The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the introductory lecture yesterday our attention was drawn to the fact that certain events in the more ancient history of mankind can be rightly understood only when we not merely observe the forces and faculties of the personalities themselves, but when we realise at the outset that through the personalities in question, as through instruments, Beings are working who allow their deeds to stream down from higher worlds into our world. We must realise that these Beings cannot take direct hold of the physical facts of our existence because, on account of the present stage of their development, they cannot incarnate in a physical Body which draws its constituents from the physical world. If, therefore, they desire to work within our physical world, they must make use of the physical human being—of his deeds, but also of his intellect, his powers of understanding. We find the influence and penetration of such Beings of the higher world the more clearly in evidence the farther back we go in the ages of the evolution of humanity. But it must not be imagined that this downpouring of forces and activities from the higher worlds into the physical world through human beings has ever ceased; it continues even into our own time.

To the spiritual scientist who for years now has been absorbing principles which lead his feelings and ideal to accept the existence of higher worlds—to him a fact such as this will certainly, from he outset, be to some extent comprehensible; for he is accustomed always to draw the connecting threads which link our knowledge, our thinking, our willing, with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But from time to time the spiritual scientist is also in the position of having to guard against the materialistic conceptions which are so prevalent in the present age and make it impossible for those who stand aloof from the development of the spiritual life even to enter into what has to be said about the working of higher worlds into our physical world.

Fundamentally speaking, it is considered an antiquated attitude in our time even to speak of the influence of abstract ideas in the events of history. Many people to-day regard it as quite impermissible, in face of the genuinely scientific approach, to speak of certain ideas, abstract ideas which properly speaking can live only in the wind, taking effect in the successive epochs of history. A last semblance, at least, of belief in the influence of abstract ideas—although how they are to work is incomprehensible precisely because they are abstract ideas!—was still in evidence even in the 19th century, in Ranke's exposition of history¹⁰ But even this belief in ideas as factors in history is gradually being discarded by our progressively materialistic development, and in a certain respect to-day it is regarded as the sign of an enlightened mind in the domain of history to believe that all the characteristic features of the several epochs merely represent the convergence of physically perceptible actions, outer needs, outer interests and ideas of physical human beings. The time is now past when spirits such as Herder, as if through a certain inspiration, still portrayed the development of human history in a way which enables one to perceive that it is based on the assumption, at least, of the existence of living powers, living super-sensible powers manifesting through the deeds and the lives of men.¹¹ Those who want to be accounted very clever to-day, will say: “Well yes, a man such as Lessing certainly had many really intelligent ideas, but then, at the end of his life, he wrote nonsense such as you find in The Education of the Human Race, where the only way in which he could help himself out of his difficulties was by linking the strict conformity to law shown by the flow of historical development with the idea of reincarnation.” In the last sentences of The Education of the Human Race,¹² Lessing has actually expressed what is described by Anthroposophy on the basis of occult facts—namely, that souls who lived in ancient epochs and then absorbed active, living forces, carry over these forces into their new incarnations, so that behind physical happenings there is not an abstract onflow of ideas but an actual and real onflow of the spirit. As I said, a clever ass will insist that in his old age Lessing hit upon ideas as confused as that of reincarnation, and that these ideas must he ignored.—This reminds one again of the bitterly ironic yet brilliant note once written by Hebbel in his diary, to the effect that a fair motif would be that a master, taking the subject of Plato in his school, has among his pupils the reincarnated Plato, who understands what the master is teaching so little that he has to be severely punished!

The conception of the historical evolution of humanity has lost much of the earlier, spiritual insight, and Spiritual Science will really have to guard against the onslaught of materialistic thinking which comes from all sides and regards communications which are based on the spiritual facts as so much lunacy. That things have come to a pretty pass is shown, for example, in the fact that all those mighty pictures, those grand symbolical conceptions which emanated from the old clairvoyant knowledge and are expressed in the characters of legends and fairy-tales, have interpreters of the very oddest kind. The most curious production in this domain is undoubtedly Solomon Reinach's little book Orpheus, which has caused a certain furor in many circles in France. Everything from which the ideas of Demeter, of Orpheus, and of other mythological cycles are supposed to have sprung, is traced back in this book to purely materialistic happenings and it is often utterly grotesque how the historical existence of this or that figure, standing, let us say, behind Hermes or Moses, is alleged to have originated, and with what superficiality an attempt has been made to explain these figures as the inventions of poetic license, of human fantasy. According to Solomon Reinach's method it would be easy, sixty or seventy years hence, when outer memory of him will have faded somewhat, to prove that there never was such a man, but that it was simply a matter of popular fantasy having transferred the old idea of Reinecke Fuchs to Solomon Reinach. According to his method this would certainly be possible. The absurdity of the whole book is on a par with what is said in the Preface—that it has been written “for the widest circles of the educated public, even for the very young.” “For the very young”—since he emphasises that he has avoided everything that might cause a shock to young girls—although he has not avoided tracing back the idea of Demeter to a pig! He promises, however, that if his book gains the influence he hopes for, he will write a special edition for mothers, which will include everything that must still be withheld from their daughters.—That is the kind of thing we have come to!

One would like to remind students of Spiritual Science particularly, that it is possible to prove on purely external grounds that spiritual powers, spiritual forces have worked through human beings right up to our own century—and this quite apart from the purely occult, esoteric research with which we shall be mainly concerned here. But in order that we may understand how it is possible for Spiritual Science to maintain, on purely external grounds, that super-sensible powers exercise sway in history, let me point to the following.

Anyone who gains a little insight into the development of modern humanity, let us say in the 14th and 15th centuries and on until the 16th, will realise how infinitely significant in this outer development was the intervention of a certain personality, one in respect of whom it can be proved from completely external evidence that spiritual, super-sensible Powers worked through her. In order to throw a little light on the occult understanding of history, we may ask the question: What would the development of modern Europe have been if at the beginning of the 15th century the Maid of Orleans had not entered the arena of events? Anyone who thinks, even from an entirely external point of view, of the development that took place during this period, must say to himself: Suppose the deeds of the Maid of Orleans were erased from history ... then, according to the knowledge obtainable from purely external historical research, one cannot but realise that without the working of higher, super-sensible Powers through the Maid of Orleans, the whole of France, indeed the whole of Europe in the 15th century, would have taken on an altogether different form. Everything in the impulses of will, in the physical brains of those times, was directed towards flooding all Europe with a general conception of the State which would have extinguished the folk-individualities and under this influence a very great deal of what has developed in Europe during the last centuries through the interplay of these folk-individualities would quite certainly have been impossible.

Imagine the deed of the Maid of Orleans blotted out from history, France abandoned to her fate without this intervention, and then ask: Without this deed, what would have become of France? And then think of the role played by France in the whole cultural life of humanity during the centuries following! Add to this the facts which cannot be refuted and are confirmed by actual documents concerning the mission of the Maid of Orleans. This young girl, certainly not highly educated even by the standards of her time, suddenly, before she is twenty years old, feels in the autumn of 1428 that spiritual Powers of the super-sensible worlds are speaking to her. True, she clothes these Powers in forms that are familiar to her, so that she is seeing them through the medium of her own mental images; but that does not do away with the reality of these Powers. Picture to yourselves that she knows that super-sensible Powers are guiding her will towards a definite point—I am speaking to begin with, not of what can be told about these facts from the Akasha Chronicle, but only of what is confirmed by documentary evidence.

We know that the Maid of Orleans confided her vision first of all to a relative who—one would almost say, by chance-happened to understand her; that after many vicissitudes and difficulties she was introduced to the Court of King Charles who, together with the whole French Army, had come to his wit's end, as the saying goes. We know too, how after every conceivable obstacle had been put in her way, she finally recognised and went straight to the King, who was standing among such a crowd of people that no physical eye could have distinguished him. It is also known that at that moment she confided to him something—he wanted to test her by it—of which it can be said that it was known only to him and to the super-sensible worlds. You also know from ordinary history that it was she who, under the unceasing impulse and urge of her intense faith—it would be better to say, through her actual vision—and in face of the greatest difficulties, led the armies to victory and the King to his crowning.

Who intervened at that time in the course of history?—None other than Beings of higher Hierarchies! The Maid of Orleans was an outer Instrument of these Beings, and it was they who guided the deeds of history. It is possible that someone may say to himself: “If I had guided these deeds I would have guided them more wisely!”—because he finds one thing or another in the procedure of the Maid of Orleans at variance with his own way of thinking. Adherents of Spiritual Science, however, should not wish to correct the deeds of gods through human intellect—a very common practice in our so-called civilisation. There have also been people who quite in the Spirit of the present age, have wanted, as it were, to unburden modern history of the deeds of the Maid of Orleans. A characteristic modern work with this materialistic trend has been written by Anatole France. One would really like to know how materialistic thinking manages to reconcile itself with much irrefutable evidence—I am still speaking only of actual historical documents. And so because we are in Stuttgart and I sometimes like to take account of local matters, I want to quote from a document to which reference has already been made here.

Those who belong to Stuttgart certainly know that there once lived here a man¹³ who carried out important research on the Gospels. As spiritual scientists we certainly need not agree with the things—some of them extremely clever—that were brought forward by Gfrörer—that was his name—and we may be quite sure that if he had heard what is now being given in the domain of Spiritual Science he would have used terms he was often wont to apply to his opponents—whom he, with his stubborn-headedness, by no means always let off lightly. He would have said that these Theosophists, too, are people who are “not quite right in the head.” But this was before the time when, as is the case to-day, historical documents can be passed over for purely materialistic reasons if they happen to deal with inconvenient facts and obviously point to the working of higher forces in our physical world. And so I will again quote from a short document—a letter published in the first half of the 19th century. I will read you just a few paragraphs from this letter, which was quoted by Gfrörer at that time in justification of his belief. I will read a passage characterising the Maid of Orleans, and then ask you to think of the implications of such a vivid description.

After the writer of this letter has set forth what the Maid of Orleans accomplished, he continues:

“This and much more has the Maid brought about, and with God's help she will accomplish still greater things. The girl is of appealing beauty and manly bearing; she speaks little and shows remarkable sagacity; when she speaks she has a pleasing, delicately feminine voice. She eats little and abstains from wine. She takes pleasure in fine horses and weapons and admires well-accoutred and noble men. To be obliged to meet and converse with large numbers of people is abhorrent to her; her tears often overflow; she loves a happy face, endures unheard of toil, and is so assiduous in the manipulation and bearing of weapons that she remains uninterruptedly for six days—day and night—in full armour. She says that the English have no right to France, and therefore—as she says—God has sent her to drive them out and conquer them, but only after previous warning. For the King she shows the deepest veneration; she says he is beloved by God, is under special protection, and will therefore be preserved. Of the Duke of Orleans, your nephew, she says that he will be delivered in a miraculous way, but only after a demand for his release has been made to the English who hold him prisoner.

“With that, revered Duke, I bring my report to a conclusion. Still more wonderful things are happening and have happened than I can write of or describe to you in words. While I write this, the afore mentioned Maid has already gone to the neighbourhood of the city of Rheims in Champagne, whither the King has hastily set off for his anointing and crowning under God's protection. Most respected and powerful Duke, and greatly venerated master! I commend myself to you in all humility, while praying the Almighty to protect you and fulfil your desires. Written at Biteromis, the 21st day of June in the year 1429.

Your humble servant
PERCEVAL
Lord of Bonlaninth. Counsellor and
Chamberlain of the King of the French
and of the Duke of Orleans, Seneschal of
Berry.”

This letter¹⁴ was written by one who knew the Maid and was in close contact with the King. It is indeed amazing when one discovers all these things on purely occult grounds and with occult means of proof—for they are indeed to be found in the Akasha Chronicle—and then sees how, in cases like this, actual historical documents can also be produced. In short, it seems almost madness to doubt what was working through the Maid of Orleans. And when we also take into consideration the fact that through her deeds the whole history of modern time assumed a different aspect, this gives us the right to say that here, verified by documentary evidence, we can see the direct intervention of the super-sensible worlds. When the spiritual researcher goes further and seeks in his own way for the one who was the real Inspirer of the Maid of Orleans, he finds something very remarkable as he investigates the successive epochs of time. He finds that the same Spirit who worked through the Maid of Orleans as his instrument at that time had inspired—in a quite different form, a quite different way—another personality who was a philosopher at the Court of Charles the Bald. This was Scotus Erigena, through whose philosophical and theological ideas in an earlier period Europe had been so deeply influenced. And so we see that the same Powers work in different epochs in a different way through human beings who are their instruments; that there is continuity, an onflowing stream of happenings in what we call history.

I showed you yesterday how a significant myth of Babylonian-Chaldean times points to the penetration of the spiritual worlds into men upon whom much depended for the third Post-Atlantean period, for the whole of historical development in ancient Chaldea, in ancient Babylonia. But we must now also observe from the standpoint of occult science the two personalities hidden behind the legendary names of Gilgamish and Eabani. In the Sense of occult history we have to see in them personalities who stand at the starting-point of the Babylonian-Chaldean epoch of culture. The impulses proceeding from them are to be discerned again in the development of the really spiritual culture of ancient Babylonia and Chaldea.—Now Gilgamish was a personality who had many incarnations behind him and may therefore be called an “old” soul within the evolution of humanity.

You know from the book Occult Science that during the Lemurian epoch of earth-evolution only very few human beings had outlasted, on the earth itself, the happenings of this evolution, that only a few remained on the earth during the Lemurian epoch; that before the actual danger of the mummification of everything human began, the majority of souls withdrew from the earth to other planets, continuing their life on Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, arid so forth. Then, from the end of the Lemurian epoch and during the Atlantean epoch, these souls gradually came down to the earth in order to incarnate in earthly bodies under the changed earthly conditions, and to appear in ever new incarnations. Thus there are souls who came down comparatively early from the planetary worlds and others who came down late; indeed not until the later periods of Atlantean evolution. The souls who came down early have therefore more incarnations behind them in earth-evolution than those who came down later; hence we can call these latter, in contrast to the former, “younger” souls—souls who have taken less into themselves.

