The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When aided by spiritual science we give ourselves up to the study of the Gospels, we are at once aware of powerful experiences coming to us from them. And we venture to say that people will first gain some idea of all that has been poured into the Gospels by those who wrote them, when spiritual science has been popularised somewhat as is the fashion to-day. Many things will then be recognised as belonging to the Gospels that are not found directly in these documents, but are only discovered when the four Gospels are studied side by side.

I should like, in the first place, to say that in the Gospel of Matthew the true history of the Christ Impulse is put before us in the story of a child. Beginning with an account of the ancient Hebrew people—or rather of their first ancestor—the account of the Christ-Impulse in this Gospel only goes back to the origin of the Hebrew people. In this Gospel we learn to know the bearer of the Christ Being as he developed out of the Hebrew people. When we pass on to the Gospel of Mark we meet with the Christ-Impulse directly. Here all mention of the life of the child is at first disregarded. After being told that John the Baptist is the great prophet who foretold the coming of the Christ-Impulse, it describes the baptism by John in Jordan.

Then from the Gospel of Luke we receive a new history of the childhood of the bearer of the Christ-Impulse, but this time it goes much further back as regards the origin of Jesus of Nazareth—it goes back to the beginning of mankind upon the earth. The descent of Jesus of Nazareth is traced back to Adam, and then to one who it states “was God.” Therefore, this story of his childhood clearly indicates that the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth can be traced back to a point of time when man first came forth from Divine Beings. The Gospel of Luke takes us back to a time when man can no longer be regarded as a Being incarnated in the flesh, but as a Spiritual Being, a Being that had come forth from the womb of divine spirituality.

In the Gospel of John the great facts are put before us so, that again without giving any account of the childhood or the destiny of Jesus of Nazareth, we are introduced directly, and in a very profound sense, to the very Being of Christ. In the course of the spiritual development we have ourselves passed through in recent years we sketched out a certain path as regards the study of the Gospels; our design was to begin first with the Gospel that gives us the most exalted outlook into the abstract spirituality of Christ—the Gospel according to John.

This was to be followed by the study of the Gospel of Luke, in order to show how the highest degree of spirituality possible in man becomes apparent when the life of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is traced back to the point of time when as earthly man he came forth from the Godhead.

The study of the Gospel of Matthew was to follow, so that we might understand the Christ-Impulse as this passed through the ancient Hebrew people.

The Gospel of Mark we reserved to the last. Why this was done will be rightly understood when much that has been touched on recently as general spiritual science is connected with things you have known for long, and also with others that are comparatively new. This is why I have spoken recently of many things in human life, and in the composition of the members of man's being, and shall speak of similar things to-day, which may serve as an introduction to certain facts of human evolution. For it becomes ever more necessary that the conditions of human evolution should be recognised, not recognised only, but kept constantly before us.

As we advance towards the future, mankind will become ever more self dependent, ever more individual. Belief in external authority will be replaced more and more by the authority of the individual soul. This is the necessary course of evolution, but in order that it may bring well-being and blessedness, man has to know his own nature. We cannot say that as a whole we are far advanced in the estimation and understanding of human nature. For what, among much else, is taking place in the history of man to-day? All kinds of programmes, all kinds of so-called ideals for mankind are certainly not wanting at the present time. One can almost say that not only a man here and there, but every man might come forward to-day as a little Messiah with a special ideal for our humanity; might construct out of his head and heart an ideal by which well-being and blessedness might be attained. Nor are societies and associations wanting that suggest one thing or another which they think necessary to introduce into our culture. These we have in great measure, and faith in them is not wanting. The strength of conviction in those who put forward such programmes is so great that it will shortly be necessary to form councils to establish the infallibility of each. In speaking of such things we mention what is deeply characteristic of our age.

Spiritual science does not keep us from thinking of our future, but points to certain fundamental tendencies and laws which cannot be disregarded if anything is to be gained from its impulse.

For what does the man of to-day believe? He takes counsel with himself; an ideal rises in his soul and he believes he is capable of making his ideal actual. He does not pause to think that perhaps the time is not ripe for its introduction, that the picture he has formed may perhaps be a caricature, and that it may possibly only reach fruition in a more or less distant future. In short it is very difficult for people to-day to understand that every event must be prepared for, that owing to the general macrocosmic relationships of the world these are ordained to take place at fixed times. It is exceedingly difficult for present day humanity to grasp this. All the same it is a universal law, and holds for each individual as well as for the whole human race.

We can recognise the working of this law as regards individuals, when we observe their lives by means of spiritual science. Here we have to consider the smallest, most intimate things that rise within the soul.

I am not now dealing with general ideas, but will keep rather to what has been observed in particular cases. In the first place let us suppose that we have someone before us who has been able to grasp some idea in his soul most intensely; that he has been so fired by it that it assumed a distinct form in his soul and he desires earnestly to make this idea actual. Let us suppose then that this idea first arose in his head, and was then filled with impulses of feeling from his heart. Such a man would not be able to-day to wait, he would set about at once giving reality to his idea.

Suppose that at first this was quite a small idea concerned with some scientific or artistic fact. Will an occultist who knows the laws put such an entirely strange idea at once before the world? We are assuming that the idea is quite a small one. The occultist knows that it appears first in the life of the astral body. This can be observed even outwardly through the fact that enthusiasm dwells in the soul. It is pre-eminently a force of the astral body.

It is as a rule harmful when people do not allow the idea at this stage to rest quietly and not set it at once before the world; for the idea has first to follow a clearly defined course. For instance, it must enter ever deeper and deeper into the astral body and then impress itself, as a seal does, on the etheric body. If the idea is a small one this process may take seven days. But this time is necessary. And if the man goes ahead hurriedly with his idea, he is apt to overlook one important fact, namely, that after seven days a quite clearly defined experience of a very subtle kind takes place. If these things are noticed he may have this experience, but if he goes madly ahead saying:—“Out with it into the world!” The result is that his soul is not disposed to listen for what may happen on the seventh day. With a small idea it always happens on the seventh day that the person does not rightly know how to carry it out, that it vanishes again within the soul. The man is restless, perhaps even frightened, oppressed with doubts, yet all the time in spite of feeling perturbed he is attached to his idea.

Enthusiasm now changes to an intimate feeling of love. The idea is now within the etheric body. If it is to prosper and thrive it must lay hold of the outer astral substances with which we are always surrounded; thus from our astral body it must first pass into our etheric body and thence into the external astrality. To accomplish this another seven days is necessary. And if the man is not such a tyro that when the idea begins to trouble him, he says:—“Away with you!” But if he pays heed to the way life progresses he can see that after this period something comes to meet his idea from outside which can be expressed somewhat as follows:—“It is well to have waited fourteen days, for now I am no longer alone with my idea. It is as if I had been inspired from the macrocosm, as if something had entered my ideas from the outer world.”

A man then feels for the first time that he is in harmony with the whole spiritual world, that it brings something to meet him, when he has something to give to it. A certain soul-satisfying feeling arises after a period of about twice seven days.

This idea has then to follow the path backwards, it has to enter the etheric body again by way of the external astrality. We are then aware of it quite objectively, and the temptation is very great to give it to the world. This must again be resisted with all our power; for there is a danger, while the idea is still in the etheric body, of its entering the world in a cold way, of being communicated to the world in a cold and icy way. But if you wait for a further period of seven days the coldness leaves it and it is filled again with the warmth of the individual astral body; it takes on the character of the personality. Thus what we gave birth to in the first place, and then allowed to be baptised by the Gods, we are now able to hand over to the world as our own. Every impulse we feel in our souls must pass through these three stages before it becomes ripe within us. This holds as regards small ideas.

For more important ideas longer periods of time are necessary, but these always pass in a rhythm of seven and seven. In this way not weeks but months are built up, and then again years in the same rhythm. We can have a rhythm of seven to seven weeks, and of seven to seven years.

From this you can see that the important thing is not so much what the man of to-day thinks, or what impulses are in his soul, but that he has the power to bear these impulses with patience to allow them to be baptised by World-Spirits, and then emerge when they are ripe. Other laws of a similar kind might be added to this, for what is called the “development of the soul” is full of such ordered arrangements.

When, for instance, on a certain day, and such days are very rare in men's lives, you have the feeling:—“To-day I feel as if blessed by the World-Spirit, ideas arise in me!” It is well to receive these quietly, to know that after nineteen days a process of fructification such as I have described will take place in the soul. The evolution of the human soul is full of such ordered arrangements. Now man has an instinctive feeling not to overvalue these things, and for this we should be very thankful, not to allow himself to be too much uplifted by them. He takes note of them, especially those men whose aim it is to develop and ripen their higher natures, take note of them without really knowing the law. Thus it is often noticed that artistic natures reveal certain periods in their creative activities, that there is a rhythm in them according to days, weeks, and years. This is easily seen in artists of the first rank, in Goethe, for instance. We note how something rises in Goethe's soul, and that only after four times seven years is it really ripe, and then it emerges in another form from that in which it first appeared.

People might easily remark here in accordance with the inclination of to-day:—“Yes, my dear spiritual investigator, such laws there may be, but why should people trouble so much about them? They note them instinctively!”

Such a remark has reference to a time that is past. Because people are becoming more self-reliant, because they harken more and more to their own individuality, they must try to develop within them an inner calendar. Just as an outer calendar is of importance in external affairs, so in the future, when the intensity of man's soul has increased, he will feel “inner weeks” he will feel an inward ebb and flow in his life of feeling and experience, inner Sundays. Men will progress in accordance with this inwardness. Many things felt by man formerly in the partitioning of his life according to number will be experienced at a later day inwardly; this will be the dawn of what is macrocosmic in the souls of men. It will then be for him a self-understood duty not to bring tumult or disorder into human evolution by overstepping the sacred laws of the soul's development. He will come to understand that it is but a refined form of egoism to desire to communicate immediately what is taking place in the soul.

Men will come of themselves to experience the spirit within them, and this not abstractly as is done to-day, but they will perceive how this spirit works regularly and according to law in their souls. When something happens to them, and they wish to communicate this to others, they will not let this loose headlong on humanity like a mad bull, but will listen to what the spirit-filled nature within them has to say.

What importance will it have for men when they learn to value more and more and to harken more and more to what emerges in this way as law out of the inner spirituality of the world, and when they allow themselves to be inspired by it? Men in general have little feeling for such things. They do not believe that Spiritual Beings enter into our inner being and work there according to law. They will for long regard it as foolishness, even where culture is well advanced, when the ordered activity of the Spirit is spoken of. And those who from spiritual scientific knowledge believe in the Spirit, will experience through the deep antipathy of the times that are approaching what is said concerning our day in the Gospel of Mark:

“And when they shall lead you (away) and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither premeditate, but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour that speak ye; for it is not ye that speak but the Holy Ghost.”—Mark XIII, 11.

We must endeavour to understand a sentence like this which has such special reference to our day, because of the value it acquires through its connection with this Gospel—not with the other Gospels.

As regards the Gospel of Mark you see that in a general way it contains what is also to be found in the other Gospels. But one passage found in this Gospel is remarkable just because it is not found in the other Gospels. This passage is especially remarkable because commentators have said some really very silly things about it. It is where Christ Jesus came out from preaching to the people, and where, after he had chosen his disciples, we are told:—

“And they went into an house. And the multitude cometh together again so that they had not roam so much as to eat bread. And when His friends heard of it they went out to lay hold of Him, for they said: He is out of His senses, He is beside Himself.”—Mark III, 19-21.

This passage is not found in the same way in the other Gospels. When we realise that the future course of human evolution will be such, that the saying of St. Paul:—“Not I, but Christ in me!” will become ever more and more true, that that human ego alone is fruitful which receives into it the Impulse of Christ, we ought to feel that this passage refers in a most outstanding way to our own day. The fate experienced through the events of Palestine by Jesus Christ, as a representative, will be lived through by the whole of humanity in the course of time. In the near future men will divine more and more that wherever Christ is taught from an inward understanding of Spiritual Science, great antipathy will be manifested by those who turn from this teaching instinctively. It will not be at all difficult to see that those things will come to pass in the future which are described in prophetic images as the Events of Christ in the Gospel according to Mark.

The outward behaviour of many people, as well as much that is produced as art, and especially what is widely circulated to-day under the guise of science, will clearly show that those who speak of the Spirit in the sense in which Christ spoke of it will say in the near future:—“There are many among them who appear to be out of their senses, ‘beside themselves’!

It has to be stated again and again that the most important facts of spiritual life, as put forward by Spiritual Science, will be regarded in the future as fanciful tales by the greater part of humanity.

From the Gospel of Mark we should be able to evolve the necessary strength to stand firm against all the opposition that will be stirred up against the truths to be discovered in the domain of the Spirit.

If one has a feeling for the finer differences of style found in this Gospel from those found in the other Gospels, one notices spiritual scientific differences here also; we find in it things not found in the other Gospels. One notices in the construction of its sentences, in the exclusion of many sentences found in the other Gospels, that many things which might be accepted quite abstractly take on a special shade of meaning. When one has a feeling for this, one notices also that in the Gospel of Mark we are given an incisive, a most pregnant teaching concerning the ego. One sentence only need be noted for this to be made clear, one sentence, the special feature of which consists in certain things being omitted that are found in the other Gospels. If one has such perception, one realises the deep significance of the following passage:—

And Jesus went out, and His disciples into the towns of Cesarea, Philippi, and by the way He asked His disciples, saying unto them, “Who do men say the ‘I’ Is? What do people recognise as the?” And those who were round about Jesus answered and said: “The people say that in the true ‘I’ must live John the Baptist.” But others say this ‘I’ must be filled with Elias, that Elias must live in the ‘I’; others again say, another of the Prophets must be so worked on that the “I” says: “Not I—but the Prophet works in me.” But He said to those who were with Him, “What do you say that the ‘I’ is?” Then Peter answered: “We understand the ‘I’ so that we grasp it in its spirituality as Thee, that is as the Christ.” And He charged them that they should not tell ordinary men of this! For this mystery they could not understand.

But to those who had been moved by His words He began to give the following teaching: “That which is the outward physical expression of the ego-nature in man must suffer many things if it is to attain full development; and so it came to pass that the most ancient masters of mankind and those who knew the content of the holiest wisdom could say: The form in which the ego dwells at present serves it no longer; in this form it shall be slain, and after three days, in accordance with the ordered rhythm of universal connections, it will rise again in a higher form.”

And they were all amazed that He should speak these words openly before all men.

Here I must remark that up to that time such words could only have been spoken in the Mysteries. It was a secret that until then was only mentioned in the temple of the Mysteries—the secret that men had to undergo “death and birth” (Stirb und Werde) in the course of initiation and after three days had to rise again. Hence we are told:—

Peter was amazed, took the Christ aside and pointed out that such things should not be spoken of openly. Then the Christ turned Himself about and said: “In speaking thus Peter, thou givest thyself over to Satan; for stating this truth as thou dost is not for our time, but belongs to the past.” These things were in those days confined within the temple. In the future, in view of the superlative Mystery of Golgotha they will gradually become the possession of all men. Thus it is ordained in the divine guidance of earthly evolution. Those who say otherwise do not speak in accordance with the divine wisdom men had in the past, but gave a temporal form to the wisdom of the gods.

It is somewhat in this way we have to understand this passage that meets us in all the grandeur of its clear-cut phrases in the Gospel of St. Mark. We have to realise that the Impulse of Christ according to the Gospel of Mark consists in our receiving the Christ into our ego, so that the saying of Paul:—“Not I, but Christ in me,” may become ever more actual; and not the abstract Christ only, but He who sent the Holy Spirit, the concrete Spirit, who in an ordered and regular manner (as we have described to-day) works inspiringly with his inward calendar in the souls of men.

In pre-Christian times people only attained knowledge through being initiated into the Mysteries, when for three and a half days they remained in a death-like state after having endured the tragic suffering of one who, while living on the physical plane, tries to raise himself to spiritual heights. There they learnt that this earthly man must be slain, that a higher man must rise again in him—that is, he must experience “death and birth.” What formerly had only been experienced in the Mysteries now became an historical fact through the Mystery of Golgotha. If they felt united with this Mystery it provided the possibility by which all men could become pupils of this greater wisdom.¹

Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha was therefore the most important understanding. It was only possible for earthly man to acquire an understanding of what was to enter more and more into the human ego after the coming of the Christ-Impulse.

We can now receive inspiration in a certain way from the Gospels. For the time in which the Christ Event took place, the Gospel of Matthew was a good “book of initiation”; for our day this holds good more especially with regard to the Gospel according to Mark.

You all know that this is the age in which the consciousness-soul is to be especially developed, in which it is to be separated in isolation from its milieu. You know that we are now summoned to direct our attention not so much to the fact that we belong to any special race, but to what is to be born in us, and is described in the words of St. Paul:—“Not I but Christ in me!”

Our fifth post-Atlantean period is that specially inspired by the Gospel according to Mark. The task of the sixth post-Atlantean period on the other hand, will be gradually to fill the whole of humanity with the spirit of Christ. Thus while in the fifth period of civilisation the Being of Christ will be an object of study, of deep inward penetration, in the sixth men will receive His nature into their whole being. Added to this, what we have learnt to recognise as the inner nature of the Gospel of Luke is of great value, for it is the one which reveals fully the origin of Jesus of Nazareth, as does also the Gospel of Matthew, which leads us back to Zarathustra, just as the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke leads us back to Buddha and Buddhism. For in our studies of the Gospel of Luke we realise that Jesus of Nazareth is presented to us throughout the course of his long evolution in such a way that we are led back to the divine spiritual origin of mankind. Through this man will be able to realise more and more his own divine nature, and because of this must fill himself with the Christ-Impulses. This stands before us as a wondrous ideal, but it will only become concrete when, through the Gospel of Luke, we rise to a true understanding of the physical man of the sense world as a divine Being with a spiritual origin.

And for the seventh post-Atlantean period of civilisation, and on until the next great catastrophe, the Gospel of John will be the book of inspiration, as for the man of to-day it is a guide for his spiritual life. In that period many things will be of service to man which he has learnt in the course of the sixth epoch. But much of what is believed to-day will have to be unlearnt—fundamentally unlearnt. This will not be difficult, for scientific facts indicate that we will have to overcome many things. Thus many things are so regarded to-day that they are called “of the senses,” things which inform us concerning such self-understood wisdom, as that the terms “motor” and “sensory nerves” are pure nonsense. There are no “motor nerves.” There are only nerves of perception. Nerves that control movements are also nerves of perception, only their purpose is to bring to our perception the corresponding movement of the muscles. It will not be so very long before people realise that movement is not conveyed to the muscle by means of the nerves, but by the Astral body, and indeed by that within our astral body which in the immediate future will not be directly perceived to be what it is. For there is a law which lays down that what is active (operative) is not recognised immediately for what it is. What calls forth movement in the muscles is connected with the astral body, and indeed in such a way that in the astral body itself, by the movement of the muscles, a kind of resonance or tone is developed.

Something of the nature of music permeates our astral body; and finds expression through the movement of the muscles. It is really the same as in the case of the well-known Chladnic tone-forms, when a fine powder scattered on a metal plate can be set in motion if this is stroked by a violin bow; certain figures then appear in the powder. Our astral body is filled with nothing but such forms which are at the same time tone-forms, and their united activity is what causes our astral body to assume its special aspect (Lage). All this is imprinted in the astral body. People can convince themselves of this in a quite trivial way. If the biceps or the muscles of the forearm are tightly braced and then laid against the ear this tone can be heard; but the exercises must be done in the right way, the muscles must be stretched and the thumb laid on them. This is no real “proof,” but only a means by which what is here mentioned can be illustrated in a trivial manner. We are permeated by music and reveal it in the movement of our muscles, and we are endowed with “motor-nerves” as they are wrongly called, so that we may know something concerning the movements of our muscles.

This is but one form of those truths that will convince people more and more that man is really a spiritual being; that he is really interwoven with the harmony of the spheres—even to his muscles. And spiritual science, whose task it is to prepare the sixth epoch in respect of the spiritual understanding of the world, will concern itself in every particular with such truths as deal with man as well as with spiritual Beings. Exactly as tone in one connection rises to a higher sphere when from musical sound it becomes the spoken human word, so it is in cosmic relationships. The sphere harmonies become something higher when they become the cosmic word or Logos; and this they are when all that is active as sphere harmonies becomes Logos.

Now in the physical organisation of man the next thing higher than the muscles is the blood. In the same way as a muscle is attuned to the sphere harmonies, the blood is attuned to the Logos, and can become ever more and more an expression of the Logos as it has been, unconsciously, since the beginning of man.

This means there is a tendency on the physical plane for the blood of man which is the expression of his ego to become the conscious expression of the Logos. And when in the sixth period of civilisation men have learnt to recognise themselves as spiritual beings, they will no longer hold to the fantastic idea that muscles are moved through motory nerves, but will know that they are moved by sphere harmonies which have become personal.

Then in the seventh period of civilisation men will feel that even to their blood they are permeated by the Logos—they will then feel for the first time the real content of the Gospel of John. The science of this Gospel will be first understood in the seventh period, and people will come to feel that every book of physiology should begin with the opening words of the Gospel of John. What our attitude to it should be is well expressed in the following words:

“Much of this Gospel we can understand now, but for long there will be much more that we cannot understand!” It stands before us as a high ideal.

From all I have said to-day you will gather that the Gospel of Matthew has to be regarded as especially inspiring for the fourth period of post-Atlantean civilisation, and for our own day the Gospel of Mark must be considered especially inspiring. For the next period, the sixth, the Gospel of Luke is important, and we must prepare ourselves for it, because the seed of everything that is to come to pass in the future must have existed already in the past. And everything that is to come to pass in the further course of human evolution, everything that is to develop in the seventh period up to the time of the next catastrophe comes fully to light in the Gospel of John if we can but understand it. It is therefore specially important that we should understand the Gospel of Mark as a book that can give us guidance in much that we have to practise, and much we have to guard against. Especially those short sentences which in their pregnant style impart to us the meaning of the Christ-Impulse for the human ego. It is very important we should realise that our task is to grasp the Spirit of Christ; and that we should realise how He will reveal Himself in the different periods of the future.

We have attempted to present this as regards our day in the words of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation” as put into the mouth of the seeress Theodora. In the scene referred to we have something like a repetition of the Event of Paul on the way to Damascus. It is but a sign of the materialism of our day when people think that the Christ-Impulse could reveal itself again within a physical human form. That we have to guard against such a belief we learn from the Gospel of Mark, which holds a special warning for our day. If much that is found in this Gospel has reference to what is past, yet one sentence, in the higher moral sense just mentioned, has meaning for the near future. When considering spiritual realms the eye of the spirit can see that the influence proceeding from Spiritual Science is a necessity. When the deep spiritual meaning of the following passage is understood we shall connect it with our age and with the one shortly to follow:

“For in those days shall be affliction such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created until this time, neither shall be.”

We have to direct men's attention to these words. All kinds of afflictions await those in the future who desire to give expression to spiritual truth in its true form:—“And except that the Lord had shortened those days nothing of spiritual nourishment would have been left, but for the elect's sake He has shortened those days!”

And then we are told:

“If in that time anyone shall say to you, ‘Lo, here is Christ, or Lo, He is there, believe Him not.’ ”

The Gospel here refers to an eventual materialistic acceptance of Christ.

“For false Christs and false Prophets shall rise and shall show signs and wonders to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold I have foretold you all things!”—Mark XIII, 19-23.

The attacks of materialism will be so strong that it will be necessary for men to acquire sufficient strength of soul really to endure what is expressed by the words:—“False Christs and false Prophets will appear.” And when they are told:—“Lo, here is the Christ!” those who have come under the influence of Spiritual Science will be able to accept the warning given in the Gospel of Mark.

When men say to you “Lo, here is the Christ,” believe it not!

• 1. See Christianity as Mystical Fact,” by Rudolf Steiner.

Our talk today must bring to a temporary conclusion the studies which, during the last few weeks we have connected in a somewhat loose and irregular way with the Gospel according to Mark.

In the lectures you have heard during this winter we have tried to make you realise that we stand to-day at a period of transition. Even by those who consider spiritual life in a somewhat external way, it can be noticed that a new order of ideas and thoughts is gradually emerging, though the people living within the new order may themselves be unaware of it. It will therefore be well if such a stimulus can be given to your thoughts this evening as will enable you to carry somewhat further the spiritual scientific matter already imparted to you.

In speaking of periods of transition, it is helpful to recall the great “period of transition” through which human evolution passed, often mentioned by me as the great incisive moment of the Event of Palestine. What this moment meant we know from many things that have been spoken of here.

When we try to form a conception of how this most important “idea”—for so we may call it—the Christ-idea, developed out of the thoughts and feelings of the age immediately preceding it, it is well to remember that the Jahve or Jehova-idea meant as much to the ancient Hebrews as the Christ-idea does to the believers in Christ. From other lectures you know that for those who enter deeply into the essence of Christianity Jahve did not really differ very greatly from the Christ Himself. We must realise far more clearly the inward connection between the Christ-idea and the Jahve-idea. It is very difficult to give, in a few words, the whole connection between these two ideas which has been developed by me in many lectures and cycles in recent years, but it is possible to show in a parable how this connection has to be thought of. We have but to recall the symbol of the sunlight to which your attention has often been directed; how this comes to us either directly from the sun or reflected back from the moon at night, especially when the moon is at the full. Sunlight comes to us from the full moon, but reflected sunlight, which is somewhat different from direct sunlight. Were we to compare the Christ with direct sunlight, then Jahve might be likened to sun-light reflected from the moon; this represents exactly what is met with here in the evolution of mankind. Those who understand such things can feel the passing over of the reflection of Christ into Jehova, or of Jehova into Christ, as men feel the difference between moonlight and sunlight—Jahve being an indirect and Christ a direct revelation of the same Being. But in thinking of “evolution,” we must think of things side by side in space, and following each other in time. Those who have to speak of such things from the occult point of view say:—If we call the religion of Christ a “sun-religion” (and we can use this expression when we remember what has been said concerning Zarathustra) then the religion of Jahve can be called a moon-religion.

So in the period preceding Christianity, we have a sun-religion prepared for by a moon-religion. What has just been said will only be rightly appreciated by those who know that symbols are not chosen arbitrarily, but are deeply rooted in the things they represent. When any religion or world-faith is represented by a symbol, this represents, for those who know how to interpret it, the essential thing in that religion. Perhaps men have lost understanding to-day to a certain extent of a symbolism which sees the moon as representing the religion of Jahve, and also of the connection between the Christian religion and the symbol of the sun; but where thoughts are completely filled with the meaning of such symbols they have to be considered.

Call to mind how I have described the whole course of human evolution. First we have a descending evolution which began when man was first driven out of the spiritual world and entered ever more deeply into matter. This is a descending path. When we picture the general course of human evolution we think of the deepest point as having been reached at the time the Impulse of Christ entered, and that through this Impulse the descending direction was gradually changed to an ascending one.

In human evolution we have at first a descending path, then after the deepest point is reached the Christ-Impulse begins to affect it and will continue to do so till earth reaches the end of its mission.

Now evolution occurs in a very complicated way; certain conditions of its progress are the result of Impulses which had been given at an earlier time. It was an evolutionary event such as this that took place through the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse was poured forth at the beginning of our era and advanced in a direct line, and growing ever more and more powerful it will permeate all human life until earthly evolution has reached its goal. This is an impulse that was imparted once, and we have to picture it as advancing in a straight line; any evolution that arose later, is seen through it to be at a higher and more perfect stage. There are many such impulses, and also others, affecting the evolution of the world which work differently, and cannot he said to advance on straight lines. We distinguished in post-Atlantean evolution the ancient Indian civilisation, following it the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, then the Greco-Latin; and in the middle of this period the Christ-Event took place. In the fifth post-Atlantean age, in which we are now living, certain things are repeated which occurred in the third age—the Egypto-Chaldean—but a somewhat different way, and so that between them and maintaining a certain relationship between the third and the fifth ages we have the Christ-Impulse. This relation-ship is maintained in the same way between the sixth age and the second, and between the seventh and the first. We are here concerned with powerful factors of evolution which are revealed in such a way that in referring to them we can make use of the Biblical expression:—“The first shall be last.” The primeval Indian age will reappear in the seventh age in another form—yet so that it will be recognisable.

There is another way in which an earlier is seen to affect a later, and this is shown through the fact that we can distinguish smaller epochs. Thus, what took place in pre-Christian times during the ancient Hebrew civilisation appears again in a certain way in post-Christian times—overpassing the Christ-Impulse as it were-ideas which had been prepared within the religion of Jehova appeared again, and, in spite of other factors being present, had an effect on these later times.

Were I to explain symbolically what I cannot deal with adequately to-day owing to the short time at my disposal I might say:—If we feel that the religion of Jehova is represented by the symbol of the moon in contradistinction to the sun, we might expect that a similar belief, overpassing Christianity, would re-emerge at a later day. This did occur, and if such things are not accepted in an external sense or smiled at for they are deeply connected with the symbolism of religions—we may say that the old moon religion of Jehova appeared again in the religion of the half-moon, the Crescent, that its influence, which had preceded the Christ-Event, was carried over into post-Christian times. The repetition of an earlier age in a later is seen with overwhelming results in the last third of the Greco-Latin period, which is reckoned by us in an occult sense as continuing to about the 12th-13th century. This means that after having been separated from it by a period of six hundred years, we have a kind of repetition of the moon religion of Jehova in the religion brought by the Arabs from Africa into Spain. It is not possible to specify here all the characteristics it brought with it. But it is important that we should impress on our souls the fact that in the religion of Mahomet the Christ-Impulse was at first disregarded, that in it we have really a kind of revival of the religion of Moses—the religion of the one indivisible God. Only into the idea of this indivisible God-head something was introduced that had come over from the other side—from the Egypto-Chaldean view-point—which preserved very exact traditions concerning the relationship of the starry heavens to worldly events. Hence many of the thoughts and ideas found among the Chaldeans, Babylonians and Assyrians are found again in the religion of Mahomed, but permeated in an extra-ordinary way with what we might call the teaching concerning the indivisible divinity of Jehova. Speaking scientifically what meets us in Arabism is a synthesis of all that was taught by the priests of Egypt and Chaldea, and in the Jahve religion of the ancient Hebrews.

In a union of this kind there is not only a compression, but there is also always something excluded and left behind. Everything which led to clairvoyant perception was excluded from it. What remained was merely a matter of intellectual research, of a combining of thought, so that all the ideas connected with the Egyptian art of healing and Chaldean astronomy, which both among the Egyptians and the Chaldeans was the outcome of ancient clairvoyance, is found in an intellectual and individualistic form in the Arabism of Mahomet.

Something filtered into Europe along with the Arabs by which all the old ideas that had prevailed among the Egyptians and Chaldeans were stripped of their clairvoyant imaginative content and given abstract forms. From this sprang the marvellous science which the Arabs brought from Africa to Europe by way of Spain. If Christianity brought an impulse mainly for the souls of men, then the great Impulse for the human head, for the intellect, came through the Arabs. Those who are not fully acquainted with the course of human evolution have no idea what the mental outlook, which appeared anew under the symbol of the moon, gave to humanity as a whole. Keppler and Copernicus would not have been possible without this Impulse which the Arabs brought to Europe. The whole method of thought, the manner in which different religious views were connected with the laying aside of the old clairvoyance, is seen again in our modern astronomy and modern science when the third period of culture celebrated its revival in our fifth age. Thus we have to see the evolution of man progressing on the one hand, so that the Impulse of Christ reaches the people of Europe directly by way of Greece and Italy; and, on the other hand, we see it taking a more southernly route which, leaving Greece and Italy on one side, unites with what came to us through the Arabs.

By the union of the religion of Christ with that of Mahomet there arose, during this most important period with which we are dealing, what really forms the content of our culture. From causes which cannot be gone into to-day, we must reckon a period of from six to six-and-ahalf centuries for such an impulse to develop; so that the renewed moon-culture actually arose, spread, and entered Europe six hundred years after the Event of Christ, and until the thirteenth century it enriched that Christian civilisation which had received its direct irnpulses by other paths. Even those who only observe the external course of events know that, however much they are opposed to Arabism, Arabian thought and science entered even into the cloisters of Western Europe, and up to the middle of the thirteenth century (which again indicates something important) we have a blending of these two impulses—the Arabian and the direct Christ-Impulse.

We may say that the sun-symbol and the moon-symbol were merged into one from the fifth and sixth centuries until between the twelfth and thirteenth, this being again a period that lasted for about six hundred years. After this direct union had reached its goal some-thing new arose which had been in gradual preparation since the twelfth and thirteenth century. It is interesting to note that even external sciences recognise that some-thing inexplicable passed through the souls of the people of Europe at that time. External science calls it “inexplicable,” but occultism says that, following the direct Impulse of Christ, there was poured by spiritual means into the souls of men what the fourth period of post-Atlantean culture had to give. The age of Greece threw up a following wave of culture called the culture of the Renaissance, it enriched everything that already existed through the centuries that followed. This was because the age of Greece, which occurred in the middle of the seven periods of post-Atlantean civilisation, underwent a certain renewal in the culture of the Renaissance.

