If something has happened, let us say in the lunar epoch of development that preceded our epoch, and part of it has been transmitted into our development, then it appears as out of place in the present time. It was good during the lunar epoch, but it appears evil to us during the earthly epoch. During the lunar epoch, someone might have had the task of organizing the instinctual urges in a harmonious way; but this activity was completed when the lunar epoch ended. The task of the earthly epoch now consists in controlling these urges again from the level of the manas. If someone today were to live out their urges as the Pitri were forced to live them, they would be an evil person in our epoch, whereas in the lunar epoch he would have been a wise man.

People do not usually think about what events such as the appearance of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim religion, meant in the sixth and beginning of the seventh century.

One must imagine that at first Christianity endeavored to grow into the various other forms of religion. At first we see only a small Jewish community in Palestine; it has remained quite small. The Folk-souls do not easily allow a principle such as that contained in Christian teaching to be imposed on them. The Apostle Paul found the way to the Gentiles by first leaving the thoughts of the Gentiles as he found them and then using the pagan religious forms to infuse the Christian essence into them. In the southern regions of Europe, the Mithras service was cultivated; it was similar to today's Sacrifice of the Mass. The pagans there accepted Christianity because they were allowed to keep the Mithras festival that had become dear to them. It was similar with the Germanic peoples with the festival that became a Christian symbol as Christmas. Their sacred ancestors were accepted as Christian saints. In this way, Christianity grew into ever new areas and among new tribes. It was the adaptability of Christianity that made this possible. The Christian religion expanded more and more; but because of this multiformity, it also needed a powerful central point: that is the Roman papacy. All the damage that was later caused by Christianity is linked to this world-historical mission of the papacy.

The Semitic peoples had to be handled differently. Mohammed did that. He formulated the first great doctrine when he said: All gods but the One are no gods. Only the one I teach you is the only God. This doctrine can only be understood as an opposition to Christianity. From the very beginning, Christianity's task in conquering the physical plane was to work its way into the human personality; it does not build on old forces, but seeks to work through manas.

We see that in Mohammedanism there is no conscious attempt to take up the old spiritual forms of paganism, but that the right way to conquer the physical plane is to be found only through physical science. We see how this physical science takes hold of the art of healing, which originated in Arabia and later spread to other countries. The Arabian doctors only started from the physical plane, unlike the healers of the ancient Egyptians, the Druids and even the ancient Germanic tribes. All of them had come to their healing profession by developing their psychic powers through asceticism and other exercises. Today we still see something similar in the practices and processes of shamanism, only that these have degenerated today. So psychic powers were developed in these early healers. Muhammad introduced the art of healing that takes its remedies only from the physical plane itself. This art of healing was developed where one did not want to know about spiritual beings, but only about a single God. Alchemy and astrology in the old sense were abolished and made into new sciences: astronomy, mathematics and so on. These later became the sciences of the Occident. The Arabs who came to Spain, we see men educated in the physical sciences, especially mathematicians. The true followers of this school said: We respectfully revere what lives in plants, animals, etc., but man should not imitate in an amateurish way what only God is called to create. Therefore, we find only arabesques in Moorish art, forms that are not even plant-like, but are purely the product of the imagination.

The Greek power was superseded by Rome, but Greek education was passed on to the Romans. The Arabs received what they have from Muhammad. Muhammad introduced science, which is only permeated with laws of the physical plane. The Christian monks were inspired by the Moors. Although the Moors were beaten back through political power, monotheism, which brings with it a deepening of physical science, came to Europe through the Moors and led to a purification of Christianity from all paganism.

Through Christianity, the emotional life of man was led up to Kama-Manas. Through Mohammedanism, the intellect, the spirit, was led down from the spiritual life to the abstract comprehension of the purely physical laws. This physical science had to develop through various stages to reach the level it now occupies. It had to go through the science of the Vedic priests and all the following stages to reach the achievements of our present time. Some of this had already been achieved by the Atlanteans, albeit through psychic powers. Since the Atlantean times, this development towards physical laws has been in preparation.

The Chinese are a remnant of the Atlantean Mongol race. When we hear the word Tao in Chinese, it is something difficult for us to understand. The Mongols of that time had developed a form of monotheism that went as far as the psychic tangibility, as far as the feeling of the spiritual. When the old Chinese, the old Mongols, pronounced the word Tao, they felt it when they pronounced it. Tao is not “the way”, as it is usually translated, it is the fundamental power by which the Atlanteans could still transform plants, by which they could set their remarkable airships in motion. This basic power, also called “Vril”, was used everywhere by the Atlanteans, and they called it their god. They felt this power within themselves; it was “the way and the goal” for them. Therefore, every Mongolian considered himself to be an instrument in the hands of the great Vril power.

This monotheism of the Atlanteans remained with those races that survived the great flood. From this form of religion, which was still spiritual, the fifth root race emerged. These old spiritual forms of religion, the worship of a unified God, gradually degenerated into polytheism. Monotheism only remained among the most highly developed priests. At the beginning of Christianity, the monks behaved cunningly: they said that Baldur had become a human being in Palestine. In the early centuries, one would have found Christianity colorfully mixed with paganism, even in Arian Christianity. This development took place at the same time as a particularly vivid glimmering of religious feeling in the old Mongolian races was being induced by highly developed shamans. We see, as a reaction to polytheism, on the one hand, the emergence of a new unified religion in Arabia through Mohammed. On the other hand, we see, somewhat earlier, an initiated shaman rising up in his Tao consciousness, taking revenge on those who had fallen away from the old monotheistic idea of God. Attila was called “The Scourge of God.” We see the princes he deposed living in splendor and pomp all around his kingdom, but he, the shaman, lived in the greatest simplicity. It is said of him that his eyes glowed and the earth trembled when he raised his sword. This great initiate would have been fully justified in the Atlantean era; in our time, he would look like a criminal. The same power that is an expression of the divine fire in its time appears as divine wrath in another period. Why does this happen? It is necessary in order to make further development possible. If development is to be continue, viewed from a higher plane, the individual threads must once again intertwine harmoniously.

We had also spoken of the Druid priests who taught the people through fairy tales and myths. They were healers, priests and astrologers at the same time. They possessed inspired knowledge. When the Celtic element was replaced by the Germanic tribes, the belief in the old form of inspiration also receded. The conquest of the physical plane was entrusted to man; he became a warrior. The intuitive and productive power comes to us in the feminine. The woman became a priestess, who was at the same time a healer, for example the Weleda. All healing arts were in the hands of women at that time; the man was pushed out onto the outer, physical plane. We still encounter this in the time of the Merovingians and Carolingians. It was only through the science learned by the monks from the Moors that the spiritual element was increasingly replaced. And from the 16th to the 19th century, the material way of thinking increased more and more. The psychic healers gave way; they were discredited and despised as magicians or witches. The loss of the ability to work with psychic means of healing is connected with this; healing in this way is no longer as effective. Paracelsus still possessed these abilities completely.

This is connected with the transition of the leadership of humanity from a Dhyan Chohan of a higher kind to another Dhyan Chohan. The Christian esoteric calls the healing Dhyan Chohan “Saint Michael”, which is the Archangel who guides the psychic idealism of man. Man only becomes free by realizing that everything that happens on the physical plane is caused by higher forces. He must enter into a relationship of discipleship with the Archangel Michael.

Two entities played a role in the Old Testament: the leading spirit is harmonious. Beelzebub, also a Dhyan Chohan, is disharmonious. He is the leader of all disharmony on the physical plane. He must be understood in order to know why one form can have a destructive effect on another. Since the 16th century, the hosts of Beelzebub have gained the upper hand over the hosts of Michael. Mammon is the god of obstacles, which holds man back from pursuing his straight path. It would be out of place if this were to continue into the next century.

All physical events are the shadows of supersensible events. The battle between spiritual forces and materialism is a reflection of the battle between the hosts of Beelzebub and Mammon against Michael. This battle first had to be fought on the higher planes; it was decided there thirty years ago in favor of Michael, and the present battle here on the physical plane is a reflection of it. The battle above has been decided, but for the individual human being the battle has not yet been fought. If the people today are not up to it, we must all perish and new people would have to come. With this the path is shown, the point at which the individual human being must step in today.

This book is the transcript of a shorthand report of nine lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in the early part of 1924, about a year before he died. Although his audience consisted very largely of people who had been studying for many years the spiritual science which is Steiner's legacy to the world (and which he also called Anthroposophie), he himself described the course as an ‘Introduction’. The German title of the book is Anthroposophie: eine Einführung in die Anthroposophische Weltanschauung. ‘We will begin again,’ he observed in Lecture IV, ‘where we began twenty years ago;’ and he may well have had in mind that the Movement itself had, in some sense, begun again only a month or two before with the solemn Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society under himself as President at Christmas 1923. Though he proceeded ab initio, assuming no previous knowledge on the part of his hearers, this course is not an elementary exposition of Anthroposophy. We are gradually led deeply in, and the path is steep towards the end.

There are many very different approaches to the general corpus of revelations or teachings which constitutes Spiritual Science. As with Nature herself, it is often only as the student penetrates deeper and nearer to the centre that any connection between these different approaches become apparent. A reader of Christianity as Mystical Fact, for example, which dates from 1902 and of Steiner's lectures on the Gospels might well be surprised to find that it is possible to read Theosophy (1904) without ever discovering that the incarnation of Christ and the death on Golgotha are, according to him, the very core of the evolution of the universe and man. The truth is that the mastery of Anthroposophy involves, for our too stereotyped thinking, something like the learning of a new language. It would be possible to learn to read Greek and only afterwards to discover that the New Testament was written in that tongue.

From this point of view the present book is in the same category as Theosophy, yet even within this category the two approaches are made from such diverse directions that one might almost suppose the books to be the work of different men. Nevertheless it is best to look on the following lectures—as Steiner himself makes it clear that he does—as a supplement or complement to what is to be found in Theosophy.

The book Theosophy is the most systematic of all the writings that Steiner has bequeathed to us. Its whole basis is classification and definition and, taken by itself, it undoubtedly gives (quite apart from the dubious associations which the word ‘theosophy’ has for English ears) a false impression of the nature of Anthroposophy. It is as indispensable to the student as a good grammar is indispensable to a man engaged in mastering a new language, and it contains as much—and as little—as a grammar does of all that the language can do and say. Its method is that of description from outside. And this approach, essential as it is as one among others, is perhaps the one most likely to lead to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Such terms as ‘soul world’, ‘spiritland’, ‘elemental beings’, ‘aura’, are liable to be taken literally in spite of the author's express warnings to the contrary. The descriptions are taken as reproductions of the reality that underlies them instead of as similes—attempts, that is, at making clear a purely spiritual reality in words which have received their stamp of significance from their relation to the physical world.