The individuality hidden behind the name Gilgamish was an old soul, and a younger soul was incarnated in Eabani, at the starting-point of the Babylonian civilisation. Indeed, in connection with human souls being younger or older in this sense, something very remarkable discloses itself—something that might almost be said to cause astonishment even to the occultist. If someone has reached the point to-day of giving a little credence to the truths of Spiritual Science, but otherwise still clings to the prejudices and criteria of the external world, it will seem plausible to him that modern philosophers or scholars, for example, should be accounted among the older souls. But, strangely enough, occult research finds just the opposite; and for the occultist himself it is surprising to find that in Kant, for example, there lived a young soul. Yes, the facts show that it is so ... it cannot be gainsaid. It can also be intimated here that younger souls—the majority at any rate—incarnate in the coloured races, so that it is the coloured races, especially the negro race, which mainly brings younger souls to incarnation. The characteristic quality of that kind of thinking which comes to expression in erudition, in the materialistic science of to-day, calls for younger souls. And it can be shown that in the case of many a personality where one would not in the least expect it, the preceding incarnation was in an uncivilised race. That again is what the facts tell us! It must be kept strictly in mind, for it is so. Naturally this does not in the least detract from the significance or value of the opinions we have formed about the world around us; nevertheless it must be grasped in order fully to understand the essentials here. In this sense, in Eabani we have to do with a young soul and in Gilgamish with an old soul in ancient Babylonia. The whole nature of an old soul will enable it early in life to grasp not only the essential element, the essential factor, in the existing culture, but also that which strikes into it as a new impulse, opening up a wide vista into the future.

There will be many, of course, who will protest if one tries to make it plausible to them that the Theosophists whom they are wont to look down upon are, generally speaking, older souls than people who deliver scientific lectures. Investigation shows, however, that this is so; and although spiritual research must not be misused for the purpose of forcing people to change their criteria of judgment, or of scoffing at what is after all part of the very make-up of our civilisation, nevertheless the truth must be faced fairly and squarely. Gilgamish, then, was a personality who, owing to his particular condition of soul, participated in the most progressive spiritual elements and spiritual factors of the age—in everything that threw light far into the future and at that time could be attained only if such a personality went through a kind of initiation. Through the imparting of something that can be received only through a certain initiation, Gilgamish was to be enabled to provide a kind of leaven for the Babylonian culture. He had to experience an initiation up to a certain degree.

Let us think of this Gilgamish at the point where he stood in the evolution of humanity before this initiation. He was a man of the third Post-Atlantean epoch. But in this epoch twilight had already fallen over the natural human clairvoyance, over what men were able to achieve through forces that were innate in them. These forces were no longer present to the degree that could enable any great number of men to look back into their earlier incarnations. If we were to go farther back, into the second or into the first Post-Atlantean epoch, we should find that the majority of human beings then on the earth could look back into their earlier incarnations, into the course of their soul-life before their present birth. But that faculty had been lost. In the case of Gilgamish, the Being who was to reveal himself through him, and who could do so only by leading him presently to a kind of initiation, kept a guiding hand upon him from the outset and set him at the place where he came to recognise his own position in the history of the world. As it were through super-sensible events, presented to us in the pictures of the myth I outlined to you yesterday, a friend was placed at the side of Gilgamish, a friend whose barbarity and uncivilised nature are indicated by the statement that his outer form was half animal. It is said that this friend had skins of animals on his body, which means that he was still covered with hair like the men of primeval times, that his soul was so young that it built for itself a body which showed the human being still in a savage state. Thus the more advanced Gilgamish had in Eabani a man at his side who, because of his young soul and the bodily Organisation conditioned by it, still possessed ancient clairvoyance. This friend was given to Gilgamish in order that he might find his own bearings in life. With the help of this friend he was then able to achieve certain things, such as the retrieval of that spiritual Power presented to us in the myth in the picture of Ishtar, the Goddess of the city of Erech. I told you how this Goddess had been stolen by the neighbouring City and that for this reason Gilgamish and Eabani together waged war against this city, vanquished its king and brought the Goddess back.

If we are to understand in the true historical sense such things as are presented to us in these old myths, we must investigate their occult background. Behind this rape of the City Goddess there lies something similar to the rape of Helen, who was carried off to Troy by Paris. We must realise that there are good grounds for what is stated in my little book, Blood is a very special Fluid. It is pointed out there that in the peoples of ancient times there was a kind of collective consciousness. A man did not merely feel his personal ego within his skin, but he felt himself as a member of the tribe, of the city-community. Just as the individual human soul is felt to be the centralising factor for our organism as a whole, uniting fingers, toes, hands, legs, so did man in very ancient times feel himself a member of the group-soul. Something of the kind still persisted in the early city-communities, even in ancient Greece. One common spirit, a folk-egohood, a tribal egohood, lived and weaved through the single personalities of the tribe or folk. But whatever could come to men's consciousness from this collective egohood had to be under the guidance of the Mysteries in the secret temples, where the priests directed the common spiritual affairs of a city or a tribe. And it is not a mere figure of speech, but in a certain sense an actual reality, to say that such a temple-sanctuary served as a dwelling-place for the city-ego, for the group-soul. There this group-soul had its habitation, and the priests of the temple were its servants. It was they who received the instructions of this group-soul through inspiration—through what was known as an Oracle—and bore them out into the world in order that one thing or another might come to pass. For we must think of the Oracles exactly in the sense I have indicated.

Now the direction of these temple-sanctuaries was bound up with certain secrets, and many conflicts in ancient times arose because the temple-priests of one city were carried off by the neighbouring city, so that in this way, together with the priests, the most important secrets of a city came into the hands of the neighbouring one. There you have the reality behind the picture of the abduction of Ishtar, the city Goddess, the group-soul of Erech, by the neighbouring city. The priests, the trustees of the temple secrets were made prisoners, because the neighbouring city hoped in this way to come into possession of the holy secrets and therewith of the power of the city in question. That is the real background.

In the condition of soul at first prevailing in him, Gilgamish could not himself be aware of such things; he did not see their full implications. But a younger soul could be for him as it were the clairvoyant sense which enabled him to recapture the temple treasure for his own city. Gilgamish now realised that in human life, especially in times of transition, there is such a thing as is described in the legend of the blind man and the cripple: each is helpless alone, but together they can make progress inasmuch as the blind man carries the cripple on his shoulders and the cripple lends the blind man his power of sight. In Gilgamish and Eabani, whose respective gifts differed so greatly, we see the same kind of co-operation transformed into the spiritual. In the historical facts of ancient times we find this at every turn. And it is important to understand it, for only then do we realise why it is that myths and sagas so often tell of friends who have to achieve something together—friends who are generally as unlike in their nature of soul as were Gilgamish and Eabani. But what Gilgamish also acquired through his friend Eabani was this: he was as it were “infected” by Eabani with a clairvoyant power of his own, so that to a certain extent he could look back into his own earlier incarnations. This would certainly have been beyond his normal faculties. And now let us picture vividly how Gilgamish must have been influenced by this vision of his past incarnations.

What was he able to experience from the moment when it became possible for him to look back into what his soul had lived through in earlier incarnations? At first it all seemed alien to him. He could not penetrate fully into what he himself had been in these earlier incarnations; he did not, as it were, recognise himself. So it would be with any human being if he began to look back into his previous incarnations. In most cases things would be different from what they are in the vain imaginings which are always so much in evidence when there is talk of some person or other being an incarnation of this or that individual. We may well come across a person who cites a whole series of great names in history as those of his former incarnations ... in fact numbers of people are convinced that they were never below the rank of a queen or a princess! In these matters, which should be treated with great earnestness, there must be no unlawful play of fancy, no misusage.

Now one who, like Gilgamish at that time, begins to look back on his successive incarnations, may also now and then be veritably astonished. Gilgamish himself looked back to incarnations when he was still involved in all kinds of conditions determined by the sway of the group-soul. To be sure he had, in a certain respect, as a person, worked his way out of these connections; through Eabani he had also come to know for the first time the whole import of what is symbolised in the myth through the figure of the city Goddess. But when he looked back there was much in his earlier incarnations that did not please him, that went against the grain. He found, for example, that in these incarnations his soul had had unusual friendships, human connection, of a kind which in his present life he would have regarded as shameful. Thus, in face of what the City Goddess had revealed to him indirectly, through Eabani, he began in a certain way—as the myth indicates—to upbraid, to reproach his own soul. In the myth it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her lovers, for he is jealous of them. He is looking as it were across the horizon of his own soul and the visions are living realities before him, as real as human beings who stand around someone in the physical world, eliciting feelings of sympathy or antipathy towards them. In the reproaches leveled by Gilgamish against the Goddess we perceive that he is really speaking in terms of what is happening in his own soul. Thus, for example, when it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her previous relationship with one who is called Ishullanu (Ischlanu) in the myth, this signifies that his own friendship with a certain person who had been his master's gardener in the preceding incarnation was not pleasing to him.¹⁵ What took place in the soul of Gilgamish and which first imparted to it that inner content, that inner realisation, which he needed in order to become the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation—all this is shown to us in the picture of the regaining of a certain clairvoyance, of the ascent into super-sensible worlds which, because he was an old soul, were in a certain sense lost to him. This is shown to us in the myth.

And then Gilgamish was to undergo a kind of initiation by being led back to that kind of vision which his own soul had possessed during Atlantean incarnations. What the myth presents as the journey over the sea, and the wanderings of Gilgamish to the West, is nothing else than the inner path towards initiation by which his soul is led upwards to spiritual heights where it can perceive its ancient Atlantean surroundings, when, still clairvoyant, it had gazed into the spiritual world. The myth tells that an this, his spiritual journeying, Gilgamish was brought to the great Atlantean Being, Xisuthros, This was a Being who belonged to certain higher Hierarchies and who during the Atlantean time lived in the sphere of humanity but was afterwards transported from the world of men to dwell in higher regions. Gilgamish was to meet this personality in order that through beholding him he might come to know the condition of souls when they are able to look into the spiritual worlds. Thus he was to be led upwards again into the spiritual spheres by being transported in his life of soul into Atlantean times. And when he is bidden not to sleep for seven nights and six days, this signifies nothing else than an exercise which was to make the soul capable of penetrating fully into the corresponding spiritual regions. When we are now told that he was not able to endure the test, Isis again signifies something of great importance, namely that Gilgamish is represented as a personality who was brought to the very brink of Initiation—who was destined, as it were, to look through the portal of Initiation into the mysteries of the spirit but owing to the conditions of the times was not able to penetrate fully into their depths. In short, this is intended to indicate that the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation had remained at the portal of Initiation, that he could not look with full clarity into the higher worlds, with the result that he gave Babylonian culture the stamp that is a sign of no more than a glimpse into the secrets of Initiation.

We shall now see that the nature of external Babylonian culture was indeed such that it confirms what has just been said. Whereas, for example, everything points to the fact that Hermes was a personality who gazed into the very depths of the holiest secrets of Initiation and could therefore become the great inaugurator of ancient Egyptian culture, it must be said that the Babylonian culture was prepared in the way I have just described: through a leading personality who had in his soul all those qualities which develop when penetration into the innermost essence of Initiation has not been fully achieved. Hence historical development in ancient Babylonia gives clear evidence of an external culture and an inner, esoteric culture running parallel to one another. Whereas in the life of ancient Egypt there was greater interplay between these two aspects, in the ancient culture of Babylonia they fell apart. And within what must be regarded as the Babylonian culture inaugurated by Gilgamish, there was enshrined the content and substance of the most sacred, most hidden Mysteries of the Chaldeans.

The Initiates of these Mysteries were indeed initiated into the innermost secrets, but this influence flowed through the external culture only as a tiny stream. This external culture proceeded from the impulse given by Gilgamish. Everything that has been said points to the fact that Gilgamish, as a personality, had not actually reached the point where he could have experienced complete Initiation. But just because at the time in which he was working he did not give effect to his own, personal impulses, did not impart his own personal forces to the world, he was very specially able to let one of the spiritual Beings we place in the rank of the Fire-Spirits, the Archangeloi, work through him. Such a Being did indeed work through Gilgamish, and it is in a Fire-Spirit that we must see the source of the ordering of Babylonian life and its impelling forces, for which Gilgamish was the instrument. So we shall rightly conceive of this Gilgamish in a picture that suggests the symbol of the ancient centaur. Such ancient symbols correspond more closely to reality than is generally supposed. A centaur—half man, half animal—was always intended to represent how in the more mighty of men of old the highest spiritual manhood and that which united the single personality with the animal organisation in a certain sense actually fell apart. Gilgamish gave the impression of a centaur to those who were capable of judging what he was, and it is the same to this day.

Remarkably enough, this picture of the centaur is cropping up again in the field of modern scientific thought. There has recently been published a book which sets out to base itself entirely on scientific facts, and yet goes to work with a certain absence of prejudice, hence it does not produce such an amateurish, senseless hotch-potch as do those who call themselves Monists. The author makes a genuine effort to understand man, and how, as an independent being of soul-and-spirit, he is related to the physical organism. And then this author, who bases himself on natural science, comes out with a remarkable picture. Quite certainly he was not thinking of the centaur when he conceived this picture, but referring to what results from natural-scientific ideas about the relation of the soul to the body, he says: This may be likened to a horseman riding upon his horse. The facts of natural science, when rightly understood, compel one to say: The soul is independent and uses the body as its instrument, as a rider uses his horse.—Yes, the centaur is here again; things will develop rapidly, and before people are aware of it, spiritual-scientific ideas will take root in our contemporaries under the compulsion of the facts of natural science itself. Not long ago I was talking to a philosopher who sets great store by materialistic ideas, and he said to me: “Of course the picture of the centaur arose because the old inhabitants of Greece saw certain tribes coming down from the North on their horses, and as it was generally misty, they thought that horse and rider were a single form. With all their superstition they might easily imagine this.”

That is a really ingenuous idea—perhaps not exactly philosophical—but certainly ingenuous! This picture of the centaur, which did not arise because the Greeks could not distinguish the rider how his horse but because the earlier peoples inevitably thought of the spiritual being of man as independent of the bodily nature—this idea of the centaur is again cropping up in our time out of the very concepts of natural science. It must therefore be said that despite all materialistic ideas we are coming to the point to-day when materialism itself, if only it will take the facts as they really are, will lead by and by to what Spiritual Science has to say from its occult sources. But if, in line with our studies, we want to focus our occult observation upon a figure such as Gilgamish—who has already become an object of interest to external research—we must realise that there we have to do with penetration by a Being of the spiritual Hierarchies. So that while we must in truth see every human being, in respect of his spirituality, in the picture of the centaur, in the case of one who works as Gilgamish worked, we must recognise, in addition, that the spiritual part of the centaur is directed by higher Powers who are sending down their forces to further the progress of humanity. And we shall find an going farther back into history that this is revealed even more clearly. We shall also see how modification takes place in the course of the ages up to our own time and how spiritual forces, when they work through human beings, assume constantly different forms the nearer we come to the immediate present.