This points again to a period of six hundred years—that is up to our own time—in which this wave of Greek culture has to a certain extent been exhausted. We are living within this period. We are living to-day in an atmosphere (as we are again at the beginning of a sixhundred-year-long wave of culture) into which some-thing new is pressing; an age which must again be enriched with something new from the Christ-Impulse. After the Moon-cult had its revival in the religion of the Crescent during the Renaissance, the time is now come when the Christ-Impulse, which continued as the direct stream, has to receive into it a neighbouring stream. Our age is powerfully attracted towards this neighbouring stream; only we must clearly understand what the addition of it to our civilisation means. All these things are absolutely in accordance with the correct progress of an occult system.

If we think of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, according to the old-not the new sequence—we may expect, after the renewal of the Moon-wave during the Renaissance, the influx of another stream to which we can quite correctly assign the symbol of Mercury. We might therefore say theoretically when this symfiol appeared that we were confronted with the influx into our culture of a wave of a kind of Mercury-influence, just as the wave of Arabism was called a Moon-influence.

If we understand the evolution of our own time aright we may describe Goethe as the last great mind who united in himself the fullness of science, of Christianity, and of the culture of the Renaissance; and we might expect that his soul would reveal a beautiful union of these—intellectualism enriched as it had been by Arabism and Christianity. If we study Goethe as we have been accustomed to do for some years past, it is easily seen that these elements did indeed meet within his soul. But in accordance with what has just been announced concerning the repeated cycle of six, and again six centuries, we might expect that nothing of the Mercury element could have appeared as yet in Goethe's soul, that could only appear as something new after his time. Now it is interesting to note that Goethe's pupil, Schopenhauer, reveals this Mercury influence. You can learn from some of my publications that Eastern wisdom entered into Schopenhauer's philosophy, especially in the form of Buddhism. Mercury was regarded as the symbol of Buddhism, and following on the age of Goethe we have a revival of the Buddha-Impulse (in which Buddha stands for Mercury and Mercury for Buddha) in the same way as the moon is symbolic of Arabism. We can now give a name to this neighbouring stream that entered the direct Christ-Impulse as a new tributary at the beginning of a new six-hundred-yearly epoch. We have to see in this neighbouring stream a revival of Buddhism only with the restrictions I explained in my public lectures on Buddha.¹

We now ask—which is the direct stream of the culture of the future? The Christ-stream! It advances in a direct line. And what neighbouring streams are there? We have first the Arabian stream, which flowed into the direct stream, paused for a time, and then received purification through the culture of the Renaissance. At present we are experiencing a renewed influx of the Buddha stream. When these facts are seen in their right light, we realise that we have to absorb certain elements out of the Buddha-stream which until now could not be received into our Western civilisation. We have to see how these elements of the Buddha-stream must pass into the spiritual development of the west. Such things, for instance, as the idea of reincarnation and Karma. These must be accepted. But one fact must be firmly impressed on our souls:—All these neighbouring streams will never be able to throw light on the central facts of our spiritual science. To question Buddhism or any other pre-Christian oriental religion that may have appeared as a revival in our time concerning the Christ, would be as sensible as for a European Christian to have questioned the Arabs of Spain concerning the nature of Christ!

The people of Europe were well aware that no conception of the Christ could come from the Arabs. If they had anything to say their ideas would not accord with the real Christ-idea. The various prophets who arose as false Messiahs up to Schabbathoi Zewi were really the outcome of Arabism, and had no knowledge of the Christ-Impulse. We must understand that the neighbouring stream of Arabism had to he made fruitful by quite other elements, not by solving in any way the central mystery of Christ. This must also be our attitude towards the stream which approaches us to-day, as the renewal of an ancient one, bringing us understanding of reincarnation and karma, but being incapable of imparting understanding of the Christ-Impulse. For this would be as absurd as to think the Arabs could impart a right conception of Christ to the people of Europe. They imparted many ideas concerning false Messiahs to Europe up to the time of Schabbathoi Zewi, and such things will occur again, for human evolution only progresses when strengthened by seeing through such deceptions. We must penetrate ever more deeply and consciously into these connections. Facts will show that the spiritual science founded by European Rosicrucians, with Christ as its central idea, will be established in the souls of men against all opposition and all misleadings.

How the central-idea of the Christ must enter men's souls, how the Christ must be interwoven, not only with the general evolution of man, but with the whole world, can he gathered from my book on Outline of Occult Science.

From it you can find which is the direct, the forward path. Everyone has the possibility of hearing of this path who understands the words from the Gospel of Matthew quoted at the end of the last lecture:—“False Christs and false prophets will appear when people will say unto you: Lo, here is the Christ or lo, there! believe it not.”

Alongside the Buddhistic stream of thought is another far removed from it, which thinks it is better in-formed regarding the Christ than the western spiritual science of the Rosicrucians. It brings all kinds of ideas and teachings into the world which have developed quite naturally out of the neighbouring oriental Buddhist stream. It would show the worst kind of weakness in western souls if they were unable to grasp the fact that the Buddha, or Mercury-stream, has as little light to throw on the direct course of the Christ-idea as Arabism has. This is not put forward from any spirit of dogmatism or fantasy, but from knowledge of the objective course of the evolution of the world. It can be proved by figures or by the trend of civilisations if you wish to follow them up, that things must be as is taught by occult science.

Added to this there is also the necessity to distinguish between an ancient orthodox Buddhism which seeks to transplant a non-progressive Buddhism into Europe, and out of it to develop a “Christ-idea;” and a truly progressive Buddhism. This means, there are people who speak of Buddha as follows:—“Look to Buddha, who lived some five to six hundred years before our era! Look to what he taught!” What such people say is comparable with what spiritual science says in a Rosicrucian sense:—“It is your fault, not Buddha's, that you speak as if Buddha had remained at the same stage at which he stood five to six centuries before our era I Can you not think or imagine that Buddha has progressed?” When speaking thus, these people refer to a teaching suited to a time long past; of a teaching given by Buddha five to six centuries before our era. But we look to a Buddha who has advanced, and who from spiritual realms exercises his enduring influence on human culture. We look to the Buddha we presented to you in our studies on the Gospel of Luke, whose influence came from the Jesus of the Nathan line of the house of David; we look to the Buddha as he has evolved further in spiritual realms, and who imparts truths to us to-day concerning the things of which we are speaking.

Something very curious has happened to dogmatic Christianity in the West; through a strange concatenation of circumstances it has come to pass that a Buddha-like form has appeared by chance among Christian Saints.

You will recall how once I spoke of a legend told all over Europe in the Middle Ages, the legend of Balaam and Josaphat. It was somewhat as follows:—There was once an Indian king on earth. He had a son. This son was brought up at first far removed from all human misery; from all external life. He lived in the king's palace, where he saw only what conduced to human happiness. He was called Josaphat; the name has been much changed and has assumed various forms—Josaphat, Judasaph, Budasaph. Josaphat lived up to a certain age in the palace without learning anything of the world. Then one day it happened that he left his father's palace and learnt something of life. He first saw a leper, then a blind man, then an aged man. We are then told that he met a Christian hermit called Balaam. By him he was converted to Christianity.

You will not fail to notice that this legend has a strong resemblance to the legend of Buddha. But you will also notice that something is added to this legend of the Middle Ages with which Buddha cannot be charged; namely, that he allowed himself to be converted to Christianity. This legend gave rise to a certain consciousness among Christians—among some of them at least—who had made calendars of the saints.

People knew that the name Josaphat or Budasaph is connected with the name “Bodhisattva.” Budasaph passes directly over into Bodhisattva. So that there is here an extraordinary and deep connection between a Christian legend and the figure of Buddha. The oriental legend, as we know, represents Buddha as entering Nirvana and passing on the Bodhisattva crown to his successor the Maytreya-Buddha, who is now a Bodhisattva, and will later become the future Buddha of the world. Buddha appears again in the legend as Josaphat. The connection between Buddhism and Christianity is described marvellously by someone who said:—Josaphat is a saint, and Buddha was himself so holy that according to the legend he was converted to Christianity from being the son of an Indian king; so he can be ranked among the saints although from one side he was regarded as a heathen.

You can see from this that it was known where the later form of Buddhism, or rather of Buddha, has to be sought. Buddhism and Christianity have meanwhile flowed one into the other in the hidden worlds. And Salaam is that strange figure who made the Bodhisattva acquainted with Christianity, so that when now we trace the course of Buddhism as an enduring world-movement in the sense of this legend, we can only see it in the changed form in which it exists at the present time. We are obliged to speak of Buddha as he exists for us to-day, when clairvoyantly we understand what he reveals to us.

Just as Arabism was not Judaism, and the Moon of Jehova did not reappear in Arabism in its old form, so neither does Buddhism reappear in its old form when it returns to enrich the culture of the West, but changed. For a later never appears as an exact replica of an earlier.

These short detached remarks are intended to act as a stimulus to thoughts on human evolution, which you can develop further for yourselves. And I assure you if you accept all the historical knowledge that it is possible to discover, and are really able to follow the spiritually scientific development of Europe, you will see that we are standing at present at the point where Christianity and Buddhism flow one into the other.

Just as at the time of which I have been speaking a union of the Jahve-religion with Christianity occurred, so to-day a union of Buddhism with Christianity is taking place. Test this by accepting all that the historians of Europe are able to give you! Test it, but not as they are wont to do, take all the factors into consideration; you will then find confirmation of what I have said. Only we should have to speak for weeks if we were to give out all that reaches us from the direction of European Rosicrucianism.

But it is not only in history that proof can be found, if you go to work in the right way you can find it also in natural science and in allied realms. You have only to look in the right way to find that new ideas appear everywhere sporadically at the present day, and that old ideas become useless and disappear. Our thinkers and investigators seem to work with ideas that have become ineffectual, because in the widest sense they are incapable as yet of accepting and making use of other lines of thought, such as those of reincarnation and karma, and all that theosophy has to give. You can search the modern literature of the various departments of science, there you will find what is so painful for those who know how fact after fact appears in scientific life and nowhere are ideas capable of grasping them. There is one such idea that plays an important part in science to-day—the idea of heredity. (These things can only be hinted at here.) The idea of heredity as it is put forward in various departments of science and even in popular literatures to-day is simply untenable.

People must learn facts, for the understanding of which other kinds of ideas are required -such, for instance, as those entirely useless ideas concerning “heredity” that are common to-day. Certain facts, well known to-day concerning heredity in man and in other creatures, will only be understood when quite different ideas prevail. When heredity is spoken of to-day, people seem to think that any faculties that appear in the human being can be traced to his immediate forefathers. The idea of rein-carnation and karma will first make it possible for clear ideas to emerge instead of the present confusion. It will be realised that a great part of what is found in human nature has nothing to do with what is called the mutual co-operation of the sexes—for a confused science still teaches that all man is to-day comes from the union of the male and female elements at conception. It is not at all true that all the things appearing in a man have to do with physical inheritance. These matters must be gone into more thoroughly. I only put them before you to-day as a stimulus to further thought.

When you consider the physical body of man you know that it has a long history behind it—it has passed through the Saturn epoch, the Sun epoch and the Moon epoch—now it is passing through the Earth epoch. It was only during the Moon epoch that the influence of the astral body appeared. This did not exist previously, and the physical body has naturally been very much changed by it. Hence we do not see the physical body as it was under the forces of the Saturn and Sun epochs, but only as it has become under the influence of these forces added to those of the astral body and the ego.

Only the physical body can be inherited through co-operation of the sexes, for this depends on the influence of the astral on the physical body; everything appertaining to laws going back to the Saturn and Sun epochs has nothing whatever to do with this. One part of human nature is received directly from the cosmos, not from the opposite sex. This means that what we have in us does not spring altogether from the union of the sexes, for this is dependent on what comes from our astral bodies, but a large part of our human nature—that which comes from the mother for example—is received directly from the macrocosm.

We have therefore to distinguish one part of our human nature as being the result of the intercourse of the sexes, and another part as received directly by the mother from the macrocosm. Clarity will only be reached in respect of this when we succeed in distinguishing the separate parts of human nature, concerning which there is the greatest confusion at the present day. The physical body is not something shut off within itself, but is formed from the combined activity of the ether body, astral body and ego; again we distinguish the forces that have to be ascribed to the direct influence of the macrocosm, and others that have to be ascribed to the co-operation of the sexes.

But something is also received from the paternal nature that has nothing to do with physical inheritance. Just as certain organs and laws having nothing to do with physical inheritance are received directly from the macrocosm, and are implanted in the organism by means of the mother; other laws are received from the macrocosm through the instrumentality of the father's organism and follow a spiritual path. It can be said of that which is received by way of the mother—her organism provides the moment of contact (Angriffsmoment). But this that is active in the organism of the mother has not its source in any co-operation of the sexes, but it co-operates with what comes from the father, and this also does not spring from any union of the sexes, but from the paternal element. It is therefore a world event—a macrocosmic event that takes place, and finds expression in a physical way. People are entirely mistaken when they describe the development of the human embryo as being only the outcome of heredity. It is the result of what is received directly from the macrocosm.

I have spoken here of facts that far transcend the ideas of science; they are ideas originating from very ancient epochs. Does anything show us this? Popular literature tells us very little about it, but it is clearly evident on the plane of occult endeavour. I should like here to tell you something. I can indeed only hint at it, but would like to point out what a remarkable difference there is between two natural scientists and thinkers of the present day who had, however, been brought up in different circles and with widely different ideas. The characters of the two men are clearely revealed in what follows.

We have in the first place Haeckel, who because he elaborated his marvellous facts with most primitive ideas, led everything back to heredity and presented the whole embryonic evolution as dependent on heredity; opposed to him is the investigator His, who held more to facts, concerning whom it was objected, with a certain amount of truth, that he thought too little. His was a Zoologist and Naturalist. Because of the special way he traced out facts, he was constrained to oppose the heredity theory of Haeckel, and pointed out that certain organs and organic formations in man can only be explained when we turn away from the idea that we have to thank the co-operation of the sexes for our origin, Haeckel makes fun of this and writes:—“Therefore Herr His ascribes the origin of the human body to a certain ‘virginal’ influence that does not depend on the co-operation of the sexes!”

This is absolutely correct. For scientific facts force us to acknowledge to-day that what is brought about through co-operation of the sexes has to be kept apart from that which comes directly from the macrocosm, which, naturally, for wide circles is an absurd idea.

From this it can be seen that even on scientific grounds we are driven towards new ideas. We are placed in the midst of an evolution that says:—If the facts that have been imparted to you are to be rightly understood you must acquire a whole host of new ideas, for the ideas that have come down from olden times do not reach far enough.

From what I have said you will see that a neighbouring stream must enter our culture—this is the “Mercury stream”; its presence is revealed through the fact that those who go through an occult development, such as has frequently been described by me, evolve towards the spiritual world, and by doing so experience many new facts. These facts stream towards them, they stream into their souls. We might compare the entrance of man into another world with the passing of a fish from the water into the air; the fish has first to be prepared for this by changing its air bladders into lungs. This resembles the transition from sense perception to spiritual perception, whereby a man's soul is made capable of employing certain forces in a different element. Many things are then revealed to him.

The air is full of thoughts to-day which make it necessary for us to grasp the new facts of science now appearing on the physical plane. As investigator of the super-sensible one participates in things pressing in from all sides. This could not have been before the entrance of the new stream of which I have spoken. When these facts are rightly understood, it will be realised we are living in an extraordinarily important age, one in which it is quite impossible for us to continue to live unless some such change takes place in human thought and feeling as I have declared to be necessary.

Man must learn to live in a new element just as the fish that is accustomed to live in water has to learn to live in a new element when compelled to live in air. We must learn to live with our thoughts within those facts which the physical plane produces. Anyone who rejects these thoughts is like a fish taken out of the water. Man must not remain in the water. If he did, his later life would be “airless” as regards spiritual ideas—he would gasp for air. Those people who desire to live within the monism of to-day resemble fish who have exchanged their watery abode for an airy one, but would like to retain their gills. Only human souls who have changed their faculties, whose thoughts have evolved to a new wait of accepting facts, will grasp what the future has to bring.

So with full understanding we feel we are standing at the confluence of two world-wide streams of thought—the one should bring us a deeper comprehension of the Christ-problem and of the Mystery of Golgotha; the other new conceptions and ideas concerning reality. They must of necessity flow one into the other in our day; and not cease to do so even though they encounter the worst of obstacles. For the periods in which such streams of thought meet are fraught with many checks and hindrances. In some respects it is the people who rely on spiritual science who find themselves in a position to understand such things.

Many of our members might perhaps say with reference to the teaching given here:—What you tell us is difficult of comprehension, we have to work at it for a long time. Why can you not give us a more comfort-able diet, that we might absorb more easily what is able to convince us of the spiritual nature of the world? Why do you lay such stress on understanding the world?” Many might say this and add:—“How much more beautiful it would be if we might believe in a Buddhism that has come down to us from the past; if we did not have to think of the Christ-Event as the single point on which the balance rests, that no other is to be compared with it, but might think that a Being like the Christ would incarnate again and again as other men do. Why do you not say—here or there such a one will appear in the flesh! Instead you say men must make themselves capable of experiencing a renewal of the event of Damascus. If only you would say:—‘One will come in the flesh,’ then we could say:—‘Behold, He is here!’ We could then see Him with our physical eyes! This would be much easier to understand!”

That such things have been said is the concern of others. The task of western spiritual science is to make the truth known; to declare the truth with full responsibility and understanding of what lies within the evolution that has brought us thus far.

Those who desire to be comfortable in the spiritual world must seek spirituality along some other path. But -those who desire the truth, such truth as is required in our day—which has need of all the intelligence won in the time of old clairvoyance and preserved until the dawn of the new clairvoyance—will, I am very sure, follow the path indicated in the words spoken to-day and on many other occasions.

What is most important is not that we should say in what form we desire truth, but that we should know from the whole course of human evolution that the truth must necessarily be spoken at a certain point of time. O! there are many other things that must be said! But for these things you shall not go unprepared.

Therefore again and again within our Rosicrucian spiritual movement things will be said which stand at the very summit of the spiritual knowledge of our day. You need never accept what is said here or elsewhere with blind belief, blind belief is never appealed to here. In your intelligence, in the employment of your own understanding you have the means for testing what is said. You may frequently hear it said: Take the whole of life, all science, everything you are able to experience, and test them by what is given out within the stream of Rosicrucian spiritual life. Do not fail to ex-amine everything—you will find it stands the test! You who live within our movement know this, but you must not fail to apply the test. For it is precisely where opposition stirs, when on the ground of true spirituality perhaps, the direct opposite appears, that belief alone does not suffice. Everything that rests on blind belief is sterile and stillborn. It may be easy to build on blind faith, but those who belong to the spiritual life of the West renounce it. They build on that which the human intellect can scrutinize.r Those who are in touch with the sources from which our Rosicrucian spiritual teaching comes say of it:—After scientific examination, this is how things are found to be! The edifice of spiritual science is raised on a foundation of truth I This is a foundation of no easy belief! Our edifice is raised on the foundation of a carefully tested if perhaps difficult truth, and the prophets of a blind and comfortable faith are in no way able to shake the foundations on which the edifice of Spiritual Science is raised!

• 1. "Buddha," is a public lecture given in Berlin on the 7th of may, 1911, see "Paths of Experience"

It is easy to see how the conceptions of spiritual science that have been voiced for some years within our circle, and in the German section generally, are spreading more and more in the world, that understanding of them is beginning to find its way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries. It is naturally not possible, although it might be a help to present day understanding, to speak casually of introducing the ideas, feelings, and knowledge of our spiritual movement into the modern world. Many of you might be glad to know how the spiritual nourishment you have received has affected other souls at the present time. It is only on certain occasions that we can speak of the spread of our spiritual ideas, but it may fill you with a certain satisfaction to know that we can see again and again how in different countries and in different hemispheres the spirit which inspires us is gaining a footing—more in one place, less in another. When I was in Triest a short time ago trying to arouse some comprehension of our point of view, I could see how the ideas we hold were gaining ground. And when from that southern city I passed northwards to Copenhagen, where, in a recent course of lectures, I tried to arouse some interest in the hearts of my hearers, it could be seen there also how the spirit we cherish under the symbol of the Rosy Cross is entering into them more and more. Taking together these separate facts one sees that a need and a longing for what we call “spiritual science” does exist at the present time.

That we should not carry on any agitation or propaganda is a fundamental principle of our spiritual movement; we should rather listen attentively to what of the great wisdom of the world the hearts and souls of the men of to-day required, so that they may have both the possibility and the certainty of life. We may therefore add to the thoughts put forward in a general lecture like this, one more—that we consider it a kind of duty at the present time to make of these spiritual. thoughts nourishment for other souls. This depends upon the whole manner in which we enter into the life of our time.

You have doubtless already accepted sufficient of the great law of Karma to know that it is not a matter of chance when an individual feels constrained at a certain point of time to assume a physical body and come down in the physical world. All the souls gathered here have felt a longing to assume a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because they desired to experience in their own souls all that was being prepared and carried out in their physical environment at this time.

Let us now consider our own age as it appears spiritually to souls, which, like our own, are born in it. Things were very different in the spiritual world, as well as in the external world, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to what they were even fifty or sixty years earlier.

The person who is making progress—and you are all in this position—is trying to learn something of the spirit, and of the spiritual guidance of the world; of what fills surrounding space as the creatures of the different kingdoms of nature, and of what enters into our own souls. For the past half century souls longing for the spirit found extraordinarily little true spiritual nourishment where they hoped to find it. This longing for the spirit exists deep within the souls of all men, it is easily silenced for it does not speak loudly, but the longing is there, and each one whatever he is, or does in life, can receive true spiritual nourishment. Whatever department of science people take up to-day, they only learn from it external material facts which serve to further the progress of civilisation in a bright and clever way, but they learn nothing of what is revealed to man through the spirit. Whether he works as an artist or in some practical walk of life he finds little of what he has need, nothing that can enter his soul, his head, or his hands, to give him power and impulse for his work, and also assurance, solace, and power in life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people had already come to the conclusion that in the near future little of this would be found. Many a one said to himself in the first half of the nineteenth century when some remnants of the old life still remained even if in another form:—“There seems to be something in the air; it is as if the ancient treasures of the spirit that have come down to us from olden times were disappearing. It is as if the expected advance in culture of the nineteenth century had entirely wiped out the spiritual communications that have been handed down to us from ancient times.” Many such voices were,heard,in the first half of the nineteenth century. To show what I mean I will mention but one example. There was a man living at that time who knew the old kind of Theosophy well; he knew also that this old form would completely disappear in the course of the nineteenth century, yet he was firmly convinced that a future was coming when the old Theosophy would surely return. The passage I am about to read was written in the year 1847, when the first half of the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. He who wrote it was a thinker such as is no longer met with to-day, for he was still conscious of the last echoes of those ancient communications which have long since been lost to us:—

What Theosophy really desires is often difficult to discover from the older theosophists, and this is even less clear to-day, because on its present path theosophy can attain to no scientific existence, and therefore cannot have any great results. It would be most premature to conclude from this that it is a passing phenomenon without scientific justification. History loudly proclaims the opposite. It tells how it can never get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon which breaks out unnoticed again and again, and whose changing forms are preserved by the links of a never-dying tradition. At all times there has really been little that has connected this vital, speculative need, with vital religious needs. It is only for these last that theosophy exists. The main thing is, if it might one day become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it would become popular and come to be accepted generally, and in this way bequeath these truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves. But all this rests within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate; for the present we are thankful for the beautiful writings of Oetinger, which can certainly reckon on a large circle of sympathisers.¹

From this we see how the theosophic spirit was regarded in 1847 by a man like Richard Rothe of Heidelberg.

What kind of spirit is the theosophic spirit really?

It is a spirit without which true culture would never have taken place. When we think of what is greatest in this, we think of the spirit without which there would have been no Homer, no Pindar, Raphael or Michelangelo, without which there would have been no deep religious feeling in man; neither spiritual life nor external culture. Everything a man creates must be created by the spirit; if he thinks he can produce anything without it, he is unaware that his whole spiritual endeavour would in that case fail for a certain time. The less spiritual the source from which anything comes the sooner it dies. Anything having enduring worth must have its source in spirit. The smallest creative act, even in everyday concerns, has an eternal value and connects us with what is eternal; for everything done by man is under the guidance of spiritual life. We know that theosophical life as cultivated by us is founded in Rosicrucianism, and it has often been explained that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom had been preparing what has come to pass since the end of the nineteenth century and will go on further into the twentieth. What was indicated by Rothe as a “future” he hoped and longed for, has already become “present” for us to-day, and will continue to become so more and more. This had long been in preparation by those who allowed this spiritual influence to pour, at first unconsciously, into mankind.

What in a special sense we have called the “Rosicrucian path” has been consciously accepted within our theosophical movement since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and what the spirit has imprinted as science on the people of Europe, has since then flowed into our hearts.

Can we form an idea from what has taken place in our civilisation of how this spirit works?

I have said that since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it has “worked” as the true Rosicrucian spirit, but it was always there, and has only assumed this last form since the dates mentioned. This spirit that is active at present as the Rosicrucian spirit goes back to very early ages of humanity. Its mysteries existed in Atlantis. The activity it has recently developed, becoming ever more and more conscious, streamed not so very long ago in an unconscious way into the hearts and souls of men. Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit entered man unconsciously.

We meet together here, and our studies show us how the human soul has developed in this or that, till it has gradually attained to a region where it understands spiritual life, where it may even perhaps see spiritual life. Many of you have striven for years to fill your souls with thoughts and ideas which can set the spiritual life before your eyes. You know the way we regard the secrets of the world. I have often explained the different stages of development the soul passes through, and how it rises to higher worlds. You know that we have to distinguish a higher from a lower part of the self; that man has come over from other planetary conditions and has experienced the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. During these his physical body, etheric body and astral body were formed; he then entered on his earthly development. You know that something dwells within us that passes through its training here so as to rise to higher conditions. You have heard that certain Beings remained behind on the Moon as Luciferic Beings, and these later approached the human astral body as tempters, giving to humanity in this way what they had to give. Then we have often spoken of how man has to overcome certain things in his lower self, that he has to conquer them before he can enter those spheres to which his higher self belongs—that in order to reach these higher regions he has to fulfil the saying of Goethe:—

Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses Stirb und Werde,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

“So long as thou hast not experienced death and becoming, thou art a gloomy (sorry) Guest upon a dark earth.”

We have also said that the human evolution possible to-day, and that can give us power, certainty, and real content in our lives, is only to be attained when we learn, for instance, of the manifold natures of man, and that this man is not put together in any chaotic manner, but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. This must not be accepted merely as words, but by describing different temperaments, by studying the education of man, we have presented clear conceptions of these things, showing how up to his seventh year he is concerned with the development of the physical body, up to his fourteenth year with that of the etheric body, and up to his twenty-first year with the astral body. And we learnt from our studies dealing with the mission of truth, of devotion, of anger and so on that what we describe as physical body, etheric body, and astral body, feeling-soul, rational-soul and consciousness-soul are no abstract ideas, but that they impart life to our whole mental outlook, making everything around as clear and full of meaning.²

It is possible by such ideas to gain understanding of the secrets of the world. And if there are many who consciously or unconsciously persist in their materialistic opinions, there is also a certain number of souls who feel it as a necessity of existence to listen to such statements as we are able to give. Many of you would not have shared in what has been practised herefor years if it were not a necessity of your life. Why are there souls present to-day who understand the views and ideas evolved here, and who conduct their lives in accordance with them? Because, as you have been born into the world with longings such as I have described, so your forefathers (which means many souls present here to-day) were born in past centuries into other surroundings and into another world than that of the nineteenth century. Let us look backwards to the sixth and seventh, or to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when many who are here now were incarnated, and let us see what these souls experienced at that time.

There was no theosophical society in those days where people discussed things as we do here, but souls then heard something quite different from the people about them. Let me try to call up before you what these souls heard. They did not travel from place to place in order to hear lectures on spiritual science, but they heard rhapsodists who passed from village to village, from place to place, declaring things concerning the spirit. What did these people say? Let us recall a single instance of this. People did not then say:—“We have a Theosophy, a teaching concerning the lower and higher ego, that deals with the different members of man's Being and so on,” but rhapsodists travelled through the land, men who were called by the spirit to declare somewhat as follows:—(I am now repeating some of the things that were spread abroad through Middle and Eastern Europe at that time).

There was once a king's son. He rode forth and came presently to a deep ditch, he heard moaning proceedi.ng from it. He followed the course of the ditch to discover the cause of the moaning, and there he found an old woman. He left his horse, descended into the ditch, and helped the old woman out. He then saw that she could not walk for she had injured her leg, so he asked her how this accident had come about. She then told him:—I am an old woman and I must rise early soon after midnight in order to go to the town to sell eggs. On the way I fell into this ditch.” The king's son said:—“Thou canst” not now reach thine own dwelling. I will set thee on my horse and take thee there.” This he did. The old woman said:—“Although of noble birth thou art a kind and good man, and because thou hast helped me, thou shalt receive a reward from me.” He now guessed that she was something more than an old woman. Then she said:—“Because of the kindness thou hast shown me thou shalt receive the reward that thy good soul deserves. Dost thou desire to marry the daughter of the Flower-Queen?” “Yes,” he said. Then, she continued:—“To do so thou hast need of what I can easily give thee.” And she gave him a little bell, saying:—“When this is rung once the king-eagle will come with his hosts to help thee, whatever the position in which thou mayst be, when thou ringest twice the king of the foxes with his pack will come to help thee, wherever thou art, and if thou ringest thrice the king of the fishes will come with his hosts and will help thee wherever thou art.”

The king's son took the little bell and returned home and said that he was going to seek the daughter of the flower-queen, and rode forth. He rode a long, long time and no one could tell him where the daughter of the flower-queen dwelt. His horse was by this time worn out and broken down, so that he had to pursue his wanderings on foot. He met an old man and asked him where the dwelling of the flower-queen's daughter was. “I cannot tell thee,” said the old man, “go on further and ever further, and thou wilt find my father, and he will perhaps tell thee.” So the king's son went on further, and at last found a very ancient primeval man of whom he asked if he could tell him where the flower-queen dwelt with her daughter. Then the old man said to him:—“The flower-queen dwells afar in a mountain that thou canst see in the distance from here. She is, however, watched over by a savage dragon. Thou canst not reach her, for the dragon never sleeps in these days; there is only a certain time in which he sleeps, and this is his waking time. But thou must go still further to another mountain, there lives the dragon's mother. Through her thou will reach thy goal.” Courageously he went on. He reached the first mountain, then the second mountain; there he found the dragon's mother, the archetype of all ugliness. But he knew it depended on her whether he would find the daughter of the flower-queen or not. He then saw near the first, seven other dragons who all desired to watch over the flower-queen and her daughter, who had long been held prisoners and who were to be liberated by a king's son. He said to the dragon's mother:—“O, I know that I must be thy bondsman if I am to find the flower-queen!” “Yes,” she answered, “thou must be my bondsman,” and thou must do me a service that is not easy. Here is a horse, thou must lead him out to pasture the first day, the second and the third day. If thou bringst him home safe then on the third day perhaps thou mayst attain thy desire. But if thou doest not bring him safe home the dragon will eat thee—we shall all eat thee.” The next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to the pasture, but soon the horse escaped from him. He sought it but could not find it, and was most unhappy. He remembered the little bell the old woman had given him. He drew it forth and rang it once. Then many eagles appeared led by the king-eagle. They found the horse, and he was able to lead it back to the mother dragon. She said:—“Because thou hast brought it back I will give thee a mantle of copper; with it thou canst take part in the ball that is to be given tonight in the circles of the flower-queen and her daughter.”

On the second day he was again to take the horse to the meadow. It was given to him, but soon it escaped again, and nowhere could he find it So he drew forth the little bell again and rang it twice. Immediately the king of the foxes appeared with a large following. They found the horse, and he was able to restore it to the dragon's mother. She then said to him:—“To-day thou shalt receive a silver mantle with which thou canst again attend the ball that takes place tonight in the circle of the flower-queen and her daughter.” At the ball the flower-queen's daughter said to him:—“Demand on the third day a number of these horses, with them thou canst rescue us and we shall be united.” On the third day the horse was again handed over to him so that he could take it to the pastures. At once it escaped again, for it was very wild. He drew forth his little bell and rang it three times. The fish-king then appeared with his following. They found the horse and he took it back a third time. He had successfully performed his task. The dragon mother then gave him as recompense a mantle of gold as his third covering; with it he could take part on the third day at the ball at the flower-queen's dwelling. Besides this he was able to bring as a fitting present to her those horses that he had taken care of. With them he could carry the flower-queen and her daughter to their own fortress. And round this fortress which all the others wished to steal from her they allowed a thick hedge of bushes to grow so that the fortress could not be taken.

Then the flower-queen said to the king's son:—“Thou bast won my daughter, thou shalt have her by and by, but only on one condition. Thou shalt only have her for half the year, the other half she must withdraw from the surface of the earth so that she may be with me; only thus is it possible for thee to be united with her.”