No one who studies the teachings of Rudolf Steiner seriously remains in any real danger of succumbing to this sort of literalness. But anyone reading hurriedly through the book Theosophy—or even through Theosophy and the Occult Science—and inclined to judge the value of Anthroposophy from that single adventure may well do so. That is why the present book seems to me to be an important one—not only for ‘advanced’ students of Anthroposophy, to whom it is perhaps primarily addressed, but also to the comparative beginner. It is condensed and difficult for most readers, and above all for those who have never dipped into the broad unbroken stream of books and lectures which flowed from Rudolf Steiner during the twenty years that elapsed between the publication of Theosophy and the delivery of this Course. But even if the content is far from fully understood, it cannot fail to give the reader some idea, let us say, of the sort of thing that is really signified by the spatial and other physical metaphors in which the systematic exposition of Theosophy is couched.

For here the approach is from within. It is no longer simply the objective facts and events, but the way in which the soul tentatively begins to experience these, which the lecturer makes such earnest efforts to convey. We have exchanged a guide book for a book of travel. The one who has been there recreates his experience for the benefit of those who have not, trying with every device at his disposal to reveal what it actually felt like. Of course the difficulty is still there; it can still only be done by metaphor and suggestion; but the difficulty is much less likely to be burked by the reader's surreptitiously substituting in his own imagination a physical or sense-experience for a purely super-sensible one.

Compare, for instance the description of the astral body given in Theosophy with the characterisation of it in No. V of these lectures:

One says to oneself: What I am observing as the astral body of this person is not really present today, i.e. on the 2nd February 1924. If the person is twenty years of age, you must go backwards in time—let us say, to January 1904. You perceive that this astral body is really back there, and extends still further back into the unlimited. It has remained there and has not accompanied him through life. Here we have only a kind of appearance—a beam. It is like looking down an avenue; there, in the distance, are the last trees, very close together. Behind them is a source of light. You can have the radiance of the light here, but the source is behind—it need not move forward that its light may shine here.

So, too, the astral body has remained behind, and only throws its beam into life. It has really remained in the spiritual world and has not come with us into the physical. In respect to our astral body we always remain before conception and birth, in the spiritual world. If we are twenty years old in 1924, it is as if we were still living spiritually before the year 1904 and, in respect to our astral body, had only stretched forth a feeler.

‘Thus,’ he adds a few pages later, ‘if you describe the astral body as I have done in my Theosophy you must realise, in order to complete your insight (my italics)’:

that what is active here is the ‘radiance’ of something far back in time. The human being is really like a comet stretching its tail far back into the past. It is not possible to obtain a true insight into man's being unless we acquire these new concepts. People who believe one can enter the spiritual world with the same concepts one has for the physical world should become spiritualists, not anthroposophists.

In the same way one could compare the description of the etheric body in the earlier book with its treatment here in Lecture IV. The etheric body is not a vehicle of any such ‘life-force’, as is understood by the creative evolutionists. It is totally incompatible with the assumptions of positivist science. If it can be described as a ‘formative forces’ body, it can equally well be described, from another approach, as a thought-body. This is the approach which is required for all the teachings which Steiner developed later concerning the descent of the Cosmic Intelligence and its progressive embodiment in the personal intelligence of man. And it is this approach which is chosen in the book which follows.

He begins by describing the practical steps needed to develop the ‘strengthened thinking’ which is the first stage of higher knowledge. And he continues:

If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the ‘second man’ you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your second existence to the cosmic ether through whose activity earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body ... I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel in a sense the flowing forces in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a ‘touching’ that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

Equally important is the exposition in this lecture of the way in which astral and etheric find outward expression in the physical constitution of man, the etheric in his fluid organisation, which can only be understood with the help of the concept of the etheric body, and the astral in that ‘third man’—who is physically the ‘airy man’ and who can be experienced as ‘an inner musical element in the breathing’. The nervous system is shown to be the representation of this inner music.

The matter in this book is extremely condensed and one feels one is maiming it by arbitrary selections such as I am making for the purpose of this Introduction. I have, for instance, said nothing of the extensive and detailed discourse on dreams contained in Lecture VII, and VIII, which some readers may even find the most enlightening thing in the book. One final selection may however perhaps be made. In these lectures Steiner approaches the life after death by speaking of ‘four phases of memory’. The theme is first heard in Lecture VI, where, after speaking of the nature of memory he emphasises that it is not the concern of the remembering individual alone, but is there for the sake of the universe—‘in order that its content may pass through us and be received again in the forms into which we can transmute it’.

The universe needs us because, through us, it ‘fulfils’ itself—fills itself again and again with its own content. ... The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives them back again in a humanised condition.

It receives them back when we die. The moment we die, the world takes back what it has given. ‘But it is something new that it receives, for we have experienced it all in a particular way.’ Then, in the ninth and last lecture, the last three phases of memory lead into—indeed become—in a miracle of condensation—all that is presented so differently in Theosophy under such titles as ‘The Soul in the Soul-World after Death’.

Is this an esoteric or an exoteric work? Certainly it will be more readily appreciated by readers who have worked through other approaches to be found in the books and lecture-cycles and perhaps especially in the Leading Thoughts. Yet it is the whole aim and character of Spiritual Science, as Rudolf Steiner developed it, to endeavour to be esoteric in an exoteric way. For that was what he believed the crisis of the twentieth century demands. And I doubt if he ever struggled harder to combine the two qualities than in these nine lectures given at the end of his life. Thus, although he was addressing members of the Anthroposophical Society, I believe that he had his gaze fixed on Western man in general, and I hope that an increasing number of those who are as yet unacquainted with any of his teaching may find in this book (and it can only be done by intensive application) a convincing proof of the immense fund of wisdom, insight and knowledge from which these teachings spring.

OWEN BARFIELD

London,
August 1960.

Dr. Steiner: I think it would be good if we took care of the formal things today. If there is still something to say about the beginning of school, it might be better to do that after we have taken care of the formal things. We will probably need to meet again tomorrow to speak about the beginning of school from a more spiritual perspective. Today, I think we should try to take care of the various needs that have arisen from the faculty.

The classes and the foreign language classes are assigned.

Dr. Steiner: The question now is if anyone has a particular wish regarding these assignments.

Changes are made to meet some expressed desires.

A teacher: I would like to ask if we can define an order of presentation for art. I thought that I would begin tomorrow in the ninth grade with those things connected with the curriculum as a whole, that is, related to history and literary history. I want to show how art arose from mythology.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to bring the art class into step with history and literary history. You could try to make a transition from Germanic mythology to art and then remain with that for a time. Then, perhaps you could show how the Germanic myths reappear in a different artistic form as aesthetics. You could certainly show, for example, the connection between Dürer and German mythology. They are fifteen-year-old children. You could use this as an occasion to show how the old Germans painted their gods just as Dürer painted his figures later.

You could then go on into the tenth grade, since the curriculum depends upon the previous year. In the tenth grade, we have Goethe’s poems and style, and that can stay. In the eleventh grade, summarize music and poetry.

Dr. Steiner confirms the teacher’s understanding about art instruction in the previous grades. The same teacher now proposes artistically treating what is done in the twelfth-grade German class, literature beginning in 1740, in preparation for the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: Then, we would no longer need a special literary history class. We need to see to it that the students learn the things they may be asked. In connection with modern literary history, they will certainly be asked about things that began with Gottsched and Bodmer and what followed them. German and art class can certainly cover the same material.

In order not to make compromises, I think it would be good to recognize that a large number of Goethe’s works are based upon impressions of paintings, and also that we can trace back much romantic art to musical impressions. Try to develop how the arts are intertwined.

An essay by Burdach, “Schiller’s Chordrama und die Geburt des tragischen Stiles aus der Musik” (Schiller’s choral drama and the birth of the tragic style from music) in the Deutschen Rundschau (German review) is mentioned.

Dr. Steiner: Burdach’s research has a problem in that it has an underlying tendency. He wants to show that somehow certain themes arise out of some primal forces, and then he follows them further. This is really very contrived. Schiller was certainly not as dependent upon earlier streams as Burdach claims. We certainly cannot ignore Schiller’s dramatic experimentation and the fact that he created a choral drama after many attempts. In Demetrius, he created a romantic drama in a style much like Shakespeare’s. You cannot ignore the details Burdach cites, since they may be useful. However, you will probably arrive at a different conclusion, probably that Schiller would have created something quite different from The Bride of Messina had he really swum in that stream.

That essay belongs with the series of things Burdach has produced. He has an idée fixe. He wants to show that a theme arises out of a subhuman source. All these things are similar, so you need to be cautious with Burdach. He also wrote other things where he derives the minstrel from Arabic provincials by finding the original impulse in the middle of the Middle Ages and using it as the beginning of the literary stream. Faust and Moses also belong in this group, as do Shakespeare’s dramas.

A teacher speaks about his tenth-grade class in Western history and Middle High-German literature.

Dr. Steiner: You need to do that harmoniously. Even if you do not like the material, we have to begin with what you have already done as a basis. There is nothing from the present we could use as a basis. We have to use an older historical picture as our basis and then present our perspective as history. Couldn’t you use Heeren as a basis? You could just as well take Rotteck, though he is a little bit old-fashioned and one-sided. It would also be good if you brought out the correspondences with artistic styles. Young people today could learn a tremendous amount if you were to read some chapters from Johannes Müller’s Vierundzwanzig Bücher allgemeiner Geschichte (Twenty-four books of history) with them. That is historical style, almost like Tacitus. Such attempts to work in a unified way have been made time and again, something that needs to be renewed from our perspective.

If you lean too heavily upon geology, you are in danger of taking the basement, leaving out the ground floor, and then taking the second floor, whereas you should actually begin with what geology offers for historical themes, such as the Great Migrations and dependence upon territory. My public lectures in Stuttgart could be helpful for that. Of course, you cannot present that in class. It was intended for enlightened older people in Stuttgart. You will need to translate it for the students and, in the future, be sure to leave out the Chymical Wedding.