---

• 10. Leopold von Ranke, 1795–1886. See Rudolf Steiner, Karmic-Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. II, lecture XIV.
• 11. J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, written between 1784 and 1791. Tr. by T. Churchill; Outline of a Philosophy of the History of Man. (London, 1803.)
• 12. G. E. Lessing. The last paragraphs of The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780, are as follows:
  
  “But ... why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world?
  “ Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human widerstanding, before the sophistries of the Schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
  “Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting which bring to man only temporal punishments and rewards ?
  “And once more, why not another time all those steps, to perform which the views of Eternal Rewards so powerfully assist us?
  “Why should I not come back as often. as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness ? Do I bring away so much from one, that there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?
  “Is this a reason against it? Or, because I forget that I have been here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of my former condition would perrnit me to make only a bad use of the present. And that which even I must forget now, is that necessarily forgotten for ever?
  “Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would have been lost to me? Lost?—And how much then should I miss?—Is not a whole Eternity mine? "
  
  Tr. F. W. Robertson (1872).
  Reprinted (1927) by Anthroposophical
  Publishing Co.
• 13. August Friedrich Gfrörer, 1803—1861.
• 14. Letter of Perceval de Boulainvilliers, 21st June, 1429. See: Procés de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d' Arc, ed. Quicherat, Tome V, pages 114—21. (Paris, 1849) where the text is in Latin. The name Boulainvilliers is said to have been incorrectly rendered in several of the earlier translations.
• 15. See Thompson, op. cit., p. 33. (Gilgamish is reproaching Ishtar):
  
  Lovest thou, too, Ishullanu, the gardener he of thy Sire, Bringing delights to thee ceaseless, while daily he garnish'd thy platter...."
  
  (From the Sixth Tablet.)

Certain things that have been said in giving a brief glimpse into the occult course of human evolution will have indicated to you that the succession of incarnations as determined by the individual character and development of human beings, is modified through the intervention of spiritual forces from the higher Hierarchies. Reincarnation is by no means such a simple process in the evolution of humanity as a certain easy-going way of thinking likes to assume. It is, of course, a fact that man incarnates again and again, that the innermost core of his being appears over and over again in new incarnations; it is also true that there is a causal connection between earlier and later lives. Moreover there is the law of karma which gives expression to this causal connection. But over and above all this there is something else which is essential for understanding the historical course of the evolution of mankind. The course of human evolution would have been quite different if nothing except the causal connections between one incarnation and the next, or between the earlier and the later incarnations of the human being came into consideration. Other forces of great significance intervene perpetually in human life, in every incarnation, to a greater or less extent, and use the human being as an instrument. This applies particularly in the case of leading personalities in history. Hence it follows that purely individual karma is modified through the successive incarnations, and this is what actually happens.

Limiting ourselves for the time being to the Post-Atlantean period, we can speak of a law according to which, in the epochs up to the present time, the influences of other worlds are connected with man's individual karma A diagram is the only means of indicating what form these influences take and how they are related to the human individuality. Let us imagine (see diagram) that the oval form in the middle represents the human ego, the kernel of human nature. We now indicate the other members of man's being, leaving aside for the moment the division of the soul into sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. Here, then, schematically, we have astral body, etheric body and physical body.

Because we are speaking of Post-Atlantean evolution only, we will try to envisage, from the many descriptions given, the essential elements in the future of man. We are now living in the middle of the Post-Atlantean epoch—in fact somewhat beyond the actual middle. lt is only necessary here to recapitulate very briefly what has been said on other occasions: that the Greco-Latin culture-epoch was the period of development paramountly of the intellectual or mind-soul, and that our present period is that of the development of the spiritual soul, the consciousness soul. The Babylonian-Egyptian culture-epoch brought the sentient soul especially to development; the preceding Persian epoch, the sentient body or astral body; and the far-off Indian epoch, the etheric body. The adaptation of the physical body to Post-Atlantean conditions of earthly existence had already been achieved during the last epochs preceding the great Atlantean catastrophe. So that when we now add to the diagram the other members of man's being we can say: in the Post-Atlantean epoch development proceeds during the ancient Indian period paramountly in the etheric body, during the ancient Persian period in the astral body, during the Egypto-Chaldean period in the sentient soul, during the Greco-Latin period in the intellectual soul, and during our own period in the consciousness-soul—that is to say, in the fifth member of man's being if we count each of the soul-members separately. In a sixth culture-epoch man will develop still further and his soul-nature will grow in a certain way into Manas, the Spirit-Self; in a seventh period—the last Post-Atlantean culture-epoch—man will grow into Life-Spirit or Buddhi; and what has been able to grow into Atma will actually unfold only after the great catastrophe by which the whole Post-Atlantean epoch will be brought to an end.

These things we know from the Lecture-Course on the apocalypse.¹⁶ But we must now take account of the fact that during the first, the ancient Indian epoch, man's development proceeded at a level below the realm of the ego itself. The ancient Indian, pre-Vedic culture was essentially an inspired culture, a culture which streamed as it were into the human soul without that activity of the ego which we know to-day as our life of thought and ideation. Since the Egyptian period, man has had to be active in his ego, to turn his ego, via the senses, to the surrounding world in order to receive its impressions; he has had himself to participate actively in this further development. The ancient Indian culture was acquired more passively, through surrender to what streamed into men like inspiration. It will therefore be understandable that this ancient Indian culture must be attributed to a kind of activity different from that carried out by the human ego to-day; what is now the activity of the ego had, so to speak, to be substituted in the ancient Indian soul by higher Beings who came down into human beings and inspired the human soul.

If we ask what it was that was brought from outside into the human soul in that age, what it was that was infused into the soul by Beings of the higher Hierarchies, we can answer: it was the came as that which man will attain at some future time as his own activity, when he has risen to the stage of Atma or Spirit-Man. In other words, the human individuality in the future will penetrate into Atma. This penetration will be achieved by the efforts of the soul itself, the efforts of the central core of man's being. And just as man himself will then be working in his own being, so did Beings of the higher Hierarchies once work into and upon the soul of the ancient Indian. To describe what took place in the etheric bodies of ancient Indian souls, we can say: it was a dim, half-slumbering ego-consciousness that was working there; Atma was working in the etheric body. It may rightly be said that the soul of the ancient Indian was an arena where superhuman work was performed; higher Beings were working in the etheric body of the ancient Indian. And what was then woven into the etheric body was an activity such as man himself will later an come to achieve in the way indicated, when Atma works in the etheric body.

In ancient Persian culture, Buddhi or Life-Spirit worked in the astral body, in the sentient body; and in Babylonian-Chaldean? Egyptian culture, Manas or Spirit-Self worked in the sentient soul. This latter culture, therefore, does not yet bear the stamp of the ego working with full activity within the soul itself. Although to a less extent than before, man was still a passive arena for the working of Manas in the sentient soul. It was in the Greco-Latin epoch that for the first time man entered into his own life of soul with full activity. It is in the intellectual soul that the ego first makes itself felt as an independent, inner member of man's being, and we can therefore say: In Greek culture the ego actually works in the ego, man as such works in man. In the course of these lectures we shall see that the essential and unique character of Greek culture is due to the fact that the ego is working in the ego.

But that culture-epoch already lies some time behind us; and whereas in the pre-Grecian epoch higher Beings came down in a certain way into the core of man's nature and worked within it, in our time we have to fulfil an opposite task. What we have developed and elaborated through our ego, what we are in a position to take in from the impressions of the outer world by dint of our own activity, we must, to begin with, be able to acquire in a purely human way; but then we must not remain at the point where the people of the Greco-Latin period came to a standstill, in that we unfold the human only, the purely human as such. What we work out for ourselves must be carried upwards md interwoven into what is still to come; we must take the direction upwards, as it were, to what is to come in later times: Manas or Spirit-Self. This, however, will not be until the sixth culture-epoch. We are now living between the fourth and the sixth epochs; the sixth gives promise that mankind will then be in a position to bear upwards into higher regions of existence what has been unfolded through the outer impressions received by the ego through its senses. In the fifth culture-epoch we are in a position only to set about giving a certain stamp to everything we acquire from outer impressions and from working on them—a stamp which will imbue everything with an impetus in the upward direction. In this respect we are in truth living in a period of transition, and if you recall what was said yesterday about the spiritual Power working in the Maid of Orleans, you will see that there was already in Operation in her something that takes the opposite direction to that of the influences of higher Powers in the pre-Grecian epoch. When, let us say, a man belonging to the ancient Persian culture received the influence of a super-sensible Power which used him as its instrument, this Power worked into and took effect in the very kernel of his being, and the man beheld and experienced what this spiritual Being inspired into him. When the man of our time enters into relation with such spiritual Powers, he can carry upwards what he experiences in the physical world through the work of his ego and the impressions it receives; he can give it all an upward orientation. Hence in personalities such as the Maid of Orleans, the revelations, the manifestations of those spiritual Powers who desire to speak to her, take place, to be sure, in the sphere to which she reaches, but something spreads itself in front of these revelations, without actually detracting from their reality but giving them a particular form—the form arising from what the ego experiences here in the physical world. In other words: the Maid of Orleans had revelations, but she could not behold them with the direct vision of the people of ancient times; the mental pictures she had known in the physical world—pictures of the Virgin Mary, of the Archangel Michael, arising from her Christian conceptions—interposed themselves between her own egohood and the objective spiritual Powers.

There we have an example of how in spiritual matters we must distinguish between the objectivity of a revelation and the objectivity of a content of consciousness. The Maid of Orleans saw the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael in the form of a certain picture. We must not conceive these pictures to be the spiritual reality itself; nor must we ascribe direct objectivity to the form they take. But to say that they are mere invention would be nonsense. Revelations from the spiritual world did indeed come to the Maid of Orleans, revelations which in the sixth culture-epoch—and not until then—man will be able to see in the form in which they should be seen in the Post-Atlantean epoch. But although the Maid of Orleans did not see this true form, it did come down towards her. She brought the religious conceptions of her day to meet these revelations, clothed them as it were in this imagery; her world of mental images was evoked by the spiritual Power. The revelation is therefore to be regarded as objective. Even if in our time someone can show that subjective elements make their way into a revelation from the spiritual world, even if we cannot regard the actual picture which the Person in question forms for himself as objective, even if it is only a veil—we must not for that reason assert that the objective revelations themselves are veils. They are objective; but their content is conjured forth from the soul. We must distinguish between the objectivity of that content and the objectivity of the facts which come from the spiritual world.—I am obliged to stress this point because in this domain mistakes are made by those who acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world as well as by our opponents—contrasting mistakes, it is true, but of very common occurrence.

The Maid of Orleans is therefore a personality already working entirely in the spirit of our own epoch, when everything that we can produce on the foundation of our outer impressions must be directed upward to the spiritual. But what does this mean when we apply it to our own culture and civilisation? It means this.—We may direct our attention, naïvely to begin with, to our environment, but if we stop at that, if we have eyes for the outer impressions only, then we are not fulfilling our bounden obligation. We fulfil it only when we are conscious that these impressions must be related to the spiritual Powers behind them. When we pursue science in the manner of academic scholarship, we are not fulfilling our obligation. We must regard everything that we can learn about the laws of natural phenomena and the laws of the manifestations of the life of soul as though it were a language which is to lead us to a revelation of the divine-spiritual. When we are conscious that all physical, chemical, biological, physiological, psychological laws must be related to something spiritual that is revealing itself to us, then we are fulfilling our obligation.

So it is in respect of the sciences of our time and so it is in respect of art. The art we characterise as that of ancient Greece which contemplated the human being in a simpler, more direct way, always presenting the purely human, the working of the ego with the ego in so far as the ego expresses itself in the physical material—this art has had its day. In our time the urge has arisen instinctively in personalities of great artistic gifts, to present art as a kind of offering to the divine-spiritual worlds; that is to say, to regard what is clothed in musical tones, for example, as an interpretation of spiritual mysteries. In the history of culture viewed from its occult aspect, Richard Wagner will one day have to be so regarded, down to the very details of his art. He, particularly, will have to be regarded as a representative man of our fifth culture-epoch, as one who always felt the urge to express in what lived in him in the form of musical tones, the impetus towards the spiritual world; who looked upon a work of art as the outer language of the spiritual world. In him the remains of ancient culture and the dawn of a new culture face each other in sharp, even discordant, contrast in our time. Have we not witnessed how the purely human arrangement of the tones, the purely formal music which Richard Wagner wanted to surmount, was vigorously defended by his opponents because they were incapable of feeling that in him a new impulse was rising instinctively, like the dawn of a new day?

I do not know whether the majority of you are aware that for a long, long time Richard Wagner has had the bitterest, most rabid critics and opponents. These critics and opponents have had a certain guidance from the extremely ingenious work an music produced in Vienna by Eduard Hanslick, the author of the interesting little volume, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Beautiful in Music.”).¹⁷ I do not know whether you realise that with the publication of this book the old was set up in opposition, as it were, to the rising of a new dawn in history. Hanslick's book may become an historic memorial of recent times. For what was his aim? He says: One cannot make music in the way Richard Wagner makes it; that is not music at all, for music there sets out with the intention of pointing to something that lies outside music, to something super-sensible. Music is an “arabesque in tones”—this was one of Hanslick's favourite expressions. In other words, music is an arabesque-like interweaving of tones, and the musical-aesthetic enjoyment of it may consist in purely human delight in the way in which the tones resound in and after one another. Hanslick says that Richard Wagner is no musician, that he simply does not understand the essence of the musical, that the essence of music lies simply in the architecture of the tone-material.—What can one say about such a phenomenon? One can only say that Hanslick was pre-eminently a reactionary, a straggler from the fourth culture-epoch. Then—in that epoch—he would have been right; but what is right for one epoch is not valid for the next. From Hanslick's standpoint one can say: Richard Wagner is no musician. But then one would have to add: that epoch is now over; we must accept what springs from it, reconciling ourselves through the fact that music, as Hanslick understands it, is expanding into something altogether new.

This clash between the old and the new can be observed in many domains, particularly in our own culture-epoch, and it is extraordinarily interesting to observe it especially in the various branches of science. It would lead much too far to attempt to show how there are reactionaries everywhere, as well as those who are striving to produce out of the different sciences what science ought to become: the expression of a divine-spiritual reality behind the phenomena. Spiritual Science should be the basic element which permeates the present time in order that the divine-spiritual may more and more consciously be made the goal and focus of our labours. Spiritual Science should everywhere awaken the impulses leading from below upwards, summoning human souls to offer up what is gained through external impressions for the sake of what is attained as we work our way to the higher regions of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man.