In this way he won the daughter of the flower-queen and lived with her always for half the year; during the other half she was with her mother. This and other stories entered into very many souls. They listened to them, but did not interpret them allegorically after the manner of the strange theosophists of recent times; for these things have no value as symbolic or allegoric statements. No! people accepted them because they found pleasure and joy in them, they felt warm life flow through their souls when they listened to such tales.

There are many souls living now who heard such tales and accepted them with joy. And when received in this way they continued to live within these souls, they turned into thought-forms, into feelings and perceptions, thus they became something different than they were before. This produced results, it imparted powers to such souls, and these powers were changed, they were transformed into something else. Into what were they changed?

They were changed into that which lives in men's souls to-day as longing for a higher elucidation of these same secrets, a longing for theosophy. The rhapsodist did not tell of people who strove towards their higher self, and to attain it must conquer the lower self which held them down, but they told of a king's son who, as he rode forth through the world, found an old woman in distress, and did a good and kindly deed! To-day, we say:—People must do good deeds, deeds of love and sacrifice. At that time men spoke in images. To-day we say:—Men must feel within such sympathy for the spirit that they divine something of the spiritual world, something that connects them with it, and enables them to develop forces that can put them in touch with it. In earlier times men were told in parables of the old woman who gave the king's son a bell. To-day they are told:—Man has taken all the other kingdoms of nature into himself, what lives scattered in them is united harmoniously in him. But he must understand how something lives in him which lives in all surrounding nature, that he can only overcome his lower nature when this is brought into right relationship with himself so that it can help him.

We have often spoken of the evolution of man through the Saturn, Sun and Moon epochs, how he left the other kingdoms of nature behind him, retaining the best out of each, so that he might rise to something higher. By what means has he evolved? By means of that which Plato uses as a symbol—the horse; on this he rides forward from incarnation to incarnation. At that time the image of the bell was used; it was rung to summon the kingdoms of nature through their representatives—the Eagle-king, Fox-king, and Fish-king—so that he who was to become the ruler of these kingdoms might be brought into right relationship with them.

The soul of man is untamed, and only when love and wisdom control it is it brought into the right relationship. At one time this was brought to man's notice in pictures; his soul was guided so that he could understand what to-day is told us differently. At that time he was told:—When you ring the bell once the Eagle-king comes, when you ring it twice the Fox-king comes, and when you ring it three times the Fish-king; these brought back the horse. This means the storms which rage in the human soul must be recognised, and when we recognise them we can free it from the lower disturbances and bring it into order.

Man must learn to know how his own passions, anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven years to another seven; he must learn to know the threefold nature of the human sheaths. In former days we were presented with a wonderful picture. Every time the king's son rang the bell (that is when by his own power he had subdued one of the kingdoms) he acquired a covering, a sheath.

To-day we say:—We study the nature of the physical body; at that time an image was used, the dragon-mother gave the man a mantle of copper. To-day we say:—We study the nature of our etheric body; then it was said:—The dragon-mother gave him a silver mantle. Again we say:—We learn to know our astral body with all its surging passions. At that time they said:—The dragon-mother gave him on the third day a golden mantle.

What we learn to-day concerning the threefold sheath-nature of man was brought to people at an earlier day through the image of the copper, silver, and golden mantles. And to the souls that then received the thought-form of the copper, silver, and golden mantles, we say to-day:—What brings you understanding of the dense physical body, is related to the other bodies as copper ore is to silver and gold. To-day we say:—Backward Luciferic Beings of seven different kinds remained behind on the moon and worked upon the human astral body. The rhapsodists said:—When the king's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the flower-queen's daughter, he met seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his day's task. We know that if our evolution is not carried out aright it is owing to the power of the seven different kinds of Luciferic Beings. To-day we say:—In carrying out our spiritual development we find our higher self. Formerly, people were presented with a picture. The king's son they were told united himself with the flower-queen's daughter. We say:—The human soul must attain to a certain rhythm.

In one of the earlier lectures in this course I said:—When an idea rises in a man's soul he must allow it time to mature, he will then observe a certain rhythm. After seven days the idea has entered deeply into his soul; after fourteen days, the idea now being more mature, is able to lay hold of the outer astral substance, and to allow itself to be “baptised by the universal spirit”; after twenty-one days it has matured still further, and only after four times seven days does it reach the stage where he can give it to the world as his own personal gift. What I have described is an inner rhythm of the soul.

A man can only create successfully when he has no desire to impart hurriedly to the world what has chanced to come to him, but knows that the orderliness of the external universe must enter in his soul. We must live so that we repeat the macrocosm microscopically in ourselves.

These pictures which were told everywhere—and hundreds of them could be cited—stimulated the powers of the human soul by means of thought-forms, so that such souls are to-day ripe enough to listen to the other form of instruction, the form cultivated in spiritual science. But the longing for this had first to become very strong. All the conscious striving of men's souls had first to disappear from the physical plane. Then with the coming of the second half of the nineteenth century materialistic culture arose, and all was desolation as regards spiritual life. But the longing, on the other hand, grew ever greater and greater, the more the ideal of a future spiritual movement grew. There were but few remaining in the first half of the nineteenth century who felt, as in a faint memory, and experienced in silent martyrdom, how the ideas which were once perceived, discussed, and developed, still existed; but were in decline.

In 1803 a man was born in whose soul some echo of the wisdom of an earlier day still remained. Something dwelt in him that was closely related to our theosophical ideas. His soul was filled with longing to solve the secrets of spiritual science—his name was Julius Mosen. His life could only be preserved by spending the greater part of it in bed. His soul no longer suited his body, for owing to the way he had grasped these things, yet was unable spiritually to enter further into them, he had drawn his etheric body out of his physical body, and consequently he had become an invalid. He had, however, risen spiritually to considerable heights. In the year 1831 he wrote a remarkable book called “Ritter Wahn.” He knew of a wonderful legend in Italy about the Knight Wahn, and when studying it he said to himself:—Something of the spirit of the universe lives in this legend, this saga has arisen in the way it has, these pictures have been formed as they are, because those who formed them were filled with the living spiritual guidance of the world. What was the result? In 1831 he wrote a most wonderful dramatic work. It has naturally been forgotten—as everything is that originates in this way from greatness of spirit. Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death. On the way he meets with three old men. It occurred to Julius Mosen strangely enough to translate the name of one of the old men, it Mondo, as Ird (earth), for he knew something special lay in translating it thus into German. The name of tile three old men whom Ritter Wahn met when he set out to conquer death were Ird, Zeit, and Raum—earth, time and space. The three could not help him for they were subject to death. Ird (earth) is that which is subject to the laws of the physical body, and therefore to death; Zeit (time), the etheric body, is transient; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the impression of space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation, but that by which we are fixed within our three sheaths according to this Italian legend is Ird, Zeit and Raum (earth, time and space). What is the Ritter Wahn?—Illusion.

We have often spoken of what enters us as Maya. We ourselves are it; we who go on from incarnation to incarnation look out on the world, and are confronted with the great illusion. Each one of us is a “Ritter Wahn” and each one goes forth, if we live in the spirit, to conquer death. In this life we meet the three old men, our sheaths. They are very old. The physical body has existed since the age of Saturn, the etheric body since the Sun-age, the Astral body since the Moon-age, and that which dwells in man as the “I” has been united with him since the coming of the Earth-age. Julius Mosen represents this in such a way that the soul, by which Ritter Wahn would conquer death, first storms out into the world as a rider, thus employing the Platonic image which was prevalent all over Central Europe and far beyond it. So Ritter Wahn rides forth, and would conquer heaven with the aid of materialistic thoughts—as people do who trust to the senses—thereby remaining entangled in delusion and Maya.

But when at death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is beautifully described by Julius Mosen—life is not exhausted, souls long to return to earth to carry out their further development. Ritter Wahn comes down to earth again. And as he sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul as it is stirred by everything earthly—just as was the flower-queen's daughter—and revealing its union with everything that can only come to man through earthly schooling, there when united with the beautiful Morgana, when again united with the earth, death falls away from him. This means he passes through death in order to raise his own soul (represented by Morgana) ever higher, to purify and develop it further in each incarnation.

From images like these, which bear the stamp of many centuries, ideas enter into man and are aided by artists like Julius Mosen. They sprang in his case from a soul too great to live healthily in a body belonging to the age of materialism that was approaching, therefore, owing to the greatness of his glowing soul, he suffered a silent martyrdom. This was in the year 1831. All these thoughts lived in the soul of a man in the first half of the nineteenth century. They must rise again, but now so that they will kindle human powers, human forces. Yes, they will rise again This gives us some understanding of what is meant when we speak of a theosophical spirit, the spirit of Rosicrucianism which must enter into mankind.

We now divine that what is cherished in our movement has existed always. We fall into the illusion of Ritter Wahn if we imagine anything can prosper without active co-operation of this spirit.

Whence came the Rhapsodists of the seventh to the twelfth century; the men wandered through the world giving rise to thought-forms so that souls might comprehend things somewhat differently.

From what centre did they come? Where had they learnt how to present such pictures to the souls of men They learnt this in those temples, which we recognise as the schools of the Rosicrucians. The Rhapsodists were pupils of the Rosicrucians. Their teachers told them:—You cannot go forth to-day and speak to mankind in ideas as will be done later; to-day you must speak to them of the king's son, of the flower-queen, of the three mantles. By this means thought-forms are built up which will live in men's souls, and when these souls return they will understand what is necessary for them for their further progress.

Spiritual centres are continually sending their messengers out into the world, so that in every age that which lives in the depths of the spirit may be brought near to the souls of men.

It is a trivial point of view when people think they can construct such tales as I have been describing from fancy. Ancient legends which express the spiritual secrets of the world arise because the men who compose them have harkened to and been purified by those who impart these secrets; the whole form of the legends is constructed in accordance with these spiritual secrets. The spirit of all humanity—both of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm—lives in them.

The Rhapsodists were sent to spread their meaningful legends through the world from the same temples whence originates the special knowledge of to-day; knowledge that entering into men's hearts and souls makes the culture they demand possible. In this way the spirit that is deeply implanted in humanity passes on from epoch to epoch. And in this way the great Beings, who in pre-Christian times instructed individualities within the holy temples concerning the things they had brought over with them from earlier planetary conditions, strengthened this teaching by introducing into it the Christ so that their work might continue in accordance with this superlative Being—the Christ who had now become the great leader and guide of mankind!

When I tell you that the tales which have endured for so many centuries and called forth thought-forms in Western culture came from the same source, and expressed the same things—only in pictures—that we tell the world to-day concerning the Christ; you will realise how in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual guides of humanity did in fact further arid support the teaching of Christ in their centres of learning. All spiritual guidance is connected with the Christ. When we are aware of this connection we catch a glimpse of the light we must have, and must make use of, more especially in respect of the things our souls longed for when they came into incarnation in the nineteenth century. If we allow those forms to affect us which can inform us regarding the longings of earlier days, we feel we can rely upon our souls and can say—those others waited so that we might accomplish what they longed for. What spirits like Julius Mosen had longed for, because they felt within them all that the messengers of the Holy Temples had related in countless pictures, so as to prepare souls for times to come; what these souls longed for is set forth in the words of Richard Rothe, who, when speaking of theosophy in 1847 at Heidelberg, says:—“Would that one day it might become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it might become popular and be generally accepted; for only in this way can it bequeath those truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves.”

In those days Rothe felt this longing—not only for himself but for his contemporaries—he found resignation in saying:—“All this lies as yet within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate!” Those who knew the secrets of the Rosicrucians did not speak in 1847 so that these could be perceived in an external way. But what rests within the womb of the future comes to life when a sufficient number of souls are found who realise that knowledge is a duty. We dare not give back our souls unevolved to the Spirit of the Universe, for in that case we would have deprived the Spirit of something He had implanted in us. When souls are found who realise what they owe to the Spirit of the Universe because of their strivings to solve the secrets of the world, they will have fulfilled the hopes cherished by the best men of an earlier age. These men looked to us who were to come after them and said:—“Once this knowledge becomes scientific it must become popular and lay hold of men's hearts.”

But such hearts must first exist, they must be there I This depends on those who have joined our spiritual society realising:—“I must gain spiritual illumination, I must learn the secrets of existence I” It depends on each separate soul within our society, whether the longing I have described is to be but a vain dream of those who hoped for the best from us, or a worthy dream that we can realise for them.

When we perceive the emptiness in modern science, in art, and in social life, we feel there is no need to be lost in this desert, we can get out of it. An age has once more come round in which the Holy Temples speak, not now merely in images and parables, but in truths, which, though still regarded by many as theoretical, will become ever more and more a source of life, and will pour living sap into the souls of men.

Each one can determine with the best powers of his soul to receive this living sap into himself.

These are the thoughts we would impress on your souls at the present time, being the sum of all we have received concerning the true meaning of the spiritual guidance of mankind. When we allow such thoughts to work within our souls we have a lively stimulus for future endeavour, and we see how much of constructive force they contain that is quite independent of the actual words with which these thoughts have been expressed.

However imperfect my words may be, it is the reality that matters, not the way the thoughts are expressed, and this reality can live in every soul. For the sum of all truth dwells in each separate soul like a seed which can blossom when this soul accepts it.

• 1. From the introduction by Richard Rothe to “The Principles of Theosophy according to Frederick Cristopher Oetinger,” Tubingen, 1847.
• 2. “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume One,” and “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume Two,” (see Book Catalogue).

Many of you know that recently in Munich we repeated last year's performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer. We also put our efforts into the production of a Rosicrucian Mystery in which we tried in a variety of ways to bring to expression what is living in our movement. For one thing, it was meant to show how the life of anthroposophy and its impulses can flow into art, into artistic form. Besides that, we should be aware that this Rosicrucian Mystery contains many of our spiritual scientific teachings that perhaps only in future years will be discerned. Please do not misunderstand me when I say that if people would exert themselves to some degree to read what is in it—not between the lines but right in the words themselves, though certainly in a spiritual sense—if people would exert themselves during the next few years to try to work with the drama, I would not have to give any more lectures for a long time. Much could be discovered in it that otherwise I would have to put forth as one or another theme in lectures. It is much more practical, however, to do this together as a group rather than as single individuals. It is fortunate in one sense that everything that lives in spiritual science also exists in such a form.

In relation to the Rosicrucian Mystery I should today like to speak about certain peculiarities of human self- knowledge. For this we will have to remind ourselves how the individuality living in the body of Johannes Thomasius brings about a characterization of himself. Therefore, I wish to start my lecture with a recitation of the scenes from the Rosicrucian Mystery that portray the self-knowledge of Johannes.

SCENE TWO

A place in the open; rocks and springs. The whole surroundings are to be thought of as within the soul of Johannes Thomasius. What follows is the content of his meditation.

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, know thou thyself.

Johannes:

For many years these words
of weighty meaning I have heard.
They sound to me from air and water;
they echo up from depths of earth.
And just as in the acorn secretly
the structure of the mighty oak is pressed,
within the power of these words
there is contained
all that my thought can comprehend
about the nature of the elements,
of souls as well as spirits,
of time and of eternity.
The world and my own nature
are living in the words:
O man, know thou thyself!

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, know thou thyself.

And now!—within me
it is becoming terribly alive.
Around me darkness weaves,
within me blackness yawns;
out of the world of darkness it resounds,
out of soul-blackness it rings forth:—
O man, know thou thyself!

(There sounds from springs and rocks:)
O man, know thou thyself.

And now it robs me of myself.
I change with every hour of the day.
I melt into the night.
The earth I follow in her cosmic course.
I rumble in the thunder,
I flash within the lightning,
I am.—But oh, I feel
already separated from my being.
I see my body's shell.
It is an alien being outside myself;
it is remote from me.
There hovers nearer now another body
and with its mouth I have to speak:
'He brought me bitter sorrow;
I gave him all my trust.
He left me in my grief alone.
He robbed me of the warmth of life
and thrust me deep into cold earth.'
She, whom I left, unhappy one,
I was now she herself,
and I must suffer her despair.
Self-knowledge lent me strength
to pour myself into another self.
O cruel words!
Your light is quenched by its own power.
O man, know thou thyself!

(There sounds from springs and rocks:)
O man, know thou thyself.

You guide me back again
into the spheres of my own being.
Yet how do I behold myself!
My human form is lost;
as raging dragon I must see myself,
begot of lust and greed.
I clearly sense
how an illusion's cloud
has hid from me till now
my own appalling form.
The fierceness of my being will devour me.
And running like consuming fire
through all my veins I feel those words,
which hitherto with elemental power
revealed to me the truth of suns and earths.
They live within my pulse,
they beat within my heart,
and even in my thought itself I feel
those unfamiliar worlds flare up as wild desires.
This is the fruitage of the words:
O man, know thou thyself.

(There sounds from springs and rocks:)
O man, know thou thyself.

There from the dark abyss,
what being gloats on me?
I feel the chains
that hold me fettered fast to you.
Prometheus was not chained so fast
upon the cliffs of Caucasus
as I am chained to you.
Who are you, horrifying being?

(There sounds from springs and rocks:)
O man, know thou thyself.

Oh, now I recognize you.
It is myself.
So knowledge chains to you, pernicious monster,

(Maria Enters, but is not noticed
By Johannes for the time being)

me, myself, pernicious monster.
I sought to flee from you.
The worlds wherein my folly fled,
in order to be free from my own self,
have dazzled and have blinded me.
And blind I am once more within the blinded soul.
O man, know thou thyself!

(There sounds from springs and rocks:)
O man, know thou thyself.

Johannes

(as if coming to himself, sees Maria. The meditation passes over into inner reality.)
Maria, you are here!

Maria

I've looked for you, my friend,
although I know
how dear to you is solitude,
now that so many people's views
have flooded through your soul.
And I know, too, that at this time
my presence cannot help my friend.
An urge that is obscure
is driving me to you this very moment
when words of Benedictus have called up, instead of light, such bitter grief
out of your spirit depths.

Johannes

How dear to me is solitude!
How often have I sought it out,
to find in it myself,
whenever pain and joy of men have driven me
into the labyrinths of thought.
Maria, that is past.
What Benedictus' words at first
drew forth out of my soul,
and what I then lived through
from everything those people said,
seems little to me now
if I compare it to the storm
which solitude has brought
into my heavy brooding.
O this solitude!
It drove me into cosmic spaces;
it tore me from myself.
Within that being to whom I brought such grief
I rose again but as another,
and had to bear the pain
which I myself had caused.
The fierce, dark solitude
then gave me back myself
but only to appall me
at the abyss of my own being.
-----------------------
For me, man's final refuge,
for me, my solitude is lost.

Maria

I must repeat my words to you:
no one but Benedictus can now help you.
The firm support we lack,
we both must have from him.
For know, I also can no longer bear
the riddle of my life,
unless some sign from him
can make the answer clear to me.
The lofty wisdom, pointing out
that only semblance and illusion
are spread out over all our life
as long as human thinking grasps alone its surface,
I've often held it up before my mind.
And every time it says:
you must be clear that an illusion
is shrouding you, though often it may seem the truth:
that evil fruit could come from your desire
to wake that light in others
which lives in you yourself.
My soul's best part can see
that heavy feelings of oppression
in you, my friend,
from living at my side
are too a portion of the thorny path
that leads you to the light of truth.
You must live through each terror
to which illusion can give birth
before the truth reveals itself to you:
thus speaks your star.
Yet through this starry word is also clear to me
that we must wander on the spirit paths together.
But when I seek these paths,
there spreads itself before my gaze dark night.
And blacker still becomes this night
through much which I must meet
as fruit of my own being.
We both must look for clarity in that light,
which for the eye can vanish
but never be extinguished.

Johannes

Maria, are you then aware
through what my soul has fought its way?
A heavy load indeed
has fallen upon you, dear friend.
Yet foreign to your being is that power
which has so wholly shattered me.
You can ascend to brightest heights of truth;
you can direct your steady gaze
at men's confusion.
In light, in darkness,
you will affirm yourself.
But every moment can
deprive me of myself.
I had to plunge into those people
who through their words revealed themselves just now.
I followed one into the cloister's loneliness,
I heard within the other's soul
Felicia's tales.
I was each one,
but for myself I died.
I'd have to have the faith
that beings spring from nothingness,
if I should cherish any hope
that from the nothingness in me
a human being ever could be born.
They force me out of fear into the darkness,
and hunt me through the darkness into fear,
these words imbued with wisdom:
O man, know thou thyself!

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, know thou thyself.

SCENE NINE

The same placed as in Scene Two

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being..

Johannes

O man, unfold your being!
For three years now I've sought
for power of soul, with wings of courage,
to give these words their truth.
Through them a man who frees himself can conquer,
and conquering himself, can find his freedom.
O man, unfold your being!

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being..

This power of soul is rising from within me
but only gently touching spirit hearing.
It harbours in itself the hope
that, growing, it will lead the human spirit
from narrowness far out to distant worlds,
just as the tiny acorn
mysteriously can expand
into the giant body of the noble oak.
The spirit in itself can bring to life
what weaves in air and water,
what has condensed to earth beneath.
For man can grasp
what has been taking hold of life
within the elements, in souls and spirits,
in time and in eternity.
The whole world-being lives within my soul,
when in the spirit there has taken root
the power that gives these words their truth:
O man, unfold your being!

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being..

I feel them sounding in my soul,
rousing themselves to give me strength.
There lives in me the light,
there speaks around me brightness,
there germinates in me the light of soul,
there works in me world-radiance.
O man, unfold your being!

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being.

I find myself secure on every side,
wherever these words' power follows me.
It will illuminate for me the senses' darkness
and will uphold me in the spirit heights.
It will enfill me with soul-substance
throughout all course of time.
The essence of the world I feel in me
and I must find myself in every world.
I see the being of my soul enlivened
through power that is my own.
I rest within myself.
I gaze on rocks and springs;
they speak the very language of my soul.
I find myself again within that being
to whom I brought such bitter grief,
and out of her I call out to myself:
'Oh, you must find me once again
and ease my suffering.'
The spirit's light will give me strength
to live the other self within myself.
O words of hope,
you stream forth power to me from all the worlds:
O man, unfold your being.

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being.

You let me feel my weakness
and place me close to lofty aims of gods,
and blissfully I feel
such lofty aims' creative might
within my frail earth form.
Out of myself shall be revealed the purpose
for which the seed lies hidden in me.
And to the world I'll give myself
by living out my very being.
I want to feel these words' full power,
although they sound so gently.
They shall become for me a quickening fire
in my soul forces
and on my spirit paths.
I feel now how my thinking penetrates
deep hidden grounds of worlds
and how its radiant light illumines them.
Such is the germinating power of these words:
O man, unfold your being.

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being.

From light-filled heights a Being shines on me,
and wings I feel
that lift me up to him.
I too will free myself, as every being does
who overcomes himself.

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being.

I see that Being.
I shall become like him in future times.
The spirit will then free itself in me
through you, exalted goal of man.
I will now follow you.

(Maria enters)
My eye of soul has been awakened
by spirit beings who have welcomed me.
And as I gaze into the worlds of spirit,
I feel within myself that power:
O man, unfold your being.

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, unfold your being.

Maria, you are here?

Maria

My soul has led me here.
I could behold your star:
it shines in its full power.

Johannes

I can unfold that power from within me.

Maria

So closely are we linked
that your soul's life
lets its light shine into my soul.

Johannes

Maria, you are then aware
of what has just revealed itself?
For me, man's core of confidence,
for me, the certainty of being has been won.
I feel indeed the power of the words
which everywhere can guide me:
O man, unfold your being!

(From the springs and rocks resounds:)
O man, know thou thyself.

In these scenes two levels of development, two steps in the unfolding of our souls, are shown.

Now please do not find it strange when I say that I do not mind interpreting this Rosicrucian Mystery just as I have interpreted other pieces of literature in our group. What I have often said about other poetry can also be brought before our souls in a lively, spontaneous way by this drama. In fact, I have never failed to point out that a flower knows little, indeed, of what someone who is looking at it will find in it; yet, whatever he finds is contained in it. And in speaking about Faust, I explained that the poet did not necessarily know or feel everything in the words he was writing down that later would be discovered in them. I can assure you that nothing of what afterward I could say about the Rosicrucian Mystery, and that I know now is in it, was in my conscious mind as I wrote down the various scenes. The scene-pictures grew one by one, just like the leaves of a plant. One cannot bring forth a character by first having an idea and then turning this into a concrete figure. It was continually interesting to me how each scene grew out of the others preceding it. Friends who knew the earlier parts said that it was remarkable how everything came about quite differently from what one could have imagined.

This Mystery Drama exists now as a picture of human evolution in the development of a single person. I want to emphasize that true feeling makes it impossible to throw a cloak of abstractions around oneself in order to present anthroposophy; every human soul is different from every other and, at its core, must be different, because each one undergoes the experience of his own development. For this reason, instruction to the many can provide only general directions. One can give the complete truth only by applying it to a single human soul, to a soul that reveals its human individuality in all its uniqueness. If, therefore, anyone should consider the figure of Johannes Thomasius in such a way as to transfer the specific description of that figure to general theories of human development, it would be absolutely incorrect. If he believed that he would experience exactly what Johannes Thomasius experienced, he would be quite mistaken. For while in the widest sense what Johannes Thomasius had to undergo is valid for everyone, in order to have the same specific experiences one would have to be Johannes Thomasius. Each person is a “Johannes Thomasius” in his own fashion.

Everything in the drama is presented, therefore, in a completely individual way. Through this, the truth portrayed by the particular figures brings out as clearly as possible the development of the soul of a human being. At the beginning, Thomasius is shown in the physical world, but certain soul-happenings are hinted at that provide a wide basis for such development, particularly an experience at a somewhat earlier time when he deserted a girl who had been lovingly devoted to him. Such things do take place, but this individual happening has a different effect on a man who has resolved to undertake his own development. There is one deep truth necessary for him who wants to undergo development: self-knowledge cannot be achieved by brooding within oneself but only through diving into the being of others. Through self- knowledge we must learn that we have emerged from the cosmos. Only when we give ourselves up can we change into another Self. First of all, we are transformed into whatever was close to us in life.

When at first Johannes sinks more deeply into himself and then plunges in self-knowledge into another person, into the one to whom he has brought bitter pain, we see this as an example of the experience of oneself within another, a descent into self-knowledge. Theoretically, one can say that if we wish to know the blossom, we must plunge into the blossom, and the best method of acquiring self-knowledge is to plunge again, but in a different way, into happenings we once took part in. As long as we remain in ourselves, we experience only superficially whatever takes place. In contrast to true self-knowledge, what we think of other persons is then mere abstraction.

For Thomasius at first, what other people have lived through becomes a part of him. One of them, Capesius, describes some of his experiences; we can observe that they are rooted in real life. But Thomasius takes in more. He is listening. His listening is singular; later, in SceneEight, we will be able to characterize it. It is really as if Thomasius' ordinary Self were not present. Another deeper force appears, as though Thomasius were creeping into the soul of Capesius and were taking part in what is happening from there. That is why it is so absolutely important for Thomasius to be estranged from himself. Tearing the Self out of oneself and entering into another is part and parcel of self-knowledge. It is noteworthy, therefore, that what he has listened to in Scene One, Thomasius says, reveals:

... A mirrored image of the whole of life,
that showed me clearly to myself.
What is revealed to us out of the spirit
has led me to perceive how many men,
who think themselves a whole, in fact
hear in themselves one single facet only.
In order to unite within myself
all these divergent sides,
I started boldly on the path taught here—
and it has made of me a nothing.

Why has it made a “nothing” of him? Because through self-knowledge he has plunged into these other persons. Brooding in your own inner self makes you proud, conceited. True self-knowledge leads, first of all, by having to plunge into a strange Self, into suffering. In Scene One Johannes follows each person so strongly that when he listens to Capesius he becomes aware of the words of Felicia within the other soul. He follows Strader into the loneliness of the cloister, but at first this has the character of something theoretical. He cannot reach as far as he is later led, in Scene Two, through pain. Self-knowledge is deepened by the meditation within his inner Self. What was shown in Scene One is shown changed in Scene Two through self-knowledge intensified from abstraction to a concrete imagination. Those well-known words, which we have heard through the centuries as the motif of the Delphic Oracle, bring about a new life for this man Johannes, though at first it is a life of estrangement from himself.

Johannes enters, as a knower-of-himself, into all the outer phenomena. He finds his life in the air and water, in the rocks and springs, but not in himself. All the words that we can let sound on stage only from outside are actually the words of his meditation. As soon as the curtain rises, we have to confront these words, which would sound louder to anyone through self-knowledge than we can dare to produce on the stage. Thereafter, he who is learning to know himself dives into the other beings and elements and thus learns to know them. Then in a terrible form the same experience he has had earlier appears to him.

It is a deep truth that self-knowledge, when it progresses in the way we have characterized, leads us to see ourselves quite differently from the way we ever saw ourselves before. It teaches us to perceive our “I” as a strange being.

Man believes his own outer physical sheath to be the closest thing to himself. Nowadays, when he cuts a finger, he is much more connected with the painful finger than when, for instance, a friend hurts him with an unjust opinion. How much more does it hurt a modern person to cut his finger than to hear an unjust opinion! Yet he is only cutting into his bodily sheath. To feel our body as a tool, however, will come about only through self- knowledge.

Whenever a person grasps an object, he can feel his hand to some degree as a tool. This, too, he can learn to feel with one or another part of his brain. The inward feeling of his brain as instrument comes about at a certain level of self-knowledge. Specific places within the brain are localized. If we hammer a nail, we know we are doing it with a tool. We know that we are also using as tool one or another part of the brain. Through the fact that these things are objective and can become separate and strange to us, we come to know our brain as something quite separate from us. Self-knowledge requires this sort of objectivity as regards our body; gradually our outer sheath becomes as objective to us as the ordinary tools we use. Then, as soon as we have made a start at feeling our bodily sheath as separate object, we truly begin to live in the outside world.

Because a person feels only his body, he is not clear about the boundary between the air outside and the air in his lungs. All the same, he will say that it is the same air, outside and inside. So it is with everything, with the blood, with everything that belongs to the body. But what belongs to the body cannot be outside and inside—that is mere illusion. It is only through the fact that we allow the internal bodily nature to become outward that in truth it finds a further life out in the rest of the world and the cosmos.

In the first scene recited today there was an effort to express the pain of feeling estranged from oneself—the pain of feeling estranged because of being outside and within all the other things. Johannes Thomasius' own bodily sheath seems like a person outside himself. But just because of that—that he feels his own body outside—he can see the approach of another body, that of the young girl he once deserted. It comes toward him; he has learned how to speak with the very words of the other being. She says to him, whose Self has widened out to her:

He brought me bitter sorrow;
I gave him all my trust.
He left me in my grief alone.
He robbed me of the warmth of life
and thrust me deep into cold earth.

Then guilt, very much alive, rises up in the soul when, plunging our own Self into another and attaching ourselves to the pain of this other being, the pain is spoken out. This is a deepening, an intensifying. Johannes is truly within the pain, because he has caused it. He feels himself dissolving into it and then waking up again. What is he actually experiencing?

When we try to put all this together, we will find that the ordinary, normal human being undergoes something similar only in the condition we call kamaloka. The initiate, however, has to experience in this world what the normal person experiences in the spiritual world. Within the physical body he must go through what ordinarily is experienced outside the physical body. All the elements of kamaloka have to be undergone as the elements of initiation. Just as Johannes dives into the soul to whom he has brought such grief, so must the normal human being in kamaloka dive into the souls to which he has brought pain. It is just as if a slap in the face has to come back to him; he has to feel the same pain. The only difference is that the initiate experiences this in the physical body, and other people after death. The one who goes through this here will afterward live otherwise in kamaloka. But even all that one undergoes in kamaloka can be so experienced that one does not become entirely free. It is a most difficult task to become completely free. A man feels as if he were chained to his physical conditions.

In our time one of the most important elements for our development—not yet so much in the Greco-Roman epoch but especially important nowadays—is that the human being must experience how infinitely difficult it is to become free of himself. Therefore, a notable initiation experience is described by Johannes as feeling chained to his own lower nature; his own being seems to be a creature to which he is firmly fettered:

I feel the chains
that hold me fettered fast to you.
Prometheus was not chained so fast
upon the cliffs of Caucasus
as I am chained to you.

This belongs to self-knowledge; it is a secret of self- knowledge. We should try to understand it correctly.

A question about this secret could be phrased like this: have we in some way become better human beings by becoming earth dwellers, by entering into our physical sheaths, or would we be better by remaining in our inner natures and throwing off those sheaths? Superficial people, taking a look at life in the spirit, may well ask: why ever do we have to plunge down into a physical body? It would be much easier to stay up there and not get into the whole miserable business of earthly existence.