If you begin preparing for this now and immediately begin with literature, you will have to use something like Heeren, Rotteck, or Johannes Müller. It is certainly not right to transform history into religious history alone. That is something for the religion teachers. I will give you the curriculum tomorrow.

A teacher: Where should I begin in this class?

Dr. Steiner: You said yourself you wanted to begin with the dependence upon the Earth. Therefore, you should take the climates of the various regions, today’s cold and temperate zones, and geological formations as a basis for history. Show how a people changed when they moved from the mountains down into the valleys, but do all this from a historical perspective, not a geographical one, so that you speak about a particular people during a particular period. Show, for example, why the Greeks became Greeks. Here, you could use Heeren as a guide. What is important is that things be done properly.

A teacher (who is to take over teaching history and German in the ninth grade): I would like some guidance for ninth-grade history. What should I particularly emphasize?

Dr. Steiner: You need to deepen their understanding.

The previous class teacher: In the eighth grade I presented history in pictures and biographies. I particularly emphasized cultural history in the nineteenth century.

Dr. Steiner: According to our curriculum, the children in the eighth and ninth grades should gain a picture of the inner historical themes, the major movements. They should learn how the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought an enlarged viewpoint to human beings, an increase in all directions, geography and astronomy. They should learn how that played out historically. Then they should learn how the effects of the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century enlightenment played out in history and how, in the nineteenth century, the integration of peoples and nations had an effect. Taking each century, you can present the facts from these perspectives.

Regarding your preparation, it would be very good if you could create a picture for yourself of what story would result if Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War were continued to the present time, that is, what modern history would be like. In regard to Middle Europe, Treitschke’s summaries are very good. In the first chapter of his German History, he brought all the threads together. A teacher wants to begin the twelfth grade with series and then go on to integral and differential calculus.

Dr. Steiner: Differential and integral calculations are not really demanded. If you want to do this efficiently, you can begin integration earlier, and use series to explain both. I would try to get far enough that the students can use differential and integral computations with curves. That is sufficient for the final examination. If the students can work with second- and third-degree equations, that is enough. The problems that will be given are published.

Dr. Steiner learns that there are also more difficult problems.

Dr. Steiner: I would certainly like to know what is left to learn at college. There is really not much more. In any event, you can begin tomorrow with series.

A teachers asks about chemical formulas.

Dr. Steiner: We will have to find out what is required for the final examination. That is the problem; we start making these compromises, but we need to go far enough that the students can pass the final examination. This is terrible.

There would be some sense in it if they at least used stereometric formulas, but they mostly use planar formulas, which is quite senseless. The students need to know the processes. All this is senseless and very sad, but we have to take it into account.

Tomorrow, we can meet again at the same time to discuss questions concerning the curriculum, but for now I would like to take care of any other questions and desires.

A teacher asks about texts for English. Dickens’s Christmas Carol is too difficult for the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You can be certain that you can read Dickens with children who know almost nothing, and what they need to learn, they can quite easily pick up. Tell them how the story goes on. Perhaps you could solve the problem if you first told the children about the content and selected some simpler excerpts for them to read. You can certainly overcome such difficulties. These texts are the very best for those children who cannot read English.

An eighth-grade teacher: E.B. is not very happy with me.

A teacher: One of his comrades would like to be in your class because it is more artistic.

Dr. Steiner: You could exchange the two.

There are problems with the class schedule, and the religion classes are too large.

Dr. Steiner: It cannot be any different than last year. There must be some way of solving the scheduling problem. I cannot imagine that we cannot solve it. There should be no more than fifty students in a religion class.

A teacher asks about a deaf-and-dumb child in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: She is not deaf. She can hear and can also be taught to speak. She is only a little slow. She does not respond, so you will simply have to try everything. You need to say something slowly, then have her speak it after you. Continue in that way; first speak slowly, then increase the speed so that she gradually needs to understand things more quickly. You could also do the exercise by speaking loudly, then having her speak softly, and then the other way around. You could do it slowly and have her do it quickly. Do variations of that. If possible, use a series of words that have some connection. Do them forward and backward in order to develop the center of speech. I would also have her do the curative eurythmy exercises connected with the head. She should do them daily, even if for only a short time.

(Speaking to the school doctor) She should also receive edelweiss at 6X potency, which is an effective means for healing the connection between the hearing nerves and the hearing center. It has a strong effect and is effective even when the hearing organs are hardened. The hardening has a relationship to edelweiss; it absorbs the flowers. You will find that the relationships that exist within this mineral, but not mineralized, material are within the flower also, and that they have an extreme similarity to the processes that constitute the hearing organ. We have used this remedy for ten years. Be sure to soak the flowers well first. A teacher asks about decorating the room for religious services.

Protocol Record Stuttgart

After various speakers have expressed themselves in the general debate, Rudolf Steiner takes the floor:

Rudolf Steiner: It seems necessary to me that we now move on to the special debate. Mr. Leinhas has already made some comments not to derive things from gray generalities and to bring them into the realm of the necessary. And Mr. Molt has also made certain suggestions. But it seems necessary to me that the following be said in order to give a truly practical side to our endeavors.

First of all, it is necessary for this cultural council to address the task of propagating the whole idea of the threefold social order so that it penetrates into broader sections of the public and is understood there. Without propagandizing for the idea of the threefold social order, one naturally does not get ahead in a single specific area.

But then it would be necessary for this Cultural Council to do a second thing, through which it could actually carry out practical work as quickly as possible. So far, we have tried - just recapitulate what has happened - to create understanding for the idea of the threefold social order. Of course we were told: That is utopian, that is ideology, that has nothing to do with reality! But we did not let ourselves be deterred from continuing to work for this understanding and at the same time to bring it to a certain result: to the propagation of the works council idea.

And now that the idea of works councils has actually been presented to the world as a real thing to be worked out, people are beginning to see the idea of the threefold social order not so much as a utopia. Now they are beginning to take it seriously. The industrialists are up in arms about the works councils, the trade unions are up in arms about the works councils, in short, there is a lot of agitation against them from all sides. I don't know whether they would agitate so strongly against something they found to be completely harmless. This shows the transition from the original germinal idea, which already contains the fact, to real life practice. But the practice of life must then also be maintained with the appropriate strength. The question of works councils also originated in Russia, only it ended in failure there because all sorts of other things poured over it and fought against it. With regard to economic life, it is therefore a matter of the works councils providing the basis for economic life and its members to emerge from the current conditions themselves. I just want to show you that we are moving on to real practical work. First, there must be an understanding of the basic idea, then you can move on to the practical work.

The cultural council should first of all be aware that its first task is, of course, in the field of education in the broadest sense and of those suggestions that must come from the rest of the intellectual life for the education system. Today, it cannot be a matter of taking socialization in the abstract again. Entertainments which have gradually become distinctly capitalist entertainments in modern times – such as the theater and, to the highest degree, the cinema, which is, after all, only a concomitant of the very extreme capitalist-bureaucratic age – will only be able to achieve their socialized form when the foundations of intellectual life are first socialized. I really fear that we will soon also be hearing about the “socialization of purebred dog breeding, the distribution of Christmas trees to families” and the like. If socialization were to be understood in this way, we would not get anywhere.

What we have to deal with first of all, if the Cultural Council is to develop its activities, is, firstly, the elementary school question. Look at the elementary school question from a practical point of view. The Anthroposophical Society itself is a spiritual movement that has emerged from contemporary spiritual life and placed itself on an independent footing – at least in terms of its intentions. It could achieve a great deal if people had the courage to do so and did not rely too much on the forces that stand in the way of such courage. But the important thing is to grasp the right approach from the point of view of threefolding. The School of Spiritual Science has been founded in Dornach. It is certainly not located on any state property; it works independently in one branch of spiritual life. A number of our members have now expressed the wish to educate their children from the bottom up, in accordance with the principles and impulses of true spiritual life. I do not need to emphasize the fact that anthroposophists also have children; so we already had the children. In Dornach we might even have had the teachers. And the parents were highly motivated. We had everything, really. So what did we lack? Why did we not found such a school? Because the state, free Switzerland, does not give us the right to do so, because it does not recognize a school that is not established by the state itself.

My dear friends, the main thing is to fight for recognition of what is achieved in such a school on the basis of purely spiritual and educational principles. It is a matter of abolishing any kind of state school supervision and any kind of law that only allows teaching to be given by this or that teacher appointed by the state, and the like. That is the first thing. And here we have to struggle with the objections that are always raised today, especially by the Socialists, under the banner of the unified school, when it comes to a healthy basis for the elementary school system.

Let us take the example of Dornach again. Dornach is in the Canton of Solothurn. When I first spoke there about the threefold social order, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Arlesheim soon came to me and said: It will be very easy to see in the canton of Solothurn how difficult it is to accommodate such an endeavor, because it took a great effort to wrest the school from the school “brothers” and school “sisters” of the canton of Solothurn, and it took a great effort to secularize the school. If the right to found schools were granted to any kind of endeavor, then clerical schools would probably arise, perhaps even schools for the nobility. In short, people were terribly afraid that these things might take hold.

These are things that must be dealt with first. The discussion must be entered into with the public: How does the Cultural Council, with its idea of the threefold social order, relate to the so-called state-run comprehensive school with compulsory education? This is the issue that must be clarified in public. So the first task is: How does the Federation for Threefolding relate to what a member of the majority socialist party and member of the state parliament in Reutlingen recently said: What do you want then? We have now created a school law that is absolutely in line with the most ideal views! – Then the Federation for Threefolding has to show through its cultural council: Even if you were angel-like beings, we would never accept a school law from the hands of the state! – because the point is to wrest the school from the state. It must be shown that people will not become illiterate again if schools are freed from state control, that new classes of students will not emerge, and so on. That is the first positive question, the elementary school question. And until it is shown [in the cultural council] that there is an understanding of such a question in the face of today's political currents, the cultural council will only be a wild beating around the bush.

The second thing is to show that we can only get rid of the higher schools if we get rid of the awful system of qualifications. Everything that stands between elementary school and university can only be determined by the fact that it is preparation for university. The universities have to say: We want to get these or those people into our ranks, for this we make the demand that the secondary modern schools and the secondary schools – which must also become something completely different according to these or those principles – are managed. Consider that the secondary modern school has long since existed only to prepare students for the one-year voluntary military service by granting them the right to do so, to become future civil servants. So here, too, it is important: Get the schools out of the state!