With this picture of human history, of occult history, before us we shall understand that a soul incarnated in the ancient Indian and then in the Persian epoch could be inspired by an individual Being of the higher Hierarchies, but that on passing into the Greco-Latin epoch this soul was alone with itself, inasmuch as the ego was then working in the ego. Everything that in the pre-Grecian age, in all the early cycles of Post-Atlantean civilisation, appears as divine inspiration, as a revelation from above—and this still holds good at the beginning of the Grecian epoch itself, in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, B.C.—everything that presents itself to us as inspired culture into which the spiritual content flows from outside, begins to be expressed more and more in the form of the purely human and personal. And this comes to its strongest expression in Greek culture. No previous age had seen—nor will any subsequent age see again—such an expression of the outer man living in the physical world as a self-based ego-being. The purely human and personal, entirely self-contained, comes to light as historical reality in the mode of life of the ancient Greek and in his creations. See how the Greek sculptor has woven the element of the human and personal into his figures of the gods! We can truly say that in a masterpiece of Greek sculpture man stands before us wholly as personality—in so far as it can be made recognisable in physical media. And if at the sight of a Greek work of art we were not able to efface the thought that the particular incarnation there expressed was preceded and will be followed by others—if we were to imagine for a single moment that in the form of an Apollo or a Zeus only one out of many incarnations is represented—then we should not have the true feeling for these masterpieces. In looking at them we must be able to forget that the human being is incarnated in successive earthly lives. In Greek works of art the whole personality has poured into the form of the single personality. This was the hallmark of the life of the Greeks.

On the other hand, when we go further back into the past, the forms become symbolic; they indicate something that is not purely human, something that man does not yet feel within his own self. In those times he could only express in symbols what was coming in from divine-spiritual worlds. Hence, in the archaic period, art was symbolic.—And when we see the form in which art then makes its way to the people who were destined to provide the material for our own, fifth culture-epoch—think only of earlier German art—we find that there we have to do, not with symbolism, nor with an expression of the purely human, but with an inwardly deepened life of soul. We see there that the soul cannot wholly permeate the outer human form. How could the figures of Albrecht Dürer be characterised otherwise than by saying that man's longing for the super-sensible world comes only to imperfect expression—imperfect in the Greek sense—in the outer configuration of the body Hence the deepening in the direction of the life of soul as art progresses to further stages.

And now it will no longer be incomprehensible to you that in the first of these lectures I said: what was incarnated at an earlier time appears in the physical world later on like a shadow-image. Beings of the higher Hierarchies streamed into the individuality of a man belonging, let us say, to the early Greek world, so that when we say “he was incarnated” we must not see this self-contained being only, but standing behind him an individuality of a higher Hierarchy. That is the picture we must have of Alexander, and of Aristotle, in the Greco-Latin epoch. We follow their individualities back into the past. From Alexander we must go back to Gilgamesh and say: in Gilgamesh is the individuality who then, projected as it were on the physical plane, appears as Alexander; behind this individuality is a Fire-Spirit who uses him as an instrument. And if we go back from Aristotle, we see the powers of the old clairvoyance working in Eabani, the friend of Gilgamesh. Thus we see how both old souls and young souls, with the old clairvoyance behind them, are placed right out on the physical plane in the Greek epoch. This confronts us vividly in the great woman mathematician Hypatia, in whom all the mathematical and philosophical wisdom of her time lived as personal ability, as personal erudition and wisdom. This was all embraced in the personality of Hypatia. And we shall understand that this individuality had to be born as a woman in order to bring together in a delicately concise form all that she had earlier received from the Orphic Mysteries—in order to impart to everything she had learnt from the Inspirers of those Mysteries the stamp of a personal style.

We see, therefore, how in the successive incarnations of human beings influences from the spiritual world bring about modifications. I can do not more than intimate that the individuality who incarnated as Hypatia, who brought with her the wisdom of the Orphic Mysteries and gave personal expression to it, was called upon in a subsequent incarnation to take the opposite path: to bear all personal wisdom upwards again to the divine-spiritual. Hypatia appeared at the turn of the 12th and 13th century as a significant, universal spirit of later history, one who had a great influence upon the knowledge that brings together science and philosophy.—Thus we see how the Powers operating in the course of history penetrate into the successive incarnations of particular individualities.

Observing the course of history in this way we actually see a kind of descent from spiritual heights until the Greco-Latin epoch, and then again an ascent. During the Greek epoch—and it has continued, naturally, into our own time—there is a gathering together of material to be acquired purely from the physical plane and then. a carrying up of it again into the spiritual world. For this, Spiritual Science should provide an impulse—an impulse that was already alive instinctively in a personality such as Hypatia, when she was incarnated again in the 13th century.

Now at this point, because the Theosophical Society is in a certain respect a veritable arena of misunderstandings, I want to emphasise that very many of these misunderstandings are pure inventions. there are people who like to read into what is said, for example, in the lectures given in our German Movement, a certain opposition to the original revelations of the Theosophical Movement in the modern age. I am therefore glad to take the opportunity of pointing out that what is given here from genuine Rosicrucian sources harmonises with mach that was originally given in the Theosophical Movement. This is an opportune moment for referring to the matter. It has been said by me, and enlarged upon quite independently of traditions, that certain personalities in later history are, as it were, shadow-images of earlier personalities portrayed in the myths, and behind whom there stand Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Such things should not be taken as though they contradicted those revelations which were given to the Theosophical Society through H. P. Blavatsky. For then, through sheer misunderstanding, one might very easily set oneself in opposition to the good old teachings which were transmitted through that extraordinarily useful instrument, H. P. Blavatsky. In connection with what we have been studying here, let me quote a passage from her later writings, where she refers to her earlier work, Isis Unveiled. The following passage will show you that what is said about contradiction is really sheer invention—there is no other way of putting it.

“But in addition to reiterating the old, ever-present fact of Reincarnation and Karma—not as taught by the Spiritualist, but as by the post Ancient Science in the world—occultists must teach cyclic and evolutionary reincarnation: that kind of rebirth, mysterious and still incomprehensible to many who are ignorant of the world's history, which was cautiously mentioned in Isis Unveiled. A general rebirth for every individual, with interludes of Kama Loca and Devachan, and a cyclic, conscious reincarnation with a grand and divine object for the few. Those great characters who tower like giants in the history of mankind, like Siddhartha Buddha and Jesus in the realm of the spiritual, and Alexander the Macedonian and Napoleon the Great in the realm of physical conquest are but the reflected images of human types which had existed—not ten thousand years before, as cautiously put forward in Isis Unveiled, but for millions of consecutive years from the beginning of the Manvantara. For—with the exception of the actual Avataras—as above explained, they are the same unbroken Rays (Monads), each respectively of its own special Parent-Flame, called Devas, Dhyan Chohans or Dhyani Buddhas, or again Planetary Angels, etc.—shining in aeonic eternity as their prototypes. It is in their image that some men are born, and when some specific humanitarian object is in view, the latter are hypostatically animated by their divine prototypes, reproduced again and again by the mysterious Powers that control and guide the destinies of our world.

“No more could be said at the time when Isis Unveiled was written; hence the statement was limited to the single remark that ‘There is no prominent character in all the annals of sacred or profane history whose prototype we cannot find in the half fictitious and half real traditions of bygone religions and mythologies.’ As the star, glimmering at an immeasurable distance above our heads in the boundless immensity of the sky, reflects itself in the still waters of a Lake, so does the imagery of men of the antediluvian ages reflect itself in the periods we can embrace in a historical retrospect.”¹⁸

As I said, I gladly seize the opportunity of emphasising the agreement of what it is possible to investigate at the present time with what was in a sense the original revelation. You know that it is a principle here to keep faith in a certain respect with the traditions of the Theosophical Movement; but the essential point—and I lay special stress upon it—is that nothing is repeated unless it has first been investigated and checked. Where agreement between what is already known and something from another source can be clearly shown, this should be done, for the sake of continuity in the Theosophical Society and in fairness; but nothing should simply be repeated without thorough examination. It is part of the mission of our German Section of the Theosophical Movement to bring our own, individual impulse into that Movement. But the examples given can show you how groundless is the misconception which crops up here and there that we always take a contrary view of things. We work faithfully onwards without constantly reiterating the old dogmas; we also test what is being presented to-day from other quarters. And we stand for that which can be said, with the best occult conscience, an the basis of the original occult investigations and the methods handed down to us through our own sacred Rosicrucian traditions.

Now it is of the greatest interest to show by the example of a particular personality how the knowledge that was inspired into humanity under the influence of higher Powers assumed in a man of the Greco-Latin epoch a character adapted to the physical plane. Thus we can show how Eabani, in the incarnation between the life as Eabani and the life as Aristotle, was able under the influence of the ancient Mystery-teachings, into which forces streamed from the super-sensible worlds, to imbibe the principles which in certain Mystery-schools were essential to the further development of the human soul. We will not speak of the particular characteristics of the different Mystery-schools, but will direct our attention to one kind of Mystery-school where, by the awakening of particular feelings, the soul developed to the stage of being able to penetrate into the superphysical world. In such Mystery-schools the feelings and impulses paramountly awakened were those capable of eradicating every trace of egoism from the soul. The soul came to realise that in truth it must always be egoistic when incarnated in a physical body. The whole range, the whole import of egoism an the physical plane were impressed into the soul; and such a soul felt shattered to the depths at having to admit: “Hitherto I have known only egoism; indeed, in the physical body I cannot be anything else than an egoist.” Such a soul was leagues away from the commonplace standpoint of people who are forever saying: “I want this, not for myself, but for someone else.” To overcome egoism and to acquire the urge towards the universal human and the cosmic is not such an easy matter as many people imagine. For it must be preceded by the complete elimination of every trace of egoism in the impulses of the soul. In the Mysteries to which I am here referring, the soul had to learn to feel pity and compassion for everything human, for everything cosmic—compassion born from the overcoming of the physical plane. It might then be hoped that such a soul would bring down again from the higher worlds the true feeling of compassion for every living creature and all existent beings.

But still another feeling was to be developed—a feeling paramount among many others. If man is to penetrate into the spiritual world, he must realise that everything in that world differs from the things of the physical world. He who is to confront the spiritual world face to face must stand before it as before something completely unknown. Fear of the unknown is present there as an actual danger. Therefore in these Mysteries, in order to equip itself to banish all the feelings of fear, anxiety, terror and horror known to man, the soul must first experience them to their very depths. Then the pupil was armed for the ascent into the unknown purlieus of the spiritual world. The soul of the pupil of these Mysteries had to be so trained as to acquire an all-embracing, universal feeling of compassion and of fearlessness. This was the ordeal to be endured by every soul in those ancient Mysteries in which Eabani participated when he appeared again in the incarnation lying between his lives as Eabani and as Aristotle. This too he experienced. And it arose again in Aristotle like a memory of earlier incarnations. He was able to define the essence of tragedy precisely because out of such memories there arose in him at the spectacle of Greek tragedy the realisation that here was an echo, a reproduction carried outwards to the physical plane, of that Mystery-training wherein the soul is purified through experiencing compassion and fear. Thus the hero and the whole construction of a tragedy must present a spectacle which on a milder level evokes in the audience compassion with the face of the hero and fear in face of the destiny and terrible death that beckon him. And so the experiences undergone by the soul of the ancient mystic were woven into the succession of events in the tragedy, into the plot and movement of the drama: purification, catharsis, through fear and compassion, and like an echo, the man of the Greek epoch was to experience this an the physical plane. What was formerly a great educative principle was now be experienced through the medium of aesthetic enjoyment. And when what Aristotle had learnt in earlier incarnations rose up into his personal consciousness, he was the one able to give the unique definition of tragedy which has become classic and has had such an effect that it was still accepted by Lessing in the 18th century, and through the 19th century played a role which caused whole libraries to be written about it. As a matter of fact it would be no great loss if the larger part of these volumes had been burnt; for they were written in complete ignorance of what has just been said—that here we have to do with a projection down into art of something that belongs to the spiritual life. These authors had no inkling that Aristotle was communicating an ancient secret of the Mysteries when he said: A tragedy is a weaving together round a hero of successive actions, which are able to arouse in the spectator the emotions of fear and compassion in order that a catharsis may take place in his soul.¹⁹

So we see that in what a single personality wills and says there is shadowed forth something that can be intelligible to us only when we look through the personality to the Being who Stands behind him, to the Inspirer. Not until we look at history in this way shall we be able to perceive what the personality, as well as the super-personal Powers, signify in history, and how there plays into the single incarnations something which Madame Blavatsky calls the interplay between personal, individual incarnations and what she means when she says: “But in addition to reiterating the old, ever-present fact of Reincarnation and Karma, occultists must teach cyclic and evolutionary reincarnation” ... and so on. She calls this “conscious” reincarnation, because in the case of most people to-day the ego is unconscious of successive incarnations, whereas the spiritual Powers who work into these incarnations from above consciously carry over their forces from one age into the other in accordance with cyclic law.

This example of what was revealed by Blavatsky in her earliest period, from out of the Rosicrucian Mysteries, can be thoroughly checked and confirmed by independent investigations. It will show you, however, that the easy-going habit of conceiving the one incarnation merely as the result of a preceding one, must be essentially modified. You will also realise that reincarnation is a far more complicated nexus of facts than is generally supposed, and can be fully understood only if the human being is seen in connection with a higher, superphysical world which penetrates continually into our world. lt can be said that in the intermediate period which we call the Greco-Latin epoch of culture, men were given time to experience an aftermath of all that had been laid into the soul from higher worlds through long series of incarnations, to let it echo for once in the purely human ego. What was lived out in the Greco-Latin world was like a human and personal expression of endless memories laid at an earlier time into these same individualities by higher worlds. Shall we then wonder that the greatest Spirits of the Greek world became specially conscious of this? Looking into their inner life they said to themselves: “There it is all streaming forth, worlds are stretching there into our personality; but these experiences are recollections of what was poured into us in earlier times from spiritual worlds.”—Read how Plato interprets human knowledge as the soul's recollection of its past experiences.²⁰ There you see how the works of a thinker such as Plato emanated from a deep and true consciousness belonging to the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch. Not until we are able to look with occult insight into the Spirit of the several epochs shall we understand what a single utterance of so outstanding a personality really signifies.