For what reason have the wise powers of destiny thrust us down here? Perhaps it helps our feelings a little to say that for millions and millions of years the divine, spiritual powers have worked on the physical body. Because of this, we should make more out of ourselves than we have the strength to do. Our inner forces are not enough. We cannot yet be what the gods have intended for us if we wish to be only what is in our inner nature, if our outer sheaths do not work some corrections in us. Life shows us that here on earth man is put into his physical sheaths and that these have been prepared for him by the beings of three world epochs. Man has now to develop his inner nature. Between birth and death, he is bad; in Devachan he is a better creature, taken up by divine, spiritual beings who shower him with their own forces. Later on, in the Vulcan epoch, he will be a perfect being. Now on the earth he is a being who gives way to this or that desire. Our hearts, for one thing, are created with such wisdom that they can hold out for decades against the excesses we indulge in, such as drinking coffee. What man can be today through his own will is the way he travels through kamaloka. There he has to learn what he can be through his own will, and that is certainly nothing very good. Whenever man is asked to describe himself, he cannot use the adjective “beautiful.” He has to describe himself as Johannes does in Scene Two:

Yet how do I behold myself!
My human form is lost;
as raging dragon I must see myself,
begot of lust and greed.
I clearly sense
how an illusion's cloud
has hid from me till now
my own appalling form.

Our inner nature stretches flexibly within our bodily sheaths and is hidden from us. When we approach initiation, we learn really to see ourselves as a kind of raging dragon. Therefore, these words are drawn up out of the deepest perception; they are words of self-knowledge, not of self-brooding:

It is myself.
So knowledge chains to you, pernicious monster,
me myself, pernicious monster.

At bottom, they are both the same, one the subject, the other the object.

I sought to flee from you.

This flight, however, merely leads the human being directly to himself.

But then the crowd turns up, the crowd we find ourselves in when we really look into ourselves. We find ourselves to be a collection of lusts and passions we had not noticed earlier, because each time we wanted to look into ourselves our eyes were distracted to the world outside. Indeed, compared to what we would have seen inside, the world outside is wonderfully beautiful. Out there, in the illusion, in the maya of life, we stop looking at ourselves inwardly. When people around us, however, begin to talk all kinds of stupidity and we cannot stand it, we escape to where we can be alone. This is quite important at some levels of development. We can and should collect ourselves; it is a good means of self-knowledge. But it can happen that, coming into a crowd of people, we can no longer be alone; those others appear, either within us or outside us, no matter; they do not allow us to be alone. Then comes the experience we must have: solitude actually brings forth the worst kind of fellowship.

For me, man's final refuge,
for me, my solitude is lost.

Those are genuine experiences. Do not let the strength, the intensity, of the happenings trouble you. You do not have to believe that such strength and intensity as described must necessarily lead to anxiety or fear. It should not prevent anyone from also plunging into these waters. No one will experience all this as swiftly or with such vehemence as Johannes does; it had to come about for him in this way for a definite purpose, even prematurely, too. A normal self-development proceeds differently. Therefore, what occurs in Johannes so tumultuously must be understood as an individual happening. Because he is this particular individual, who has suffered a kind of shipwreck, everything he undergoes takes place much more tempestuously than it otherwise would. He is confronted by the laws of self-development in such a way that they throw him completely off balance. As for us, one thing should be awakened by this description of Johannes, that is, the perception that true self-knowledge has nothing to do with trite phrases, that true self- knowledge inevitably leads us into pain and sorrow.

Things that once were a source of delight can assume a different face when they appear in the realm of self- knowledge. We can long for solitude, no doubt, when we have already found self-knowledge. But in certain moments of self-development it is solitude we have lost when we look for it as we did earlier, in moments when we flow out into the objective world, when in loneliness we have to suffer the sharpest pain.

Learning to perceive in the right way this outpouring of the Self into other beings will help us feel what has been put into the Mystery Drama: a certain artistic element has been created in which everything is spiritually realistic. One who thinks realistically—a genuine, artistic, sensitive realist—undergoes at unrealistic performances a certain amount of suffering. Even what at a certain level can provide great satisfaction is at another level a source of pain. This is due to the path of self- development. A play by Shakespeare, for instance, an immense achievement in the physical world, can be an occasion for artistic pleasure. But a certain moment of development can arrive when we are no longer satisfied by Shakespeare because we seem inwardly torn to pieces. We go from one scene to the next but no longer see the necessity that has ordered one scene to follow another. We begin to find it unnatural that a scene follows the one preceding it. Why unnatural? Because nothing holds two scenes together except the dramatist Shakespeare and his audience. His scenes follow the abstract principle of cause and effect but not a concrete reality. It is characteristic of Shakespeare's drama that nothing of underlying karma is hinted at; this would tie the scenes together more closely.

The Rosicrucian drama grew into a realistic, spiritually realistic one. It makes huge demands on Johannes Thomasius, who is constantly on stage without taking part actively or showing a single important dramatic characteristic. He is the one in whose soul everything takes place, and what is described is the development of that soul, the real experience of the soul's development.

Johannes' soul spins one scene realistically out of the one before it. Through this we see that realistic and spiritual do not contradict each other. Materialistic and spiritual things do not need each other, and they can contradict each other. But realistic and spiritual are not opposites; it is quite possible for spiritual realism to be admired even by a materialistic person. In regard to artistic principles, the plays of Shakespeare can be thought of as realistic. You will understand, however, how far the art that goes hand in hand with a science of the spirit must finally lead. For the one who finds his Self out in the cosmos, the whole cosmos becomes an ego being. We cannot bear then anything coming toward us that is not related to the ego being. Art will gradually learn something in this direction; it will come to the ego principle, because the Christ has brought us our ego for the first time. In the most various realms will this ego be alive.

In still another way can the specific human entity be shown within the soul and also divided into its various components outside. If someone asked which person represents Atma, which one Buddhi, which one Manas? ... if someone in the audience could exclaim, “O yes, that figure on the stage is the personification of Manas!” ... it would be a horrible kind of art, a dreadful kind of art. It is a bad theosophical habit to try to explain everything like this. One would like to say, “Poor thing!” of a work of art that has to be “explained.” If it were to be attempted with Shakespeare's plays, it would indeed be absurd and downright wrong.

These habits are the childhood diseases of the theosophical movement. They will gradually be cured. But for once at least, it is necessary to point them out. It might even happen that someone tries to look for the nine members of the human organization in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven!

On the other hand, it is correct to some extent to say that the united elements of human nature can be assigned to different characters. One person has this soul coloring, a second person another; we can see characters on the stage who present different sides of the whole unified human being. The people we encounter in the world usually present one or another particular trait. As we develop from incarnation to incarnation, we gradually become a whole. To show this underlying fact on the stage, our whole life has somehow to be separated into parts.

In this Rosicrucian Mystery, we will find that everything that Maria is supposed to be is dispersed among the other figures who are around her as companions. They form with her what might be called an “egoity.” We find special characteristics of the sentient soul in Philia, of the intellectual soul in Astrid, of the consciousness soul in Luna. It was for this reason that their names were chosen. The names of all the characters and beings were given according to their natures. In Devachan, Scene Seven, particularly, where everything is spirit, not only the words but also the placing of the words is meant to characterize the three figures of Philia, Astrid, and Luna in their exact relationships. The speeches at the beginning of Scene Seven are a better description of sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul than any number of words otherwise could achieve. Here one can really demonstrate what each soul is. One can show in an artistic form the relationship of the three souls by means of the levels at which the figures stand. In the human being they flow into one another. Separated from each other, they show themselves clearly: Philia as she places herself in the cosmos; Astrid as she relates herself to the elements; Luna as she directs herself into free deed and self-knowledge. Because they show themselves so clearly in the Devachan scene, everything in it is alchemy in the purest sense of the word; all of alchemy is there, if one can gradually discover it.

Not only as abstract content is alchemy in the scene but in the weaving essence of the words. Therefore, you should listen not merely to what is said, nor indeed only to what each single character speaks, but particularly to how the soul forces speak in relation to one another. The sentient soul pushes itself into the astral body; we can perceive weaving astrality there. The intellectual soul slips itself into the etheric body; there we perceive weaving ether being. We can observe how the consciousness soul pours itself with inner firmness into the physical body. Soul endeavor that has an effect like light is contained in Philia's words. In Astrid is contained what brings about the etheric-objective ability to confront the very truth of things. Inner resolve connected at first with the firmness of the physical body is given in Luna. We must begin to be sensitive to all this. Let us listen to the soul forces in Scene Seven:

Philia (Sentient soul)

I will imbue myself
with clearest essence of the light
from worldwide spaces.
I will breathe in sound-substance,
life-bestowing,
from far ethereal regions,
that you, beloved sister, with your work
may reach your goal.

Astrid (Intellectual soul)

And I will weave
into the radiant light
the clouding darkness.
I will condense
the life of sound,
that glistening it may ring
and ringing it may glisten,
that you, beloved sister,
may guide the rays of soul.

Luna (Consciousness soul)

I will enwarm soul-substance
and will make firm life-ether.
They shall condense themselves,
they shall perceive themselves,
and in themselves residing
guard their creative forces,
that you, beloved sister,
within the seeking soul
may quicken certainty of knowledge.

I would like to draw your attention to the words of Philia,

Dass dir, geliebte Schwester,
Das Werk gelingen kann.
(that you, beloved sister, with your work may reach your goal.)

and to those of Astrid that carry the connotation of something heavier, more compact,

Dass du, geliebte Schwester ...

“Dass dir,” “Dass du,” and then we have the “Du” again in Luna's speech woven together with the still heavier, weighty

Der suchenden Menschenseele
(within the seeking soul)

There the “u” is woven into its neighboring consonants, so that it can take on a still firmer compactness.¹

These are the things that one can actually characterize. Please remember, it all depends on the “How.” Let us compare the words Philia speaks next:

I will entreat the spirits of the worlds
that they, with light of being,
enchant soul feeling,
that they, with tone of words,
charm spirit hearing,

with the rather different ones of Astrid:

I will guide streams of love
that fill the world with warmth,
into the heart
of him, the consecrated one.

Just here, where these words are spoken, the inner weaving essence of the world of Devachan has been achieved.

I am mentioning all this, because the scenes should make it clear that when self-knowledge begins to unfold into the outer cosmic weaving and being, we have to give up everything that is one-sided. We have to learn, too, to be aware—as we otherwise do only in a quite superficial, pedestrian way—of what is at hand at every point of existence. We become inflexible creatures, we human beings, when we stay rooted to only one spot in space, believing that our words can express the truth. But words, limited as they are to physical sound, are not what best will communicate truth. I would like to put it like this: we have to become sensitive to the voice itself. Anything as important as Johannes Thomasius' path to self-knowledge can be rightfully experienced—it depends on this—only when he struggles courageously for that self-knowledge and holds on to it.

When self-knowledge has crushed us, the next stage is to begin to draw into ourselves, to harbor inwardly what was our outer experience, learning how closely the cosmos is related to ourselves (for this comes to us after we understand the nature of the beings around us); now we must attempt courageously to live with our understanding. It is only one half of the matter to dive down like Johannes into a being to whom we have brought sorrow and have thrust into cold earth. For now, we have begun to feel differently. We summon up our courage to make amends for the pain we have caused. Now we can dive into this new life and speak out of our own nature differently. This is what confronts us in Scene Nine. In Scene Two the young girl cried out to Johannes:

He brought me bitter sorrow;
I gave him all my trust.
He left me in my grief alone.
He robbed me of the warmth of life
and thrust me deep into cold earth.

In Scene Nine, however, after Johannes has undergone what every path to self-knowledge demands, the same being calls to him:

O you must find me once again
and ease my suffering.

This is the other side of the coin: first the devastation and despair, and now the return to equilibrium. The being calls to him:

O you must find me once again ...

It could not have been described otherwise, this lifting into perception of the world, this replenishing of himself with life experience. True self-knowledge through perception of the cosmos could only have been described with the words Johannes uses when he comes to himself. It has begun, of course, in Scene Two:

For many years these words
of weighty meaning I have heard.

Then—after he has dived down into deep earth, after he has united himself with it—the power is born in his soul to let the words arise that express the essence of Scene Nine:

For three years now I've sought
for power of soul, with wings of courage,
to give these words their truth.
Through them a man who frees himself can conquer
and, conquering himself, can find his freedom.

The words, “O man, unfold your being!” are in direct contrast to the words of Scene Two, “O man, know thou thyself!” There appears to us once and again the very same scene. It leads the first time downward to:

The world and my own nature
are living in the words:
O man, know thou thyself!

Then afterward it is the opposite; it has changed. The scene characterizes soul development.

You have also heard the devastating words:

Maria, are you then aware
through what my soul has fought its way?
-------------------
For me, man's final refuge,
for me, my solitude is lost.

But Scene Nine shows how the being of the girl attains first hope and then security. That is the turning point. It cannot be constructed haphazardly; it is actual experience. Through it we can sense how self-knowledge in a soul like Johannes Thomasius can ascend into a self- unfolding. We should perceive, too, how his experience is distributed among many single persons in whom one characteristic has been formed in each incarnation.

At the end of the drama a whole community stands there in the Sun Temple, like a tableau, and the many together are a single person. The various characteristics of a human being are distributed among them all; essentially there is one person there. A pedant might like to object. “Are there not too many different members of the whole? Surely nine or twelve would be the correct number!” But reality does not always work in such a way as to be in complete agreement with theory. This way it corresponds more nearly with the truth than if we had all the single constituents of man's being marching up in military rank and file.

Let us now put ourselves into the Sun Temple. There are various persons standing in the places they belong to karmically, just as their karmas have brought them together in life. But when we think of Johannes here in the middle and think, too, that all the other characters are mirrored in his soul, each character as one of his soul qualities—what is happening there if we can accept it as reality?

Johannes Thomasius

Karma has actually brought these persons together as in a focal point. Nothing is without intention, plan, or reason; what the single individualities have done not only has meaning for each one himself, but each is also a soul experience for Johannes Thomasius. Everything is happening twice: once in the macrocosm, a second time in the microcosm, in the soul of Johannes. This is his initiation. Just as Maria, for example, has a special connection with him, so, too, there is an important part of his soul with a similar connection to another part of his soul. Those are absolute correspondences, embodied in the drama uncompromisingly. What one sees as outer stage- happening is, in Johannes, an inner happening in his development. There has to come about what the Hierophant has described in Scene Three:

There forms itself within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.

It has already formed itself, and this truly entangled knot shows what everything is leading toward. There is absolute reality as to how karma spins its threads; it is not an aimless spinning. We experience the knot as the initiation event in Johannes' soul, and the whole scene shows us a certain individuality actually standing above the others, that is, the Hierophant, who is directing, who is guiding the threads. We need only think of the Hierophant's relationship to Maria.

But it is just there that we can realize how self- knowledge can illuminate what happens to Maria in Scene Three. It is not at all pleasant, this emerging out of the Self. It is a thoroughly real experience, a forsaking of the human sheaths by our inner power; the sheaths left behind become then a battleground for inferior powers. When Maria sends down a ray of love to the Hierophant, it can only be portrayed in this way: down below, the physical body, taken over by the power of the adversary, speaks out the antithesis of what is happening above. From above a ray of love streams down, and below arises a curse. Those are the contrasting scenes: Scene Seven inDevachan, where Maria describes what she has actually brought about, and Scene Three, where, from the deserted body, the curses of the demonic forces are directed toward the Hierophant. Those are the two corresponding scenes. They complete each other. If they had had to be “constructed” theoretically from the beginning, the end result would have been incredibly poor.

I therefore have based today's lecture on one aspect of this Mystery Drama, and I should like to extend this to include certain special characteristics that underlie initiation.

Although it has been necessary to bring out rather sharply what has just been shown as the actual events of initiation, it should not let you lose courage or resolve in your own striving toward the spiritual world. The description of dangers was aimed at strengthening a person against powerful forces. The dangers are there; pain and sorrow are the prospect. It would be a poor sort of effort if we proposed to rise into higher worlds in the most convenient way. Striving to reach the spiritual worlds cannot yet be as convenient as rolling over the miles in a modern train, one of those many conveniences our materialistic culture has put into our everyday lives. What has been described should not make us timid; to a certain extent the very encounter with the dangers of initiation should steel our courage.

Johannes Thomasius' disposition made him unable to continue painting; this grew into pain, and the pain grew into perception. So, it is that everything that arouses pain and sorrow will transform itself into perception. But we have to search earnestly for this path, and our search will be possible only when we realize that the truths of spiritual science are not at all simple. They are such profound truths for our whole life that no one will ever understand them perfectly. It is just the single example in actual life that helps us to understand the world. One can speak about the conditions of a spiritual development much more exactly when one describes the development of Johannes, rather than when one describes the development of human beings in general. In the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,² the development that every human being can undertake is described, simply the concrete possibility as such. When we portray Johannes Thomasius, we look at a single individuality. But therewith we lose the opportunity of describing such development in a general way.

I hope you will be induced to say that I have not yet spoken out the essential truth of the matter. For we have described two extremes and must find the various gradations between them. I can give only a few suggestive ideas, which should then begin to live in your hearts and souls.

When I gave you some indications about the Gospel of St. Matthew,³ I asked you not to try to remember the very words but to try—when you go out into life—to look into your heart and soul to discover what the words have become. Read not only the printed lectures, but read also in a truly earnest way your own soul.

For this to happen, however, something must have been given from outside, something has first to enter into us; otherwise, there could be self-deception of the soul. If you can begin to read in your soul, you will notice that what comes to you from outside re-echoes quite differently within. A true anthroposophical effort would be first of all to understand what is said in as many different ways as there are listeners.

No one speaking about spiritual science could wish to be understood in only one sense. He would like to be understood in as many ways as there are souls present to understand him. Anthroposophy can tolerate this. One thing is needed, however, and this is not an incidental remark; one thing is needed: every single kind of understanding should be correct and true. Each one may be individual, but it must be true. Sometimes it seems that the uniqueness of the interpretation lies in being just the opposite of what has been said.

When then we speak of self-knowledge, we should realize how much more useful it is to come to it by looking for mistakes within ourselves and for the truth outside.

It shall not be said, “Search within yourself for the truth!” Indeed, truth is to be found outside ourselves. We will find it poured out over the world. Through self- knowledge we must become free of ourselves and undergo those various gradations of soul experience. Loneliness can become a horrid companion.

We can also perceive our terrible weakness when we sense with our feelings the greatness of the cosmos out of which we have been born. But then through this we take courage. And we can make ourselves courageous enough to experience what we perceive.

Then we will finally discover that, after the loss of all the certainty we had in life, there will blossom for us the first and last certainty of life, the confidence that finding ourselves in the cosmos allows us to conquer and find ourselves anew.

O man, experience the world within yourself!
For then—in striding forth beyond your self—
You will find yourself at last
Within you own true Self.

Let us feel these words as genuine experience. They will gradually become for us steps in our development.

• 1. In the English translation of The Portal of Initiation these three sound distinctions could not be kept, except in the word “soul” at the end of Luna's speech, in which the (spoken) diphthong possesses a nuance of “u.”
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, reprinted 1983.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of St. Matthew, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965.

The light of the sun is flooding
The realms of space;
The song of birds resounds
Through fields of air;
The tender plants spring forth
From Mother Earth,
And human souls rise up
With grateful hearts
To all the spirits of the world.

Those of you who were present at the performance in Munich will remember that this children's song was the prelude to the Rosicrucian Mystery. Tonight, something of a spiritual scientific nature should unfold itself to us in connection with the content of this drama and with what, one could say, has come to life in it.

If I may, I would like to touch on the long, slow spiritual path that led to this Mystery Drama. When I think about it and look at it, its origins go back to the year 1889, twenty-one years ago; it is not approximately but exactly twenty-one years that bring me back to the germinal point of this drama. In these matters, absolute exactness can be observed. The direction has been quite clear to me in which, in 3x7 years, these seeds have grown (without any special assistance, I can say, on my part), for they have led their own individual life in these 3x7 years. It is truly remarkable to follow the path of such seeds to what may be called their finished form. Their progress can be described as a passage through the Underworld. It takes seven years for them to descend; then they return, and for this they need seven more years.

By then, having reached more or less the place where they first engaged a person before their descent, they must go in the opposite direction for seven years toward the other side; one could even say, onto a higher level. After twice seven years, then, plus seven more years, it is possible to try to embody them, foreseeing that whatever has been right in their development can take on a distinct form. If I were not convinced that within the Rosicrucian Mystery an individual organism has lived and grown for 3x7 years, I would not venture to speak further about it. I feel not only justified in speaking, however, though this is not really the question, but also in a sense obligated to speak about what lives in this Rosicrucian Mystery, not only between the lines, between the characters, in the What and the How, but what is alive in everything in the drama and what must be alive in it.

In various places since the performance of the drama in Munich, I have stated the fact that many, many things of an esoteric nature would not need to be described, that lectures would be unnecessary on my part, if only everything that lies in the Rosicrucian Mystery could work directly on your souls, my dear friends, and on the souls of others, too. I would have to use the enormous number of words necessary in my lectures and speak for days, for weeks, even for years, in order to describe what has been said and what could be said in the single drama. Everything you find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,¹ which is written in a somewhat tentative style—and in esoteric matters it is certainly correct to write thus as a description of the path into higher worlds—combined with what was said in Occult Science,² can be found, after all, in a much more forceful, true-to-life, and substantial form in the Rosicrucian Mystery. The reason is that it is more highly individualized. What is said in such a book as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds about human development had to be applicable to every individual who wishes to direct his path in some way into higher worlds, applicable to each and every person. Because of this, the book takes on—even with as much concreteness as possible—a certain abstract character, or you might call it a semi-theoretical character. We must hold fast, however, to this point: human development is never merely development in general. There is no such thing as development per se, no such thing as common, ordinary, orthodox development. There is only the development of this or that particular person, of a third, fourth, or twentieth human being. For each individual in the world, there must be a different process of development.

For this reason, the most honest description of the esoteric path of knowledge must have such a general character that it never in any way will coincide with an individual development. Should one actually describe the path of development as seen in the spiritual world, one can do it only by shaping the development of a single human being, by altering for the individual whatever is universally true. The book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, contains, to a certain extent, the beginning of the secrets of all human development. The Rosicrucian Mystery contains the secrets of the development of a single individual, Johannes Thomasius.

It was a truly long descent from all the occult laws of development down to a single, actually real human being. In this process, on this path, what has a tendency to become theory in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds had to be turned almost completely upside down. If it was to go beyond mere theory and particularly if it was to enter the artistic sphere, it had to be completely reversed, because the laws of art are quite different from any others. Just as there are natural laws, so there are also artistic laws, and these cannot be manipulated by the ordinary human consciousness, for then only dry-as-dust allegories would be the result.

Artistic laws must be handled just as Mother Nature handles her own laws when she lets a child, a plant, or an animal come into existence. If everything we can know about the world of nature is to be seen from the one direction that reveals its laws and secrets to the beholder, then whatever is to be revealed in art—any kind of art—must be seen from the other side, from just the opposite point of view. Therefore, it would be the worst imaginable interpretation of a work of art to start from ideas, concepts, or laws we have picked up somewhere, when we approach, say, a poem. Whoever thinks of explaining a work of art by means of abstract or symbolic ideas cannot be considered artistic. The poorest method of looking at a piece of work from the past in which true esoteric power has been invested, for instance, Goethe's Faust, would be to search within this work of art for the ideas and concepts one already has. Bad habits of this kind once prevailed in the theosophical movement in the most horrible way. I can remember something that happened just last year when we were performing Schuré's play, The Children of Lucifer. How shocking it was to the dramatist, who is an artist in the best sense of the word, when someone came up to him to ask, “Does this character represent Atma, this one Buddhi, a third Manas, or maybe this one is Kama Manas?” etc., etc. This kind of allegorizing is simply impossible in a truly creative, artistic process, and it is just as impossible in an explanation or interpretation. Therefore, it can now be said that no one should be pondering the anthroposophical meaning of Johannes Thomasius. To this question there is only one answer: as the main character in the drama, he is nothing more than Johannes Thomasius. He is nothing more than the living figure, Johannes Thomasius, in whom nothing more is portrayed than the mystery of development of one man, Johannes Thomasius.

If one speaks in too general a way about the various characters, one thing will be missing, which is hinted at in the words of the drama itself:

There forms itself out of this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.

There is no development evolving at any point of human history without the knotting of threads within that development, “spun by karma in world becoming.” And no individual development can be described without showing what is at work in the realm of the occult, that is, in the physical environment one looks at with the forces lying behind that physical environment. Therefore, Johannes Thomasius must be placed in the human surroundings out of which his development is proceeding in the real world of physical men and women.

For this reason, the drama has to have a double introduction. The Prelude shows how the cosmic world in which the threads are knotting together for Johannes, threads that “karma spins in world becoming,” how this world confronts the ordinary outside world. One can certainly ask if this must be shown, if there must be a Prelude to show how this cosmic world looks from outside. Yes, it has to be shown. Something would be lacking if it were not so presented. The world in which karma spins its knots was quite different in 5000 B.C., for instance, from the world in 300 B.C. or in 1000 A.D. or today. The exoteric, ordinary, outside world is always changing, too, and its own karma is connected with the environment of a person who wishes to develop himself. Thus, the circle is drawn from outside inward. On the inside is the small circle in which Johannes Thomasius stands: the second Prelude. In the ordinary world outside there are trivial waves touching the shore; in the small circle, great waves are surging high. They show their turbulence, however, only within the soul of Johannes. That is why we are introduced first to the physical plane, and it is shown to us in such a way that the threads, which karma is spinning everywhere within this physical plane, are pointed out.

When you look with occult vision at any group of people, you will find that there are strands extending from one person to another, tangled in the most astonishing way. You see human beings who apparently have little to do with each other in ordinary life, but between their souls are flung the most important, most vital connections. Everything so tangled together has gradually to be illuminated, with the focus on one particular knot. Sometimes, however, whatever is in the process of becoming must be hinted at more subtly. These delicate tones had to be sounded in Scene One, where the action is taking place on the physical plane and people with a wide variety of interests are coming together. Outwardly, they chat about this or that. As they talk, however, more or less on the surface, they are revealing karma. Everyone we first meet in Scene One on the physical plane is bound to the others by destiny. What is most fundamental is how they are bound by destiny. None of the connections have been simply thought out; they are all based on esoteric life. All the threads can come to life, and each thread is quite unique.

The remarkable character of these connections you can guess at when you find such figures as Felix and Felicia Balde meeting with Capesius and Strader. What they say is not the important thing; it is that just these persons say it. They are living persons, not invented characters. I, for one, am well acquainted with them; by that I mean they are not thought out but fully alive. They are real. I have taken especially the figure of Professor Capesius, who has grown quite dear to my heart, directly from life. The extraordinary scene of the seeress Theodora had to be brought into this setting of our ordinary world. She, as one who sometimes looks into the future, now foresees the event that is to happen before the end of the twentieth century, the coming Christ event. It is a future event that can be explained karmically, although it would be wrong to interpret other events so precisely.

Then there is the karmic relationship existing between Felicia Balde and Professor Capesius, which we find hinted at by the peculiar effect on Capesius of Felicia's fairy tales. When, too, we see Strader deeply moved by the seeress Theodora, it suggests that karmic threads are arising in Strader's heart, connecting him to her. These are all threads that lie occultly behind the physical occurrences, and they seem to be spun by karma and directed toward one point, Johannes Thomasius. In him they come together. While so much is being spoken about on the physical plane, a light begins to radiate in Johannes' soul, a light that arouses terrible waves within him. At the same time, however, this light kindles his esoteric development; as a distinctly individual development it will cross his own karma with world karma. We see, therefore, what a strong impression the happenings around him on the physical plane are making on him and how the unconscious greatness in his soul is striving upward to higher worlds.

The journey into higher worlds, however, should not take place without a compass; there must be guidance and direction. Into the midst, then, of these many relationships comes the one who is described as the leader of the group. He is also the one who understands the cosmic relationships and discerns therefore “the knots that karma spins in world becoming”; it is Benedictus, and he becomes Johannes' guide. The karma working in Johannes Thomasius, which perhaps otherwise would have to work another thousand or even thousands of years, is kindled and set ablaze in one particular moment through a karmic relationship between Benedictus and Johannes, lightly drawn in the Meditation Room scene (Scene Three). There we find ourselves at the point where a human being, destined by karma to develop himself, begins to strive upward into higher worlds. In order not to do so blindly, he will be led by Benedictus in the right direction. These thoughts will become clearer when the following passages of Scene Three are presented.

A room for meditation.
Benedictus, Johannes, Maria, and a Child.

Maria

I'm bringing you the child.
He needs a guiding word from you.

Benedictus

My child, from now on you shall come
to me each evening to hear the words
that then should dwell with you
before you enter the soul realm of sleep.
Will you do this?

Child

I'll do it gladly.

Benedictus

This evening fill your heart,
till sleep enfolds you,
with strength from these few words:
‘The heavenly powers of light are carrying me
into the spirit's house.’

(The Child is taken out by Maria, who then returns.)

Maria

And now that this child's destiny shall in future flow
within the shadow of your paternal care,
I too may ask your guiding counsel,
for I've become his mother
through powers of destiny,
if not by blood.
You showed me how
to bring him up
from that first day
when I discovered him,
left by his unknown mother at my door.
And all your rules
I followed for his guidance
worked wonders on my foster child.
For every force could come to light
that in his body and his soul lay hidden.
It soon was clear that your advice
sprang from the realm
which sheltered this child's soul
before it built its body's sheath.
We saw it hopefully unfold
and shine more brightly each new day.
You know how hard it was for me at first
to gain the child's affection.
He grew up in my care,
yet nothing more than habit
first joined his soul with mine.
He looked at me, perceiving only
that I gave him all he needed
for the well-being of his body and his soul.
Then came the time when in his heart
love was enkindled
for me, the foster mother.
An outer cause brought forth this change.
The seeress came into our circle.
The child became attached to her
and learned, enchanted by the way she spoke,
one or the other charming word.
Then came a moment when exaltation
laid hold of our strange friend;
our child could see
the glimmering light within her eyes.
He felt his young soul shaken to the core
and, frightened, rushed to me.
From this time on
the child has been devoted
to me in warmest love.
Yet since he now received his care from me
not just through natural impulse
but with awakened feeling—
since his young heart stirs warmly
whenever he looks lovingly at me—
the treasures of your wisdom
have lost their fruitfulness.
And withered now is much
that had already ripened in the child.
I saw revealed within his being
what for my friend has proved so terrible.
I'm ever more a dark enigma to myself.
Do not deny my asking this grave question:
why do I ruin friend and child
when lovingly I try to do for them
the work that spirit guidance
lets me perceive within my heart as good?
You've shown to me the lofty truth:
illusion's veil is covering the surface of our life.
Yet I must have clear knowledge,
if I must bear this destiny
which is so cruel and which works such evil.

Benedictus

There forms itself within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.
O friend, your sorrows
are part of such a knot of destiny in which
the deeds of gods entwine themselves with human life.
When on the pilgrimage of soul
I had attained that stage
which granted me the honor
of serving with my counsel in the spirit spheres,
there came to me a higher being
which should descend into the realm of earth
to take up its abode within a human body.
Man's destiny is now demanding this
at such a turning point of time.
A great step forward in our evolution
is only possible when gods
unite themselves with man's own lot.
For spirit eyes, which should awake
in human souls, can only be evolved
when first a god has laid the seed
within a human being.
The task was now assigned to me
to find that human being
who might be worthy to accept within his soul
the seed-force of the god.
I had to link a deed of heaven
unto a human destiny.
My spirit's eye made search—
it fell on you.
Your course of life had fitted you
as mediator for new healing forces.
In many lives you had acquired
an openness for the nobility
alive in human hearts.
The precious quality of beauty,
the highest claim of virtue,
you carried in your gentle soul
as spirit heritage.
What your eternal ego
brought down into this life through birth
matured to ripened fruit
in your first youthful years.
You did not scale too soon
the lofty spirit heights.
The longing for the spiritual world
did not arise in you
till you had fully grasped
the senses' innocent delights.
Your soul encountered love and anger while as yet
your thought was far away
from all desire for spirit.
To drink the joy of Nature in her beauty
and pick the fruits of art
was all you wished to find as riches in your life.
And you could gaily laugh
as only a small child can laugh
who has as yet no knowledge
of life's grey shadow side.
You learned to fathom human happiness,
and mourn men's pain, in times
when not an inkling had yet dawned
of questioning the roots of joy and sorrow.
The soul who shows such character
encounters earthly life
as the ripe fruit sprung from many lives.
Its childlike nature is its blossom, not
its root of being.
It was this soul alone that I could choose
as mediator for that spirit
who should attain to active power
within our human world.
So comprehend now that your being
must change into its opposite
when pouring forth from you to other beings.
The spirit in you works
in everything that can grow ripe in man
as fruit for realms eternal.
And therefore much it must destroy
that only has its place within the realm of time.
Its sacrifice in death, however,
is seed of immortality.
What flourishes for higher life
must bloom from death of lower being.

Maria

So this is how it stands with me.
You give me light,
but light that robs me of the power of sight
and tears me from myself.
Am I then nothing but a spirit's mediator
and not my own true being?
No more will I endure
this form of mine,
which is a mask and not the truth.

Johannes

Dear friend, what is it?
Your gaze has lost its light.
Your body's turned into a pillar.
I take your hand—
and it is cold as death.

Benedictus

My son, you've had to meet with many trials;
but now you stand before the hardest one.
You see her body's covering.
And yet before my gaze
her Self soars into spirit spheres.