Then we must fight for the autonomy of the university. It already had that in the old days. We have only just destroyed the last remnants of the university's autonomy in recent times. The university must be an autonomous corporation. It must regain what has particularly ventured in recent times. What the universities used to consider as self-evident was what they awarded when they granted a doctorate in any faculty. That was the expression for it: the university here and there, which is regarded as an autonomous body, gives XY the right to call himself a doctor in a certain field; it therefore awards him the diploma. This meant that the autonomous body had established the right for people, which it could guarantee as an autonomous body. And the state has conquered this whole thing, because today the awards of the faculties are only decorative pieces, titles without any rights, and the states have introduced their state examinations for this, that is, they have extended their tentacles to the universities. They are no longer autonomous. You can't find anything like in the past, where someone could be said to be a doctor who studied at the University of Montpellier; that's a good school! Today everything is abstracted. So the demand is: autonomous universities, abolition of all state exams. If the state needs people, it should test them. If it needs someone for a position, it can test them according to its own criteria. Such a test is only meaningful for the state, not for what must be free from the state in the areas of teaching and education.

The following positive questions arise:

Firstly, a free comprehensive school without state supervision, justified by the demands of the time;

secondly, the abolition of the so-called system of qualification for secondary schools,

thirdly, the reduction of state examinations and the autonomy of universities.

These things must be presented to the world as a clear program. If we start with this, we begin at a similar point as in business life with the question of works councils. If we start with this, the others, who of course need this or that, will follow. The point is to start by tackling things where they are universally human: in lower and higher education, which is generally also universally human.

That is what I wanted to say first about the transition to the special debate, so that this comes out. Certainly a committee should be elected. But it should deal with the most current issues and I wanted to point out to you that the most current issues and positive ones are important. Initially, no value should be placed on the content of the individual worldviews. What matters is not whether Catholics, Protestants and so on want to found their schools, but [that] we achieve the very next practical thing in a positive way – initially in the field of intellectual life, which concerns all people: the position of the school on its own feet.

These are the issues that must be vigorously discussed in the coming days and must crystallize into very specific individual points. And with these individual points, those who are truly able and have the will to do so must then go before humanity to implement these things. For this upheaval in spiritual life is more important than anything else. Because without this upheaval in spiritual life, none of the rest will come about.

The character of Spiritual Science is such that the truths and data of knowledge contained in it increase in difficulty the farther we descend from universal principles to concrete details. You may already have noticed this when attempts have been made in different groups to speak about historical details, for example about the reincarnations of the great leader of the ancient Persian religion, Zarathustra, or about his connection with Moses, with Hermes, and also with Jesus of Nazareth.¹ On other occasions too, concrete questions of history have been touched upon. As soon as we descend from the great truths concerning the universe as pervaded and woven through by Spirit, from the great cosmic laws to the spiritual nature of a particular individuality, a particular personality, we pass from matters where the human heart will still accept, comparatively easily, this or that questionable point, into realms teeming with improbabilities. And, as a rule, those who are insufficiently prepared become incredulous when they confront this abyss between universal and specific truths.

Our study is intended to be an introduction to lectures which belong to the domain of occult history and will present historical facts and personalities in the light of Spiritual Science. In these lectures I shall have many things to say to you that will seem strange. You will hear many things that will have to reckon upon the will-for-understanding promoted by all the spiritual-scientific knowledge brought before you in the course of the years. For, after all, the finest, most significant fruit of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is that, complicated and detailed as the knowledge is, we finally have before us not a collection of dogmas, but within us, in our hearts and feelings, we possess something that carries us beyond the standpoint we can reach through any other world-view. We do not imbibe so many dogmas, tenets, or mere information, but through our knowledge we become different human beings. In a certain respect, the aspects of Spiritual Science we shall now be considering call for more than a purely intellectual understanding—for an understanding by the soul, which at many points must be willing to listen to and accept intimations that would become crass and crude if pressed into too sharp outlines.

The picture I want to call up in your minds is that behind the whole evolutionary and historical process, through the millennia up to our own times, spiritual Beings, spiritual Individualities, stand as guides and leaders behind all human evolution and human happenings, and that in the greatest, most significant events in history, this or that human being appears with his whole soul, his whole being, as an instrument of spiritual Individualities standing and working with set purpose behind him. But we must familiarise ourselves with many a concept unknown in ordinary life if we are to gain insight into the strange and mysterious connections between earlier and later happenings in the course of history

If you will remind yourselves of many things that have been said through the years, you will be able to picture that in ancient times—and in Post-Atlantean times, too, if we go back only a few thousand years before what is usually called the historic era—men fell into more or less abnormal states of clairvoyance. Between our matter-of-fact waking consciousness, limited as it is entirely to the physical world, and the unconscious sleeping state, there was once a realm of consciousness through which man penetrated into spiritual reality. And we know that what is nowadays explained as poetic folk-fantasy by scholars who are themselves the originators of so many scientific myths and legends, is to be traced back to ancient clairvoyance, to clairvoyant states of the human soul which in those times gazed behind physical existence and expressed what it saw in the pictures contained in myths, fairy-tales and legends. So that in old, genuinely old myths, fairy-tales and legends, more knowledge, more wisdom and truth are to be found than in the abstract erudition and science of the present day. Therefore when we look back to very ancient times, we-find men who were clairvoyant; we know too that this clairvoyance faded away more and more among the various peoples in the different epochs. In the Christmas lecture to-day² I told you how in Europe, at a comparatively very late time, abundant remains of this ancient clairvoyance still survived. The extinguishing of clairvoyance and the advent of consciousness limited to the physical plane occur at different times among the different peoples.

You can conceive that through the culture-epochs after the great Atlantean catastrophe—through the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin culture-epochs and an into our own—the effects produced in the plan of world-history by the activities of men have been very diverse—inevitably so, because the peoples all stood in different relationships to the spiritual world. In ancient Persian and also in ancient Egyptian times, what man inwardly felt and experienced extended upwards into the spiritual world, and spiritual Powers played into his very soul. Not until the Greco-Latin epoch did this living connection between the human soul and the spiritual world cease in essentials; nor did it disappear completely until our own times. As far as outer history is concerned, the connection exists in our time only when, with the means that are accessible to man to-day, the link between the human soul and the realities of the spiritual worlds is sought consciously. Thus in ancient times, when man looked into his own soul, this soul enshrined not only what it had learnt from the physical world, had pictured according to the pattern of the things of the physical world, but the spiritual Hierarchies ranging above man up into the spiritual worlds were experienced as immediate realities. All this worked down to the physical plane through the instrument of the human soul, and men knew themselves to be connected with these individual Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we look back, let us say, into the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—but it must be the earlier periods of it—we find men who are, so to say, historical personalities; but we do not understand them if we think of them as historical personalities in the modern sense.

When as men of the materialistic age we speak of historical personalities, we are convinced that it is only the impulses, the intentions, of the actual personalities in question that take effect in the course of history. But with this conception we can in reality understand only the men of the last three thousand years: that is—approximately of course—the men of the millennium which ended with the birth of Christ Jesus, and those of the first and the second Christian millennia in which we ourselves are living. Plato, Socrates, possibly also Thales and Pericles, are men who can still be understood as having at any rate some resemblance to ourselves. But farther back than that it is not possible to understand human beings if we attempt to do so merely by analogy with those living to-day. This applies, shall we say, to Hermes, the great Teacher of the Egyptian epoch, also to Zarathustra, and even to Moses. When we go back before the thousand. years preceding the Christian era we must reckon with the fact that wherever we have to do with historical personalities, higher Individualities, higher Hierarchies stand behind and take possession of these personalities—in the best sense of the word, of course. And now a strange phenomenon comes to light, without knowledge of which the process of historical evolution cannot really be understood.

Five culture-epochs including our own, have been enumerated. Many, many thousands of years ago we come to the first Post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the ancient Indian; this was followed by the second, the ancient Persian; this by the third, the Egypto-Chaldean; this by the fourth, the Greco-Latin; and this by the fifth, our own epoch. When we go back from the Greco-Latin to the Egyptian epoch we must change our whole way of studying history: instead of looking at the purely human aspect—which it is still possible to do in connection with the figures of the Greek world as far back as the age of the Heroes—we must now apply a different criterion by looking behind the single personalities for the spiritual Powers which represent the super-personal and work through the personalities as their instruments. We must have These spiritual Individualities always in mind, so that working behind some human being an the physical plane we can discern discern a Being of the higher Hierarchies who, as it were, takes hold of him from behind and Sets him at the appropriate place in evolution.

From this point of view it is highly interesting to perceive the connections between the really significant happenings—those which were determinative factors in the course of history—in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch and in the Greco-Latin epoch. These two culture-epochs follow one another, and to begin with we go back, let us say to the years from 2800 to 3200–3500 B.C.—which comparatively speaking is not so very far. Nevertheless we shall not understand happenings then—of which ancient history is already able to tell something to-day—unless behind the historical personalities we discern the higher Individualities. But then it also becomes evident to us that in the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, there is a kind of repetition of the really important happenings of the third epoch. It is almost as if things that in the earlier epoch an be explained through higher laws, must be explained in the following age through laws of the physical world, as if everything had sunk down, had become a stage more material, more physical. There is a kind of reflection in the physical world of great events of the preceding period.

By way of introduction, I want to draw your attention to how one of the most important happenings of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch is presented to us in a significant myth, and how this event is reflected, but at a lower stage, in the Greco-Latin epoch. I shall therefore be speaking of two parallel happenings which in the occult sense belong together, the one taking place half a plane higher, as it were, and the other entirely on the physical earth but like a kind of shadow-image on the physical plane of a spiritual event of the earlier epoch. Outwardly, it is only in the form of myths that humanity has ever been able to tell of events behind which stand Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But we shall see what lies behind the myth which describes the most significant event of the Chaldean epoch.³ We will look only at the main features of this myth.

There was once a great king, by name Gilgamesh. From the name itself, one who understands such matters will recognise that here we have to do not merely with a physical king, but with a divinity standing behind him, a spiritual Individuality by whom the king of Erech is inspired, who works and acts through him. Thus we have to do with one who in the real sense must be called a god-man.⁴ The story narrates that he oppresses the city of Erech. The city turns to its deity, Aruru, and she causes a helper to arise out of the earth. These are pictures of the myth. We shall see what deeply significant historical events lie behind it. The Goddess of the City produces Eabani out of the earth. Eabani is a kind of human being who, in comparison with Gilgamesh, seems to be of an inferior nature, for we are told that he was clothed in the skins of animals, was covered with hair, was like a wild man. Nevertheless in his wild nature there was divine Inspiration, ancient clairvoyance, clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception.