• 16. See Rudolf Steiner, The Apocalypse of St. John
• 17. Published in Leipzig, 1854.
• 18. See H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. III, p. 370. (London, 1897.)
• 19. Aristotle, The Poetics, VI. The several English renderings of this famous passalte differ slightly in wording. The following translation is by W. Hamilton Fyfe, in Aristotle's Art of Poetry (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1940): “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious, has magnitude, and is complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the various parts of the work; in a dramatic, not a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”
• 20. See Phaedo, 75; 76, an the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. “... But if the knowledge which we acquired before but was lost by us at birth, and if afterwards by the use of the scnses we recovered what we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be rightly termed recollection? ...”
  (Tr. Jowett.)

From indications in the preceding lecture you will have been able to gather that in a certain respect the Greco-Latin civilisation-epoch lies in the middle of the Post-Atlantean epoch as a whole. The three preceding civilisation-epochs are as it were a preparation for that activity of the human soul which characterises Greek culture—the ego working in the ego. The culture of the ancient Indian, Persian and Egyptian epochs represents a descent from clairvoyant vision to purely human vision in the Greek epoch. What begins with our own age, and must be attained in ever-increasing measure during the coming centuries and millennia, should be conceived as a reascent, a reattainment of forms of culture imbued with clairvoyance. The Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean epoch is therefore to be regarded as the last stage of preparation for the essentially human culture of Greece. In the preceding, third Post-Atlantean epoch, man descends from the old clairvoyant conditions which enabled him to participate directly in the life of the spiritual world, in preparation for the purely personal, purely human culture characterised by the activity of soul that may be described as “the ego works in the ego.” Hence we saw how the vision into earlier incarnations which had been implicit in clairvoyant culture was, to begin with, uncertain and indistinct in Gilgamesh, the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation; how even when Eabani had as it were endowed him with certain faculties for looking back into earlier incarnations, he was not really sure of his bearings. And everything we see transmitted to posterity through the activity of these Babylonian souls is entirely in accordance with this descent from spiritual heights and entry into the purely personal element that is peculiarly characteristic of the Babylonian soul.

In studying the occult aspect of history it is borne in upon us more and more that with their activities and cultural achievements the several peoples by no means stand isolated in world-evolution, in the general progress of humanity. Each people has its spiritual task, a special contribution to make to human progress. Our civilisation to-day is extremely complex, for many single streams of culture have converged in it. In our present spiritual life and in external life, too, there is a confluence of the most varied folk cultures which were developed more or less one-sidedly by the several peoples in accordance with their own missions, and then flowed into the general stream. Hence the single peoples all differ from one another; in each case we can speak of a particular mission. And we may ask: To what can we, who have received into our own culture the work achieved for civilisation by our forefathers—to what can we point that will show us what contribution was made by this or that people to the general progress of humanity

It is deeply interesting here to think of the task and mission of the Babylonian people. The Babylonian people presented a great riddle to historical research in the 19th century as a result of the decipherment of the cuneiform writing. And even the superficial information which it has been possible to acquire is in the highest degree noteworthy. For the researcher can state to-day that the length of time formerly accepted as historical has been almost doubled by the information gained through the decipherment of the cuneiform script. Evidence provided by external records themselves enables historical research to look back five and six thousand years before the Christian era, and to affirm that through the whole of this period a civilisation of greatness and significance existed in the regions which later on were the scene of the activities of the Babylonians and Assyrians. There, above all in the earliest times, lived a most remarkable people, known in history as the Sumerians. They lived in the regions around the Euphrates and the Tigris, mainly in the upper districts but also towards the lower. There is not enough time to go into the question of the historical records themselves and we must rather concern ourselves with what can be learnt from occult history.

In their thought and spiritual achievements, and also in their outer accomplishments, this people belonged to a comparatively very early stage of Post-Atlantean civilisation. And the farther we go back in the history of the Sumerians, who may be called the predecessors of the Babylonians, the more evident it becomes that spiritual traditions of the highest significance were alive in this people, that there was present among them a spiritual wisdom which may be described by saying that in them the whole mode of life, the way of living not in thought alone, but in the very soul and spirit, was entirely different from anything that developed in later periods of world-history. In the men of later times there is evidence, for example, of a certain hiatus between the thought and the spoken word. How can anyone fail to realise to-day that thinking and speaking are two quite different matters, that in a certain respect speech consists of conventional means of expression for what is being thought This is evident from the very fact that through our many different languages we express a great many common ideas. Thus there is a certain hiatus between thinking and speaking. It was not so among the Sumerians, this ancient people whose language was related to the soul quite differently from what came to be the rule in all later languages. Especially when we go back into times of the greatest antiquity we find something like a primal human language—although no longer preserved, even then, in complete purity. True, we already find differentiation in the languages of the various tribes and races in widespread areas of Europe, Asia and Africa, but there existed among the Sumerians a kind of common speech-element which was intelligible through the whole of the then known earth, especially to more deeply spiritual men. How was this possible? It was because a tone or a sound evoked a definite feeling and the soul was bound to express unequivocally what was felt in association with a particular thought and at the same time with a particular sound.

Let me indicate what this implies by saying that even in the names I quoted from the Epic of Gilgamesh—even there striking sounds are still to be found: Ishtar, Ishulan and the like. When these sounds are pronounced and their occult value is known, one realises that they are names in which the sounds Gould not be other than they are if they are to designate the beings in question, because U(oo), I(ee) and A(ah) can relate only to something quite specific. In the course of the further development of language men have lost the feeling that sounds—consonantal and vowel sounds—are related to specific realities, so that in those ancient times a thing could be designated only by a definite combination of sounds. As little as when we have some definite object in mind to-day do we have a fundamentally different idea of it in England and in Germany, as little could men in those times designate some object or being otherwise than by a specific combination of sounds, because the immediate spiritual feeling for sounds was still alive. So that language in ancient times—and in the Sumerian language there was an echo of it—bore a quite definite character and was intelligible to one who listened to it simply because of the nature of the soul. This applies, of course, to the very earliest Post-Atlantean civilisations.

But it was the task of the Babylonian people to lead this living connection of man with the spiritual world down into the personal, to the realm where the personality is based entirely upon itself in its separateness, in its singularity. It was the mission of the Babylonians to lead the spiritual world down to the physical plane. And with this is connected the fact that the living, spiritual feeling for language ceases and language adjusts itself according to such factors as climate, geographical position, race, and the like. The Bible—which narrates these things more accurately than do the phantasies of the self-styled philologist Fritz Mauthner²¹ describes this significant truth in the story of the Babylonian Tower of Babel, whereby men who speak a common language are scattered over the earth.²² When we know that the erection of sacred buildings in ancient times was guided by certain principles, we can also understand this Tower of Babel in the spiritual sense. Buildings intended to serve as places where certain acts dedicated to the sacred wisdom were to be performed, or which were to stand as signs and tokens of the holy truths—such buildings were erected according to measures derived either from the heavens or from the human structure. Fundamentally, these are identical, for man as the microcosm is a replica of the macrocosm. Therefore the measures to be found in buildings such as the pyramids are taken from the heavens and from the human body.

If we were to go back into relatively early times, we should find in sacred buildings symbolic representations of the measures contained in the human structure or in the phenomena of the heavens. Length, breadth, depth, the architectural form of the interior—everything was modeled on the measures of the heavens or those of the human Body. This was possible because when there was living consciousness of man's connection with the spiritual world, the measures were brought down from that world. What, then, was bound to happen when human knowledge was to be led down from the heavens to the earth, from the universal spiritual-human to the human-personal? The measures could then be taken only from man himself, from the human personality in so far as it is an expression of the single egohood. Thus the Tower of Babel was to be the cultic centre for men who were henceforward to derive the measures from the human personality. But at the same time it had to be shown that the personality must first mature to the stage of being able again to ascend to the spiritual worlds. The fourth and the fifth civilisation-epochs must be lived through before the reascent is possible—which it would not have been at that time. That the heavens were not yet within the reach of powers deriving from the human personality—this is indicated by the fact that the Tower of Babel was bound to be an unhappy affair. Infinite depths are contained in this world-symbol of the Tower of Babel through which men were limited to the personality as such; to what the personality could achieve under the particular conditions prevailing among some rate or people.

Thus the Babylonians were led downwards from the spiritual world to our earth; there lay their mission and their task. But, as I have already said, underlying the external Babylonian civilisation there was a Chaldean Mystery-culture which, while remaining esoteric, nevertheless flowed quite definitely into the outer civilisation. Hence we see the primeval wisdom still glimmering through in the ways and means available to the Babylonians. But these means were not to be used for the purpose of ascending into the spiritual regions; they were to be applied on the earth. This element in the mission of the Babylonians was embodied in their culture and has come down to our own times, as can be demonstrated. We must, however, learn to have at least some respect for that still great and powerful vision into the spiritual worlds which nurtured the old traditions in the soul and over which the shadows of twilight were only just beginning to creep. We must learn to have respect for the profound knowledge of the heavens possessed by the Babylonians, and for their great mission, which lay in drawing forth from what was known to mankind through vision of the spiritual world, from the laws of measure prevailing in the heavens, everything that must be incorporated into civilisation for the needs of outer, practical life. At the same time it was their mission to relate everything to man. And it is interesting that certain ideas have lived on into our own times, ideas that are like an echo of feelings that were still living experiences in the Babylonians—feelings of the inflow of the macrocosm into man, of a law which, holding sway in man as an earthly personality, mirrors the great law of the heavens.

In ancient Babylon there was a saying: “Look at a man who goes about not as a greybeard and not as a child, who moves about as a healthy, not as a sick being, who neither runs too swiftly nor walks too slowly—and you will behold the measure of the sun's course.” It is a momentous saying and one that can point us deeply into the souls of the ancient Babylonians. For they pictured that if a man with a good healthy gait, a man who maintains a pace in his walking consonant with healthiness of life, were to walk round the earth neither too quickly or too slowly, he would need 365¼ days to complete the circuit—and that is approximately correct, assuming he walks day and night without pause. And so they said: “That is the time in which a healthy human being could complete the circuit of the earth, and it is also the length of time which the sun takes to move round the earth” (for they believed in the apparent movement of the sun around the earth). “If therefore you walk as a healthy human being, neither too quickly nor too slowly around the earth, you are keeping the tempo of the sun's course.” And this means: “O Man, it lies in your very health that you keep the pace of the course of the sun around the earth.”

This is certainly something that can inspire us with respect for the majestic vision of the cosmos possessed by the Babylonian people. For on this basis they divided up the journey of a man sound the earth, using certain fractional measures and then arriving at a result approximately equal to the distance covered by a man when he walks for two hours: this comes to about a mile. (Note by translator: a German mile equals about five English miles.) They calculated this on the basis of a normal, healthy pace and adopted it as a kind of norm for measuring the ground on a larger scale. And in fact this measure persisted until fairly recently—when everything in human evolution became abstract—in the German mile, which can be covered in about two hours, And so there lasted on into the 19th century something that stems from the mission of the ancient Babylonians, who brought it down from the cosmos, calculating it in accordance with the course of the sun.

Not until our own time were there measures which originated from man's nature itself reduced inevitably to abstract measures taken from something deal. For it is obvious that measure to-day is abstract in comparison with the concrete measures directly connected with man and with the phenomena of the heavens—measures which are in truth all to be traced back to the mission of the Babylonian people. In the case of other measures too, such as the “foot,” derived from a human limb, or the “ell,” derived from the human hand and arm, we could find underlying them something that had been discovered as law prevailing in man, the macrocosm, In point of fact the ancient Babylonian way of thinking still underlay our system of measure until a time not so very long ago. The twelve zodiacal constellations and the five planets gave the Babylonians 5 times 12 = 60—this they took as a basic number. They counted up to 60 and then began again. Whenever they were counting things of everyday life they took the number 12 as the basis, because, since it derives from laws of the cosmos, it is related in a fax more concrete way to all external conditions. The number 12 is capable of much division. Twelve—the dozen—is nothing else than a gift from the mission of the Babylonians. We ourselves base everything an 10—a number which causes great difficulty when it has to be divided into parts, whereas the dozen, both in its relation to 60 and in its various possibilities of division, is eminently suited to be the basis of a metrical and numerical system.

When it is said that humanity has sailed into abstraction even in respect of calculation and counting, this is not intended as a criticism of our time, for one epoch cannot do the same as the preceding epoch. If we want to portray the course of civilisation from the Atlantean catastrophe to the Greek period and on through our own, we may say: The Indian, Persian and Egyptian epochs are periods of descent; in Greek civilisation the point is reached where the essentially human is unfolded on the physical plane; then the reascent begins. But this reascent is such that it represents one aspect only of the actual course of development, and on the other side there is a progressive descent into materialism. Hence in our time, side by side with spiritual endeavour there is the crassest materialism which links deeply, deeply into matter. These things are natural parallels. This current of materialism is inevitably present as an obstacle which has to be overcome in order that a higher forte may be developed. But it is the nature of this materialistic current to make everything abstract. The whole decimal system is an abstract system. This is not criticism but simply characterisation. And in other directions, too, the whole tendency is to suppress the concrete reality. Just think of the proposals that have been put forward—for example to make the Easter Festival fall an a fixed day in April, in order that the inconveniences caused to commerce and industry may be avoided! No heed is given to the fact that there we still have something which, determined as it is by the heavens, reaches over to us from ancient times. Everything has to nun into abstraction, and concrete reality, which pressed on again to the spiritual, flows into our civilisation to begin with only as a tiny trickle.