Johannes

O see, her lips begin to move.
She speaks ...

Maria

You gave me clarity,
yes, clarity that shrouded me
in darkness on all sides.
I curse your clarity,
and you I curse
who made of me
a tool of those wild arts
through which you seek to misguide men.
Not for one moment have I ever doubted
how high you stand in spirit.
Yet now one single instant has sufficed
to tear all faith in you out of my heart.
And I must recognize that they are hell-born beings,
the spirits whom you serve.
I had to mislead others
because you misled me!
I'll flee from you to regions
wherein no word of yours can penetrate,
and yet be near enough
so that my curses can still reach you!
The fire of my blood
you've torn away from me
and given to your own false god
what must be mine.
The fire of this blood,
O may it burn you!
I had to trust
in lying and deceit,
and to accomplish this
you had at first to make of me
a phantom form.
I've often had to see
how deeds and thoughts of mine
were changed into their opposite.
So now let all
that once was love for you
be changed into wild hatred's fire.
I'll hunt through all the worlds
to find that fire
that can consume you.

I cur ... ah ...

Johannes

Who is it that is speaking here?
I do not see my friend—
I see a gruesome being!

Benedictus

Maria's soul is hovering in the heights;
she's left behind her here with us
her mortal semblance only.
And where a human body
is left without a spirit,
there's room which then
the enemy of good seeks out
to step into the realm of visibility.
He finds a body's covering
and through it he can speak.
Just such an adversary spoke
who strives now to destroy the work
I must fulfill
for many human beings' future,
for you as well, my son.
For could I take these curses,
just spoken by Maria's vacant shell,
as other than the tempter's guile,
you should not follow me.
The enemy of good was at my side;
and you, my son, have seen
plunge down into the darkness
the temporal part of her
to whom your whole love radiates.
Because so often spirits
have spoken to you through her lips,
world karma has not spared you
from hearing through them also
the prince of hell.

Now you can seek her finally
and learn to know her being's core.
For she shall be the image of that higher man
to whom you shall aspire to raise yourself.
Her soul is soaring forth to spirit heights
where men can find their being's primal form
that in itself is rooted.
You now shall follow her to spirit realms
and see her in the Temple of the Sun.
There forms itself
within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.
My son, you have stood firm so far;
you will progress still further.
I see your star in its full radiance.
There is no place in sense existence
for battles such as men must fight
who strive for consecration.
What sense existence hides as riddles
which can be solved by intellect,
what human hearts receive from such existence—
no matter if it comes from love or hate
or whether it bursts forth with frightful power—
this for the spirit seeker must become
a field on which he, uninvolved,
directs his vision from without.
For forces must unfold themselves for him
which are not found upon this field itself.
You had to wrest your way through trials of soul
which only come to those
well-armed to meet those powers
belonging to the spirit worlds.
And had those powers not found you ready
to tread the path of knowledge,
they would have had to lame your feeling
before you were allowed to know
what now has been revealed to you.
The beings who can gaze at world-foundations
lead men who strive into the heights
at first up to that summit
where can be shown
if they have strength
for conscious spirit sight.
Those who possess such forces
can be released out of the world of sense.
The others still must wait.
You have sustained your Self, my son,
when powers of the heights have shaken you
and spirit forces shrouded you in dread.
Your Self has strongly battled its way through,
when doubts were wrestling in your breast
and sought to give you over to dark depths.
You have been my true pupil only
since that portentous hour
when you, despairing, felt
that you yourself were lost,
and yet the strength in you still held you firm.
I was allowed to grant from wisdom's treasures
what gave you strength
to hold yourself,
though you believed no longer in yourself.
So was the wisdom which you conquered
more truthful than the faith
bestowed on you.
You are now found mature.
You now may be released.
Your friend has led the way.
In spirit you will find her.
I can still further give you the direction:
Call forth the fiery power of your soul
with words which, uttered through my mouth,
give you the key to spirit heights.
They will accompany you
when nothing longer guides you
which eyes of sense can still behold.
With your whole heart now willingly receive them:

Light's weaving essence radiates
through far-flung spaces
to fill the world with life.
Love's blessing pours its warmth
through time's long ages
to call forth revelation of all worlds.
And messengers of spirit join
light's weaving essence
with revelation of the soul.
And when with both, the human being
can join his own true self,
he is alive in spirit heights.

O spirits who can be perceived by man,
quicken with life the soul of this our son.
Let shine in him
what can illumine
his soul with spirit light.
Let sound in him
what can awaken
his self to joyous spirit growth.

Spirit Voice (behind the scene):

Thoughts now guide him
to depths of world-beginnings;
what as shadows he has thought,
what as phantoms he has felt
soars out, beyond the world of forms—
world, of whose fullness
men, when thinking,
dream in shadows;
world, from whose fullness
men, when seeing,
live within phantoms.

(As the curtain falls slowly, the music begins.)

Those last tones of music, composed by our dear friend, Arenson,³ bring to expression what is echoing from higher worlds into Johannes Thomasius' soul in the drama. It follows the solemn experience he has had in the Meditation Room, which proved him genuinely mature and strong enough to ascend into these higher worlds. At the end of the scene just recited, we hear words actually sounding out of the spiritual worlds in a completely real way, into a soul that up to a certain level, if I may so describe it, has stood the test. The imponderable had to be touched on gently with words that are more meaningful than one at first believes.

It must be quite clear that the knot spun out of the threads of world karma presents to Johannes Thomasius a fact of the most sublime and powerful nature in that solemn place. What is actually happening?

Johannes Thomasius has to perceive a soul to whom he is joined karmically in a wonderful way (as shown later in Devachan, Scene Seven), ascending directly before him into the spiritual world. It is a unique moment in world history when such a soul enters divine worlds. Naturally, not everything connected with this moment can be fully described, but it is definitely a real happening that anyone conversant with occult life will recognize in its frightening and powerful interweaving of light and shadow.

Such a person knows, too, what happens in the physical world at the shattering moment when a soul disappears into the spiritual world, not with the gradual step of individual karma but suddenly, challenged by world karma. These are moments that are vital for the evolution of mankind. They are also moments when the real, ever-present forces of temptation, peering into our physical world out of the spiritual world (just as the powers of good do), have the strength to take possession of deserted physical sheaths and use them as platforms for their guile and powers of deception. The body is the point from which they launch their attack. Immediately, then, the situation will show itself as maya, illusion, of the worst kind.

Confronted with the small deceptions of karma, a person who is not far developed will be unable to withstand temptation. Confronted with much greater deceptions of karma, something that at a certain stage of development one would no longer have believed to be possible, a soul will recoil terrified, unless it has already gone through certain tragic depths of life experience. One can imagine some people saying that they, too, could have withstood what happened in the Meditation Room—but they should really find themselves sometime in the same situation! The reality is far different from what we might think it to be. In a spiritual reality, strange forces are at work. If someone does not believe this, he should just consider whether or not he has had any genuine experience with a human physical body abandoned by its own soul. Human beings know only ensouled bodies. In this case quite different forces come into play, and it is against these forces that Johannes Thomasius has to stand firm, having been guided to this moment in world karma.

Now two things come into question. Johannes Thomasius first has to endure what is usually known as kamaloka, the world in which there appears to us as a mirror image what we ourselves truly are. Again, this sounds milder when spoken about than it is in reality. When it appears in its reality, there is not merely a picture limited in space to tell us what it is, but it intones this from every corner of the world around us. The whole world is we ourselves. For this reason, when you hear in Scene Two how Johannes Thomasius descends into the depths of his soul where he is “among rocks and springs,” it is not a single mirror image he conjures up, speaking to him out of his soul, but it sounds to him from everywhere around him, out of the rocks and springs, out of his whole surroundings. At such a moment, words that were tame enough as they came out of world theories or philosophical works, or even spiritual scientific writings, suddenly grow into terrifying power, for they sound forth out of the whole world from every side as though, reflected from unending space, they are caught up in the various processes of nature.

O man, know thou thyself!

Thus, they sound when they become audible after living year after year within the soul. The soul then is left, lonely and forsaken, and stands before its Self. Nothing is there but the world—but this world is one's own soul; it contains everything the soul is, what its karma is, everything it has perpetrated.

In a poetic work, only a special theme can be singled out—for instance, an action far in the past, the desertion of a woman—but this comes fully alive to confront Johannes Thomasius' soul. I can say only a few words about this. When it happens, Johannes loses what is necessary for him to lose: confidence in himself, in his strength, even in the ability to find in loneliness the healing for what brings him such agonizing pain on the physical plane when experiencing it there. The following words, therefore, I beg you to take as they should be taken, that is, as shaking the soul and filling it completely. When Johannes Thomasius hears from all the world around him the words, “O man, know thou thyself,” his soul answers, as though his ego were not present:

For many years these words
of weighty meaning I have heard.
They sound to me from air and water;
they echo up from depths of earth.
And just as in the acorn secretly
the structure of the mighty oak is pressed,
within the power of these words
there is contained
all that my thought can comprehend
about the nature of the elements,
of souls as well as spirits,
of time and of eternity.
The world and my own nature
are living in the words:
O man, know thou thyself!

This is answered powerfully “from the springs and rocks.” Then his whole inner being is turned outward:

And now! within me
it is becoming terribly alive.
Around me darkness weaves,
within me blackness yawns;
out of the world of darkness it resounds,
out of soul-blackness it rings forth:
O man, know thou thyself!

(There sounds from springs and rocks:
O man, know thou thyself!)

You must try to imagine how the Self joins the cosmic process outside. Usually, we stand still or go about our hourly tasks and fail to see what is happening out there. We have no idea of it and believe that we are within our own inner being. But Johannes is following consciously what is going on. Consciously, he keeps pace with the power of all the elements, moves with the hours of the day and transforms himself into the night.

The earth I follow in her cosmic course.
I rumble in the thunder,
I flash within the lightning.

All this leaves the impression with him: I am. This is the moment, however, when the I am becomes the Daimon of his own soul. In the process, man's self-assertion is completely silenced. One can scarcely try to speak out, “I am,” but the soul replies:

... But oh, I feel
already separated from my being.

Then Johannes' own being appears in a limited, constrained form:

I see my body's shell.
It is an alien being outside myself;
it is remote from me.
There hovers nearer now another body ...

Now he can no longer speak with his own mouth but with the mouth of another person. It is the woman to whom he has done a wrong:

‘He brought me bitter sorrow;
I gave him all my trust.
He left me in my grief alone.
He robbed me of the warmth of life
and thrust me deep into cold earth.’

Then he returns to his own body:

She whom I left, unhappy one,
I was now she herself,
and I must suffer her despair.
Self-knowledge lent me strength
to pour myself into another self.

At this point a path is begun that is afterward described at the close of the scene in the words showing the effect of the world and the effect of solitude. In the world everything that streams in from outside works in the most frightful way. What comes from within works in such a way that the solitude is absolutely filled with people. This is a test, a test designed for the purpose hinted at in the words recited to you earlier:

The beings who can gaze at world foundations
lead men who strive into the heights
at first up to that summit
where can be shown
if they have strength
for conscious spirit sight.
Those who possess such forces
can be released out of the world of sense.
The others still must wait.

At this moment Johannes Thomasius would have lost consciousness and been flung back into the sense world if he had not held his ground in Scene Two, the scene we have been discussing in which he confronts his Self. Two things then became clear: his Self, as far as it is aware, has little strength; this deprives him of self-confidence. But the eternal “I” within him, of which he as yet knows nothing, has immense strength. It buoys him up and helps him to surmount the experience in the Meditation Room when Maria's soul departs. He needs, therefore, only the words of Benedictus, the force of those words, to guide him upward.

In the lines read to you, you must sense a Mystery of Words. What this means is not merely something written down in a play. In these lines, cosmic forces are actually contained, down to the very sounds. Indeed, the sounds cannot be changed. The opening of a door into the spiritual world is provided by these words; therefore, they must be heard just as they are spoken. Anything of the nature of the following lines cannot be put together in an arbitrary manner:

Des Lichtes webend Wesen, es erstrahlet
Durch Raumesweiten,
Zu füllen die Welt mit Sein.
Der Liebe Segen, er erwärmet
Die Zeitenfolgen,
Zu rufen aller Welten Offenbarung.
Und Geistesboten, sie vermählen
Des Lichtes webend Wesen
Mit Seelenoffenbarung;
Und wenn vermählen kann mit beiden
Der Mensch sein eigen Selbst,
Ist er in Geisteshöhen lebend.

Light's weaving essence radiates
through far-flung spaces
to fill the world with life.
Love's blessing pours its warmth
through time's long ages
to call forth revelation of all worlds.
And messengers of spirit join
light's weaving essence
with revelation of the soul.
And when with both the human being
can join his own true self,
he is alive in spirit heights.

Only after this can there sound from out the other world what is to sound into the soul. These are only hints, as has been said before.

Johannes Thomasius is then really impelled into the spiritual world. He cannot, however, rise directly into this world into which every person must go; he must first pass through the astral world. In Scene Four you have the astral world represented as Johannes Thomasius perceives it on the background of his own particular, individual past experience. It is not a universal description of this world but rather a description of what, for example, Johannes Thomasius had to experience there. The astral world is quite different from the physical. It is possible to meet a person there and see him as he was decades before, or to see a young man as he will become in future years. They are both realities. In your soul nature, you are still the same today as you were as a child of three. What you see in the soul world is by no means what is shown in man's outer physical form. The physical appearance conceals at every moment what was true before and what will come as truth in the future. When we look into the astral world, it is first of all necessary to overcome the primary maya of the sense world in order to understand the illusory power of time. For this reason, Johannes Thomasius sees in the astral world the person he has met on the physical plane, Capesius, as he once was as a youth, and he sees the one he knows as Strader just as he will be as an old man. What does this mean? Johannes knows Strader as he is now in the sense world with the forces present in his soul on the physical plane. But already within Strader are the conditions for what he will become after several decades. This also has to be included in our knowledge of a human being. Thus, time is rent asunder. It is really so that time is quite elastic in its nature when one enters the higher worlds. In the physical world Johannes Thomasius knows Capesius as elderly, Strader as young; now they stand together in the astral world: Capesius young, Strader old. It is not that time is stretched forward and backward but that one man is shown in his youth, the other in his old age. It is an absolutely real fact.

Something more is shown in this scene, something people react to with adolescent scorn. This is the fact that our soul experiences are greater than we usually think they are, that good and bad have their consequences when experienced within the soul. For example, if we think thoughts that are cruel or even false, they stream into the depths of the world and back again; we are closely connected in our soul experiences with the elemental powers of nature. This is no mere image. From the esoteric point of view, for example, it is a reality when Capesius is brought before the Spirit of the Elements, who leads every human being into existence. Actually, Capesius is confronting what the Spirit of the Elements is concerned with—and concerned with in such a way that when we experience anything in the soul, it is related to the elemental forces of nature. Johannes Thomasius is shown that both Capesius and Strader, out of the depths of their souls, can arouse the opposing powers of the elements. In that world, therefore, thunder and lightning follow what they have felt in their souls as pride or haughtiness, error, truth or lies. In the physical world, the error or lie a person has in his soul is quite peculiar. Someone can stand before us with error and lying in his soul and may appear to be quite innocent. But the moment we look at him with astral vision, we can see raging storms that otherwise are represented on earth only as a picture by the most terrible convulsions of the elements. All this Johannes has to experience and everything, too, that in the astral world can show him the remarkable connections he did not recognize when he met them on the physical plane.

The names given in this Rosicrucian Mystery are not given just by chance. Names such as “the Other Maria,” and so on, all point to definite relationships, so that the “one” and the “other” Maria are not merely “two Marias” but present themselves as Maria-forces to the other characters. “The Other Maria,” the mysterious nature figure, is revealed to Johannes Thomasius as the soul living below the ordinary conscious soul quite inaudibly and imperceptibly as long as man lives only in the physical world. But you must not take these relationships and characters as symbols. The Other Maria is absolutely a real person, a reality, just as the first Maria is. They should be taken for what they really are.

Everything that Johannes Thomasius has experienced passes before the eyes of his soul. He has experienced the astral world. This he can now bring into his consciousness by saying:

In realms of soul I find again
the human beings who are known to me.
The man who spoke about Felicia's fairy tales:
I could behold him here
as in his younger years;
and also he who as a youth
had chosen to become a monk:
here as an old man he appeared to me.
And with them was the Spirit of the Elements.

(End of Scene Four)

Johannes Thomasius has passed through what wipes out time before his eyes, because he has now become mature, sufficiently mature to see into the astral world. Is this world free from error? No, it is not. But in the astral world one thing can become a certainty for man. It will become a certainty for him, if he enters it in purity and without guilt, that there is a higher world shining into the astral world, just as the astral world shines into the ordinary physical world. The only question is whether or not he can see this as it actually is. People who go about in this physical world are themselves only a kind of illusion, in that they have something behind them leading them into the higher world. They stand in contrast to what they have perhaps been in distant or more recent times and what they will become in the future. But certain errors do not show us the astral world in which one is quite entangled in the world of the senses. For instance, they do not show the relationship of the three great forces of our existence: Will, Love, and Wisdom. This is so difficult to discern and understand in its reality that it remains hidden for a long time in the astral world. It is not an easy matter to discover it there. Besides, some relationships that are errors in the sense world are continued on into the astral world.

The working together of will, wisdom, and love, which at this point can only be touched on, takes place in the physical world through human beings. In the higher worlds, it takes place through the beings who expend their forces whenever, on the physical plane, the forces of supersensible beings descend into human souls. This happens through initiates in those temples where there are human representatives for the single world-forces, where human beings have come so far as to renounce the desire to portray the whole human being as he is but limit themselves to portraying a single force. It is the representatives who have taken over. But when man looks into the astral world, those holy places of the representatives of the powers of will, wisdom, and love are shown to him in a picture filled with maya. Therewith is woven a fearful web between the illusion of the sense world and of the astral world.

Now, I should have to talk for weeks if I wished to explain how it is with that figure of the higher powers shown as the initiate of the powers of will; he has met Johannes Thomasius on the physical plane, and there he really seems to be an ordinary, superficial fellow. In such a case the question can arise: are the primal forces of will supposed to work through such a person? Yes, they are. We can perhaps understand that the force manifesting the powers of will can permeate just this kind of less developed human being in the same way as the radiance of wisdom enters a man like Benedictus. We must grasp the following. If we have a beautiful flower in full bloom and place a seed beside it, it may be that the seed when developed will bring forth a still more beautiful flower. The flower can at this moment be considered quite perfect, but, according to cosmic reality, the seed is actually something more perfect. Hence, we have these opposites: Benedictus, the eminent bearer of wisdom, and the man who on the physical plane behaves in such a strange way toward everything said about the spiritual worlds and in such a strange way rejects it all. When in a group of people he hears talk about the spiritual worlds, he says, as if he were unwilling to listen:

I cannot find the bridge that leads across
from mere ideas to actual deeds.

(Romanus, Scene One)

He is a man who finds elsewhere what leads to deeds; to him, any talk about the spiritual is simply empty talk. You could tell this fellow beautiful things about theosophy; to the man he is, now, on the physical plane, it is nothing but words. What he finds worthwhile is the working of machines. When he hears about the Other Maria, how spiritual power has become part of her, kindling a strength of feeling and love in her so that she can perform healing deeds, he is the one who rejects all this, saying merely, “That comes from her having a good heart!” He remains wholly on the physical plane, where he is indeed a philistine, an ordinary fellow, but also at the same time an energetic, determined man of will. Hence, he says:

If this good person has achieved so much
the impulse lies
in her warm heart.
When work is done, men surely need
refreshment and renewal from ideas.
But only training of the will,
combined with skill and strength
in all the genuine work of life,
will further human progress.
When whirr of wheels
is humming in my ears,
and when contented human hands
are labouring at machines,
it's then I feel the powers of life at work.

This is the man of will, the man of action. If you were to talk to him day in and day out about the spirit, his only response would be, “You can't turn a winch with that; meanwhile, what are people going to eat?” This amounts to saying, “Turn your winches all day long, and then, if you have a little spare time, talk about the spirit for amusement!” Here are the forces still latent in the seed, and they are good forces, important forces. Through the powers of will they stream into the world. When people hear about spiritual worlds and receive what is said, each in his own way, this must not be judged theoretically, for it is extremely difficult to arrive at the truth. If you do not understand that a seed must be looked upon as the counterpart to such a person as has just been described, you will be experiencing the same kind of illusion as the one presented by the Subterranean Temple. There it is an astral maya. There is reality in what Johannes Thomasius perceives in the scene with Capesius and Strader when he sees them at different ages. But in Scene Five a maya, a Fata Morgana of the spiritual world, is pictured, from which, after it has been experienced, the soul must free itself. Therefore, you have to take Scene Five as justified only by the fact that reality is intermingled with the maya.

No part of this scene would contribute to Johannes Thomasius' development unless it bore the same relationship to astral experience that the concepts and ideas of the physical world bear to our understanding of the world. What scientific knowledge is for the physical plane, the “Maya Temple” is for the astral world. The “Maya Temple” is no more a reality rooted in the spiritual world than a concept is something we can eat. But concepts must live in the world for an understanding of the world to be possible. Only in this way can there play in from another world what is profoundly illuminating for Johannes Thomasius, that is, to recognize the definite knot in world karma formed when Felix Balde comprehends that in solitary wanderings about the world he must not bury his soul treasures but must bring them to the temple.

Then, for the first time, it is possible for Johannes Thomasius to perceive relationships in the spiritual world that are, so to speak, much more real, and of a more delicate and intimate nature. For example, the projection of the astral world into the physical world takes place when such a thing happens as the inspiring of a man like Capesius by someone who does not really know, herself, how much is living in her soul. In the Mystery Play, Felicia Balde does not know this. In the case of a man of intellect, a man who works intellectually, everything passes through his intellect. There is nothing whatever in the intellect that can give us strength while it instructs us about the world. This lies outside the capacity of the intellect. In a person of exceptional intelligence, a force coming from the spiritual world may pass through the intellect and then continue. At this point, he will be able to speak of the spiritual world in splendid, theoretical terms. The mind, however, does not influence the degree of inner esoteric life or the content of the soul. What comes from theories may reach the soul even without passing through the intellect; it can discover a person who is receptive to the fountainhead of spirit and who can summon up something there that Capesius, for instance, describes on the physical plane. This is clearly shown in his words about Felicia Balde, who lives out there in the solitude with Felix, and what she really means to him—when he says how gladly he listens to her because she speaks out of the most profound, age-old wisdom. It is important for us to grasp fully what Capesius is saying: on the physical plane, there is a woman to whom he likes to listen and from whose lips come things welling up from occult sources. She cannot clothe them in elegant words, but when her words reach the ear of Capesius, he can say:

I must allude
if I'm to tell about it,
to something which in truth
seems far more wonderful to me
than much that I have heard of here,
because it speaks more to my heart.
I scarcely should be able in another place
to bring the words across my lips
which here I find so easy.
I feel my soul, at times,
as though entirely empty and exhausted;
it is as if the very fountainhead
of knowledge had run dry within me,
as if I could not find one word
that seems worthwhile to speak or to be heard.

(Scene One)

Such things exist. Such people, however much they know, feel at these times as if they could get no further.

And when I feel such barrenness of spirit,
then I escape and go where these good people
have their refreshing, quiet solitude.

Then his soul begins to open out, because that is for him the door into the occult world.

And there Felicia tells me many a tale
in pictures fabulous,
of beings dwelling in the land of dreams
and in the realm of magic fairy tales,
who live a motley life.
The tone in which she tells of them
recalls the bards of ancient times.
I do not ask the sources of her words,
but this one thing I clearly know:
that new life wells and flows into my soul
dispelling its paralysis.

The reality of all this Johannes Thomasius can observe on the physical plane, for he is present, but to be able to explain it to himself he has first to look into the astral world. In Scene Six then, in the astral world, Felicia Balde appears to him “just as she is in life.” She gives the Spirit of the Elements one of the hundreds of fairy tales she has told Capesius. Now, however, comes the reciprocal movement to what takes place below the threshold of consciousness.

Felicia has told Capesius her fairy tales. When she tells one that she herself does not understand, the forces arise in his soul that banish his mental paralysis; then he can, in turn, relate something to his audience. It sounds, however, quite different from what Felicia has related. Mysterious forces are active even in Capesius. When one seeks to discover them, he will find their origin in the astral world, where it can be seen how they call forth countercurrents. Wherever there are elemental powers, they call up the kind of reverberations that Felicia's words awaken in the soul of Capesius. The same kind of thing occurs in our brain. A little spirit lives there who perhaps thinks out the most wonderful things. When we try to discover how he comes out of the macrocosm, we are likely to find the Earth-brain, which thinks thoughts on quite a different scale from those appearing in the small human brain. A man will often assert something he does not see in his own brain, but it will look grotesque when it is reflected in the giant Earth-brain. This has to be reflected; hence, the relationship of Gairman, who appears on the physical plane and then as the Spirit of the Earth-brain. About this, too, one could speak for a long time. Were we to look with soul vision at what takes place in the lonely cottage when Felicia tells her fairy tales and afterward behold the Spirit of the Earth-brain, we would discover many a secret, as, for instance, how ironical this Spirit of the Earth-brain is and how often he mocks. Ridicule has to be a concern of his, because he finds much to laugh at in what human beings do.

From an artistic point of view, it is justifiable that the moment this mockery is out of place, Gairman appears in the role he has so often to play and shows himself in his true guise. We see then, after Felicia Balde has told one of her fairy tales before the Spirit of the Elements in Scene Six, how an abnormal effect is produced on the Spirit of the Earth-brain, who translates the tale in quite different words. Felicia relates the story:

... Once upon a time
there was a Being
that flew from East to West,
following the journey of the sun.
It flew on, over lands and over seas;
and from the heights it watched
the busy life of men.
It saw how men love one another,
and how in hate they persecute each other.
Nothing could hinder
this Being in its flight;
for hate and love create
always the same a thousandfold.
But over one house on its way
the Being had to pause.
Within, there was a tired man
who pondered over human love
and pondered, too, on human hate.
His pondering had carved
deep furrows on his brow,
had turned his hair quite white.
In its concern for him,
the Being lost its guide, the sun,
and stayed at this man's side.
It was still in his room
at evening when the sun went down;
and when the sun returned,
the Being was once more
caught upward by the spirit of the sun.
Again it saw the many people in love, in hate,
continue on their earthly course.
And when it came a second time
above the house, still following the sun,
its gaze fell there
upon a dead old man.

The Spirit of the Earth-brain responds in a way that is naturally not at all justifiable:

Once upon a time there was a man
who tramped from East to West;
the urge for knowledge lured him on
to travel over lands and seas,
and by his rules of wisdom
he watched the busy life of men.
He saw how men love one another
and how in hate they persecute each other.
At every single instant
he saw himself at all his wisdom's end.
For how it is that hate and love
forever rule the earthly world
could not be brought into a law.
He noted many thousand cases,
yet lacked a comprehensive whole.
This dry researcher
encountered on his way
a Being of the Light,
upon whom life weighed heavily,
for it was in a constant battle
with a dark shadow-form.
‘Well, who are you?’
inquired the dry researcher.
‘Oh, I am Love,’
one being answered.
‘In me behold dark Hate,’
so spoke the other.
The man, however, could
no longer hear these beings' words.
As deaf researcher, tramped on
from East to West, this man.

These things are distinct experiences of the astral world. Johannes Thomasius has to pass through them in order to ascend into the spiritual world.

Today I will only say briefly that it is necessary for Johannes Thomasius, in order to reach the spiritual world itself, to make a real connection with that world on threads already woven in the physical world. As you will hear later in the recitation of Scene Seven, his connection with the spiritual world arose out of the karma encompassed by incarnations, and this could be revealed only to Devachanic vision. Devachanic elements actually have to play their part. Therefore, I ask you to notice how everything is alive in the living, weaving Devachanic ocean. This can be described, but the details must more or less be hinted at. For a real description, we must go further. Let us not think that we know anything of higher worlds by speaking about them with the words sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, alluding to Philia, Astrid, and Luna. These three figures are in no way personifications of the three soul principles, nor are they symbols for them. Listen to the vowels with which each of these characters describes her activities. Try to hear what lives in the vowels. Then you can follow how the sequence of single vowels and single words make clear what is given in a different way as sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. Should you delete any part of it, it will no longer be intact. Therefore, it is important to listen carefully to the words when, for instance, Luna speaks, so as to get an understanding of the Devachanic element in the consciousness soul:

Ich will erwärmen Seelenstoff
Und will erhärten Lebensäther.
Sie sollen sich verdichten,
Sie sollen sich erfühlen,
Und in sich selber seiend
Sich schaffend halten,
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
Der suchenden Menschenseele
Des Wissens Sicherheit erzeugen kannst.

I will enwarm soul-substance
and will make firm life-ether.
They shall condense themselves,
they shall perceive themselves,
and in themselves residing
guard their creative forces,
that you, beloved sister,
Within the seeking soul
may quicken certainty of knowledge.

(Scene Seven)

In the movement of the words can be heard in this description of Devachan what otherwise cannot in any way be expressed. This, too, must be taken into consideration. When speaking about higher worlds, we are definitely obliged to speak in many different ways. What I could never say theoretically about the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls you may perceive, if you have the desire to understand it, from the characterization of the three figures, Philia, Astrid, and Luna. But you must understand that these three are not symbols or allegories of the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. Should you ask, “What are these three?” the answer would be, “They are persons who are alive; they are Philia-, Astrid-, and Luna-people.” This always must be kept firmly in mind.

How karma, finally intertwining and twisting itself together, can display in a picture what as microcosm Johannes Thomasius experiences in his soul—this was portrayed in the whole closing scene of the Munich performance. Showing how karma is at work, the various characters stood in their places. Each had his position according to his relationship to another person. If you imagine this actually mirrored in the soul of Johannes Thomasius, you will then have more or less what is contained in this picture of the spirit realm in Scene Seven, which could only with great difficulty be given verbal expression.

(There followed a recitation of Scene Seven by Marie von Sivers, accompanied at the beginning and end by the music of Adolf Arenson.)

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, reprinted 1983.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, 1979.
• 3. Adolf Arenson (1855-1936) composed the music for the four Mystery Dramas at the request of Rudolf Steiner.

Let us consider today the second Mystery Drama, The Soul's Probation. You will have noticed that in our various stage performances, and especially in this play, an attempt was made to bring the dramatic happenings into connection with our anthroposophical world view. In this play in particular, we wanted to present on the stage in a very real way the idea of reincarnation and its effect on the human soul. I need not say that the incidents in The Soul's Probation are not simply thought out; they fully correspond with observations of esoteric study in certain ways, so that the scenes are completely realistic in a definite sense of the word. We can discuss this evening first of all the idea that a kind of transition had to be created, leading from Capesius' normal life to his plunge into a former life, into the time when he lived through his previous incarnation.

I have often asked myself since The Soul's Probation was written, what enabled Capesius to build a bridge from his life in a world where he had known—though certainly with a genial spirit—only what is given by external sense perception with a world view bound to the instrument of the brain; how it was, I say, that a bridge could be created from such a world to the one into which he then plunged, which could only be revealed through occult sense organs. I have often asked myself why the fairy tale, with the three figures at the rock spring (Scene Five) had to be the bridge for Capesius. Of course, it was not because of some clever idea or some deliberate decision that the fairy tale was placed just at this point, but simply because imagination brought it about. One could even ask afterward why such a fairy tale is necessary. In connection, then, with The Soul's Probation there came to me certain enlightening points of view about the poetry of fairy tales in general and about poetry in relation to anthroposophy.

A person could well put into practical use in his life the facts implicit in the division of the soul into sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls, but when he does, riddles of perception will loom up in a simply elemental- emotional way with regard to his place in, and relationship to, the world. These riddles do not allow themselves to be spoken out in our ordinary language, with our ordinary concepts, for the simple reason that we are living today in too intellectual a time to bring to expression in words, or through what is possible in words, the subtle distinctions between the three members of our soul.

It is better to choose a method that will allow the soul's relationship to the world to seem diversified and yet quite definite and clear. What moves through the whole of The Soul's Probation as the connecting link between the events themselves and what is significant in the three figures, Philia, Astrid, and Luna, had to be expressed in delicate outlines; yet this had to call up strong enough soul responses to bring out clearly man's relationship to the world around him. It could be presented in no other way than to show how the telling of the fairy tale about the three women awoke in Capesius' soul, as a definite preparation for his development, the strong urge to descend into those worlds that only now are beginning to be perceived again by human beings as real.

There will now be a recital of the fairy tale, so that we can reflect upon it afterward.