Eabani comes to know a woman of Erech and is attracted by her into the City. He becomes the friend of Gilgamesh and this brings peace to the city. Gilgamesh and Eabani together are now the rulers. Then Ishtar, the Goddess of Erech, is stolen by a neighbouring city. There upon Eabani and Gilgamesh go to war with the marauding city, conquer the king and bring the Goddess back again to Erech. Gilgamesh lives near her, and here we come to the strange fact that he has no understanding of the essential nature of the Goddess. A scene takes place, directly reminiscent of a Biblical scene described in the Gospel of St. John. Gilgamesh confronts Ishtar, but his conduct is very different from that of Christ Jesus. He upbraids the Goddess for having loved many other men before she had encountered him, reproaching her particularly for her most recent attachment. Thereupon the Goddess carries her complaints to that deity, that Being of the higher Hierarchies, to whom she belongs. She goes to Anu. And now Anu sends a bull down to the earth; Gilgamesh has to engage in combat with it. Those who recall Mithras's fight with the bull will see a resemblance here. All these events—and when we come to explain the myth we shall see what depths it contains—have led meanwhile to the death of Eabani. Gilgamesh is now alone. A thought comes to him that gnaws at the very fibres of his soul. Under the impression of what he has experienced, he becomes conscious for the first time of the thought that man is mortal; a thought to which he had previously paid no heed comes before his soul in all its terror. And then he hears of the only man of earth who has remained immortal, whereas all other human beings in the Post-Atlantean epoch have become conscious of mortality: he hears of the immortal Xisuthros far away in the West. And because he is resolved to fathom the riddle of life and death, he sets out on the perilous journey to the West.⁵—I can tell you at once that this journey to the West is nothing else than the search for the secrets of ancient Atlantis, for happenings prior to the great Atlantean catastrophe.

Gilgamesh sets out on his journey. The details are interesting. He has to pass through an entrance guarded by giant scorpions; the spirit leads him into the realm of death; he enters the kingdom of Xisuthros and there learns that in the Post-Atlantean epoch all men will inevitably be more and more penetrated with the consciousness of death. Gilgamesh now asks Xisuthros whence he has knowledge of his eternal being; how comes it that he is conscious of immortality? Thereupon Xisuthros says to him: “You too can have this consciousness, but you must undergo all that I had to experience in overcoming the terror, anxiety and loneliness through which it was my lot to pass. When the god Ea had resolved to let perish” (in what we call the Atlantean catastrophe) “that part of humanity which was to live no longer, he bade me to withdraw into a kind of ship. I was to take with me the animals that were to remain, and those Individualities who are truly to be called the Masters. By means of this ship I outlived the great catastrophe.” Xisuthros then tells Gilgamesh: “What was there undergone, you can experience only in your innermost being; but you can attain the consciousness of immortality if for seven nights and six days you refrain from sleep.” Gilgamesh wishes to submit to the test but soon falls asleep. Then the wife of Xisuthros baked seven mystic loaves which by being eaten are to be a substitute for what would have been attained in the seven nights and six days without sleep. With this “life-elixir” Gilgamesh continues his journeying, bathes as it were in a fountain of youth, and again reaches the borders of his own country in the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris. A serpent deprives him of the power of the life-elixir and so he reaches his country without it, but all the same with the consciousness that there is indeed immortality, and filled with longing to see the spirit at least, of Eabani. The spirit of Eabani appears to him, and from the discourse which then takes place we can glean how, for the culture of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, a consciousness of the link with the spiritual world could arise.—This relationship between Gilgamesh and Eabani is very significant. I have now outlined pictures from the significant myth of Gilgamesh which, as we shall see, will lead us into the spiritual depths lying behind the Chaldean-Babylonian culture-epoch. These pictures show that two individualities stand there: the individuality of one—Gilgamesh—into whom a divine-spiritual being has penetrated; and an individuality who is more of a human being, but of such a nature that he may be called a young soul, who has had few incarnations and for that reason has carried over ancient clairvoyance into later times—Eabani.

Eabani is depicted as being clothed in skins of animals. This is an indication of his wild nature; but because of this very wildness he is still endowed with ancient clairvoyance an the one hand, and an the other hand he is a young soul who has lived through far, far fewer incarnations than other souls who have reached a high level of development. Thus Gilgamesh represents a being who was ready for initiation but was not able to attain it, for the journey to the West is the journey to an initiation that was not carried through to the end. On the one side we see in Gilgamesh the actual inaugurator of the Chaldean-Babylonian culture, and working behind him a divine-spiritual Being, a kind of Fire-Spirit.⁶ And beside Gilgamesh there is another individuality—Eabani—a young soul who descended late to earthly incarnation. If you read the book Occult Science, you will find that the individualities returned only gradually from the planets.—The exchange of the knowledge possessed by these two is the root of the Babylonian-Chaldean culture, and we shall see that the whole of this culture is an outcome of what proceeds from Gilgamesh and Eabani. Clairvoyance from the divine man, Gilgamesh, and clairvoyance from the young soul, Eabani, penetrate into the Chaldean-Babylonian culture. This process, enacted by two beings working side by side, each of whom is necessary to the other, is then reflected in the later, fourth culture-epoch, the Greco-Latin, and in fact reflected on the physical plane. We shall of course only very gradually reach complete understanding of such a process. A more spiritual process is thus reflected on the physical plane when humanity has descended very far, when men no longer feel the relation of human personality to the divine-spiritual world.

These secrets of the divine-spiritual world were preserved in the places of the Mysteries. So, for example, many of the ancient, holy secrets which proclaimed the connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual worlds were preserved in the Mysteries of Diana of Ephesus and in the Ephesian temple. A great deal in these Mysteries was no longer comprehensible in an age when human personality had come into prominence. And like a token of how little the purely external personality understood what had remained spiritually, there stands the half-mystical figure of Herostratus, who has eyes only for the superficial aspect of personality—Herostratus who flings the burning torch into the temple of Ephesus. This deed is like a token of the clash between the personality and what had survived from ancient spirituality. And on the very same day when a man, merely in order that his name might go down to posterity, throws the burning brand into the sanctuary of Ephesus, there is born the man who has achieved more than all others for the culture of personality—and on the very soil where the culture of were personality was meant to be overcome. Herostratus flings the burning torch on the day when Alexander the Great is born—the man who is all personality! Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow-image of Gilgamesh.⁷ A profound truth lies behind this. In the Greco-Latin epoch, Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow image of Gilgamesh, as a projection of the spiritual on to the physical plane. And Eabani, projected on to the physical plane, is Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great.

Here indeed is a strange circumstance: Alexander and Aristotle standing, like Gilgamesh and Eabani, side by side. And we see how in the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch there is carried over, as it were, by Alexander the Great but transformed into the laws of the physical plane—that which had been imparted to the Babylonian-Chaldean culture by Gilgamesh. This comes to wonderful expression in the fact that, as a result of the deeds of Alexander, there was established an the scene of Egypto-Chaldean culture Alexandria itself, the city founded by Alexander in 332 B.C. in order that the great achievements of the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture-epoch might be brought together in one centre. And gradually all the streams of Post-Atlantean culture that were intended to come together did indeed converge on Alexandria, the city established an the scene of the third culture-epoch but with the character of the fourth.

Alexandria outlasted the beginnings of Christianity. Indeed it was in Alexandria that the factors of greatest significance in the fourth culture-epoch developed, when Christianity was already in existence. There the great scholars were working; there the three most important streams of culture flowed together: the ancient Pagan-Grecian stream, the Christian stream and the Mosaic-Hebrew stream. They interpenetrated one another in Alexandria. And it is impossible to conceive that the culture of Alexandria which was built entirely on the foundation of personality—could have been inaugurated in any other way than through the being who was inspired by personality—Alexander the Great. For now, through the very existence of this centre of culture, everything that formerly was super-personal, extending from the human personality upwards into the spiritual world, assumed a personal character. The personalities we find in Alexandria have, as it were, everything within themselves; the Powers from higher Hierarchies who guide the personalities and set them in their allotted places, are very little in evidence. All the sages and philosophers working in Alexandria seem to be embodiments of ancient wisdom transformed into human personality; it is the personal element that speaks out of them. The singular fact is that everything in ancient Paganism that could be explained only by the teaching of how gods came down and united with daughters of men in order to bring forth heroes—all this is transformed into personal forcefulness in the men in Alexandria. And the forms which Judaism, the Mosaic culture, assumed in Alexandria can be described from what is in evidence precisely during the period when Christianity was already in existence. Nothing is to be found of those deep conceptions of a link between the world of men and the spiritual world which were present in the age of the prophets and are still to be found in the last two centuries before the beginning of our era. In Judaism too, everything has become personality. There are gifted, able men in Alexandria, men possessed of extraordinarily deep insight into the secrets of the ancient occult teachings ... but everything has become personal; personalities are working in Alexandria. And it is there that to begin with, Christianity appears, shall we say, in a distorted, debased state of infancy. Christianity, whose real function is to lead the personal element in man upwards into the impersonal, made its appearance in Alexandria in a very ruthless form. Christian personalities, in particular, acted in such a way that we often have the impression: their deeds are anticipations of later actions by bishops and archbishops working on a purely personal basis. This applies both to Archbishop Theophilus in the fourth century and to his kinsman and successor, St. Cyril.⁸ We can judge them only an the basis of their human failings. Christianity, which was to give to mankind the greatest of all gifts, reveals itself to begin with in its greatest failings and from its personal side. But in Alexandria a sign and token was to stand before the whole evolution of humanity.

There again we have a projection on the physical plane of earlier, more spiritual conditions. In the Orphic Mysteries of ancient Greece there was a wonderful personality, one who was initiated in the Mystery-secrets and was among the most loveable, most interesting pupils of these Mysteries, well prepared by a certain Celtic occult training undergone in earlier incarnations. This individuality sought with deepest fervour for the secrets of the Orphic Mysteries. The pupils of these Mysteries had to live through in their own soul what is described in the myth of Dionysos Zagreus, who was dismembered by the Titans but whose body was carried away by Zeus into a higher life. How, as the result of a certain path taken in the Mysteries, man's life is surrendered to the outer world, how his whole being is torn in pieces so that he can no longer find his bearings within himself—this was to become an actual, individual experience in the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries.