It is extraordinarily interesting to see how not only in Spiritual Science, but outside it as well, humanity is instinctively impelled to take the upward path, to ascend again, let us say to a connection with measure, number and form similar to that which prevailed in the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians. For in our time there is actually a kind of repetition of Babylonian and Egyptian culture; the civilisation-epochs preceding our era repeat themselves: the Egyptian in our own epoch, the Persian in the sixth, the Indian in the seventh. The first corresponds with the seventh, the second with the sixth, the third with the fifth, our own; the fourth Stands by itself, forming the middle. For this reason., so much that went to form the ancient Egyptian view of the world is being repeated instinctively. Remarkable things come to light. Men may be rooted in thoroughly materialistic ideas and concepts, nevertheless through the weight of the facts themselves—not through the scientific theories, all of which are materialistic to-day—they can be 1ed into the spiritual life. For example, there is in Berlin au interesting doctor who has made remarkable observations based entirely an facts, apart from any theory. I will indicate it on the blackboard.—Let us suppose that this point represents the date of a woman's death. I am not speaking of a hypothetical case but of something that has been actually observed.—The woman is the grandmother of a family. A certain number of days before her death a grandchild is born, the number of days being 1,428. Strange to say, 1,428 days after the grandmother's death another grandchild is born, and a great-granddaughter 9,996 days after her death. Divide 9,996 by 1,428, and you have 7. After a period, therefore, seven times the length of the period between the birth of the first grandchild and the death of the grandmother, a great grandchild is born. And now the same doctor shows that this is not an isolated case, but that one may investigate a number of families and invariably find that in respect of death and birth absolutely definite numerical relationships are in evidence. And the most interesting point of all is that if, for example, you take the number 1,428, again you have a number divisible by seven. In short, the very facts compel people to-day to rediscover in the succession of outer events certain regularities, certain periodicities, which are connected with the old sacred numbers. And already to-day the number of findings in this direction collected by Fliess—such is the name of the doctor in Berlin²³—and his students, is a proof that the sequence of such events is regulated by quite definite numbers. These figures are already available in overwhelming quantity. The interpretation placed upon them is thoroughly materialistic, but the facts themselves compel belief in the factor of number in world-happenings. I must emphasise that the application of this principle by Fliess and his students is extremely misleading and erroneous. The way he applies his main numbers, especially 23 and 28—28 = 4 times 7—will have to be amended in many respects. Nevertheless, in a study such as this we can see something like an instinctive emergence of ancient Babylonian culture in the age when mankind is an the path of ascent. Of course, such things are confined to Small circles; the vast majority of people have no feeling for them. But it is certainly remarkable to see the unusual thoughts and feelings which arise in people such as the pupils of Fliess, for example, who discover these things. One of these pupils says: “If these things had been known in ancient times, whatever would men have Said?”—But they were known! And the following passage seems to me particularly characteristic.

After this pupil of Fliess has collected a great deal of such material, he says: “Periods constructed on the clearest mathematical principles are here derived from nature, and such things have at all times been beyond the reach of gifted minds accustomed to far more difficult problems. With what religious fervour would the Babylonians, with their love of calculation, have investigated this domain and with what magic would these questions have been surrounded.”—So you see how near people have already come to an inkling of what has actually happened! How unmistakably men's instinct is working once again in the direction of the spiritual life! But just where the science current in our time passes blindly by, there is much to be found that sheds great illumination on the occult force of which people are completely unconscious. Those who draw attention to this remarkable law of numbers explain it in an altogether materialistic way; but the weight of the facts themselves is already compelling people to-day once again to recognise the spiritual, mathematical law prevailing in the things of the world. We see how deeply true it is that everything which comes to expression in personal form in the later course of human evolution is a shadow-image of what was present formerly in elemental, original grandeur, because the connection with the spiritual world was still intact.

In order that it may be deeply inscribed in your souls, I want to emphasise that it was the Babylonians who in their transition to the fourth civilisation-epoch bad, as it were, to bring down the heavens into measure, number, weight; that in our own day we experience the echo of it; and that we shall find our way again to this technique of numbers which will inevitably come more and more into prominence, although in other domains of life an abstract system of measure and number is naturally the appropriate one. Here again, Chen, we can see how on the path of descent a certain point is reached in the Greco-Latin cultivation of pure, essential manhood, of the expression of personality an the physical plane, and how then a reascent begins. So that in very fact the Greek epoch lies in the middle of the whole course of Post-Atlantean civilisation.

But we must remember that in this Greek epoch there came the impulse of Christianity which is to lead humanity upwards into other regions. We have already seen how in the first phase of its development this Christianity did not at once appear with its full significance, with its spiritual content and substance. The behaviour of the men of Alexandria towards Hypatia gave us a picture of the failings and the shadow-sides with which Christianity was fraught at the beginning. It has indeed often been stressed that the times have yet to come when Christianity will be understood in all its profundity, that there are still infinite and unfathomed depths in Christianity, which really belongs more to the future than to the present—let alone to the past. We see how in Christianity something still in the throes of birth places itself into what had entered into the heritage of primeval world-wisdom and spirituality. For what the culture of Greece had received, what it bore within itself, was actually like a heritage of everything that in countless incarnations had been acquired by men through their living connection with the spiritual world. All the spirituality experienced in the preceding ages had sank down into the hearts and souls of the Greeks and lived itself out in them. Hence it is understandable—especially in view of what had resulted from the Christian impulse in the first centuries that there were men who could not regard the coming of Christianity as equal in value to all that had been transmitted to Greek culture with overwhelming greatness and depth of spirituality, as an ancient heritage of thousands of years.

There was a particularly characteristic personality who experienced as it were within his own breast this battle of the old with the new, this battle between treasures of primordial, spiritual wisdom and what was only at its very beginning—a feebly flowing stream. This personality of the Greco-Latin epoch in the 4th century, who experienced these things in the arena of his own soul, was Julian the Apostate.²⁴ It is interesting in the very highest degree to follow the life of the Roman Emperor Julian. He was a nephew of the ambitious, revengeful Emperor Constantine, and the intention was that he and his brother should both be put to death in childhood. He was allowed to live only because it was feared that his death would cause too great an uproar, and because it was expected that whatever harm he might be able to do could afterwards be counteracted. Julian was obliged to acquire his education through many wanderings among various communities, and strict care was taken to ensure that he should imbibe what at that time was accepted, for opportunistic reasons, in Rome and by Rome, by the Roman Empire, as Christian development. This, however, was a hotchpotch of what took shape by degrees as the Catholic Church and what existed as Arianism, the desire being that neither element should be impaired by the other. And so at that time hostility against the old Hellenistic-Pagan ideal, the ancient Gods and the ancient Mysteries, was fairly vehement on all sides. As I said, every effort was made to ensure that Julian, who might be expected eventually to succeed to the throne of the Cæsars, should become a good Christian.

But a strange urge was asserting itself in this soul. This soul Gould never really acquire any deep feeling for Christianity. Wherever the boy was taken, and wherever vestiges not only of ancient Paganism but of ancient spirituality still survived, his heart warmed to it. Wherever he found something of the old sacred traditions and institutions living an into the civilisation of the fourth epoch, he drank it in. And so it happened that on his many wanderings, to which he was driven by the persecutions meted out to him by his uncle the Emperor, he came into contact with teachers of the so-called Neo-Platonic School and with pupils of the men of Alexandria, who had received the old traditions handed down from there. It was then that for the First time Julian's heart was nourished with that to which he was so deeply drawn. And then he came to know such treasures of ancient wisdom as still existed in Greece itself. And with all that Greece gave him, with all that the old world gave him in the way of wisdom, Julian could not bat unfold a living Feeling for the language of the heavens, for the secrets which in the starry script speak down to us from cosmic spare. Then came the time when he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries by one of the last hierophants; and in Julian we have the strange spectacle that one who is inspired by the ancient Mysteries, one who stands fully within what can be received when the spiritual life becomes a reality through the Mysteries—that such an initiate sits on the throne of the Cæsars. And although many misconceptions crept into Julian's writings against the Christians, we know what greatness there was in his conception of the world when he was speaking out of the majestic experiences of his Initiation.

But because as a pupil of Mysteries already in decline he did not rightly know how to find his bearings in the times, he faced the martyrdom looming before one who is inspired but is no longer aware of which secrets must be kept hidden and which may legitimately be communicated. Out of the ardour and enthusiasm kindled in Julian by his Hellenistic education and through his Initiation, out of the sublime experiences which the hierophant had enabled him to undergo, there arose in him the resolve to re-establish what he beheld as the active, weaving life of the ancient spirituality. And so we see him endeavouring by many ways and means to introduce the old Gods again into a civilisation already penetrated by Christianity. He went too far both in the matter of speaking openly of the Mystery-secrets and in his attitude towards Christianity. And so it came about that in the year 363, when he had to conduct a military campaign against the Persians, he was overtaken by his destiny. Just as destiny overtakes anyone who has unlawfully uttered those things which may not be uttered without authorisation, so it was in the case of Julian, and there is historical proof that on this expedition against the Persians, he fell by the hand of a Christian. For not only did this news spread abroad very soon afterwards and has never been disavowed by any of the Christian writers of note, but it would have been highly astonishing if the Persians had brought about the death of their arch-enemy without boasting about it. Among them, too, the view prevailed immediately afterwards that Julian had fallen by the hand of a Christian. It was really something like a storm that went forth from this inspired soul, from the fiery enthusiasm acquired from initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries which were already approaching their period of twilight. Such was the destiny of a man of the 4th century, of an entirely personal human being whose world-karma consisted, essentially, in living out in personal anger, personal resentment and personal enthusiasm, the heritage he had received. That was the fundamental law prevailing in his life.

For the study of occult history, it is interesting to observe the laxer course taken by this particular life, this particular individuality. During the 16th century, in the year 1546, a remarkable man was born of a noble house of Northern Europe, and in his very cradle, so to speak, everything was laid—including family wealth—that could have led him to positions of great honour in the traditional life of that time. Because, in line with his family traditions, it was intended that he should occupy some eminent political or other high position, he was marked out for the legal profession and sent with a tutor to the University of Leipzig to study jurisprudence. The tutor tormented the boy—for he was still a boy when he was forced to study law—all day long. But at night, while the tutor was sleeping the sleep of the just and dreaming of legal theories, the boy stole out of bed and observed the stars with the very simple instruments he had himself devised. And very soon he knew not only more than any of the teachers about the secrets of the stars but more than was to he found at that time in any book. For example, he very soon noticed a definite position of Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation of Leo, turned to the books and found that they recorded it quite erroneously. The longing then arose in him to acquire as exact a knowledge as possible of this star-script, to record as accurately as possible the course of the stars. No wonder that in spite of all his family's resistance he soon extracted the permission to become a natural philosopher and astronomer, instead of dreaming his life away over legal books and doctrines. And having considerable means at his disposal, he was able to set up a whole establishment.

This was arranged in a remarkable way. In the upper storeys were instruments designed for observing the secrets of the stars; in the cellars there was equipment for bringing about different combinations and dissolutions of substances. And there he worked, dividing his time between observations carried out on the upper floors of the building and the boiling, fermenting, mixing and weighing which went on in the cellars below. There he worked, in Order to show, little by little, how the laws that are written in the stars, the laws of the planets and fixed stars, the macrocosmic laws, are to be found again microcosmically in the mathematical numbers underlying the combinations and dissolutions of substances. And what he discovered as a living connection between the heavenly and the earthly he applied to the art of medicine, producing medicaments which were the cause of bitter animosity around him because he gave them freely to those he wanted to help. The doctors at that time, intent upon extorting high fees, raged against this man who was accused of perpetrating all sorts of “horrors” with what he endeavoured to bring down from the heavens to the earth.

Fortunately, as the result of a certain happening, he found favour with the Danish King, Frederick the Second, and as long as he retained this favour, all went well: tremendous insight was gained into the spiritual working of cosmic laws in the sense I have just described. This man did indeed know something about the spiritual course of cosmic laws. He dumbfounded the world with things which admittedly would no longer find the same credence to-day. On one Occasion, when he was at Rostock, he prophesied, from the constellation of the stars, the death of the Sultan Soliman, which came true within a few days of the date he had foretold. The news of this made the name of Tycho Brahe²⁵ (also Appendix) famous in Europe. To-day the world at large knows hardly anything more of Tycho Brahe, whose life lies such a short time behind us, than that he was somewhat of a crank and never quite reached the lofty standpoint of modern materialism. He recorded a thousand stars for the first time in the maps of the heavens and also made the epoch-making discovery of a type of star, the “Nova,” which flares up and vanishes again, and described it. But these things are mostly passed over in silence. The world really knows nothing about him except that he was still “stupid” enough to devise a plan of the cosmos in which the earth stands still and the sun together with the planets revolve around it. That is what the world in general knows to-day. The fact that we have to do here with a significant personality of the 16th century, with one who accomplished an infinite amount that even to-day is still useful to astronomy, that untold depths of wisdom are contained in what he gave—none of this is usually recorded, for the simple reason that in presenting the system in detail, out of his own deep knowledge, Tycho Brahe saw difficulties which Copernicus did not see. If such a thing dare be said—for it does indeed seem paradoxical—even with the Copernican cosmic system the last word has not yet been uttered. And the conflict between the two Systems will still occupy the minds of a later humanity.—That, however, only by the way; it is too paradoxical for the present age.

It was only under the successor of the King who had been well-disposed towards him that the enemies of Tycho Brahe arose an all sides. They were doctors and professors at the University of Copenhagen, and they succeeded in inciting the successor of his patron against him. Tycho Brahe was driven from his fatherland and was obliged to go south again. It was in Augsburg that he had originally set up his first great planisphere and the gilded globe an which he always marked the new stars he discovered—finally amounting to a thousand. This man was destined to die in exile in Prague. To this very day, if we turn, not to the usual textbooks, but to the actual sources, and study Kepler, let us say, we can still see that Kepler was able to arrive at his laws because of the meticulous astronomical observations made by Tycho Brahe before him. Here indeed was a personality who again bore the stamp, in a grand style, of what had been great and significant wisdom before his time; one who could not reconcile himself to the kind of knowledge that became popular immediately afterwards in the shape of the materialistic view of the world. Truly it is a strange destiny, this destiny of Tycho Brahe!

And now, placing both personal destinies side by side, think how endlessly instructive it is when we learn from the Akasha Chronicle that the individuality of Julian the Apostate appears again in Tycho Brahe, that Tycho Brahe is, so to say, a reincarnation of Julian the Apostate. Thus strangely and paradoxically does the law of reincarnation take effect when the karmic connection of the single individual are modified by world-historic karma; when the cosmic Powers themselves use the human individuality as their instrument.

Let Inc expressly emphasise that I do not speak of such matters as the connection between Julian the Apostate and Tycho Brahe in order that they shall be proclaimed at once from the housetops and discussed at every dinner-table and coffee-table, but in order that they may sink into many a soul as the teaching of occult wisdom, and that we may learn to understand more and more how super-sensible reality everywhere underlies the human being in his physical manifestation.