(Scene Five: Tale of the Rockspring Wonder)

Once upon a time there was a boy
who lived—the only child of a poor forester—
within a woodland solitude. He knew
besides his parents hardly any other people.
His build was slender,
his skin almost transparent.
One could look long into his eyes:
they treasured deepest spirit wonders.
And though indeed few people entered
the circle of his life,
he never was in need of friends.
When in the nearby mountains
the golden sunlight glowed and glimmered,
the boy's rapt, musing eye drew forth
the spirit gold into his soul
until his heart resembled
the morning brightness of the sun.—
But when through darkening clouds
the morning sunrays could not pierce
and dreariness hung over mountain heights,
the boy's eye, too, grew dull;
a mood of sadness filled his heart.—
The spirit weaving of his narrow world
took hold of him so fully
that it was no less strange to him
than were his body and his limbs.
The trees and flowers of the woods
were all his friends:
there spoke to him from crown and calyx
and from the lofty tree-tops spirit beings
and what they whispered, he could understand.—
Such wondrous things of worlds unknown
unlocked themselves before the boy
whenever his soul conversed
with what most people would regard as lifeless.
At evening his anxious parents
from time to time missed their beloved child.—
The boy was at a spot nearby
where from the rocks a spring burst forth,
and waterdrops, dispersing thousandfold,
were scattered over stones.
When moonlight's silver glance,
in sparkling colours' sorcery,
was mirrored in the water's misty spray,
the boy could sit for hours on end
beside the rock-born spring.
And figures, formed by spirit-magic,
arose before his youthful vision
in rushing water and in moonlight's glimmer.
They grew into three women's forms
who told him of those things
toward which his soul's desire was turned.—
And when upon a gentle summer night
the boy was sitting at the spring again,
one woman of the three caught up a myriad of drops
out of the glittering spray
and gave them to the second woman.
She fashioned from the tiny drops
a chalice with a silver gleam
and passed it to the third.
She filled it with the moonlight's silver rays
and gave it to the boy,
who had beheld all this
with youthful inner sight.—
Now in the night
which followed this event,
he dreamed that he was robbed
by a fierce dragon of the chalice.
After this night the boy beheld
just three times more the wonder of the spring.
Henceforth the women came no more
although the boy sat musing
beside the rock-born spring in moonlight's silver sheen.
And when three hundred sixty weeks
had run their course three times,
the boy had long become a man
and left his parents' home and forest country
to live in a strange city.
One evening, tired from the day's hard toil,
he pondered on what life had still in store for him,
and suddenly he felt himself a boy,
caught up and carried to his rock-born spring.
Again he could behold the water-women
and this time heard them speak.
The first one said to him:

Remember me at any time
you feel alone in life.
I lure man's eye of soul
to starry spaces and ethereal realms.
And whosoever wills to feel me,
I offer him the draught of hope in life
out of my wonder goblet.—

And then the second spoke:

Do not forget me at the times
when courage in your life is threatened.
I lead man's yearning heart
to depths of soul and up to spirit heights.
And whosoever seeks his strength from me,
for him I forge the steel of faith in life,
shaped by my wonder hammer.—

The third one could be heard:

To me lift up your eye of spirit
when your life's riddles overwhelm you.
I spin the threads of thought that lead
through labyrinths of life and the abyss of soul.
And whosoever harbours trust in me,
for him I weave the living rays of love
upon my wonder loom.—

Thus it befell the man,
and in the night that followed this
he dreamed a dream:
a savage dragon prowled
in circles round about him,—
and yet could not come near him.
He was protected from that dragon by
the beings he had seen beside the rock-born spring
and who with him had left his home
for this far-distant place.

It seems to me that the world of fairy tales can quite rightfully be placed between the external world and everything that in past times man, with his early clairvoyance, could see in the spiritual world; with everything, too, that he can still behold today if, by chance, either through certain abnormal propensities or through a trained clairvoyance, he can raise himself to the spiritual world. Between the world of spirit and the world of outer reality, of intelligence, of the senses, it is the world of the fairy tale that is the most fitting connecting link. It would seem necessary to find an explanation for this position of the fairy tale and the fairy tale mood between these other two worlds.

It is extraordinarily difficult to create the bridge between these spheres, but I realized that a fairy tale itself could construct it. Better than all the theoretical explanations, a simple fairy tale really seems to build this bridge, a tale that one could tell something like this:

Once upon a time there was a poor boy who owned nothing but a clever cat. The cat helped him win great riches by persuading the King that her master possessed an estate so huge, so remarkably beautiful that it would amaze even the King himself. The clever cat brought it about that the King set forth and traveled through several astonishing parts of the country. Everywhere he went, he heard—thanks to the cat's trickery—that all the great fields and strange buildings belonged to the poor boy.

Finally, the King arrived at a magnificent castle, but he came a bit late (as often happens in fairy tales), for it was just the time when the Giant Troll, who was the actual owner of this wonderful place, was returning home from his wanderings over the earth, intending to enter his castle.

The King was inside looking at all its wonders, and so the clever cat stretched herself out in front of the entrance door, for the King must not suspect that everything belonged to the Giant Troll. It was just before dawn that the Giant arrived home and the cat began to tell him a long tale, holding him there at the front door to listen to it. She rattled along about a peasant plowing his field, putting on manure, digging it in, going after the seed he wanted to use, and finally sowing the field. In short, she told him such an endless tale that dawn came and the sun began to rise. The wily cat told the Giant to turn around and look at the Golden Maid of the East whom he surely had never seen before. But when he turned to look, the Giant Troll burst into pieces, for that is what happens to giants and is a law they have to conform to: they may not look at the rising sun. Therefore, through the cat's delaying the Giant, the poor boy actually came into possession of the wonderful palace. The clever cat at first had given her master only hope, but finally, with her tricks, also the great castle and the vast estate.

One can say that this simple little tale is extremely significant for its explanation of fairy tale style today. It is really so that when we look at men and women in their earthly development, we can see what most of them are—those who have developed on earth in the various incarnations they have lived through and are now incarnated. Each one is a “poor boy.” Yes, in comparison to earlier historical epochs, today we are fundamentally “poor boys” who possess nothing but a clever cat. We do, however, it's true, have a clever cat, which is our intelligence, our intellect. Everything the human being has acquired through his senses, whatever he now possesses of the outer world through the intelligence limited to the brain, is absolute poverty in comparison to the whole cosmic world and to what man experienced in the ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs. All of us are basically “poor boys,” possessing only our intelligence, something that can exert itself a little in order to promise us some imaginary property. In short, our modern situation is like the boy with the clever cat.

Actually, though, we are not altogether the “poor boy”; that is only in relation to our consciousness. Our ego is rooted in the secret depths of our soul life, and these secret depths are connected with endless worlds and endless cosmic happenings, all of which affect our lives and play into them. But each of us who today has become a “poor boy” knows nothing more of this splendor; we can at best, through the cat, through philosophy, explain the meaning and importance of what we see with our eyes or take in with our other senses. When a modern person wants somehow to speak about anything beyond the sense world, or if he wishes to create something that reaches beyond the sense world, he does it, and has been doing it for several hundred years, by means of art and poetry.

Our modern age, which in many ways is a peculiarly transitional one, points up strongly how men and women fail to escape the mood of being “poor boys,” even when they can produce poetry and art in the sense world. For in our time (1911), there is a kind of disbelief in trying to aim toward anything higher in art than naturalism, the purely external mirroring of outer reality. Who can deny that often today when we look at the glittering art and literature expressing the world of reality, we can hear a melancholy sigh, “Oh, it's only delusion; there's no truth in any of it.” Such a mood is all too common in our time. The King of the fairy tale, who lives in each one of us and has his origin in the spiritual world, definitely needs to be persuaded by the clever cat—by the intelligence given to man—that everything growing out of the imagination and awakened by art is truly a genuine human possession. Man is persuaded at first by the King within him but only for a certain length of time. At some point, and today we are living just at the beginning of such a time, it is necessary for human beings to find once more the entrance to the spiritual, divine world. It is today necessary for human beings, and everywhere we can feel an urgency in them, to rise again toward the spheres of the spiritual world.

There has first, however, to be some sort of bridge, and the easiest of all transitions would be a thoughtful activating of the fairy tale mood. The mood of the fairy tale, even in a quite superficial sense, is truly the means to prepare human souls, such as they are today, for the experience of what can shine into them from higher, supersensible worlds. The simple fairy tale, approaching modestly with no pretension of copying everyday reality but leaping grandly over all its laws, provides a preparation in human souls for once more accepting the divine, spiritual worlds. A rough faith in the divine worlds was possible in earlier times because of man's more primitive constitution, which gave him a certain kind of clairvoyance. But in the face of reality today, this kind of faith has to burst into pieces just as the Giant Troll did. Only through clever cat questions and cat tales, spun about everyday reality, can we hold him back. Certainly, we can spin those endless tales of the clever cat to show how here and there external reality is forced toward a spiritual explanation.

In broad philosophical terms, one can spin out a long- winded answer to this or that question only by referring to the spiritual world. One still keeps all this as a kind of memento from earlier times; with it one can succeed in detaining the Giant for a short time. What is with us from earlier times, however, cannot hold its own against the clear language of reality. It will burst into pieces just as the Giant Troll burst, on looking at the rising sun. But one has to recognize this mood of the bursting Giant. It is something that has a relationship to the psychology of the fairy tale. Because I find it impossible to describe such things theoretically, I can get at this psychology only through observing the nature of the human soul. Let me say the following about it.

Think for a moment how there might appear livingly, imaginatively, before someone's soul what we recently described in the lectures about pneumatosophy,¹ depicting briefly some details of the spiritual world. In these anthroposophical circles, we certainly speak a good deal about the spiritual world. Before a person's soul, it should come at first as a living imagination. There would be little explicit description, however, if you intended only to describe what urges itself forward toward the soul, even toward the clairvoyant soul. A queer sort of disharmony comes about when one mixes such truths as those about ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, as described in our last three anthroposophical meetings,² into the dismal, ghostlike thoughts of modern times. Over against those things raised up before the soul, one is aware of man's narrow limits. Those secrets of divine worlds have to be grasped, it would seem, by something in us resembling a troll. A swollen, troll-like giant is what one becomes when trying to catch hold of the pictures of the spiritual world. Before the rising sun, then, one has voluntarily to let the pictures burst in a certain way in order for them to be in accord with the mood of modern times. But you can hold something back; you can hold back just what the “poor boy” held back. For our immediate, present-day soul to be left in possession of something, you need the transformation, the matter-of-fact transformation, of the gigantic content of the world of the imagination into the subtlety of the fairy tale mood. Then the human soul will truly feel like the King who has been guided to look at what the soul, this “poor boy” soul, actually does not possess. Nevertheless, it does come into possession of riches when the gigantic Troll bursts into pieces, when one sacrifices the imaginative world in the face of external reality and draws it into the palace that one's phantasy is able to erect.

In former times, the phantasy of the “poor boy” was nourished by the world of the imagination, but in view of today's soul development this is no longer possible. If, however, we first of all give up the whole world of the imagination and press the whole thing into the subtle mood of the fairy tale, which does not rely on everyday reality, something can remain to us in the fairy tale phantasy that is deep, deep truth. In other words, the “poor boy,” who has nothing but his cat, the clever intellect, finds in the fairy tale mood just what he needs in modern times to educate his soul to enter the spiritual world in a new way.

It therefore seems to me from this point of view to be psychologically right that Capesius, educated so completely in the modern world of ideas, though certainly with quite a spiritual regard for this world, should come to the realm of the fairy tale as something new that will open for him a genuine relationship to the occult world. So there had to be something like a fairy tale written into the scene to form a bridge for Capesius between the world of external reality and the world into which he was to plunge, beholding himself in an earlier incarnation.

What has just been described as a purely personal remark about the reason I had for putting the fairy tale at this very place in the drama coincides with what we can call the history of how fairy tales arose in mankind's development. It agrees wonderfully with the way that fairy tales appeared in human lives. Looking back into earlier epochs of human development, we will find in every prehistoric folk a certain primitive kind of clairvoyance, a capacity to look into the spiritual world. Therefore, we must not only distinguish the two alternating conditions of waking and sleeping in those early times, with a chaotic transition of dream as well, but we must assume in these ancient people a transition between waking and sleeping that was not merely a dream; on the contrary, it was the possibility of looking into reality, living with a spiritual existence. A modern man, awake, is in the world with his consciousness, but only with his sentient consciousness and with his intelligence. He has become as poor as the boy who had nothing but a clever cat. He can also be in the spiritual world in the night, but then he is asleep and is not conscious of it. Between these two conditions, early man had still a third, which conjured something like magnificent pictures before his soul. He lived then in a real world, one that a clairvoyant who has attained the art of clairvoyance also experiences as a world of reality, but not dreamlike or chaotic. Still, ancient man possessed it to such a degree that he could encompass his imaginations with conscious clarity. He lived in these three different conditions. Then, when he felt his soul widening out into the spiritual cosmos, finding its connection with spiritual beings of another kind close to the hierarchies, close to the spiritual beings living in the elements, in earth, water, air, and fire, when he felt his whole being widening out from the narrow limits of his existence, it must have been for him, in these in-between conditions, like the Giant who nevertheless burst into pieces when the sun rose and he had to wake up.

These descriptions are not at all unrealistic. Because today one no longer feels the full weight of words, you might think the words “burst into pieces” are put there more or less carelessly, just as a word often is merely added to another. But the bursting into pieces actually describes a specific fact. There came to the ancient human being, after he had felt his soul growing out into the entire universe and then, with the coming of the Golden Maid of the Morning, had had to adapt his eyes to everyday reality, there came to him the everyday reality like a painful blow thrusting away what he had just seen. The words really describe the fact.

But within us there is a genuine King, which is a strong and effective part of our human nature; he would never let himself be prevented from carrying something into our world of ordinary reality out of that world in which the soul has its roots. What is thus carried into our everyday world is the projection or reflection of experience; it is the world of phantasy, a real phantasy, not the fantastic, which simply throws together a few of the rags and tatters of life, but it is true phantasy, which lives deep in the soul and which can be urged out of there into every phase of creating. Naturalistic phantasy goes in the opposite direction from genuine phantasy. Naturalistic phantasy picks up a motif here and a motif there, seeks the patterns for every kind of art from everyday reality and stitches these rags of reality together like patchwork. This is the one and only method in periods of decadent art.

With the kind of phantasy that is the reflection of true imagination, there is something at work of unspecified form, not this shape nor that, and not yet aware of what the outer forms will be that it wants to create. It feels urged on by the material itself to create from within outward. There will then appear, like a darkening of the light-process, what inclines itself in devotion to external reality as image-rich, creatively structured art. It is exactly the opposite process from the one so often observed in today's art work. From an inner center outward everything moves toward this true phantasy, which stands behind our sense reality as a spiritual fact, an imaginative fact. What comes about is phantasy-reality, something that can grow and develop lawfully out of divine, spiritual worlds into our own reality, the lawful possession, one can say, of the poor lad—modern man—limited as he is to the poverty of the outer sense world.

Of all the forms of literature the fairy tale is certainly least bound to outer reality. If we look at sagas, myths, and legends, we will find features in all of them that follow only supersensible laws, but these are actually immersed in the laws of external reality as they leave the spiritual and go into the outside world just as the source material, historical or history-related, is connected to a historical figure. Only the fairy tale does not allow itself to be manipulated around real figures; it stays quite free of them. It can use everything it finds of ordinary reality and has always used it. Therefore, it is the fairy tale that is the purest child of ancient, primitive clairvoyance; it is a sort of return payment for that early clairvoyance. Let old Sober-sides, the pedant who never gets beyond his academic point of view, fail to perceive this. It doesn't matter; he needn't perceive it. The simple fact is that for every truth he hears, he asks, “Does it agree with reality?”

A person like Capesius is searching above everything else for truth. He finds no satisfaction in the question, “Does it agree with reality?” For he tells himself, “Is a matter of truth completely explained when you can say that it accords with the external world?” Things can really be true, and true and true again, as well as correct, and correct and ever correct, and still have as little relationship to reality as the truth of the little boy sent to buy rolls from the village baker. He figured out correctly that he would get five rolls for his ten kreuzers, but his figuring did not accord with reality; he practiced the same kind of thinking as the pedant who philosophizes about reality. You see, in that village, if you bought five rolls, you got an extra one thrown in—nothing to do with philosophy or logic, just plain reality.

In the same way Capesius is not interested in the question of how this or that idea or concept accords with reality. He asks first what the human soul perceives when it forms for itself a certain concept. The human soul, for one thing, perceives in mere external, everyday reality nothing more than emptiness, dryness, the tendency in itself continually to die. That is why Capesius so often needs the refreshment of Dame Felicia's fairy tales, needs exactly what is least true to outer reality but has substance that is real and is not necessarily true in the ordinary sense of the word. This substance of the fairy tale prepares him to find his way into the occult world.

In the fairy tale, there is something left to us humans that is like a grandchild of the clairvoyant experience of ancient human beings. It is within a form that is so lawful that no one who allows it to pour into his soul demands that its details accord with external reality. In fairy tale phantasy the poor boy, who has only a clever cat, has really also a palace obtruding directly into external reality. For every age, therefore, fairy tales can be a wonderful, spiritual nourishment. When we tell a child the right fairy tale, we enliven the child's soul so that it is led toward reality without always remaining glued to concepts true to everyday logic; such a relationship to reality dries up the soul and leaves it desolate. On the other hand, the soul can stay fresh and lively and able to penetrate the whole organism if, perceiving in the lawful figures of a fairy tale what is real in the highest sense of the word, it is lifted up far above the ordinary world. Stronger in life, comprehending life more vigorously, will be the person who in childhood has had fairy tales working their way into his soul.

For Capesius, fairy tales stimulate imaginative knowledge. What works and weaves from them into his soul is not their content, not their plot, but rather how they take their course, how one motif moves into the next. A motif may induce certain powers of soul to strive upward, a second motif persuades other powers to venture downward, still others will induce the soul forces to mingle and intertwine upward and downward. It is through this that Capesius' soul comes into active movement; out of his soul will then emerge what enables him finally to see into the spiritual world. For many people, a fairy tale can be more stimulating than anything else. We will find in those that originated in earlier times motifs that show elements of ancient clairvoyance. The first tales did not begin by someone thinking them out; only the theories of modern professors of folklore explaining fairy tales begin like that. Fairy tales are never thought out; they are the final remains of ancient clairvoyance, experienced in dreams by human beings who still had that power. What was seen in a dream was told as a story—for instance, “Puss in Boots,” one version of which I have just related. All the fairy tales in existence are thus the last remnants of that original clairvoyance. For this reason, a genuine fairy tale can be created only when—consciously or unconsciously—an imagination is present in the soul of the teller, an imagination that projects itself into the soul. Otherwise, it is not a true fairy tale. Any sort of thought-out tale can never be genuine. Here and there today, when a real fairy tale is created, it arises only because an ardent longing has awakened in the writer toward those ancient times mankind lived through so long ago. The longing exists, although sometimes it creeps into such secret soul crevices that the writer fails to recognize in what he can create consciously how much is rising out of these hidden soul depths, and also how much is disfigured by what he creates out of his modern consciousness.

Here I should like to point out the following. Nothing put into poetic form can actually ever be grounded in truth unless it turns essentially to such a longing—a longing that has to be satisfied and that longs for the ancient clairvoyant penetration into the world, or unless it can use a new, genuine clairvoyance that does not need to reveal itself completely but can flash up in the hidden depths of the soul, casting only a many-hued shadow. This relationship still exists. How many people today still feel the necessity of rhyme? Where there is rhyme, how many people feel how necessary it is? Today there is that dreadful method of reciting poetry that suppresses the rhyme as far as possible and emphasizes the meaning, that is, whatever accords with external reality. But this element of poetry—rhyme—belongs to the stage of the development of language that existed at the time when the aftereffects of the ancient clairvoyance still prevailed.

Indeed, the end-rhyme belongs to the peculiar condition of soul expressing itself since man entered upon his modern development through the culture of the intellectual or feeling soul (Verstandes- oder Gemütsseele). Actually, the time in which the intellectual or feeling soul arose in men in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch (747 B.C. to 1413 A.D.) is just the time when in poetry the memory dawned of earlier times that reach back into the ancient imaginative world. This dawning memory found its expression in the regular formation of the end- rhyme for what was lighting up in the intellectual or feeling soul; it was cultivated primarily by what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

On the other hand, wherever the culture of the fourth epoch had penetrated, there was an incomparable refreshment through the effects of Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha. It was this that poured into the European sentient soul. In the northern reaches of Europe, the culture of the sentient soul had remained in a backward state, waiting for a higher stage, the intellectual soul culture that advanced from the Mediterranean and Southern Europe. This took place over the whole period of the fourth epoch and beyond, in order that what had developed in Central and Southern Europe, and in the Near East, could enter into the ancient sentient soul culture of Central Europe. There it could absorb the strength of will, the energy of will that comes to expression chiefly in the sentient soul culture. Thus, we see the end-rhyme regularly at home in the poetry of the South, and for the culture of the will that has already taken up Christianity, the other kind of rhyme—alliteration—as the appropriate mode of expression. In the alliterations of Northern and Central Europe we can feel the rolling, circling will pouring into the culture of the fourth epoch at its height, the culture of the intellectual or feeling soul.

It is astonishing that poets who want to bring to life, out of primeval soul forces in themselves, the memory of some primeval force in a particular sphere sometimes point back to the past in a quite haphazard fashion. This is the case with Wilhelm Jordan.³ In his Nibelungen he wished to renew the ancient alliterations, and he achieved a remarkable effect as he wandered about like a bard, trying to resurrect the old mode of expression. People did not quite know what to make of it, because nowadays, in this intellectual time of ours, they think of speech as an expression only of meaning. People listen for the content of speech, not the effect that the sentient soul wants to obtain with alliteration, or that the intellectual soul wants to achieve with the end-rhyme. The consciousness soul really can no longer use any kind of rhyme; a poet today must find other devices.

Fräulein von Sivers [Marie Steiner] will now let us hear a short example of alliteration that will characterize how the artist, Wilhelm Jordan, wished to bring about the renewal of ancient modes.

Und es nahten die Nomen, von niemand gesehen,
Zu geräuschlosem Reigen und machten die Runde
Um diese Verlobten. Ein leiser Lufthauch,
Das war die Meinung der Minneberauschten,
Winde sich murmelnd herein zum Kamine;
Doch hinunter zur Nachtwelt, zu Nibelheims Tiefen,
Und hinauf zu den Wolken zu Walhalls Bewohnern
Erklang nun für andere als irdische Ohren
Vernehmlich wie Seesturm der Nomen Gesang:

Dein eigen ist alles,
Dein Heil wie dein Unheil,
Dein Wollen und Wähnen,
Dein Sinnen und Sein.
Wohl kommen, gekettet
In ewige Ordnung
Die Larven des Lebens,
Die Scharen des Scheins.
Sie ziehen die Zirkel,
Sie zeigen die Ziele,
Sie impfen den Abscheu,
Sie wecken den Wunsch;
Doch dein ist das Dünken,
Und wie du geworden,
So wirst du dich wenden,
Wir wissen die Wahl.

Rough English Translation

And the Norns then came nearer but no one could see them;
In soft silent steps they circled and swayed
Around the Betrothed—who, burning with love,
Thought a breath of sweet air was blowing about them;
While down to the night-world, in Nibelheim's nethermost,
And high in the heav'ns to the hosts of Valhalla
The Norns sang their song, for other than earth-ears
As clear as the clamorous raging of sea storms:

All is thine own:
Thy healing or hating,
Desires or delusions,
Thy thought and thy life.
Chained will come, cheerless,
In order eternal,
The hosts of the hidden,
The Larva of Life.
They mark out their measures,
They forecast fulfillment,
They implant raging passion,
Awaken the will.
Yet thine is the thinking,
The fashioning, forming,
The testing and turning:
We challenge thy choice.

Wilhelm Jordan really did bring the alliteration to life when he recited his poetry, but it is something that a modern person no longer can relate to completely. In order to agree sympathetically with what Jordan proposed as a kind of platform for his intentions,⁴ one has to experience those ancient times imaginatively in those of the present. It is much like bringing to mind all the happenings of these last few days in our auditorium in the Architektenhaus during the Annual Meeting,⁵ and perceiving them shrouded in astral currents that make visible what was spoken there. Then one can also discover that what in these days repeatedly played into our efforts for knowledge and understanding is the pictorial expression of a Jordan idea; that is, one could rightly understand what he set up as a kind of program to revive a mood that had held sway in the old Germanic world:

... der Sprache Springquell ...
Bedarf nur der Leitung, um lauter und lieblich
Mit rauschendem Redestrom bis zum Rande
Der Vorzeit Gefäße wieder zu füllen
Und new zu verjüngen nach tausend Jahren
Die wundergewaltige uralte Weise
Der deutschen Dichtkunst.

(The source of speech requires only guidance to fill again to the brim the ancient vessels with rushing streams of verse, sonorous and beautiful; and after a thousand years to bring anew to life the wonder and the power of the ancient German art of poetry.)

But to attain this goal, an ear is needed that can perceive the sounds of speech. This belongs intrinsically to the imaginations of the ancient clairvoyant epoch, for it was then that the feeling for sounds originated. But what is a speech sound? It is itself an imagination, an imaginative idea.

As long as you say Licht (light) and Luft (air) and can think only of the brightness of the one and the wafting movement of the other, you have not yet an imagination. But the words themselves are imaginations. As soon as you can feel their imaginative power, you will perceive in a word like Licht, with the vowel sound “ee” predominating, a radiant, unbounded brightness; in Luft, with its vowel sound “oo,” a wholeness, an abundance. Because a ray of light is a thin fullness and the air an abundant fullness, the alliterating “I” expresses the family relationship of fullness. It is not unimportant whether you put together words that alliterate, such as Licht and Luft, or do not alliterate; it is not unimportant whether you string together the names of brothers or whether you put them together in such a way that the hearer or reader feels that cosmic will has brought them together, as in Gunther, Gemot, Giselher. Such an ancient imagination the sentient soul could perceive in the alliteration.

In the end-rhyme the intellectual soul could recognize itself as part of the ancient imagination. When language is made alive, its effects can be felt in the soul even into our dreams, where it can secrete certain imaginations for a person to become aware of in dream. These imaginations appear also to clairvoyance, correctly characterizing, for instance, the four elements. It does not always hold good, but if someone truly feels what, for example, Licht and Luft are, and lets this enter into a dream, there often blossoms out of the dream-fantasy something that can lead to a characterization of those elements, light and air. Human beings will not become aware of the secrets of language until it is led back to its origin, led back, in fact, to imaginative perception. Language actually originated in the time when man was not yet a “poor boy” but also when man had not yet a clever cat. In a way, he still lived attached to the Giant, imagination, and out of the Giant's limbs he was aware of the audible imagination imbuing each sound. When a tone is laid hold of by the imagination, then the sound originates, the actual sound of speech.

These are the things I wanted to bring to you today, in a rather unpretentious and disconnected way, in order to show how we must bring to life again what mankind once lost but that has been rescued for our time. Just as Capesius wins his way to it, we must win it back, so that human beings can grow rightly into the era just ahead of us and find their way into higher worlds, thus truly to participate in them.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, 1971.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Realities of Evolution, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1953.
• 3. Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904), Nibelungen, Canto One, Sigfridsage.
• 4. In the 1925 German edition of this lecture there is the following footnote: “Translated into the language of spiritual science, one could say that Jordan wished instinctively to revive for the consciousness soul as poetry what the sentient soul had earlier developed quite naturally.”
• 5. December 10, 1911. Discussions took place on December 12, 14, 15.

for the inauguration of the Novalis branch

Due to the circumstances, a number of our friends here in Strasbourg have founded a second branch in addition to the already existing one, which is to bear the significant name “Novalis Branch”. Our friends from other places, who have lovingly gathered in Strasbourg today, have shown through their visit how they understand that branches can also exist side by side in one city and that the diversity of work in different fields need not preclude what we must call harmony and concord, which must prevail among all those who consider themselves members of our society spread across the globe. And so this branch should also be part of the great current that we call spiritual science.

You, my dear friends of the Novalis branch, have chosen a significant name for your signature, a sign of your work. The name Novalis belongs to a personality who last, that is, in her last incarnation, was active only in the 18th century; a personality whose whole being is permeated, spiritualized, by what we regard as a spirit-knowing sense, as spirituality. And so you showed from the very beginning that you want spiritual science to be something directly alive, that you seek it wherever it can be found, not just in this or that time, but as it lives through all times, and how it can pour out into the world through one or the other personality in many different ways. In Novalis, we can see how the striving for spiritual knowledge is something that can permeate and interweave our ordinary everyday lives. Of course, if we wanted to point to the sources of the theosophical spirit in Novalis, we would have to look into earlier incarnations of this lofty spirit, and from these earlier incarnations it would become clear to us how what can only be the most profound form of theosophical spiritual life was lived in the incarnations that preceded Novalis's own. But even if we consider only that Novalis, who was barely thirty years old and lived at the end of the 18th century, if we consider only that one incarnation, then we can already see in him how spiritual knowledge is not something that takes people up into a dreamy, fantastic world, something that draws him away from immediate reality. On the contrary, in the most diverse ways, we can see in Novalis how the spirit of reality, how real life acquires its value and true content by permeating it with spiritual science.

Novalis came from a noble family in central Germany in which there was a certain, I might say materialistic piety – for such a thing also exists – but not really that which one can describe as the yearning of the heart for a real, living spirit. In order to fulfill the karma of Novalis in the right way, it happened that the father of Novalis, the old Hardenberg, even in his later age - although he was not imbued with spiritual life, but because he came into the Herrnhut sect, a pietistic sect - was interspersed with pious impulses from a certain side. And from this middle-class, German-speaking environment – which, as I said, had enough of the spirit in it to enable even old Hardenberg, in his later life, to achieve a certain spirituality, even if it was sectarian – our Novalis emerged. He grew into – not into what was destined for him according to the will of his family, for that would have been some military or diplomatic position – he grew into a great time; into that time in which great, powerful minds worked at the chair of the Central German University of Thuringia.

So he could still hear Schiller's history being presented in Jena at that time. Contemporary history teachers may say that Schiller was not an erudite historian. But what history should be in life, a permeation of the whole of human development with spiritual life, that is what came from Schiller to those souls who were able to hear him in Jena as a history teacher. Schiller spoke as a great personality above all. Spirit spoke from this personality; it awakened the spirit.

And there was yet another teacher when Novalis was young, a teacher who, through the great energy of his spiritual life, not only created things in the field of philosophy that belong to the whole human race but are still little understood today. Fichte was working at the time when Novalis was living his life. He worked in such a way that his whole demeanour, Fichte's demeanour, had something spiritual about it. One can look at it as an externality. Those who have a sense for it will not look at it as an externality, that Fichte, when he lectured in the dark hall in the evening and the candle was burning on his lectern, first extinguished the candle by saying: So, my dear listeners, now the physical light has been extinguished, now only the spiritual light should shine in this room.

When the relationship between the spiritual and the physical is conjured up not only before the soul but also before the eyes at the right moment, this means something tremendous for receptive souls like Novalis. Such a soul can thereby become capable of maintaining an unshakable belief in spiritual life. It imbues the soul with a noble sentiment that remains for life when a Novalis comes into such an environment. One cannot say that Novalis was prone to enthusiasm. Those who believe that he was a dreamer do not understand Novalis. No, the spirit that lived in Novalis said – we can read it today in his unpublished writings –: the state of sleep is different from the state of wakefulness. When a person is awake, the inner soul – as it was called in those days, what we would call today the astral body – is united with the outer body. The body enjoys the soul. A beautiful word that Novalis used to express the relationship between the physical and astral bodies. And in sleep, the soul is released from the body, as Novalis said, and the body digests the soul when the person is asleep. This is another beautiful, short, concise expression for a relationship that we also encountered in spiritual science. It is beautiful when Novalis writes the saying in his notes: We are always surrounded by a spiritual world. Wherever we are, spiritual beings are around us. It is only up to the human being to project his or her self in such a way that he or she becomes aware of the spiritual beings that surround us wherever we are. It is wonderful how he shows a deep understanding of the course of esoteric human development and writes: In ancient times, attempts were made to lead the soul to a higher development by mortifying the body, through self-chastisement and so on. In more recent times, the strengthening of the soul must take its place: strengthening the soul. Through this strengthening, the soul must gain power over the body, must not become weaker as a result, and must then exercise a certain mastery.

We could talk about Novalis for hours. We would not find a spirit that expresses itself in words and teachings like the ones we can give in spiritual science today, but we would find a spirit that expresses exactly the same thing with its words. He was no dreamer, no fantasist. Although his lyric poetry took on the highest momentum we can imagine, leading us up to the highest warmth of feeling, Novalis – and this applies to him, who did not live to be thirty – was a practical mind, who studied at the Mining Academy, was a practical man, through and through a mathematician, who felt that mathematics was a great poem, according to whose lines the divine spirit had woven the world, but who proved himself to be practical in everything a mining engineer needs. Novalis was a spirit who, despite this practicality, knew how to implement in his emotional life, in his heart, what was for him a theosophical attitude, directly into his life. Truly, what we know of his relationship with Sophie von Kühn should not be understood as something related to sensuality. He loved a girl who died at the age of fourteen. He actually only began to love her so ardently when she was already dead. He felt that he now lives in the realm in which she has been since her “death.” He decided to die after her. His further life was a living with a physically dead personality. All this shows us what Novalis grew into through the strong pull of his spiritual being.