When in the ordinary way we study animals, plants and minerals, what we learn is merely abstract knowledge because we remain outside them; but anyone who wishes to obtain knowledge in the occult sense must train himself to feel as if he were actually within the animals, plants and minerals, in air and water, in springs and mountains, in stones and Stars, in other human beings—as if he were one with them. all. Nevertheless, a pupil of the Orphic Mysteries had to develop the inner strength of soul which would enable him, re-established as a self-based individuality, to triumph over the disintegration of his being in the external world. When all this had become an actual human experience, it represented in a certain sense one of the very highest secrets of Initiation. And many pupils of the Orphic Mysteries had undergone such experiences, had lived through this disintegration in the world and, as a kind of preparation for Christianity, had therewith attained the highest experience within reach in pre-Christian times.

Among the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the loveable personality of whom I am speaking, whose earthly name has not come down to posterity, but who stands out clearly as a pupil of these Mysteries. Already in youth and then for many years, this person was closely connected with all the Greek Orphics during the period preceding that of Greek philosophy—a period of which no account is given in books an the history of philosophy. For what is recorded of Thales and Heraclitus is an echo of what the Mystery-pupils had accomplished in their way at an earlier period. And one of the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the individual of whom I have just spoken, whose pupil in turn was Pherecydes of Syros, referred to in the lecture-course given at Munich last year: The East in the light of the West⁹

Investigation of the Akasha Chronicle reveals that the individuality of that pupil of the Orphic Mysteries was reincarnated in the 4th century A.D. We find this individuality amid the activity and life of those gathered together in Alexandria, the Orphic secrets now transformed into personal experiences of the loftiest kind. It is very remarkable how all the Orphic secrets were transformed into personal experiences in this new incarnation. At the end of the 4th century, A.D., we find this individuality reborn as the daughter of a great mathematician, Theon. We see how there flashes up in her soul all that could be experienced of the Orphic Mysteries through vision of the great mathematical, light-woven texture of the universe. All this was now personal talent, personal genius. These faculties had now to be of so personal a character that it was necessary even for this individuality to have a mathematician as father in order that something might be received from heredity.

Thus we look back to times when man was still in living connection with the spiritual worlds, as was this Orphic pupil; and we see the shadow-image of this pupil among those who taught in Alexandria at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century A.D. This individuality had as yet experienced nothing that enabled men at that time to see beyond the shadow-sides of Christianity at its beginning. For all that had remained in this soul as an echo of the Orphic Mysteries was still too powerful to enable any Illumination to be received from that other Light, the new Christ Event. What arose round about as Christianity, represented by men of the type of Theophilus and Cyril, was in truth of such a nature that this Orphic individuality, working now with personal faculties, had things far greater, far richer in wisdom to say and to give than those who represented Christianity in Alexandria at that time.

Theophilus and Cyril were both filled with the deepest hatred of everything that was not Christian in the narrow ecclesiastical sense in which these two bishops, in particular, understood it. Christianity had assumed in them such an entirely personal character that these two patriarchs levied hirelings in their service; men were collected from far and near to form bodyguards for them. Their aim was power in its most personal sense. They were utterly obsessed by hatred of what originated in ancient times and yet was so much greater than the new that was appearing in caricatured shape. The deepest hatred was directed by the dignitaries of Christianity in Alexandria against the individuality of the reborn Orphic pupil. The fact that she was branded as a black magician will not therefore surprise us. But that was enough to incite the whole mob of hirelings against the noble, unique figure of the reborn pupil of the Orphic Mysteries. She was still young, but in spite of her youth, in spite of the fact that she was obliged to undergo much that in those days, too, imposed great hardships an a woman during a long period of study, she found her way upwards to the light that outshone all the wisdom, all the knowledge existing in those days. And it was wonderful how in the lecture halls of Hypatia—for such was the name of this reincarnated Orphic pupil—the purest, most luminous wisdom in Alexandria was presented to the enraptured listeners. She drew to her feet not only the Pagans, bat also Christians of deep and penetrating insight, such as Synesius. She was an influence of outstanding significance, and the revival of the old Pagan wisdom of Orpheus transformed into personality could be experienced in Alexandria in the figure of Hypatia.

World-karma was working in the truest sense symbolically. What had constituted the secret of her Initiation was now projected, mirrored, on the physical plane. And here we come to an event that is symbolically significant in the case of many things that have taken place in historical times. We come to one of those events that is seemingly only a martyrdom, but is in reality a symbol in which spiritual forces, spiritual intimations are coming to expression.

On a day in March in the year 415 A.D., Hypatia fell victim to the fury of these who formed the entourage of the patriarch of Alexandria. They resolved to rid themselves of her power, of her spiritual power. The utterly uncivilised, wild hordes were rushed in from the environs of Alexandria as well, and the chaste young sage was fetched away under false pretences. She mounted the chariot, and at a given sign the enflamed rabble fell upon her, tore off her clothing, dragged her into a church, and literally tore the flesh from her bones. The fragments of her body were then scattered around the city by these hordes, completely dehumanised by their rapacious passions. Such was the fate of the great woman philosopher, Hypatia.

Symbolically, so to say, there is indicated here something that is deeply connected with the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great—although it happened a long time after the actual founding of the city. In this event, important secrets of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch are reflected. This epoch, destined as it was to represent the dissolution, the sweeping-away, of the old, contained so much that was great and significant, and with paradoxical grandeur placed before the world a most pregnant symbol in the slaughter—one can call it nothing else—of Hypatia, the outstanding woman at the turn of the 4th-5th centuries of our era.

• 1. See among other lectures by Rudolf Steiner: Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew, lectures II and III; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lectures I, II, III; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, lecture III; From Jesus to Christ, lecture VIII.
• 2. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: Yuletide and the Christmas Symbols. Stuttgart, 27.12.1910.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, notably lectures III, IV, V.
• 4. See also: Jastrow (Mords), Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Chapter XXIII. (Boston, 1898.) Budge (E. A. Wallis), The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (London, 1920. Revised by C. J. Gadd, 1929.) Thompson (Reginald Campbell), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London, 1928.) Contains a fairly full text.
• 5. See Budge, op. cit., p. 50:
  
  "I myself shall die, and shall not I then be as Enkidi (Eabani)
  Sorrow hath entered into my soul,
  Because of the fear of death which hach got hold of me do I wander over the country ..."
  
  Xisuthros, said to mean "the exceedingly wise," is a Greek corruption of an earlier designation. He is the same being as Uta-Napishtim in the versions of the Epic mentioned abovc, and is the Babylonian Noah. He tells the story of the Deluge to Gilgamesh. Cp. Cory (Isaac Preston), Ancient Fragments, p. 49; also Enc. of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VI, pp. 642—3; and Budge, op. cit., PP. 25—40.
• 6. See Langdon, op. cit., pp. 207—8. The name Gilgamesh is said to mean: " The Fire-god is a commander."
• 7. Cp. Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 516–17
• 8. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, 385–412. Persecuted the followers of Origen. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria. Played a prominent patt at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
• 9. The passage on Pherecydes of Syros occurs in lecture 4 of the Course entitled The East in the Light of the West, pp. 67—71 in the English edition.

[ 1 ] The teaching which came from the holy Rishis, during the first post-Atlantean period of civilisation was a knowledge that sprang from purely spiritual sources of existence. What is so important in that teaching and in the investigations of those times is that it entered so deeply into the processes of nature and realised so well the activity of the spirit in those processes. In reality we are always surrounded by spiritual activities and by spiritual entities. When during the time of that ancient holy teaching, mention was made of the phenomena of the world surrounding us, one was always referred to as being the most significant, the most important of all these, this was considered (by that ancient spiritual science) to be the phenomenon of fire. In all explanations of what exists and happens upon the earth, the central point of importance was always given to the spiritual investigation of fire. If we want to understand what we may call the Eastern teaching about fire, which was of such far-reaching importance in those ancient times for the acquisition of the knowledge and understanding of all life, then we must look around us at the other phenomena and occurrences of nature and see how these were considered by that very ancient teaching, which can still be useful nowadays for the purposes of spiritual science. [ 2 ] All that surrounds man in the world was then referred back to the so-called four elements. These four elements are respected no longer by the materialistic science of to-day. You all know that these four elements are called Earth, Water, Air, Fire. But where spiritual science flourished the word ‘earth’ had not the same meaning as it has nowadays. It stood for a certain state in the material realm: the state or condition of solidity. All that is solid was called ‘earthy’ by the spiritual science of those times. So whether we take the solid earth of a field, or a piece of crystal, or lead, or gold, anything that is solid was then called earth. Everything liquid, not only the water of to-day, was characterised as watery, or as water. If for instance you take iron, pass it through heat to the point of melting so that it can flow, then that liquid iron would have been called water by spiritual science. All metals when liquid were described as water. Everything that has the character of air for us to day, no matter whether it was the condition we call gas, or oxygen, or hydrogen, or other gases, was called air. [ 3 ] Fire was considered the fourth element. Those of you who remember elementary physics will know that modern science does not see in fire anything that could be compared with either earth, water or air: the physical science of to day sees in it only a certain condition of movement. Spiritual science sees in warmth or fire something which has in it a still finer substance than air. Just as earth or solidity changes into liquid, So does all air-substance change gradually into the condition of fire — according to spiritual science — and fire is so fine an element that it interpenetrates all other elements. Fire interpenetrates the air and makes it warm, the same with water and earth. The other three elements are, so to speak, separated from each other, but we see the element of fire interpenetrating them all.

[ 4 ] Both ancient and modern spiritual science agree that there is yet another still more remarkable difference between what we call Earth, Water, Air, and what we call Fire or Warmth. How do we come to the cognisance of earth or solidity? Through touching it. We realise the solid through touching it and feeling its resistance. It is the same with watery substance. This gives way, it is not so resistant, still we realize it as something external that offers resistance. And it is the same with the element of air. We recognise it also as something external. With warmth it is different. Here we find something which modern science does not consider important, but which must become important for us if we want to study the real problems of existence.