• 21. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923. A writer, Journalist and author of philosophical works, notably on the subject of language, often referred to by Rudolf Steiner.
• 22. Genesis, XI.
• 23. Wilhelm Fliess, b. 1858. Author of Der Ablauf des Lebens: Grundlagen zur exakten Biologie, Leipzig and Vienna, 1906; also Das Jahr im Lebendigen, Jena, 1919.
• 24. Julian the Apostate, 331–63. Emperor from 361–63. See Rudolf Steiner: Building-Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, lectures VII and VIII; Man's Life on Earth and in the Spiritual Worlds, lecture I; The Sun Mystery in the Course of Human History; Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. IV, lectures V and VI; World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, lecture VI.
  
  There are many other references, too numerous to be detailed here. The above are of outstanding importance.
• 25. Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. IV, lectures V and VI; also Appendix, p. 121.

The glimpse into the development of individualities such as those whom we were able, in the lecture yesterday, to follow through two incarnations allows us to discern something of the mysterious inflow and activity of the cosmic Spirits during the evolution and history of mankind. For when we keep before our minds the pictures which, in brief outline at least, came before us yesterday, the pictures of Julian the Apostate and of a later expression of this individuality in history as Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, one thing may strike us particularly. Precisely in the case of personalities who signify something in history we can observe that the special qualities of the individuality work over from one incarnation into another; but that what spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies desire to accomplish in history, using single individuals as their instrument, asserts itself in the straightforward course of reincarnation as a modifying factor.

For we shall realise that in the 4th century A.D. it was the function of the individuality who appeared as Julian the Apostate to give as it were a last impetus for the final flaring up of the spiritual wisdom belonging to earlier epochs, and thus to preserve it from the fate that might easily have befallen it if struggling Christianity alone had been left to handle such treasures. And on the other hand we shall realise that an individuality incarnated in a man whose good fortune it was to be initiated into the Elusinian Mysteries had opportunities, on reincarnating, for receiving in endless abundance the impulses of the time and the influences of beings working in the way destined for the 16th century. We shall find entirely understandable the greatness and power of the personality of Tycho Brahe, as outlined yesterday, if we realise that precisely because he had been an Initiate in an earlier incarnation he was able to bring to light an untold fund of macrocosmic science in its application to the microcosm. Such studies of occult history make us aware that it is men themselves who make history, but that history in the last resort becomes comprehensible only when we find the connection between the single personalities who appear and pass away and the individual threads which run through the whole course of human evolution, reincarnating in personalities. But if we are to understand the historical life of mankind on our earth, we must always associate with it that which streams in from other worlds, super-sensible worlds, through the Powers of other Hierarchies.

In the course of these lectures we have heard how certain high-ranking Powers of the Hierarchies have worked, through human beings, into all the civilisation-epochs since the Atlantean catastrophe. This was most strongly evident in the ancient Indian soul which may be said to have been simply an arena for the inflowing of higher spiritual Beings. In the soul of the ancient Persian it was not so to the Same extent. And then we heard how in Egypto-Chaldean civilisation it was even then the mission of the human soul—noticeable particularly in the Babylonian people—to bring the super-personal down into the personal, the spiritual down to the physical plane. The significance of personality constantly increases the nearer we come to the Greek epoch, when the ego works and weaves in the ego. In the strong and forceful figures of the Greek epoch the stamp of personality is complete. It is with the Greeks, and later with the Romans, that what can at first be bestowed on the individuality only from higher worlds withdraws to the greatest extent, while what a man expresses in his personality as his proper humanity comes to the forefront.

The question may arise: Which particular Spirits, from which Hierarchies, worked through the ancient Indians, the ancient Persians, the Babylonians, Chaldeans and Egyptians respectively It is the answer to this question that alone can give us deeper insight into the occult course of history.²⁶ The investigations made possible from occult sources enable us, in a certain sense at any rate, to say which particular Beings of the higher Hierarchies worked through men as their instruments in each of these periods. Into the ancient Indian soul, which created the civilisation immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the Beings we call the Angeloi, the Angels, poured their forces. And in a certain connection it is true to say that when a man of ancient India spoke, when he gave expression to what was active in his soul, it was not his own egohood speaking directly, but an Angelos, an Angel. Ranking only one stage higher than man, the Angel is the hierarchical Being most closely related to him and therefore able, as it were, to speak more directly. It is in the ancient Indian mode of speech that an element foreign to the human comes most strongly into evidence, because the Angel, as the Being most closely related to man, is able to speak with the greatest directness.

This direct expression was less possible for the Beings of the higher Hierarchies who spoke through the souls of the ancient Persian people, for they were Beings of the next higher rank—the Archangels. And because these Beings stand two stages higher than man, what they were able to express by means of human instruments was farther away from their own inherent nature than what the Angels could express through the ancient Indians. Thus, stage by stage, everything becomes more human. Nevertheless this downflow from the higher Hierarchies is continuous, unbroken. Through the souls of the Babylonian, Chaldean, Egyptian peoples, the Spirits of Personality (the Archai) express themselves. Hence it is in this period that the emergence of personality is most prominent, and what man is still able to give out from the forces streaming down to him is therefore the farthest removed from its origin, bearing the essential stamp of the human-personal. And so, as evolution advances to the Egypto-Babylonian epoch, there is a continuing manifestation of the Angels, the Archangels and the Spirits of Personality.

In the ancient Persians, especially, we can see very exactly how they had an awareness that the Archangels—the Spirits of paramount importance in that epoch—were working into the human organism, the human organism in its totality. We must not, to be sure, take an average Persian when considering the downflowing of forces from the Hierarchies. The forces streamed down, too, upon the average Persian, but only those who were the immediate pupils of the inspirer of the ancient Persian culture, of Zarathustra himself, were capable of knowing how this happened, of seeing through to the reality. And they did indeed possess this knowledge. For you will remember from many descriptions I have given of the teachings of Zarathustra, or from exoteric traditions, that according to the view of the ancient Persians the primal Divinity, Zervana Akarana, reveals himself through the two opposing powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman. The ancient Persians were clearly aware that whatever comes to manifestation in the human being derives from the macrocosm, and that the phenomena of the macrocosm—especially, therefore, the movements and positions of the stars—are mysteriously connected with the microcosm, with man. Hence the pupils of Zarathustra saw in the Zodiac the external expression, the image, of Zervana Akarana, of the primal reality of Being living and weaving through eternity. Even the very word “Zodiac” is reminiscent of the word Zervana Akarana. The pupils of Zarathustra saw twelve powers proceeding from the twelve directions of the Zodiac, six directed towards the light side of the Zodiac traversed by the sun by day; the other six towards the dark side—turned, as they said, towards Ahriman. Thus the Persian conceived of the macrocosmic forces coming from the twelve directions of the universe and penetrating into, working into humanity, so that they are immediately present in man. Consequently, what unfolds through the working of the twelve forces must reveal itself also in its microcosmic form, in human intelligence; that is to say, it must come to expression in the microcosm, too, through the twelve Amshaspands²⁷ (Archangels), and indeed as a final manifestation, so to say, of these twelve spiritual, macrocosmic Beings who had already worked in former ages, preparing that which merely reached a last stage of development during the epoch of Persian civilisation.

It should not be beyond the scope of modern physiology to know where the microcosmic counterparts of the twelve Amshaspands are to be found. They are the twelve main nerves proceeding from the head; these are nothing else than material densifications of what arose in the human belong through the instreaming of the twelve macrocosmic powers. The ancient Persians pictured the twelve Archangel-Beings working from the twelve directions of the Zodiac, working into the human head in twelve rays, in order gradually to produce what is now our intelligence. Naturally they did not work into man for the first time in the ancient Persian epoch, but finally they worked in such a way that we can speak of twelve cosmic radiations, twelve Archangel-radiations, which then densified in the human head into twelve main cerebral nerves. And just as knowledge in a later age includes what was already known in an earlier one, so could the Persians also know that Spirits of a lower rank than the Archangels had been at work previously, in the Indian epoch. The Persians called the Beings of the rank below the Amshaspands, “Izads,” and of these they enumerated 28 to 31. The Izads, therefore, are Beings who give rise to a less lofty activity; to soul-activity in man. They send in their rays, which correspond to the 28, 30 to 31 spinal nerves. And so in Zarathustrianism you have our modern physiology translated into terms of the spiritual, the macrocosmic, in the twelve Amshaspands and in the 28 to 31 Izads of the next lower Hierarchy.

A true fact of historical evolution is that what was originally seen spiritually is now presented to us through anatomical dissection; things that were formerly accessible to clairvoyant vision appear in later epochs in materialistic form. A wonderful bridge is disclosed here between Zarathustrianism, with its spirituality, and modern physiology, with its materialism. Of course, the destiny of the great majority of mankind makes it inevitable that such an idea as that of the connection between the Persian Amshaspands and Izads and our nerves is regarded as lunacy, especially by those who study the materialistic physiology of to-day. But after all, we have plenty of time, for the Persian epoch will be fully recapitulated only in the Sixth epoch which follows our own. Then, for the first time, the conditions prevailing will enable such things to be intelligible to a large part of humanity. Therefore we have to content ourselves with the fact that indications of them can be given to-day as part of the spiritual-scientific outlook. And such indications must be given if a spiritual-scientific conception of the world is to be spoken of in the true sense, and attention called, not merely in general phrases, to the fact that man is a microcosmic replica of the macrocosm.

In other regions, too, it has been known that what comes to manifestation in the human being flows in from outside. For example, in certain periods of Germanic mythology mention is made of twelve streams flowing from Niflheim to Muspelheim. The twelve streams are not meant in the physical-material sense, but they are that which, seen by clairvoyance, flows as a kind of reflection from the macrocosm into the human microcosm, the human being who moves over the earth and whose evolution is to be brought about through macrocosmic forces.

It must however be emphasised that these streams are to be regarded to-day as astral streams, whereas in the Atlantean epoch, which immediately followed that of Lemuria, and in Lemuria itself, they could be seen as etheric streams. So a planet which is related to the earth, but represents an earlier stage of development, must reveal some similar phenomenon. And as from a distance things can often be observed which in proximity escape our observation, because what we see is then broken up into details, so in the case of a planet resembling the earth, when it is sufficiently distant and passing through earlier stages of development such as those undergone by our earth, it might be possible, even to-day, to observe these twelve streams.

To be sure, they will not look quite the Same as once they appeared when seen an the earth. Distance is an essential factor, for if, to take an example, you are standing in the midst of a swarm of gnats, you do not see the swarm with its different shades of density; these are perceived only when you see the swarm from some way off. What I have just said lies at the root of the observations of so-called “canals” an Mars. It is there a matter of certain streams of force which correspond to an earlier stage of the earth²⁸ and are described in the old Germanic myths as streams flowing from Niflheim to Muspelheim. Naturally this is rank heresy from the point of view of modern academic physiology and astronomy, but these sciences will have to submit to a great deal of revision in the course of the next few thousand years.²⁹

All these things show us what profound wisdom is to be divined in the simple saying: The human microcosm is a kind of image of the macrocosm. Such sayings themselves bear witness that the words touch directly upon the deepest treasures of wisdom. The saying that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm can be just a trivial phrase, but rightly understood it epitomises an untold multitude of concrete truths. All this has been said in order to indicate to you the configuration of soul in the man of ancient Persian civilisation; especially in the leading personalities there was a living feeling of man's connection with the macrocosm.

After the Beings whom we have named in their sequence as Angels, Archangels and Spirits of Personality had worked until the age of the Babylonian-Egyptian civilisation, there followed that remarkable Greco-Latin civilisation which brought the personality as such, the weaving of the ego in the ego, particularly to expression. There, too, certain Beings made themselves manifest—the Spirits of Form, who are one stage higher than the Spirits of Personality. But the manifestation of these Spirits of Form was different from that of the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels and the Angels. How do the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels and the Angels manifest in the Post-Atlantean epoch? They work into man's inner nature. The Angels worked as inspirers of the ancient Indians; the Archangels similarly in the ancient Persians, but here the influence of the human element already asserted itself to a somewhat greater degree. The Spirits of Personality stood as it were behind the souls of the Egyptians, urging them to project the spiritual on to the physical plane. The Spirits of Form manifest in a different way. They manifest from below upwards as far more powerful Spirits who are not dependent upon using man merely as an instrument; they manifest in the kingdoms of Nature around us, in the configuration of the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. And if man would recognise the Spirits of Form in their manifestation, he must direct his gaze outwards, he must observe Nature and investigate what has been woven into her by the Spirits of Form. Consequently in the Greek epoch, when the paramount manifestation is that of the Spirits of Form, man does not receive any direct influence as an inspiration. The influence of the Spirits of Form works far rather in such a way that man is allured by the outer world of sense; his senses are directed with joy and delight towards everything spread out around him, and he tries to elaborate and perfect it. Thus the Spirits of Form attract him from without. And one of the chief Spirits of Form is the Being designated as Jahve or Jehovah. Although there are seven Spirits of Form and they work in the different kingdoms of Nature, men of the present age have a faculty of perception only for the one Spirit, Jehovah.—If we reflect on all this, it will be intelligible to us that with the approach of the fourth epoch, man is more or less forsaken by these inner Guiding-Powers, by the Angels, Archangels and Spirits of Personality, and that he turn his gaze entirely to the external world, to the physical horizon where the Spirits of Form are in manifestation. They were of course already present behind the physical world in earlier times, but they had not as it were yielded themselves to human recognition. In the period immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the Spirits of Form had been at work; they had been at work in the kingdoms of Nature, in the laws governing wind and weather, in the laws of the plants, animals and minerals. They had also worked in times more ancient still. But man did not direct his gaze to what then came to meet him externally, for he was inwardly inspired by the other Spirits. His attention was diverted from the outer world.

How is this to be explained? In what sense are we to understand the fact that these other Hierarchies, who are of a lower rank than the Spirits of Form, asserted their influence so dominantly over against the already existing activity of the Spirits of Form? This is connected with a definite period in the evolution of the earth as a whole. To the clairvoyant vision which with the help of the Akasha Chronicle looks back into the past, these things present an appearance entirely different from the speculative pictures based on the geological data of the present day. When we go back before the activity of the Spirits of Personality in the Chaldean epoch, before that of the Archangels in the ancient Persian and of the Angels in the ancient Indian epoch, we come to the period when the Atlantean cataclysm was at the height of its fury. We find our way gradually into the conditions then prevailing. This is the time to which the legends of the Deluge existing among the different peoples refer, but their picture of it was very different from that drawn by the hypotheses of modern geology. In still earlier Atlantean times, the picture was again quite different. Man was a being capable of transformation. Before this catastrophe the whole face of the earth was different from anything that can be imagined to-day. You can well conceive that at that time Spiritual Hierarchies worked into the earth still more strongly.