We can see from Novalis that, as a human being, you basically only need to have one quality in order to have a sense of this spirituality that spiritual science is supposed to bring us. You only need one quality, and this one quality becomes so difficult for people. Because it becomes so difficult for people, people do not come to spiritual science easily. When this one quality is mentioned, it seems to people as if they all have it. Nevertheless, it is this quality, the lack of which prevents people from coming to spiritual science: truthfulness, honestly confessing what really is in the deepest soul. Seemingly, they have so many people — in their own opinion. Nevertheless, Novalis in particular gives us an example of how just a moment of real honesty is needed, and how through this one moment of honesty a person should confess what spirituality can be for the human heart. Novalis' father had a certain inclination towards spirituality; otherwise he would not have joined the Moravian Church. But his soul was not as free and honest as is meant here. What lived in his soul from the external physical world prevented him from doing so. The physical world, with all its prejudices, did not allow him to ascend into the spiritual world. But his son had this truthfulness. What was more obvious than that the father could have no inkling of what lived in this son? The physical world, with its separateness, disharmony, and lack of truthfulness, erected a barrier here between what the young Novalis really was and what the old Hardenberg wanted to be , but which he could not be because of a lack of real inner truthfulness, the physical world with all that it makes of a person did not allow him to realize his son's importance as long as Novalis lived. The son had been dead for a few weeks when old Hardenberg was in his Herrnhut community. They sang a hymn in the community: “What would I have been without you, what would I not be without you.” And this hymn that was sung – old Hardenberg had not yet heard it, but in that moment everything that was spiritual in his soul ignited. He was so overwhelmed by the great impression of what flowed from this song that in that moment his soul, which had become honest, was filled with the spirit of the world, with spiritual life. And when the meeting was over, the old Hardenberg asked someone the name of the song that had so deeply moved him. Then they told him: It is your son's song. It was only necessary that for a moment everything that the physical plane brought could be forgotten, and then, without knowing it, pure truthfulness, pure objectivity, not the prejudices of the physical plane, lived in him for a moment, brought into him by him who had brought it. This is how spirit would find spirit if we, without what are the obstacles of the physical plane, were to face soul to soul. In that moment when man, given over purely to the truth, can find the soul of the other and the soul of the world, in each such moment he must be imbued with what might be called theosophical spirituality.

What could be called theosophical spirituality does not lie only in some theory, in some doctrine, although we must never forget that for us humans, who are born to think, a doctrine is indispensable. But the essence of theosophy does not lie in the doctrine. Anyone who might want to emphasize that the doctrine is superfluous and that it is only important to cultivate what is called universal brotherly love must be repeatedly and repeatedly reminded that universal brotherly love cannot be achieved anywhere in the world by preaching universal brotherly love. If we preach only of love, then for the connoisseur of life it is as if we were saying to a stove: Dear stove, it behoves you, for your stove-love, to warm the room. But the room remains cold, no matter how often we preach of love. If, however, we give it fuel, wood and fire, then the wood and fire in it are transformed into warmth, and it warms the room. The fuel for the human soul is the great ideals, the great thoughts that we can absorb, through which we recognize the context of the world, through which we can learn the secrets of human destiny and human life. These are not thoughts that only fill us with theory, but those that warm us inwardly, and the result of theosophical wisdom is love. And just as surely as the stove warms the room by heating and not by preaching, so surely the right teaching of the great thoughts that permeate the world will make the soul loving. For that is the secret of real wisdom: that it transforms itself into love in the soul through its own power. Those who have not yet found the way from wisdom to love only show that they have not yet come far enough in wisdom. But anyone who wants to believe that the thoughts we absorb about the evolution of the world, the evolution of man, about karma and so on, are unimportant for man should realize again and again in his soul that these are not just human thoughts, that they are not just thoughts that we think first, but that these thoughts, which penetrate our soul, are the thoughts according to which the divine spirits have built the world.

In spiritual science, it is not our thoughts that arise in our mind's eye, but the thoughts of the divine architects, the divine spirits of the world. What the gods of the world thought among themselves before the creation of the physical world is what we reflect on in spiritual science, and in so doing we explore that which flowed from the divine beings into the activity and becoming of the world to which we belong. But that which the gods have thought is spiritual light. And anyone who does not want to think what the gods have thought, even if he does not know it, does not give himself the direction towards the light, but towards darkness. The only possible foundation for a real development of the human soul is the one in which we start from what the divine thoughts of the world are. The abilities of the spirits of the world have not been given to us as potentialities to be left fallow. They have been given to us to develop. And since thinking is our most important and outstanding ability in this cycle of human development, we must start from thinking. But we must not stop at thinking. This gradually leads us to implement spiritual science in our attitudes, so that we learn to understand the secrets of how knowledge leads to character traits, to emotional qualities. Correctly understood knowledge leads to character traits, to real emotional qualities.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of a single example, by realizing that we humans undergo successive, ever new embodiments, incarnations. What would be the point of these incarnations, these repeated lives on earth, if they were not meant to make man more and more perfect? We must look back from our present incarnation to earlier incarnations and say to ourselves: What we have become at the present time, we have become through the fact that, incarnation after incarnation, these or those qualities of our soul have been added, that our soul has always absorbed new and ever new forces, had new and ever new experiences, had new and ever new experiences. What is built into this soul in one incarnation then comes out in the following incarnation.

We have now become what we have been prepared to become in previous incarnations. But then we can stop for a moment and say: we are not only looking back into the past, but we are also looking up into the future, to later, more perfect lives. What would this human life be through all these many embodiments if we could not say to ourselves: The further we develop into the future, the higher the stages will have been attained by what sits within us today as our ego.

We can only guess at what we are still capable of becoming, for otherwise we would already be it. We must ascribe to ourselves the ability to rise ever higher. — But so we must look shyly and reverently into the future; we must say to ourselves, even if we can already recognize this or that today, are able to experience this or that in the world already today: with the greater abilities that we can attain, we will be able to experience and recognize many more things.

How impossible it is for someone who writes such a thought as has now been expressed in his soul, how impossible it is for him to say to himself: I can decide today what is true or false, I can ultimately judge between true and false. — It behoves him only to say: If I could decide today, then it would be impossible for even higher abilities to arise in me in the future. But when we internalize this, it gives us the great modesty, the true, dignified humility that we need to truly be human in every moment of our development. Thus, the realization of reincarnation transforms into a feeling, a character trait: into dignified humility, into true modesty.

You could put it this way: Anyone who today realizes that he is going through successive incarnations and is constantly rising higher in his development would have to be a fool if he said to himself, “I am perfect.” Or he would say, “There is no need for me to learn today, because tomorrow I will experience it quite differently.” Knowledge is transformed into a real character trait. And when viewed correctly, every spiritual-scientific insight is transformed into a character trait. But we can see that if we are unable to apply our powers at any stage of our existence, then these powers from spiritual worlds would not have been given to us. If we want to wait until the world has reached its final stage, in the belief that we must first be so perfect that we can finally recognize and experience, then we would not have to go through various incarnations. That means, we must be clear that we have to apply our powers of knowledge in every incarnation. We must not say: we want to recognize only in the following incarnation, or at the end of our existence. — We should apply the power that we have despite humility and modesty.

Thus, alongside humility and modesty, there arises a justified human sense of self, which flows directly from our being imbued with the Divine-Spiritual and which tells us: although our knowledge will only be complete when we have reached a high level, we can make it complete precisely by becoming aware of our human dignity today and applying our strength today. In this way our character will acquire something that can be compared to a pair of scales. We can put humility and modesty on one side of the scales and justified self-esteem, boldness in judgment on the other, and say: We have attained a level in knowledge and self-awareness. In short, we will find that whenever you try to introduce into your feelings what spiritual science teaches, the teachings or theories of spiritual science are transformed in our soul, because they contain thoughts of the divine spirits, are transformed in our soul into our character, our will, our feelings. This can show us that in spiritual science the teaching, the theory, is not the main thing, but that it is, so to speak, the kindling for the development of the human soul; that it is that which is to bring forth higher qualities precisely in our soul. And anyone who demands these qualities without realization lives in the worst of illusions, in self-deception, that self-deception which has entered into human evolution in that, in the course of earthly development, other beings have also entered into it, have participated in our evolution, beings who were not only harmful, but also useful. But however useful they were to us, in that they brought us freedom and self-awareness, we must nevertheless be clear about the fact that precisely these gifts of the so-called luciferic entities: freedom and self-awareness, must not be allowed to degenerate into extremes, into radicalism, for then they become pride and arrogance. And pride and arrogance in the face of knowledge lead this knowledge into darkness. Knowledge is the acceptance of divine light, of divine thoughts. Rejection of knowledge is something that leads into darkness and that cannot lead to higher qualities of the soul either. If we look at spiritual science in this way, we will recognize it as one of the most important matters for humanity. We will recognize it as something that we do not do just for our own sake, but because we are aware of our duty to humanity and to development.

We are not living in a completely unimportant time today; we are living in an important time. It is often said by people living in this or that time that they live in a transitional time. All times of human development have been called transitional times, but not all are such significant transitional times. But today we can truly say that our time is a transitional time. To what extent is this the case? Let us first realize the character of another transition period. For example, it was a transition period for human development when the predecessor of our Christ Jesus, John the Baptist, appeared. When John the Baptist appeared, he told the people what was later repeated in significant words by Christ Jesus: “Change your minds, the Kingdoms of Heaven are near.”

What does this mean? We can understand what it means if we remember that as people have developed from incarnation to incarnation, they have passed through various qualities of soul. In the distant past, people did not yet have the qualities and soul abilities that they have today. It was possible for all people in ancient times to develop a dim, twilight, dream-like clairvoyance, to look into the spiritual world. There was the possibility for all people not only to see the physical, but to look into the spiritual world. But in those days when clairvoyance was common, people did not yet have what they have today: clearly developed self-awareness. At that time, people could not yet say “I am” to themselves in a clear way. Stability in the center of the inner being could only be achieved by the old clairvoyance disappearing for a while. They had to accept, as it were, their isolation from the spiritual world in order to develop a clear self-awareness here on the physical plane. Later, this clairvoyance will develop again together with self-awareness, so that the two qualities will arise together again and people will have them once more. We can therefore look back into the distant past. At least for certain periods of time, when people were inattentive to the physical, when they closed their eyes and turned away from the physical, and left their ears inattentive to sounds, they were able to see into the spiritual world and gain direct conviction of the existence of the spiritual world. These qualities faded, but in their place came more and more the ability to think, the ability to be self-aware, to draw conclusions, to make independent judgments, which is what makes up our present-day consciousness. The time can be roughly estimated when it gradually occurred that the old clairvoyant abilities completely disappeared from the abilities of mankind. Before the year 3101, almost all people on our planet were still endowed with dim clairvoyance. Then, from that year on, it diminished more and more, became weaker and weaker. But with this, self-awareness, self-consciousness, judgment, reasoning, and self-confident thinking grew. So, as it were, the light of spirituality grew dim, and that which is the human ego dawned, became brighter and brighter. It grew brighter within, but it grew darker in spirituality. In this year begins what Oriental philosophy calls the Kali Yuga, the dark, black age. Something had come to a crisis, so to speak, at the time when John the Baptist and then Jesus the Christ appeared as forerunners. They had to say to mankind: You must now learn that spirituality exists, even though you do not see spirituality with any spiritual eye. You must learn that the Kingdoms of Heaven are there. You must grasp it from your own self. — Therefore, the Christ had to embody himself in a physical body, because only on the physical plane could self-awareness perceive spirituality during the Kali Yuga.

At that time there was a transition period. The old abilities had faded away. If the people of that time had not heard the call of the Baptist, of Christ Jesus, then they would have fallen into decline at this stage, would not have progressed. Those who heard these voices had to recognize the God who descended into the physical and carnal. They understood that the Kingdoms of Heaven had come close to the ego.

Christ was on Earth in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years. That was the time when people could only see with the physical eye when a God descended to them.

Today, we are once again living in a transitional age, in a crisis. The Kali Yuga expired around the year 1899. And now, although people are unaware of it, new qualities are developing in them. New qualities are developing in the human soul in a natural way. The fact that so many people are unaware of this is no proof to the contrary. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus was still writing about an unknown sect of Christians; and in Rome, after Christ Jesus had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha seventy to eighty years earlier, people still talked about a sect that was said to live in a back alley and was led by a certain Jesus. But the most important events had taken place in front of countless people. If people do not perceive something, that is no proof that this most important, most decisive and most incomparable thing is not there. Since about 1899, abilities have been developing unnoticed in people that will emerge in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century, roughly between 1933 and 1937. Then, because the time has come, these soul abilities will arise in a whole series of people; abilities of etheric clairvoyance will arise. They will be there. Just as there were people with an ego consciousness carried to the highest peak when Christ Jesus was here, so in our century there will be people who will not only see with the physical eye, but who, as a natural development, will experience what strives down from spiritual levels, so that spiritual-soul abilities emerge from their soul, and they enter into the etheric existence. And the happiness of these people will be to understand the new world that they will see. One thing is true and important for our soul to know that Christ Jesus said, “I am with you until the end of our Earth cycle.” He is here. He has been within our Earth orbit since that time. And when their spiritual eyes are opened, they will see him as Paul saw him at the event outside Damascus. That is what will happen around 1933, that he will be seen as an ethereal being, as a being that does not descend to the physical plane, but can be seen in the etheric body, because a certain number of people will then ascend to etheric vision. But people will be ignorant if they are not prepared for what they will see through spiritual science. That is why we are living in a time of transition, because we are growing into a new way of seeing.

Spiritual science has the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment when the Christ will not appear in the fleshly body – for He was only once in the fleshly body – but He is there and He will come again in a form that those whose eyes are open will see Him in the world, which is only visible to clairvoyant eyes. People will grow up to Him. That will be the return of Christ: a growing up of people into the sphere in which the Christ is. But they would stand there foolishly if they were not prepared for this great moment through spiritual science. This preparation must be a serious one, for it is a responsible one. Humanity is to be prepared for the fact that more will be seen than what has been seen so far, if people do not lead this ability into darkness and cause it to wither. Because it could also happen that the whole of the twentieth century would pass without bringing the fulfillment of this goal. We have the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment through spiritual science. But we have to prepare people spiritually, to make them understand that only the spirit will meet the Christ with the spiritual eye open. A materialistic mind might believe that the Christ would appear in a carnal body again. But that would not be spiritualistic, it would be materialistic. If we humans believed that, we would not have the will to work our way up to his spirit. That is why certain prophecies from the Apocalypse will be fulfilled at that time. Relying on and building on the materialistic spirit, individuals will appear in physical bodies who will then say that they are the embodied Christ. And those who are not led to the right knowledge through spiritual science will fall prey to them, for Maya will be great and the possibility of self-deception will be enormous. Temptations will grow to gigantic proportions. Only spiritual knowledge that is aware of its responsibility will bring people to an understanding of what is to happen.

These were reflections intended to show how spirituality through spiritual science should work in the individual human soul, and that spiritual knowledge is a task for the times, because we can also say of today's times: We are facing the most important things. But because even the most important things could be completely overlooked by humanity in the darkness, because the great moment could pass without people seeing it, that is why spiritual science must work in the right way. Penetrating with our spirit what is transmitted to us by the study of the spirit will give us the spirituality we need in every branch to develop our own soul ever higher, to perform ever higher and higher services for humanity.

Let us try to remember more often that the words spoken at the time of Christ also apply to our time: “Change your minds, for the time is at hand.” At that time it was said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Today, prophetically looking into the near future, we must say: “For the human ego is close to the Kingdoms of Heaven”. Let us prepare ourselves through correct spiritual science so that we may enter worthily into the kingdom that demands something of us. And we ourselves can only flourish if we find the way to the Kingdoms of Heaven. When we process the experiences we have on earth and allow what we experience in the higher spiritual existence to arise, offering it as a great sacrifice at the altar of divine existence, then we fulfill our destiny as human beings to the fullest. Let what you are working on here be imbued with both the spirit of Novalis and the spirit of spiritual science itself, which has come before our soul, and you will see that your work will proceed in the good sense. For when our work is imbued with such an attitude, then, while we are gathered in our branches, there flows in that which we call the light of the Masters of Wisdom and the harmony of the intuitions. We are never without the help of these advanced individuals when we are united in the right attitude in one of our branches. May such spirit unite you! Such spirit, which is at the same time the spirit of the Masters of Wisdom, inspire you! Work in this spirit and your work will be a part of the great spiritual scientific work, your work will be a part of the spirit that shall go throughout the whole world.

Today we shall be considering Hegel not from an anthroposophical but from a purely philosophical point of view. This is possible in an anthroposophical circle because, although the object of spiritual science is to be drawn from experiences in the supersensible world, the process of combining these experiences into a comprehensive, systematic world view requires clear and conscientious thinking that is well-trained in every single point. And if even untrained thinking causes quite a lot of harm in external science, in the anthroposophical movement, more harm is caused by this than by incorrect observations, because in many people the interest in supersensible things does not go hand in hand with an equally strong interest in logical thinking. And this purely logical thinking can be particularly trained by a study of the thinking of George William Frederick Hegel. From such a study, a certain light can also be shed on our present time, in which one speaks occasionally of a return to Hegel, but of which one cannot say that the intellectual prerequisites that it has would meet with an understanding of Hegel. Hegel, with his whole system of thought, has outgrown the time when it was the chief concern of philosophy to deduce the foundations of all knowledge and being from certain supreme points of view. It is no mere accident, but a profound necessity, that Hegel should have lived in an age when these supreme foundations were being sought in the most diverse fields.

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart. He entered the Tübingen seminary (1788-1793), which was so important for the development of German intellectual life at that time, as a pupil, where he was a fellow student of Schelling, who towered over him for a long, long time, and Hölderlin, who was deeply predisposed and soon sank into mental derangement, albeit not precisely because of his deep predisposition. They formed a kind of cloverleaf: the deeply intuitive Hölderlin, who sought in mystical chiaroscuro; Schelling, who was endowed with a sharp intellectual energy and an effervescent imagination; and Hegel, who was somewhat ponderous, with thoughts that came hard from the soul. Schelling and Hegel later worked together again at the University of Jena, which was a center of intellectual life at the time. Schelling carried his audience away with the powerful intellectual momentum with which he dealt with the problems of thought; he also carried away those who did not seek to penetrate the questions of existence out of feeling and mind. Schelling pointed out that in human knowledge there is something that goes beyond all thinking, an intellectual intuition, as he called it, which is supposed to be an original faculty for looking into the depths of existence. Hegel was his colleague as a lecturer (1801-1806). Even then, his thinking was still cumbersome because he wanted to shape every thought so that it never included more than it was supposed to mean. And because of this slowly drilling cumbersomeness of thinking, Hegel is not easily understood at first.

Then came the sad time of 1806. It was during this period that Hegel undertook, as he himself expressed it, the actual great voyages of discovery of his mind. It was under the thunder of the guns at Jena that he completed his first work, the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, which arose out of an intensive and tremendously deep concentration of the mind. It is a work that the whole of world literature has no equal. Above all, Hegel wanted to make clear to himself what experiences the soul can have when it ascends from the subordinate points of view, so to speak, to the highest, to what Hegel calls the self-comprehension of the spirit within itself. At first, one lives in a very close connection with the outside world, where every this or that, every tree and every house is something one lives with, every opinion is something one lives in. Only when one reflects on this and that, does perception arise. From perception, we then come through thinking to a sense of self at first, to a dark inkling of the self. Only then do we arrive at the first glimmer of true consciousness. But here the I is still, so to speak, enchanted with its surroundings. It works itself out of this enchantment through the content, which it is supposed to have only from itself, by increasingly leaving out what has to do with the outside world, what is connected with it. This is how self-awareness comes about and with it the interweaving of self-awareness with the spirit. It becomes spirit itself, which comprehends itself, becomes spirit that becomes aware of itself. And when a person now looks back, he recognizes what is comprehending itself as spirit, he recognizes the idea that he has, as it were, taken out of the enchantment of the outside world. He recognizes that he used to be stuck in the contradiction between subject and object, but that now, in the overcoming of subject and object, he grasps what Hegel calls the absolute idea in the idea that grasps itself, which is not only subject and not only object. Thus, through an immense effort of thought, Hegel had arrived at the foundation of so-called absolute idealism.

Hegel's life took many twists and turns after his time as a lecturer in Jena. He worked for a time as a political editor in Bamberg (1807-1808), then as a grammar school teacher and headmaster in Nuremberg (1808-1816), and through manifold external experiences he became the realistically thinking mind with whom we are later confronted. From Nuremberg, Hegel was briefly appointed to the University of Heidelberg, where he published his “Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften” (Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) in 1817. Regarding the reception of the work, Hegel could well have said what legend attributes to him as a saying shortly before his death: “Of all my students, only one understood me, and he misunderstood me.

It is indeed a most remarkable feeling to have sunk something so tremendously deep into the stream of the world and at the same time to see how completely all the preconditions for absorbing the depth were absent. Only from Hegel's standpoint can something like a skeleton be drawn of what this “encyclopedia” should be. But when I now speak in Hegel's sense, I beg not to be looked upon as a Hegelian. For Hegel, it was about implementing the standpoint he had attained in the Phenomenology of Spirit by placing himself beyond subject and object on the standpoint of the idea – and now, if I may say so, to use this standpoint to gain an overview of the full scope of human thought and action.

According to Hegel, the absolute idea must not contain the concepts of subject and object, of knowing and believing, and the like. The idea is beyond all these contradictions. Hegel wants to grasp this idea as if it were being presented in its purity, this idea that does indeed operate in subject and object but goes beyond both. This idea can certainly be found in man, in the external world, in spirit and nature, but it is precisely beyond both, it lies beyond spirit and nature. So in Hegel's sense, one must not grasp the idea in the first instance in the abstract, like an abstract point. Rather, it is a complete entity in itself, which allows a rich content to sprout out of itself as an idea, just as the whole plant with all its individual parts is implicit in the plant germ. Thus, according to Hegel, the idea should allow a content to sprout out of itself that is independent of spirit and nature, and which, when applied, must therefore be applied to both. So before you get involved with the meaning of spirit and nature, you gain a point of view above both and then see a manifestation of the idea in nature and also see the idea being realized in the spiritual. So we have to gain a point of view from which the idea is developed as if the human being were not even there. The human being then abandons himself to the very own process of the world of ideas developing in and out of himself. This point of view results in what can be called the science of logic in Hegel's sense. Here one is not dealing with a subject and object, as in Aristotelian logic, but with the self-movement of the idea that stands above subject and object.

For any thinking that wants to devote itself only to the things of the external world, it is difficult to get used to the strictly closed columns of Hegelian concepts. One feels as if one is being subjected to violence, as if one is being thrust into a system of ideas that has absolutely nothing in common with the usual everyday rational argument. It is the idea that should think, not I: that is the feeling one has. That is why most people do not even try to get into the world of Hegelian ideas. But if you do, well, you might want to correct Hegel here and there – that is especially easy with Hegel – but that is not the point. The point is that by studying Hegel, a person undergoes a tremendous self-discipline of thought, because there is nothing like Hegel's logic to teach you where a system of human concepts, in general, a concept, may occur. A concept can only be recognized in its full scope if it can only be thought at a certain point in a whole fabric of concepts. In order to make this clear, Hegel begins with the most empty concept, the concept of being, which is usually presented without one actually being aware of where it is actually placed. Now, according to Hegel, this concept should be completely empty. So we have to disregard all later content that this concept has acquired, right from the very beginning of Hegel's logic. Thus the concept of being is not actually established by man, but rather it presents itself to man after man has thrown all other concepts out of it.

Now Hegel wants to find the method of developing the concept, that is, one concept must develop from another. Thus, if we look at it correctly, the concept of being must immediately rise above itself. When we apply the abstract concept of being to a thing, it is no longer pure. It then already refers to a this or that. Thus we come to recognize that being is a nothing, mind you, only within the concept. Through the dialectic living in itself, one has thus drawn out of being the concept of nothingness.

If you have disciplined yourself in thinking, you are already educating yourself at this point in Hegelian logic to think in a way that is only ever applied in Hegel's further discussions of being and nothingness as it has just emerged. Being and nothingness now give rise to a third: that is becoming. But in order for us to grasp becoming, it must be brought to a standstill. Thus, in the fourth place, the concept of existence emerges from the concept of becoming. The concept of existence may only be used in this way in Hegel's further logic, as a being that has turned into a nothing, that together with this has produced becoming, which, brought to a standstill, has produced existence. And in this method Hegel goes further. He arrives at the concept of the one and the many, he arrives at the concept of quantity and quality, of measure and so on.

Thus in the first part of Hegel's “Encyklopädie” we have an organism of the idea. Only when we have grasped everything else before that, can we then arrive at the concept of the end, which stands at the end of Hegel's logic. Through such absolute logic, an immense self-discipline of the spirit is indeed achieved, which at least as an ideal must be presented to our time. Through this, one learns to express a concept only when one has its content fully in consciousness. One must then have in one's concepts only what one has at some time in life made clear to oneself as a development of the concept. Within Hegel's logic, the following then emerge as later concepts: subject and object, knowledge, essence, causality, which one now has clearly in consciousness.

Once Hegel had established the complete system of concepts, he was able to show how the concepts reveal themselves, so to speak, in enchantment. The concept cannot only be in the subject, because then all talk about nature would make no sense. Rather, our concepts underlie natural phenomena; they have made them. Thus, it is immaterial to the concept whether it appears outside or inside. To us, it hides itself outside. Nature is the concept or the idea in its otherness, as Hegel says. Anyone who says something different about nature goes beyond what he knows for sure. So a natural philosophy arises, a natural science, that seeks the development of the idea outside, after it has first been sought in itself, in its purer existence, in logic.

The idea first realizes itself in subordinate phenomena, where the concept is most hidden, so that we might be tempted to speak of natural phenomena that are entirely without ideas. This happens in mechanics. But even within mechanical phenomena, Hegel's discipline of thought makes a distinction on two levels. He distinguishes between ordinary mechanics, as it underlies the phenomena of impact, force, and matter, which, as he says, is relative mechanics, and absolute mechanics; that is, he considers it inadmissible to apply the ordinary concepts of relative mechanics to the heavenly bodies. Only when one develops the concept of absolute mechanics does one find the idea that lies in celestial mechanics. But in today's science, nothing is to be found of this distinction. Hence Hegel's polemic against Newton, who has most readily transferred the concepts of relative mechanics to the concepts of absolute mechanics.

From the concept of absolute mechanics, Hegel moves on to the concept of the real organism. He recognizes three members of the organism:

Firstly, the geological organism. In his view, this does not mean that the whole structure of the earth can be understood by extending the laws of a small area to the whole world, as is the case with today's geology. Hegel sees in every mountain range, in every geological form, an organism that has become rigid.

Secondly, the plant organism, in which the concept manifests itself as it were in indifference to the idea, in uniformity for the idea.

Thirdly, the animal organism, which in a certain sense already represents the existence of the idea in the external world.

Thus the appearance of the idea, as it were the enchanted idea, is exhausted in earthly existence. Man now outgrows these enchanted ideas. He must first be understood in terms of his natural characteristics. This is the subject of anthropology. In his perception, man finds himself, as it were, dulled in external existence. But when he comes to consciousness, and from there to self-consciousness, he breaks away from external existence in a certain respect. This is where “phenomenology of the spirit” now enters the picture, following on from anthropology. Within this phenomenology, man finally grasps himself as spirit. In so doing, he recognizes himself as subjective spirit by first breaking free from the enchantment of nature. Gradually, the idea itself appears to him again. What it was in the first, very first concept of being now springs forth. Having recognized the idea in its being-in-itself in logic, in this being-out-of-itself in nature, man now comprehends it where it is in and for itself.

Now this initially subjective spirit becomes objective spirit. The idea reveals what it is in itself in what the spiritual institutions are: marriage, family, law, custom. All this comes together in the state. What emerges in the state as objective spirit, as the realization of the idea, what is found in the interplay from state to state, that is world history. Thus world history is the existence of the idea after its passage through the subjective spirit.

And the question arises: can we ultimately close the circle like a snake biting its own tail, that is, can we come back to the absolute idea, to a realization of the idea where it overcomes subjectively and objectively again? The absolute idea can appear in its absolute reality, initially in a preparatory way, so that it is not enchanted, hidden as in nature, but so that it shines through the appearance. That is the case in art. Beyond world history, Hegel thus creates the first realization of the absolute idea in art. But here it still has something of an objective, external nuance about it. But it can also work in such a way that it no longer has a nuance of the external, but a nuance of the internal. That is the case in religion. It is thus the realization of the absolute idea on the second level.

But the idea can also overcome the nuance of externality, which it still has in art, and the nuance of inwardness, which it still has in religion. It does this in the comprehension of itself, where it captures itself in itself, in philosophy in the Hegelian sense.

And so the circle is complete. In the whole field of history, there is nothing as complete as the Hegelian system.

He later developed some of its individual parts in more detail, such as the philosophy of law (1821), an area in which a strictly disciplined way of thinking has an especially beneficial effect. And in the preface to the “Outlines of the Philosophy of Right” Hegel makes a remarkable statement: When reason grasps the idea, everything must be grasped by seeing the idea, that is, the working of reason in things. Everything real is therefore reasonable in the Hegelian sense. This proposition can, of course, be immediately refuted by the arbitrariness of the usual reasoning, if one does not take into account Hegel's context of thought.

If we sketchily present Hegel's philosophy to ourselves, we have recognized the basic nerve of his philosophy in the most tremendously disciplined thinking.

Hegel then taught this philosophy in Berlin from 1818 to 1831, where he died on November 14, 1831, the anniversary of the death of Leibniz, who had once put forward the completely opposite philosophy. In Hegel's philosophy, the idea, which remains entirely with itself, is at the center. In Leibniz, the idea disperses into the immense sum of monads. But only a single monad, which contains the pre-established harmony, would have to take the path of the Hegelian absolute idea if it develops. Thus, Hegel's system lies in the development of a single monad. Hegel has set up the strictest monistic system, Leibniz the strictest monadological system. As long as we remain within Hegel's trains of thought, we are in a strictly closed cycle of the mind. We go beyond him when we measure Hegel's system against monadology. Indeed, one thinker found that Leibniz's monadology exploded Hegel's monism. This is how Schelling felt.

After remaining silent since 1814, he was appointed to Berlin in 1841, ten years after Hegel's death, and now tried to go beyond Hegel, with whom he had previously worked and co-edited the “Critical Journal of Philosophy” in 1802-03. These were peculiar lectures that he now gave in Berlin.

There is only one way to get beyond Hegel, and that is by drilling a hole from the outside where, in Hegel, the self grasps itself in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. But one also gets stuck in Leibnitz's monad if one does not drill the hole at the same place. If one starts here, one goes beyond the ego, which only grasps itself, and arrives at supersensible experiences that really go beyond what Hegel comprehends in his system. And that is what Schelling did in fact. He began to teach 'theosophy', real 'theosophy', though in an abstract form, and he had the same success that a person would have today who wanted to teach 'theosophy' at a university.

A triplicity of the world ground, a threefold potency, Schelling taught: first, the being-can; secondly, pure being; thirdly, the summary. In this way he foreshadowed what is being sought today in the threefold Logos. And now Schelling sought to recognize the secrets of the ancient mysteries in his 'Philosophy of Mythology'. He sought to teach what we are exploring today, enriched by the possibility of supersensible experiences since then. Schelling then strove to do justice to the Christian mysteries in his Philosophy of Revelation, which attempts to elucidate Christianity in a theosophical sense. Schelling was only able to give these lectures because he had once before stood at a professorship with different views. All the more was the rage against Schelling now. Today, in all the textbooks and other histories of philosophy, this last 'theosophical period' of Schelling is presented with great horror, where he, having already asserted the madness of his 'intellectual view', now went completely mad — so they think.

With this transition from Hegel to Schelling, however, an era had now come of age that lived entirely under the spell of natural science. And since then we have been witnessing a remarkable spectacle, through the observation of which we shall recognize why Theosophy, spiritual science, must be received today as it is received.

No one can marvel more at the results than I do, and yet the following must be said. The discovery of the plant and animal cell by Schwann and Schleiden in the 1830s was a great achievement, but it was followed by little in the way of opinions. There was the doctrine of force and matter, which regarded everything of a spiritual nature as no more than a bubble on the surface of physical processes. The worst result of this school of thought was the rigid system in which Baechner, in his book “Kraft und Stoff” (Force and Matter), conceived theoretical materialism. Of course, Baechner's bold courage remains to be admired. The other researchers simply did not have the courage to think their thoughts through to the end.

But even more refined minds went other ways than Hegel and Schelling under the constraint of natural science, for example, Hermann Helmholtz, who made truly great contributions in the fields of psychophysics, sensory physiology, physiological optics, and phonetics. His discoveries led him, through the nature of the experiments and their suggestive power, not through thinking, to reject Hegel, so that he said: “When I open Hegel and read a few sentences from his ‘Natural Philosophy’, it is pure nonsense.