We can realise warmth without coming in contact with it externally. What is essential is that we can realise warmth by touching a body which has a certain degree of warmth: we can perceive it externally in the same way as we realise the three other elements, but we also feel it in our inward conditions. Therefore ancient science says (and did so already at the time of the old Indians), that earth, water, air, can be realised only in the outer world, but warmth is the first element which can also be felt within oneself. Thus, fire or warmth has, so to speak, two sides to it. An outer, which it shows when we take cognisance of it in the outer world and an inner when we feel that we ourselves are in a certain state of warmth. Man feels his own condition of warmth; he is hot, or he freezes; but consciously he is not much concerned with the gaseous or liquid or solid substances — the air, water, or earth — which are in him. He begins to ‘feel’ himself in the element of warmth. The element of warmth has an inner and an outward side. Therefore both ancient and modern spiritual science agree that warmth or fire is that wherein matter begins to become soul. And so in the true sense of the word — we may speak of an outer fire which we realise in the other elements, and of an inner psychic fire within our soul.

[ 5 ] In this way, spiritual science always considered fire as the link between the outer material world on the one side, and the realm of the soul on the other, which can be known by man within his inner being. Fire or warmth was placed in the centre of all observations of nature, because fire is, so to speak, the portal through which we may pass from the outer into the inner. In all truth, fire is like a door in front of which one stands. One sees it from outside, one opens it and can observe it from within. Such is fire amongst the objects of nature. One touches some object and becomes acquainted with fire, which streams towards us from outside like the three other elements: one realises one's own inner warmth and feels it as something belonging to oneself; one stands inside the portal, one has entered into the realm of the soul. Thus was the science of fire described. In fire was seen the interplay of soul and matter. We have now placed before our souls an elementary lesson of primeval human wisdom.

[ 6 ] The ancient teachers may have spoken thus: ‘Look at that burning object. See how the fire destroys it. Thou seest two things in that burning object.’ In those ancient times one was called smoke, and it may still be so called nowadays, and the other was called light, and the spiritual scientist saw the fire in the middle between light and smoke. The teacher said: ‘Out of the flame are born simultaneously light on the one side, smoke on the other.’ [ 7 ] Now we must for once put very clearly before us a very simple but very far-reaching fact, which has to do with the light, which is born of fire. It is most probable that many people when asked whether they see the light would answer: ‘Yes, of course.’ And yet this answer is as false as possible; for, in truth, no physical eye can see light. Through light one sees objects which are solid, liquid, or gaseous, but the light itself one does not see. Imagine the whole of universal space illuminated by a light the source of which was somewhere behind you, where you could not see it and you were to look into the world spaces illuminated through and through by that light. Would you see the light? You would see absolutely nothing. You would first see something when some object was placed within that illuminated space. One does not see the light, one sees the solid, the watery, the gaseous, by means of the light. One does not see physical light with the physical eye. This is something which comes before the spiritual eye with particular clearness. Spiritual science says therefore: light makes everything visible, but is itself invisible. This sentence is important: light is imperceptible. It cannot be perceived by the outer senses: one call perceive what is solid, liquid, or gaseous, finally one can perceive warmth or fire outwardly. This one can also begin to feel inwardly, but light itself one can no longer perceive outwardly. If you believe that when you see the sun you see light you are mistaken: you see a flaming body, a burning substance out of which the light streams. It could be proved to you that you have there gaseous, liquid, and earthy substances. You do not see light, you see that which is burning. [ 8 ] But spiritual science says we pass in ascending order from earth to water, from air to fire, and then to light, we pass thus from the outwardly recognisable world, from the visible world into the invisible, into the etheric-spiritual world. Fire stands on the border between the outwardly visible, material world, and that which is etheric and spiritual, which is no more outwardly visible or recognisable. What happens to a body that is destroyed through fire? What happens when something burns? When something burns, we see on one side light appear, which is outwardly imperceptible and which is operative in the spiritual world. Something that is not merely outer material gives forth the warmth and when it is strong enough to become a source of light it yields something invisible, something which cannot be recognised any more through the outer senses, but it must pay for this in smoke. From what was formerly translucent and transparent it has to bring forth something not transparent — something of the nature of smoke. Thus you see how warmth or fire becomes differentiated, how it divides. On one side it divides itself into light, with which it opens a way into the super-sensible world, and in payment for that which it sends up as light into the super-sensible world, it must send something down into the material world, into the world of non-transparent, visible things. Nothing one-sided comes forth in the world. Everything that exists has two sides to it. When light is produced through warmth, then turbid, dark matter appears on the other side. That is the teaching of primeval spiritual science.

[ 9 ] But the process we have just described is only the outer side, the physical, material process. At the foundation of this physically material process there lies something essentially different. When you have only warmth in some object which as yet does not shine, then this warmth which you perceive is itself the outer physical part but within it is something spiritual. When this warmth grows so strong that it begins to shine and smoke is formed, then some of the spirit which was in the warmth must go into the smoke. That spiritual part which was in the warmth and has passed into the smoke, which being gaseous and belonging to air is a lower element than warmth, that spiritual part is transmuted, bewitched, as it were, into smoke. Thus with everything which like a turbid extract or a materialisation is deposited by the warmth, there is also associated what might be called the bewitching of some spiritual being. We can explain it still more simply. Let us imagine that we reduce air to a watery condition. Air itself is nothing but solidified warmth, densified warmth in which smoke has been formed. The spiritual part which really wanted to be in the fire has been bewitched into smoke. Spiritual beings, which are also called elementals, are bewitched in all air, and will even be bewitched, banished, so to speak, to a lower existence, when air is changed into water. Hence spiritual science sees in everything that is outwardly perceptible something that has proceeded from an original condition of fire or warmth and which has turned into air, smoke, or gas, when the warmth began to condense into gas, gas into liquid, liquid into solid. ‘Look backwards,’ says the spiritual scientist, look at any solid substance. That solidity was once liquid, it is only in the course of evolution that it has become solid and the liquid was once upon a time gaseous and the gaseous formed itself as smoke, out of the fire. But a transmutation, a bewitching of spiritual being is always connected with these processes of condensation and with the formation of gases and solids.

[ 10 ] Let us now look around at our world: we see solid rocks, flowing streams of water, we see the water changing into rising mist: we see the air, we see all the solid, liquid, gaseous things and we see fire, so that at the foundation of all things we have nothing but fire. All is fire — solidified fire: gold, silver, copper, are solidified fire. All things were once upon a time fire; everything has been born out of fire. But in all that solidified realm, some bewitched spirits are dwelling.

[ 11 ] How are those spiritual, divine beings who surround us able to produce solid matter as it is on our planet — to produce liquids, and air substances? They send down their elemental spirits, those which live in the fire: they imprison them in air, in water and in earth. These are the emissaries, the elemental emissaries of the spiritual, creative, building beings. The elemental spirits first enter into fire. In fire they still feel comfortable — if we care to express it by images — and then they are condemned to a life of bewitchment. We can say looking around us: ‘These beings, whom we have to thank for all the things that surround us, had to come down out of the fire-element; they are bewitched in those things.’

[ 12 ] Can we as men do anything to help those elemental spirits? This is the great question which was put by the Holy Rishis. Can we do anything to release, to redeem, all that is here, bewitched? Yes! We can help them. Because what we men do here in the physical world is nothing else than an outward expression of spiritual processes. All we do is also of importance for the spiritual world. Let us consider the following. A man stands in front of a crystal, or a lump of gold, or anything of that kind. He looks at it. What happens when a man simply gazes, simply stares with his physical eye upon some outer object? A continual interplay occurs between the man and the bewitched elemental spirits. The man and that which is bewitched in the substance have something to do with each other. Let us suppose that the man only stares at the object and takes in only what is impressed on his physical eye. Something is always passing from the elemental being into the man. Something from those bewitched elementals passes continually into the man, from morning till night. While you are thus regarding objects, hosts of these elemental beings, who were and are being continually bewitched through the world-processes of condensation, are continually entering from your surroundings into you. Let us take it that the man staring at the objects has no inclination whatever to think about those objects, no inclination to let the spirit of things live in his soul. He lives comfortably, merely passes through the world, but he does not work on it spiritually, with his ideas or feelings or in any such way. He remains simply a spectator of the material things he meets with in the world. Then these elemental spirits pass into him and remain there, having gained nothing from the world's process, but the fact of having passed from the outer world into man. Let us take another kind of man, one who works spiritually on the impressions he receives from the outer world, who with his understanding and ideas forms conceptions regarding the spiritual foundations of the world, one who does not simply stare at a metal, but ponders over its nature and feels the beauty which inspires and spiritualises his impressions. What does such a man do? Through his own spiritual process, he releases the elemental being which has streamed into him from the outer world; he raises it to what it was before, he frees the elemental from its state of enchantment. Thus, through our own spiritual life, we can, without changing them, either imprison within us those spirits which are bewitched in air, water and earth, or else through our own increasing spirituality, free them and lead them back to their own element. During the whole of his earthly life, man lets those elemental spirits stream into him from the outer world. In the same measure in which he only stares at things, in the same measure in which he simply lets the spirit dwell in him without transforming them, so, in like measure as he tries with his ideas, conceptions and feeling for beauty to work out spiritually what he sees in the outer world, does he release and redeem those spiritual elemental beings.

[ 13 ] Now what happens to those elemental beings which, having come out of things, enter into man? They remain at first within him. Also those which are released at first remain, but they stay only until his death. When the man passes through death a differentiation takes place between those elemental beings which have simply passed into him and which he had not led back to their higher element, and those whom he has through his own spiritualisation led back to their former condition. Those whom the man has not changed have not gained anything from their passage from the outer world into him, but others have gained the possibility of returning to their own original world with the man's death. During his life man is a place of transition for these elemental beings. When he has passed through the spiritual world and returns to earth in his next incarnation, all the elemental beings which he has not released during his former life flock into him again when he passes through the portals of his new birth, they return with him into the physical world; but those he has released he does not bring back with him for they have returned into their original element.

[ 14 ] Thus we see how man has it in his power, by the way he acts and feels towards outer nature, either to release those elemental spirits which have been necessarily bewitched through the coming into existence of our earth, or to bind them to the earth still more strongly than they were before. What does a man do when, in looking at some outer object he releases from it an elemental being by elucidating it? He spiritually does the opposite of what has been done before. Previously, smoke had been brought forth out of fire, but man spiritually forms fire again out of that smoke; only after death does he release this fire. Now think for a moment of the endless depth and spirituality of the ancient ceremonies of sacrifice, as seen in the light of primeval spiritual science! Imagine to yourselves the Priest at the sacrificial altar in those times when religion was built on the real knowledge of spiritual laws; think of the Priest lighting the flame, and the rising of the smoke, and as the smoke rises a real sacrifice is offered, for it is followed upwards by prayers — What happens then? What happens during such a sacrifice? The Priest stands at the altar where the smoke is produced. Where something solid comes out of the warmth, a spirit is being transmuted, bewitched. But because the man follows the whole procedure with prayers, he at the same time receives that spirit into himself in such a way that after death it rises again into the higher world. What did the teacher of ancient wisdom say to those who had to understand this? He said: ‘If thou lookest upon the outer world in such a way that thy spiritual process does not stop at the smoke, but rises to the element of fire, then after thy death thou dost free the spirit which is bewitched in the smoke.’ Yes! The teacher who knew the fate of the spirit, which after being bewitched in the smoke had passed into man, spoke thus: ‘If thou leavest that spirit as it was when it was in the smoke, then it must be reborn with thee and cannot rise into the spiritual world after thy death; but if thou hast released it and restored it to the fire, then after thy death it will rise again into the spiritual worlds and will not need to return to the earth at thy rebirth.’

[ 15 ] Now we have explained one part of that profound sentence from the Bhagavad Gita of which I spoke in my last lecture. It does not speak here at all of the human Ego, it speaks of those nature spirits, of these elemental beings which enter into man from the outer world, and it says there: ‘Behold the fire, behold the smoke, that which man through his spiritual processes turns into fire are spirits which he liberates with his death.’ That which he leaves as it is, in the smoke, must remain united to him at his death and must be reborn with him when he returns to earth. It is the destiny of the elemental spirits that is here described; through the wisdom which man develops, he continually liberates at his death these elemental spirits; through lack of wisdom, through the materialistic attachment to the mere things of the senses, he ties those elemental spirits to himself and forces them to follow him into this world, ever to be born again with him.

[ 16 ] But these elemental beings are not only associated with fire and with what is connected with fire, they are the emissaries of higher spiritual divine beings in all that takes place in the outer sense world. There never could have been that interplay of forces in the world that produce the day and the night, for instance, if numbers of such elemental being had not worked suitably at the rotation of the planet through the universe, so that precisely this interchange of day and night could come about. All that takes place is the result of the activity of hosts of lower and higher spiritual entities belonging to the spiritual hierarchies. We have been speaking of the lowest order, of the messengers. When night becomes day and day night, elemental beings live also in that process, and so it is that man stands in an intimate relationship with the beings of the elemental world which have to take part in working at the day and the night. When man is idle and lets himself go, he affects those elementals who have to do with the day and the night quite differently, than when he has creative force, when he is active, diligent, and productive. When a man is lazy for instance, he unites himself with a certain kind of elemental and he also does so when he is active, but in a particular way. Those elementals of the second class, just named, who are active during the day, are then in their higher element. As fire elementals, those of the first class, are bound in air water and earth, so certain elemental being are also tied to darkness; and day could not turn into night, day could not be divided from night, if these elementals were not so to speak imprisoned in night. That man is able to enjoy daylight, he has to thank divine spiritual beings who have driven forth elemental spirits and have chained them to the night-time. When man is lazy these elementals flow into him continually, but he leaves them as they are, unchanged. Those elemental spirits which at night are chained to darkness, he let through his idleness remain in the same state; those elemental who enter into him when he is active and industrious and filled with working power, he leads back into daylight. Thus he continually releases these elementals of the second class. Throughout the whole of our lifetime we bear within us all those elemental spirits which have entered into us either during our hours of idleness or during those of active work. When we pass through the gates of death those beings whom we have led towards daylight can now return into the spirit world; those we have left chained to the night through our idleness, must return with us in our new incarnation. With this we arrive at the second point in the Bhagavad Gita. Again it is not the human self, but those elemental beings which are indicated with the words: ‘Behold the day and the night. That which thou hast thyself released by turning it from a being of the night into a being of the day through thy diligence; that which comes forth out of the day enters when thou diest, into the higher world; that which thou takest with thee as beings of the night, thou forcest to reincarnate with thee again.’

[ 17 ] And now you will see clearly how the matter proceeds. As it is with the phenomena of which we have just spoken, so it is on a larger scale with our month of 28 days, with the changes of the waxing and waning moon. Whole flocks of elemental beings have to come into activity to direct the motions of the moon so that our lunar periods can come about as they do with all the influences they bring with them upon our visible earth. For this purpose certain of the higher beings had again to be bewitched, doomed, chained. Clairvoyant vision sees how, with the waxing moon, spiritual beings of a lower kingdom ever rise into a higher. But, so that order should exist, other spiritual elemental beings must again be transformed into those of lower realms. There are also those elementals of a third realm who stand in relationship with men. When man is serene and bright, when he is pleased with the world, when he has feelings of gladness towards all things, he continually releases those beings which are chained to the waning moon. These beings enter into him and are continually set free, through his soul's peaceful attitude, through his inner contentment, through his harmonious feelings and ideas towards the whole world. The beings which enter into man when he is sullen, peevish, morose, discontented with anything, when everything depresses him — when he is pessimistic — these spirits remain in the condition of bewitchment they were in at the time of the waning moon. Oh! There are men who through the harmonious condition of their soul, through the bright way they look upon the world, release and set free great numbers of these bewitched elemental beings. The man of harmonious and optimistic feelings and who feels inner satisfaction with the world, is a deliverer of elemental spiritual beings. The pessimist, he who is morose, sullen and discontented, becomes through his depression the gaoler of elemental spirits which could have been released by his cheerfulness. Thus you see that the conditions of mind and soul have not only a personal importance for this man, but also that he works either at the liberation or the imprisonment of spiritual beings; either deliverance or fetters proceed from him. The conditions of soul that a man experiences go out in all directions into the spiritual world. We have here the third point of that important teaching in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Behold what man does through the feelings and conditions of his soul, how he sets spirits free, as they are set free by the growing moon.’ When the man dies, these released spirits can return to the spiritual world. If through his depression and hypochondriacal moods, he calls to him the elemental spirits which are around him, and then leaves them as they are, as they have to be in order to bring about the orderly courses of the moon, then these spirits remain chained to him and must reincarnate with him into this world.

[ 18 ] And last of all we have a fourth degree of elemental spirits, those who have to work at the annual course of the sun, so that the summer sun may shine upon the earth to awaken and fructify it, so that spring can appear and be succeeded by autumn. In order that this may come to pass certain spirits must be fettered to winter-time, must be bewitched during the time of the winter sun. And man acts upon these spirits in the same way as we have described his acting on the other grades of spirits. Let us take man who at the beginning of winter says to himself: ‘The nights are getting longer, the days shorter, we come to that time of the sun's yearly course when the sun withdraws his fructifying forces from the earth. The outer earth dies, but with this deadening of the earth I feel it my duty to be all the more spiritually awake. I must now take more and more of the spirit within me.’ Let us take a man who acquires a more and more religious mood appropriate to the season as Christmas comes on, who learns to know the significance of Christmas and to know also that when the outer world of the senses is dead the life of the spirit must now grow stronger. This man lives through winter until Easter. He remembers that with the awakening of the outer world is combined the death of the spiritual: he lives through the Easter festival comprehending its meaning. Such a man has not only an outer religion; he has religious understanding of the processes of nature, of the spirit which rules it; and through his piety, his spirituality, he releases numbers of that fourth class of elemental beings which continually stream in and out of him, which are connected with the course of the sun. But the man who is not pious in this sense, who denies or does not understand the spirit and is always muddling through a materialistic chaos, into him these elementals of the fourth class flow, but remain unchanged. At death it happens again: that these elemental spirits of the fourth degree are either set free in their own element, or else are bound to the man and have to return with him at his next incarnation. Thus, the man, who uniting with the winter spirits does not change them into summer spirits, does not redeem them through his spirituality, dooms them to rebirth, whereas they might have been freed and not have had to return with him. [ 19 ] Behold the fire and the smoke! If you so unite with the outer world that the activity of your soul and spirit is like that of fire, from which smoke comes forth, so that you spiritualise things, through knowledge and through right feeling, you help certain spiritual elemental beings to rise; but if you unite with the smoke you condemn them to rebirth. If you associate yourself with the day, you then set free the corresponding spirits of day and so on. Behold the light! Behold the day! Behold the waxing of the moon and the sunny half of the year! If you act so that you lead the elemental spirits back to the light, to the day, to the waxing moon, to the summer-time of the year, you then at your death release these elementary spirits which are so necessary to you. They rise to the spiritual world. If you associate yourself with the smoke, if you only gaze at the solid things of the earth, if through laziness you unite yourself with the night and with the spirits of the waning moon, and if through your depression you unite yourself with those spirits who are chained to the winter sun, then through your lack of spirit, your godlessness, you condemn these elementary beings to be reincarnated with you again!

[ 20 ] Now we know for the first time what this passage in the Bhagavad Gita really means. If anyone thinks that man is here spoken of, he does not understand the Bhagavad Gita; but those who know that all human life is a continual interplay between man and the spirits who live bewitched into our surroundings and who must be released again — those know that these sentences speak of the ascension or of the reincarnation of four groups of elemental beings. The mystery of this lowest kind of hierarchy has been preserved for us in these sentences in the Bhagavad Gita. Yes! When one has to bring forth out of primeval wisdom what is presented to us in the documents of ancient religion, one sees how grand these are and how wrong it is to understand them superficially and not in all their profundity. They are only considered in the right way when one says to oneself: ‘No wisdom is exalted enough to discover the mysteries herein contained.’ Only when these ancient documents are interpenetrated by the magic of real devotional feeling, do they become what in the true sense of the word they must be — self-ennobling and purifying forces for human evolution. They point frequently to fathomless abysses of human wisdom, and only when that which springs from the sources of the occult schools and the mysteries, streams forth from now on to all mankind, only then, will these reflections of the primeval wisdom (for they are but reflections) be seen in all their greatness. [ 21 ] We have had to show, by means of a comparatively difficult example, how in the times of primeval wisdom the co-operation of all those spirits which are everywhere around us was well known, how it was also known that the deeds of men represent an interchanging activity between the spiritual world and the world of man's own inner being. The problem of humanity first becomes important for us, when we know that in all we do, even in our moods, we influence a whole Cosmos, and that this small world of ours is of infinitely far-reaching importance for all that comes to pass in the macrocosm. An increase in our feeling of responsibility is the finest and most important of all the things we gain from spiritual science. It teaches us to grasp the true meaning of life and to realise its importance, so that this life which we cast on the stream of evolution may not enter that stream void of meaning.