And again, a fine mind that was also trained in thinking was not understood in his thoughts, Julius Robert Mayer, who discovered the law of conservation of energy. His law did indeed have an enormous physical significance, and this was also appreciated. But Mayer's train of thought on the mechanical equivalent of heat in his paper on “The Organic Movement in its Connection with Metabolism” (1845) was never understood. People preferred to read Helmholtz, who was much easier to understand. So people preferred to read his work “On the Interaction of Natural Forces” (1854), in which he proved the validity of Mayer's Law, starting from the impossibility of perpetual motion.

Then came the achievements of Darwinism, and a bold mind like Haeckel's, who was averse to all intellectual culture and therefore could see nothing in Hegelian philosophy but a tangle of concepts, was thus called upon to expand the scientific facts in the sense of an external, material history of development. Thus he became the founder of the materialistic Darwinism of the sixties and seventies. No school of philosophical thought rose up against it. At that time, the world could no longer be grasped by philosophy; for it there was nothing but an interrelationship between philosophy and natural science.

Thus a thinker as important as Eduard von Hartmann, who in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) dragged materialistic Darwinism, so to speak, before the forum of an intellectual philosophy, was decried as a dilettante who had no idea of natural science. Many refutations appeared, including a highly ingenious anonymous one: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Philosophy and Descent Theory” (1872). Haeckel said of this writing that it was so excellent and so thoroughly demonstrated the errors of Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy that he himself (Haeckel) could have written it, and Oscar Schmidt, the biographer of Darwin, vividly regretted that his esteemed colleague did not emerge from his anonymity. Then a new edition of this writing appeared, and Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author.

Thus philosophy had once provided the most brutal proof of the fact that it can very well understand natural science, even if trained thinking leads it to completely different results than those of materialism. This struggle is not just about sentence against sentence, but about cultural forces that confront each other.

More subtle minds always retained an understanding of both, of philosophy and of natural science. But due to the dominant power of suggestion of natural science, they could only be heard in the narrowest of circles. Thus Vincenz Knauer's extraordinarily fine and comprehensive history of philosophy, 'Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie', could only be understood by a very limited circle. Not even what the narrow Herbartian philosophy put forward against external materialism was able to have an effect. And so it came about that a strictly logical mind, even though schooled in scholasticism, which wanted to build within itself the bridge to the scientific method, could not even do this within itself. This was the case with Franz Brentano, who wanted to combine the scientific method with strictly logical thinking in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Point of View), the first volume of which appeared in 1874. But his mental self-discipline did not prevail; inwardly he was still too much under the sway of natural-scientific materialism. He could not come to terms with himself, and so the second volume, announced for the fall, was not published for some time. And today Brentano lives as an old man in Florence, and the second volume has still not been published.

I myself was a witness to the terrible conflict that this conflict could have on the individual soul. I saw how the methodical in the training of thought almost lost its power through the suggestion of natural science. It was at a solemn session of the Vienna Academy in the 1880s, at which I was present, when Ernst Mach gave a lecture on the economy of natural phenomena. He could not find a way to grasp natural phenomena in his method. In each sentence, it was painfully felt how all method of thinking disappeared, how everything shrank to the principle of the least expenditure of energy in the recognition of nature. Thus, thinking was pushed from the central position it had with Hegel to the lowest conceivable economic significance.

Thus Hegel himself remained, as it were, an enchanted spirit, and even a Kuno Fischer could not release him. The truth of what Rosenkranz had said in the introduction to his Hegel biography proved to be true: we philosophers of the second half of the 19th century are, at best, only the gravediggers of the philosophers of the first half of the 19th century. And by that he meant – biographers.

The works of Otto Liebmann, Zeller and others, which went back to Kant, seemed to bring a new impetus to the method of thinking. Liebmann wrote one of the most ingenious treatises ever written in the field of epistemology. He tried by all means to found a transcendental epistemology, but in the end he arrived at a kind of epistemology that can be roughly described as something akin to a dog running around in circles. He did not get beyond the starting point of his epistemology.

And so the present situation developed. There was the important formulation of the theory of heat by Clausius, which had an effect on the physiology of sense and this finally again on the theory of knowledge. Here also, therefore, a subjection of philosophy under natural science.

Thus, those who spoke in terms of the old way of thinking were not heard. In the 1880s, one researcher did attempt to advance epistemology on the basis of Kant, but he was not listened to. Under the pressure of the circumstances, he left the field entirely and turned to aesthetics. It was only in 1906 that he published another small epistemological work, by Johannes Volkelt, on “The Sources of the Certainty of our Knowledge”. The conditions for a true epistemology were as little present as they were for a true understanding of Hegel.

Our time finds itself far more satisfied with a Spencerian encyclopedia, which goes beyond natural science by very little and very superficially. And when the view of the smallest economic measure, as proposed by Mach, was brought back from the New World in the pragmatism of William James, it was enthusiastically received as something new. However, the strict columns of Hegel's absolute logic and the completely unphilosophical raisonnement of pragmatism make a rather strange combination.

But the good cannot be completely suppressed, it can only be suppressed temporarily. Where a misunderstood Kantianism could not lie like a mildew on the thinking, so to speak, out of the strength of the people, a healthy thinking stirred. Thus the Russian philosopher Solowjow brought in fact new significant methodological approaches by the fact that he based on a young national strength, which, if you want, has not even brought it to a right culture, but not on an old one like Franz Brentano. The Frenchman Boutroux also introduced a new useful concept into the history of development. But such efforts are ignored. Under the ashes, the truth continues to glow, as it were. It can be overgrown by prejudice and impotence, but as a self-discipline of thought it continues to work secretly. And precisely those who believe they have to represent spiritual science must hope that this self-discipline of thought will pave the way for spiritual science. They must find the way to Hegel's strictest logic, for only in this way can they firmly establish on the foundation of thought that which they must often bring down from higher spiritual worlds in loose structures. Thus, in the supersensible realm, if we may be permitted the expression, there is nothing that strictly trained thinking must reject. ke more acute and self-trained mind will find the transition, the bridge that leads from the highest product of the physical plane, thinking, to the supersensible.

During these three days, we shall deal with a specific “topic.” We shall speak about the paths that the human soul can take in the present in the sense of a spiritual-scientific worldview, and about the goals of theosophical life. Today's lecture will provide a kind of introduction to this. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we will then penetrate to the very heart of our consideration. Today, we want to take the standpoint more from the outside, so to speak, and first ask ourselves the questions: Is what we feel as a spiritual-scientific world view something that has been brought about by the will of individuals, or is it rooted in the soul of the time itself? Do we have something before us that is connected with the deepest needs of our epoch? We can best approach an answer to this question if we realize that all those who come to spiritual science from the most diverse walks of life, whether rich or poor, strong or weak, are seeking souls. They are all seeking souls who do not always know exactly what they are seeking, but feel that they are seeking something. They are often souls who have taken the most diverse paths and allowed themselves to be affected by what the present can give. Souls that have sought to satisfy their longings in this or that field of art, souls that have looked around in what science can give; souls that have felt, more or less darkly, more or less brightly after much laborious seeking, that they cannot find in the present what coincides with the soul's seeking. Such souls are often touched by what the spiritual-scientific movement can give, and they say: Yes, here lives an impulse that is different from anywhere else, different from what comes from the life around me.

What do such souls feel, or what might they feel when they come into contact with what today we might call Theosophy? We must not believe that these seeking souls who find their way to spiritual science are the only ones who seek. They are chosen, or they choose themselves from a great multitude of seeking souls. Those who listen to what is spoken from the deepest need of our time will see that there are many souls who say: “We long for means to solve the great riddles of the world, and we cannot find that all that tradition has brought, all that modern science has to say, can solve these riddles.

Let us listen for a moment to what these souls, the best among them, have to say. They say something like the following, and in these words, which flow from hundreds of thousands of such searching souls, we encounter something like the yearning heart of our time: We look back into distant times and see how from century to century, from millennium to millennium, different ideas about God and nature have followed one another, how they have replaced one another and led to the struggle between their representatives. Much has come down to us. Millions of people profess such beliefs, adhere to them in sincere truthfulness, but just as many can no longer profess what has been handed down out of such a sense of truth. They feel compelled out of love for the truth to let go of the old views.

What was it like in the dim and distant past? There, for example, people looked at the river that went from the heights to the plains, saw the beneficial effect of this river and asked themselves: What speaks to us from the roar of this river? What is it that works in this river? And they found in it something that they also found in themselves. They found that it was based on a spiritual something, a divine being, and they found in the flowing stream a divine-spiritual power that rewarded, that gave man what he needed for his good. In the blowing of the wind, in the rolling of the thunder, in the flashing of the lightning, they found a spiritual activity similar to that which underlies the flowing of the stream, the rushing of the sea surf. They saw in it something of which they said: “The murmuring of the brook, the raging of the storm, is akin to what lives in my soul. They may speak differently, but there is something similar there, and I feel that I can understand it.

Those to whom Moses brought down the tablets of the law felt the same way. They felt that a being was speaking to them from them, infinitely greater than the father of a family, but still related to what spoke from the thunder and what spoke from the venerable head of the family. They felt the spirit. They sensed a living bond between what lived in them as pain and joy and the outside world. A bond that this man of the past could understand.

That is how the best speak. And if you go where serious science speaks, not trivial superficiality, you can hear the following: Our ancestors looked up to spiritual powers. They not only saw trickling water, blowing wind, and the fire of lightning. They also saw spiritual beings in these natural forces, gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders. However we may feel about these people, they found understanding among their contemporaries, those people who projected their beliefs into the outside world, from which they drew strength and stability.

And now the best of these seeking souls add: We can no longer believe in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders, in spiritual beings of nature. For we have been taught that iron laws operate down to the smallest atom. And we must think of the outer world as a construction of it. We can no longer animate it as our ancestors did, we can no longer perform sacrificial ceremonies and cultic acts that send up our voices, we can no longer say when pain overwhelms us: take comfort, for life in the spiritual world will give you all the more comfort. — And a great number of people say: our whole world has become different. We no longer build on what was built on in the past. If, for example, a rusty iron had been driven into a person's arm in the past, they would have sought comfort in spiritual beings. Today we do better to go to the doctor and use external medicine. Today we treat with what lives in the soul what used to be treated with what lives in the soul.

It is countered: But we cannot be without faith in a spirit, we cannot do without it. A spirit rules in all laws, works in thunder as in the atom. And it takes only someone to be beyond the worst trivialities of materialism in order not to be able to close themselves off from this insight. When the word spirit is spoken by seeking souls, what is meant by that? What is spirit? Where does it have its roots? How does man come to have an idea of spirit?

A strange view is being propagated today. In America, people are talking about a new religion. This religion only wants to recognize a God who works in the laws of nature, right down to the atom. No one today can imagine a God who has a human form, says the representative of this doctrine, but we cannot do without a divine spirit. And so this personality comes up with a strange saying: the laws of chemistry are not enough. But where can we find the content for an idea of God? — And so we hear the following: We must think of the spirit that rules in the laws of nature as being endowed with the noblest qualities of the human soul. — So one is not willing to imagine a God who is endowed with human qualities, but one would still like to have something that gives this idea of God a content.

And here we have the result: We cannot help it, we cannot take the content of the idea of God from anywhere other than from within man. — And further, the representative of this world view points out that in earlier times divine beings were worshiped who were inspirers who filled man with their power and pushed him towards a task. Now, of course, we can no longer believe that there are supernatural entities that act as inspirers. But the future will worship advanced helpers, richer spirits who have something to give to the poorer ones.

You see, feelings will nevertheless be set up in place of the former, which cling to those who can give comfort. After every earthquake, for example, there will be those who give comfort to the many who have lost their loved ones. Human love will exist when there are no longer supersensory helpers.

Do you not see that there is a strange contradiction here too? We are supposed to look to those who give comfort. But where do they get from within their soul what they need to be able to give comfort and love? We find that the best people search, but that the soul must feel confronted with a void.

And what about science? Is comfort found there in what science has brought us? We want to fully acknowledge the beneficial effects of science, but there is one thing we must not forget. How much of the purely physical pain that man has had to endure since ancient times is alleviated? Humanity has certainly not become stronger and healthier since then. Of course, there are many remedies that provide relief. But attention must be called to a contradiction here. External science believes that nothing can be lost. For example, when rubbing, the force becomes effective as warmth. What disappears reappears as a different force. Anesthetic agents relieve pain, and people talk as if the pain has disappeared. Here there is a contradiction with that simple law. If the pain disappears, it still reappears in a different place. No matter how much external pain is alleviated, it turns into mental anguish. And man does not know that this is connected with the alleviation of external pain. This does not prevent us from doing what our insight suggests to alleviate external pain, but we must learn to recognize the connections and not indulge in illusions in the spiritual realm.

The seeking souls have no inkling that the human being, placed as he is today in the outer life, for example in the powerfully developing fields of industry and technology, can indeed be enraptured by what presents itself to his eyes. But those who look more deeply know: This intoxication, this enthusiasm, comes at a price. They know that souls are becoming more and more barren and desolate, feeling less and less the answer to the riddles of existence. Certainly we should bring into all areas what can alleviate external suffering, but we should not forget that even if we satisfy the outer physical body, we can leave the soul more and more starved, causing the soul more and more suffering through unfulfilled longing. This is the mood that overcomes those who not only look lovingly at the hustle and bustle of human life, but who also see the course that the future will take.

Much is said about the goals that man can set for himself. In the intoxication that overcomes his soul when the whirlpool of today's outer life takes hold of him, he does not realize that this soul must remain a searching one. And why? Let us place before our soul only the deepest background of all the contradictions in today's perception. If we cut our finger and heal it with the best means at our disposal, we know that the same natural laws prevail in it as in the surrounding world. We are formed out of the whole of nature, out of the laws that prevail around us. But at the same time, we feel the need to see something else in us. We see that spirit flashes from a person's eye, that spirit speaks from their hand, that spirit resounds from their voice. And in recognizing this, we also feel that we are still the bearers of the spirit. We feel that we have arisen out of our environment, but not out of it alone. What governs this environment? Physical laws, chemical laws, what are known today as ironclad laws of nature. That is not enough to explain the spirit. What physics, chemistry, biology give is not enough for that.

Where does that which can be addressed as spirit have its root? It is within us, in ourselves, but homeless, rootless. We can understand the chemical composition of blood, can grasp exactly the combustion process that takes place in us, and everything that is subject to physical and chemical laws in the external world. But as soon as we see the outer nature in a spiritless way, everything is rootless. We cannot say: just as blood is subject to the laws of blood circulation, so some spiritual substance follows the laws of the environment. A spirit cannot be found in it, says the seeking and erring soul of the present time. From there the answer to the questions that torment me cannot come. From where will it come to me?

Now we see where the problem lies. We see that our ideas about the external world are becoming increasingly clear. But now the human being wants to root himself with his spirit, with his soul, in something. The soul cannot help but want that. It cannot flee from itself into a barren physical-chemical existence. That is where the conflict arises. The soul has the need to imagine a spiritual being, but nowhere in the outer world can it find what corresponds to its present ideas about a spiritual being. This gives rise to a deep falsehood. Modern man cannot believe in sylphs, salamanders, undines and gnomes. But what could give him satisfaction is not available. The soul stands there without content.

The more deeply this is felt, the more untrue it becomes to speak only of spirit. Either one finds spirit, or one has to insert it artificially. It may seem to some that what has just been said is too far removed from daily feeling. But everywhere we will find souls whose pain stems from this. What spiritual science brings wants to meet this great quest. Its endeavour is to build a bridge between the soul itself and that which is outside, whether the soul listens to the raging of the storm or watches the lovely movements of the sea waves. Man is no longer able, on the basis of human qualities, to idealize gods that are active behind air and water. We have to refrain from seeing an anthropomorphic image of ourselves in what we call divine beings. That is the realization of today. But the other thing is the powerlessness of the seeking soul. From one side it is told: If you want to find a god, you must not endow it with human qualities. On the other hand, it turns out that we are not able to create a substitute for ourselves. Because these searching souls lack something that would justify this self-evident fact, they are at a loss. Where can they find the firm ground that gives them security?

This is only possible because man is again acquiring the right to research the spiritual, to look deeper into his inner being. What was once enough for man is now not enough. Spiritual science says to modern man: You have taken the wrong path. Are the qualities that man has found so far all there are? Is there no deeper substratum? Do we not find something hidden from view that we can say: Yes, this could be related to what I feel to be the divine?

There must be something that is more deeply rooted than anything that man has known about himself so far, that gives him the right to transfer human-soul qualities to the divine. But how to find the way to the hidden foundations within ourselves?

Here spiritual science points us to paths that only a few people have taken in the past. Today, many need guidance along these paths. There are two paths: firstly, the path of mysticism and, secondly, the path of occultism in the true sense of the word.

Let us consider these two paths. What is the path of mysticism? To understand this, we need only take a moment to consider our own souls. You all know that in spiritual science we speak of the fact that a person is not the same being in sleep as they are when awake. When falling asleep, the inner being of the person emerges, and when waking up, it descends again into the physical body and the etheric body. In general, people do not notice that something special is happening in the process. Do we ever see what descends from within? A tremendous change takes place in a person at that moment. When he descends, he does not see his etheric body and his physical body from within. Otherwise he would see that his corporeality is illusion and maya. As ordinary people, we see the environment and that part of ourselves that we can see from the outside. What works and lives in him, the human being sees nothing of that. He sees only the outside, which he also sees in stones and minerals. For his gaze is distracted to the outer world as soon as he descends into his lower bodies. Those who have striven for a conscious awakening were the mystics. They experienced a conscious descent into the outer man. All the images of the inner life known to the mystics are what the human being can see when he turns his gaze away from the outer world, from what otherwise captures his gaze. The mystic experiences what the human being is when he looks at himself from within. He does not see, for example, how the blood circulates, but he sees that the blood is the carrier of divine activity; he sees that the blood is a shadow of spiritual reality. That is what the mystic experiences: the spiritual motor of his own being instead of the external Maya.

What the mystics tell us is true. Listen to what they report: This descent is associated with what we call trials and temptations, the awakening of selfish instincts. Read the descriptions of what the soul is capable of unfolding in terms of base instincts. We have to go through a whole layer of passions, desires, selfish impulses that we hardly thought we were capable of anymore. All this must be overcome if we want to penetrate into the deep layers of our own being. It is wisely arranged that our gaze is initially diverted from our own inner being, because man is not mature enough to consciously descend into his own inner being. He must fight everything that rears up in him when he has embarked on the path of overcoming his own egoism. Only then does he find the true human being, who is concentrated in the smallest space, in the I-point. Only then are we completely within ourselves, recognizing ourselves in good and evil, seeing what the human being really is when he is beyond the layer formed by his instincts and desires, and when he has outgrown all that has been instilled in him by education and convention. We have to go through this layer if we want to penetrate into our inner selves.

There is yet another way to recognize the spirit and ourselves. It is not easy to enter and is protected from the immature, because it also contains its dangers. In addition to the important moment of waking up, there is also the moment of falling asleep, which is equally significant for the contemplation of the human being. Let us examine it more closely. At the moment of falling asleep, the human being passes into the spiritual world, into the world beyond physical reality. His consciousness ceases, it fades away. The normal person has no spiritual world around him in a conscious way. If he were to enter the spiritual world in an immature state, he would experience to the utmost degree what in the physical world is blindness. He would be blinded by the direct vision of the spiritual poured out through the outer world.

Again it is necessary to make man so strong that he will not be blinded by this spirit poured out through the outer world. This is done through the occult path. Through this path he finds his ego, not crowded together in the narrowest part of his own inner being, but poured out over the whole outer world, one with that outer world. That is the occult path.

When man learns to go both ways, the mystical path and the occult path, a significant fact comes to his attention. Let him seek out the point where he is most compressed, most crowded in his own interior, and let him be poured out over the whole outside world, then he experiences the one great, the mighty. What you experience when you descend into the depths of your own self and when you pour yourself into the infinite is the same: mysticism and occultism go in opposite directions and lead to the same goal. Man discovers something that has slumbered in him, that is enchanted in the outer world, that can be found in the depths of his own soul and outside in the world of appearances. He finds that which lives as spirit behind the phenomena, and he finds the spiritual in himself when he has connected with the mystical path of knowledge and with the occult path of knowledge. That is the bridge by which the abyss can be bridged, which the seeking soul of today faces when it realizes that it itself is something different from the world of appearances outside and cannot connect with its qualities to what surrounds it outside.

Today there is the possibility of finding a way that shows how what lives in us is the same as what lives in the outside world. The seeking souls who are outside of our aspirations do not yet know it. The spiritual science shows the way. The theosophical world view aims to be a signpost for this goal. It will provide answers to the questions posed by the bleeding, struggling souls of today. These questions will resound to the windows of the present, and spiritual science will provide the answer. This gives it its inner justification and shows that it has not arisen arbitrarily from a few minds, but from the needs of the time. Spiritual science will again indicate means and ways to find harmony between what lives in the environment and what lives in the human soul. It will lead us to recognize the laws governing nature not as empty abstractions, but as thoughts of divine spiritual entities. In this way, it will rediscover the spirit in the outer world. The fact that the soul cannot do this today is what accounts for its emptiness and desolation. It can only find consolation, help and strength by seeking the paths and goals of the spiritual human being. This shows how deeply justified this spiritual-scientific endeavour is.

If we understand spiritual science in its deepest sources, we will give the soul the nourishment it craves, we will open up sources of spiritual activity for it, and, because everything external is an expression of the spiritual, in the course of time also health. From the yearning and searching of today, spiritual science will be given its goals.

When speaking of the paths and goals of spiritual man, the question will arise again and again: Why should one think of going such special ways? Why are we being pointed to the fact that we should set ourselves such goals through spiritual science? - What we have to give as an answer must be transformed into feeling and sentiment for us. It has been pointed out time and again that forces lie dormant in the human being and in nature, striving to develop, which can be unfolded. In addition to the human being who sees and hears in the physical world, every human being has a higher human being within him. This is present as a kind of seed, germinating. Spiritual science brings this to our attention more and more urgently. It is a human being of whom ordinary consciousness does not know much.

We must be clear about the following: what we can see now is our ordinary everyday human being. But the one who slumbers in us, who is in us as a seed, is a spiritual human being. Whether this seed develops or not depends on our ordinary human being. We can prepare the ground with the powers of our ordinary self, but we can also leave it uncultivated and not take care of it. Then we fail in our duty to our spiritual self. Through spiritual science itself, through what it can give us as teachings and messages, we can prepare the ground for this higher self. If we transform this insight into feeling and sentiment, it will give us the answer to the question: Is it not a higher selfishness to occupy ourselves with ourselves in this way? — As long as we have not learned anything from spiritual science, it is our karma to wait. But once we have heard about the higher human being slumbering within us, it is our duty to do what can develop its powers in order to better fulfill our tasks in the world. We cannot speak of selfishness here, but only of our obligation to our spiritual self.

This is the right point of view for a Theosophist to take in relation to the outer life. Theosophy gives us a number of communications that have been obtained through spiritual research. However, not everyone who wants to live theosophy needs to be a spiritual researcher. The more we are able to follow the path of our inner development, the better. But before we ourselves can achieve results in the field of spiritual research, we must have its contents related to us by others. When we have presented the question to ourselves long enough, the outer life will confirm the communications of the spiritual researchers. If we have grasped these communications through sound logic, we are given the opportunity to ascend to higher worlds. Reason and logic are the surest guides for this.

The question may arise: How should we use these messages? How should we relate to them? — Let us take the truth that we call the law of karma. It states that in later lives on earth we find events that point back to previous incarnations. The more we apply such a law of spiritual research in life, the more we will see how true it is. Just as we never find a triangle in the sense world whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees, so the circumstances of life must always confirm what is recognized as a law in spiritual research. And if the karmic effects do not appear to us to be consistent, this will at most correspond to the slight deviation that may occur when measuring a circle with the help of the planimeter. The result may be 361 degrees one time and 359 the next, but that does not negate the law itself. Nor is the law of gravity overthrown because a push causes the plumb line of a falling machine to swing to the side. This only proves that a different result is achieved when a new force is added.

Spiritual research also shows how we encounter repetitions of previous periods of time within our lives between birth and death. For example, what we acquire between the ages of three and seven in our first childhood will come back to us in its karmic effect in our old age. If you examine how someone was allowed to spend their first childhood, you will discover a remarkable connection with those childhood years in their old age. If, instead of being subject to the external constraints of certain rules, he has developed healthy needs, his old age will take a different shape. In many cases, however, what is considered right is implanted and crammed into the child's soul. However, it is not what is implanted that matters, but that the child must have the need to do this or that of his own free will. It turns out that people can maintain their health in old age, that they retain freshness and inner strength until the last stage of their lives.

However, there are even more significant connections. From people's writing, you can learn a lot about how their past has shaped them.

During the age of seven to fourteen years, it is necessary that man not be educated to premature use of his reason. Authority must cause truth to appear to us as such. If we can admire the people who surround us during this period of our lives, it will serve us well in the penultimate stage of our lives. Devoutly looking up at natural wonders and being in the mood for prayer are beneficial factors for later on. Happy recognition of authority comes back, transformed in a way that makes it self-evident that such a person has authority. The devotion that children are able to develop during this period results in them becoming people who, without having to do anything, merely need to be in the company of others to have a blessing effect. The hand that has never been able to fold in devotion with the other will never be able to bless. Those who have never learned to bend their knees will never be able to bless. If you have penetrated such a law, you will find it confirmed. In this way, the effect of the law of karma can be seen in the course of a single human life. Thus, life everywhere provides us with evidence of a lawfulness that is effective in all fields.

Of course, circumstances can arise that conceal the law. In physics, for example, we know the law of gravity. Imagine an object that is moving through space at any given moment without support, completely left to its own devices. According to the law of gravity, this object will approach the earth with increasing speed until it hits the earth. The object will move in the direction of the center of the earth according to very definite laws; it will fall. Let us further imagine that the falling object is suddenly hit by a horizontally directed blow. The naive observer, who expects the object, falling vertically due to the law of gravity, to arrive at the relevant point on the earth, will in this case wait in vain. The object stays away. Does that mean that the law of fall is repealed? Not at all. Through the horizontally guided blow, only a new force has been added, and the object now moves under its effect in a curve that corresponds quite lawfully to the result of gravity and the later added force, towards the earth. At the point where the object hits the ground under these circumstances, its fall will be seen by any observer as something quite random and unpredictable. But this is not the case. The lawfulness is complete and incorruptible.

The same applies in full to the law of karma, although we can rarely follow it in all its composite and intricate effects. That is why man is always inclined to doubt his karma. But however confused we may be by the outer Maja, we should only let ourselves be guided by what has become law in our soul. Many who wish to develop the powers of the spirit within themselves will not find it easy, for the physical life is always intruding. There but for the grace of something in our existence, how easily we are carried away by wrong judgment, for instance, to insults, without thinking of the consequences of our actions. We strike a blow at a person and do not know that we have raised our hand against ourselves, because this blow will strike us again in our own hour. The law of karma is at work everywhere. Everything that happens to us in life happens under the law of karma. But merely considering this law as a doctrine, as a theory, does not make us theosophists.

There are two feelings that we must acquire if we want to work on our spiritual development. On the one hand, we must say to ourselves: There is nothing about us that can be perfected, nowhere is there a limit to our ascent. At every moment, the feeling of imperfection should urge us to climb higher and higher on the ladder of perfection, which knows no highest rung. We must keep reminding ourselves of this, otherwise we will not make any progress in our work on our spiritual self. On the other hand, we should say to ourselves: a second step is necessary. In every moment we must feel that there is an infinite possibility for perfection within us. We must make our hidden self as great as possible. This is an apparent contradiction, and the human being must feel it as such. Between these two points, the feeling of one's own imperfection and the striving to make the hidden self as great as possible, development is included.

The one who strives as a mystic, who descends into his own inner being, who wants to advance through an inner deepening, must pass through the first point. He must acquire humility. The best rule a mystic can set for himself is this: to think of everything that arises within him as imperfect as possible, to detach himself completely from his own personality. For anyone who enters into his own inner being must be prepared to experience terrible things. Stories of tragic experiences take place in the inner world of the person who dares to venture into the depths of his own being. A Tauler, a Eckhart, a Paulus can tell of it. And how was the help that these sought against the dangers? Paul says: Not I, but the Christ in me wants to act. Take with you the Master, the Ideal, but feel with it that the ego must be driven out. Not from your own ego should all feeling, all willing, all thinking be done. Your unworthy ego had to be driven out. This feeling is very similar to the sense of shame in the ordinary man. Wanting to be another, wanting to organize another into your own soul, that is the way of mysticism.

And what belongs to the path of occultism? The path of the occultists leads into the outer world. If a person wants to follow the occult path, he must live in such a way that he gradually learns to bear the higher world when he has left his body during sleep. He must develop a feeling for perfecting himself in the Infinite. But here too a danger lies in wait for him, as it does for the mystic when he descends into his own inner being. We have been permitted to mention the dangers that beset the mystic; the mystic himself reports about them. The dangers that beset the occultist are not mentioned. Each one must acquaint himself with this danger.

When we look into our own inner being, it would be bad if we had not learned to feel ourselves as a unity that is poured out over our entire being. This ability to hold on to a unity is disrupted by every passion that overcomes us. Anger, envy, hatred destroy our power to focus on unity. And worst of all is when we have not learned to concentrate, when we are driven hither and thither. Firm and uninfluenced, we must learn to feel as one.

But if we, as occultists, seek the way into the outer world, we must eliminate our personality, as it has just been characterized. Here one must not seek a unity underlying the whole outer world. For when we turn to the spiritual world, we encounter an infinite variety of beings and conditions. If the occultist were to attempt to penetrate the unity that underlies the entire manifested world, he would perish. Imagine a drop of red liquid being poured into a large basin of water. Liquid as the drop is, it would immediately dissolve in the mass of water, it would melt away. This is what happens to the unstable ego when it wants to enter the world of the All-One. We dare not venture to penetrate there alone, for we will lose ourselves as the red drop loses itself in the mass of water. If we want to enter the astral realm, we are pointed to a multiplicity. We must ask about the multiplicity, from the beings who stand higher than we do, from those who have themselves gradually gone through a higher development, from the hierarchies of that world. We must not want to skip anything, for it would be presumptuous to want to go straight to the highest. We must gradually learn to study with the help of the higher beings if we want to grasp the unity. The arrogance of wanting to reach the highest level will surely lead to failure. We must not let ourselves be tempted by our monotheistic ideas into believing that when the veil that separates us from the spiritual world slides aside, we will see only a single divine oneness. It is the multiplicity that we look into, and it is on the multiplicity that we must focus our gaze.

But how are we to find our way? Pythagoras said: “Seek not the manifold with your eyes, ears and senses, seek it through number!” Equipped with number, we are to approach the manifold. Just as the mystic must pour the ideal of higher perfection into his inner being, so the occultist must appeal to number. And here one quality is absolutely essential, namely certainty. We must feel secure. For if man wavers, what is he? A will-o'-the-wisp, a flickering light, and the world is a labyrinth. We need an Ariadne's thread to find our way back. The number makes us firm, we must keep it in mind. If you want to enter the spiritual world, you have to step out of yourself, you have to enter the chaos of the many first. How do we find this factor? Where is the organizing principle? We find it through the number, through the lawfulness of the number. We have to penetrate into the essence of the number and get to know its real value. The number alone can become our guide in the labyrinth. The number can teach us a great deal, and certain numbers are based on profound secrets.

Take the number two, for example. Everything that comes into being manifests itself in twos. There is no right without left, no light without darkness. Everything that manifests itself outwardly is subject to the number two. The number two is the number of revelation, the number of manifestation.

The number three is the number of the conformity to law of the soul: thinking, feeling and willing. Insofar as something is organized and structured in the soul, it is subject to the number three. Where the number three reveals itself as a conformity to law, something soul-like underlies it. We can find the number three in countless relationships. In the three logoi we have the three fundamental powers, which point back to something divinely soul-impregnated.

In relation to all that is temporal, the number seven applies: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, which denote the seven successive states of evolution.

Where we see something interacting simultaneously, we get the number twelve: the twelve gods, the twelve apostles, and so on. The reduction of the fixed stars to the twelve signs of the zodiac is also connected with this. The number twelve teaches us yet another law. Let us think of materialism. Is materialism wrong? It does not have to be, as long as man does not carry it into the soul. If one wants to be a materialist, then one must pay homage to vitalism, then one learns to understand material life. But one must choose a different point of view for the soul and for the spiritual. If we want to understand the world in its fullness, then we must be able to place ourselves in different points of view. We must take the practical spiritual path.

Now one may well hear a person express the principle: You must make a certain system for yourself if you want to penetrate into the higher worlds. But that is the worst way to go. Instead, one should first step out of one's own personality: from the center that this personality occupies in its existence, to the horizon of our physical existence. Only here in the horizon should we place ourselves on a certain point of view, first the materialistic one, and look at it from the inside out, from the one point of view through which, as already mentioned, we get to know the material life. Only then can we walk around the horizon and choose twelve different points of view. This is the only way that can lead to real knowledge. The practical occultist must become very selfless before he can walk around the horizon in a circle. By having to forget his personal self twelve times, he maintains uniformity in both the external and the internal.