Between the old influences in the Atlantean epoch and those in the Post-Atlantean, there was a boundary-period filled by the Atlantean catastrophe—by those events whereby the face of the earth was totally changed in regard to the distribution of water and land. Such periods and changes consequent upon them are connected with mighty processes in the constellation, position and movement of the cosmic bodies connected with the sun. In fact, such periods in the earth's evolution are determined and directed from macrocosmic space. It would lead too far if I were to attempt to describe to you how these successive periods are directed and regulated by what is called in modern astronomy the precession of the equinoxes. This is connected with the position of the earth's axis in relation to the axis of the ecliptic, with mighty processes in the constellation of neighbouring celestial bodies; and there are definite times when, on account of the particular position of the earth's axis in relation to these other bodies of the cosmic system, the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth is radically changed. This position of the earth's axis in relation to the neighbouring stars causes the climatic conditions to change. In the course of something over 25,000 years, the axis of the earth describes a kind of conical or spherical movement, so that conditions undergone by the earth at a certain time are undergone again, in a different form and indeed at a higher stage, after 25,000 to 26,000 years. But between these great periods of time there are always shorter periods. The process does not go forward in absolute, unvarying continuity, but in such a way that certain years are crucial points, deeply incisive times in which momentous happenings take place. And here, because it is of essential significance in the whole historical development of earthly humanity, we may point particularly to the fact that in the seventh millennium before Christ there was a very specially important astronomical epoch—important because, on account of the constellation brought about by the relative position of the earth's axis to the neighbouring stars, the climatic conditions on earth culminated in the Atlantean cataclysm. This happened six to eight thousand years before our era, and the effects of it continued for long ages. Here we can only emphasise what is correct, as opposed to the fantastic periods of time that are mentioned, for these happenings lie much less far behind us than is generally believed. During this period the macrocosmic conditions worked into the physical in such a way as to bring about the mighty physical upheavals of the Atlantean cataclysm, which completely changed the face of the earth. This was the greatest physical transformation of all, the most drastic action of the macrocosm upon the physical earth. Hence the influence from the macrocosm upon the spirit of man at that time was at its lowest; this epoch therefore provided an opportunity for the less powerful Beings of the Hierarchies to begin to exercise on man a potent influence, which then ebbed gradually away.

Thus when the Spirits of Form were working powerfully to revolutionise the physical, they had less time to work also upon the spirit of man, with the result that the physical vanished as it were from under man's feet. But an the other hand it was precisely during the time of the Atlantean catastrophe that men were transported most completely into spiritual realms and only gradually found their way again into the physical world in the Post-Atlantean epoch. Now when you picture that at this time—six to eight thousand years before the Christian era—the least influence was exercised upon the human spirit and the strongest influence on the physical conditions of the earth, it will not be difficult for you to conceive that there may be another point of time when the opposite situation comes about: when those who are cognisant of such a matter experience the reverse of these conditions—namely, the least influence upon the physical and the greatest influence, precisely of the Spirits of Form, upon the human spirit. Hypothetically you can conceive that there may he a point in history where the reverse of the great Atlantean catastrophe applies. Of course it will not be so easily noticeable, for the Atlantean catastrophe, when parts of the very earth were blotted out, is bound to be a very striking event for people of our Post-Atlantean epoch, with their strong leanings to the physical. When the Spirits of Form are exercising a powerful influence on the human personality and have only a little influence upon what is taking place in the external world, the impression will be less vivid. The point of time when this condition—in the nature of things, less perceptible to men—set in, was the year A.D. 1250 This year 1250 is of momentous importance in history.³⁰ It fell in a period that can be characterised briefly as follows.

The spirits of men felt as though impelled to express with the greatest possible precision how the mind and heart can look upwards to the Divine Beings above the other Hierarchies, how man seeks to come into relation with these Beings, conceived primarily as a unity, first through Jehovah, then through Christ, and how all human knowledge is to be applied to the unveiling of the mystery of Christ Jesus. That was a point of time especially adapted for conveying to mankind the mysteries which come to direct expression in the connection of the Spiritual with the working of Nature. Hence we see that this year 1250 was the starting-point of great and detailed elaborations of what was formerly only believed, only divined: it was the starting-point of Scholasticism, which is greatly undervalued to-day.³¹ It was also the starting-point of revelations which found expression in spirits such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, and which took effect most deeply in Rosicrucianism. This shows that if we want to search for the deeper forces of historical development, we must take stock of conditions quite other than those outwardly in evidence. In point of fact, behind the things of which I have just been speaking there are also hidden the forces working, for example, in the waves and subsequent ebbing of the Crusades. The whole of European history, especially the flow of happenings between East and West is attributable solely to the fact that forces are at work behind the events, as I have now elucidated.

We may therefore say: There are two points of time, one of them marked by a great upheaval an the outer physical plane and the other by a change in character of all that had once resounded in the secrecy of the Mysteries. But we must keep well in mind that in all such matters there are again other laws which cut across the main laws. Hence we can understand that in this period there lies the starting-point for great revelations; that this period is entirely in keeping with the appearance of a man such as Julian the Apostate, who had once been inspired in the Eleusinian Mysteries. At that time he had opened his soul to the revelations coming from the Spirits of Form. But the initial onset of a powerful influence always works for a period of about four hundred years, then it begins to ebb and the streams as it were to separate. Hence the eventual effect of what had been perceived at that time as spiritual reality behind the manifestations of Nature was that men forgot the Spiritual and paid attention only to the manifestations of Nature. That is the modern mentality. Tycho Brahe is one of the last of those who still grasped the reality of the Spiritual behind the data constituting the sciences of external Nature. Tycho Brahe was a truly wonderful personality, because with. his supreme mastery of external astronomy he discovered thousands of stars, and at the same time he had such deep inner knowledge of the sway of the spiritual Powers that he could astonish all Europe by boldly predicting the death of the Sultan Soliman. We see how out of the spiritual nature-knowledge, which begins to appear in 1250 and is exemplified in Spirits such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, there gradually emerges what later on amounts merely to perception of the manifestations of external Nature; while the inner, the Spiritual, remains in that mysterious stream known to us as Rosicrucianism. Then the two streams flow on.

It is indeed remarkable how this process shows itself in actual personalities. Once, near the beginning of our German Movement, I drew your attention to how in a personality of the 15th century there appears the continuance of a spiritual movement still connected with a certain knowledge of Nature, and how the Spiritual is then cast aside and the further course is a purely external one. We can follow this in the case of a single individuality: Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464). The mere reading of his works—and one can do much more than read—shows clearly that he combined a most penetrating spiritual vision with knowledge of outer Nature, especially where this knowledge is clothed in mathematical forms. And because he perceived how difficult this was, in an age moving more and more towards external learning, he entitled his work, with epoch-making humility, Docta Ignorantia, “Learned Ignorante.” He did not of course mean to imply that he was himself an utter dunce, but that what he had to say was above the level of what was going to develop as mere external learning. To use a prefix much in vogue nowadays, we may say: this “Learned Ignorance” is a “super”-learnedness. Then, as you know, he was born again—it was a case of a very quick reincarnation—as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)³² The same being who had lived in Nicolaus Cusanus continued to work in Nicolaus Copernicus. But you can see how far human mentality had moved by that time towards the physical, for the depth of knowledge possessed by Nicolaus Cusanus could work in Copernicus only in such a way as to produce the plan of the outer, physical cosmos. The knowledge that had lived in Nicolaus Cusanus was as it were filtered; the Spiritual was ignored and re-cast in terms of external science. There we have a tangible illustration of how that mighty impulse was to work within a short period from the year 1250, which was its central point in time. What streamed into our earth at this point of time worked on its own way. It worked an in there two streams, one of which is materialistic and will become ever more so, while the other strives for the Spiritual, manifesting particularly in what we know as the Rosicrucian revelation, which flowed in greatest intensity from this very starting-point, although there had of course been previous preparation.

So you see that there is a certain epoch, lasting for about six to eight thousand years, during which earth-evolution passes through an important cycle in regard to the historical facts with which man's development is interwoven. Such cycles are again intersected by others, for periodic forces of the most diverse kinds work into our earth-evolution. Only when we analyse, when we investigate the particular forces and their configurations—only then can we really fathom how things come to pass on the earth. Through all such forces and laws mankind is brought forward and human progress effected. You know, too, that in our century, but proceeding from a different stream, there is an important point of time indicated in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation: vision once again into the etheric world and the revelation of Christ in that world.³³ But that belongs to a different stream—I am speaking now more of forces that work into the broad basis of historical happenings.

If we want to understand there happenings fully, we must also take into consideration that such crucial points in evolution are always connected with certain positions of the stars, and that in the year 1250 the earth's axis lay in a definite position and was therefore related in a particular way to the so-called minor axis of the ecliptic. When we take account of the fact that what happens on the earth is brought about by great celestial conditions, even external climates show us that further specialisation and differentiation take place in the sphere of the earth itself. Because the forces work in a certain way from the cosmos, the earth is girdled by the torrid zone, then the temperate zone, then the arctic zone. This can be taken as a kind of example of how what is brought about by spiritual happenings, through the sun and other factors, takes effect on the physical plane. But there is again differentiation an the earth itself; in the torrid zone the climate of low-lying land is not the same as on heights, where it can be extremely cold. Hence in the same latitude there is a quite different distribution of climatic conditions to be observed in Africa, say, as compared with America. There is also something in spiritual evolution which allows of comparison with this kind of differentiation; for it is really true that in epochs during which a definite character due to the stellar constellations is widely predominant over the earth, modifications, special conditions, come about in the activities of the spiritual Beings and in the souls of men.

This is of great importance, for from time to time provision has obviously to be made for the distant future. Just imagine—naturally this is said hypothetically—that the wise leadership of the world was obliged, thousands of years ago, to say: There is a group of souls who must be prepared in order to accomplish this or that task in their next incarnations.—In such a case, connections have to be created so that perhaps a small group of men who have undergone some quite definite happening, who are incarnated together an a little corner of the earth, can pass through an experience which, at that particular time, may seem unimportant. But when we perceive how such men, having been crowded together in a small area, are scattered abroad in their next incarnations, and make effective for humanity as a whole what they received when they were living in this narrow compass—then the matter takes an a very different aspect. And so we can understand that in times when the general character of mankind has a certain definite quality, something very surprising may make its appearance in separate sections of civilisation, something that is entirely distinct from the prevailing character. I will give you an example of this, because it lies fairly near our own time.

In Steinthal, near Strassburg, Oberlin lived.³⁴ The deep-thinking German psychologist and researcher, G. H. von Schubert, has repeatedly referred to him This Oberlin was an unusual personality and he had a strange effect upon people. He was clairvoyant—I can allude to this only briefly—and after he had lost his wife comparatively early, he was able to live with her individuality in a communion as real as with a living person. Day by day he made notes of what was happening in the world where his wife now dwelt; he also marked this an a map of the heavens and showed it to the people who gathered around him, so that actually a whole community shared in the life Oberlin was leading with his deceased wife. Such a thing is strangely out of place at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries; but if you take what I have said into consideration, you will grasp what it portends. Things such as were revealed to Oberlin are among the most significant in this domain in modern times. I may perhaps remind you that we now have a very fine literary and historical work dealing with Oberlin and these affairs: it is the novel by Fritz Lienhard.³⁵ You will find it extraordinarily stimulating reading, with regard not only to the character of this priest but also to the cultural conditions of those days. Such things, which can easily be underestimated and regarded as chance, are able to show us how an occurrence of this kind strikes into evolution, how it can take effect in the whole process of the evolution of mankind. For the human beings who are thrown together in such circumstances, who gather round a personality as the central figure, are destined to undertake certain tasks in later incarnations.

So you see—and this is what I wanted to bring before you today—how the great macrocosmic penetration from the vast universe into the souls of men is connected with what may take place in a minute arena. But these things become especially interesting if we connect them with another law, with such points of intersection in evolution as was the year 1250. At that time there was the strongest possible penetration into the souls of men—and that is not so readily noticed as the upheavals of continents. During the Atlantean catastrophe the Spirits of Form worked so little into the souls of men that the younger hierarchies held the field, as it were, at that time. Thus the activities of the different ranks of hierarchical Beings are distributed. And it is important to know that again in these cyclic movements certain laws of ascent and decline prevail. I indicated something of this when I said that in the year 1250 there was an impetus and then an ebbing away which manifested in the current of materialism. Such things are often to be perceived. And it is interesting to notice how cycles of ascent and of decline alternate in the history of mankind.

• 26. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Lectures II and III.
• 27. See Rudolf Steiner, Turning-Points in Spiritual History. Lecture I.
• 28. See Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Hierarchies. Lecture 8. “Mars is a repetition of the ancient Moon and stands in the Same orbit to which the ancient Moon extended. ...” See also, Arenson's Index to Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses, Vol. II, p. 181: “The Mars of to-day arose when the Earth was repeating the ancient Moon existence. What separated off and remained behind at this stage of repetition is the Mars of to-day.”
• 29. See Rudolf Steiner, The Whitsuntide Festival: its place in the study of Karma. (Lecture given at Dornach, 4th June, 1924.) “ ... The physical science of to-day looks to find also in the Universe everything which is on the Earth. But the physical organisation is not there in the Universe at all. Man begins with his physical organisation: then he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe an the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical is only on the Earth and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. ...”
• 30. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Lecture II.
• 31. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking: a Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. With an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendices by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicoll. (Hodder and Stoughton, 1956.)
• 32. See Rudolf Steiner, The Life between Death and Rebirth in relation to Cosmic Facts. Lecture 5.
• 33. See Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation, Scene I. Four Mystery Plays, Vol. I, p. 28. The following is the English version of words spoken by Theodora, a seeress:
  
  “... Once, long ago, Christ lived upon the earth,
  And from this life ensured the consequence
  That in soul-substance clad He hovers o'er
  The evolution of Humanity,
  In union with the earth's own spirit-sphere;
  And though as yet invisible to men,
  When in such form He manifests Himself,
  Since now their being Lacks that spirit-sight
  Which first will show itself in future times;
  Yet even now this future draweth nigh
  When that new sight shall come to men an earth.
  What once the senses saw, when Christ did live
  Upon the earth: this shall be seen by souls
  When soon the time shall reach its fullness due.”
  
  See also, Rudolf Steiner, The Vision of Christ's Advent in the Etheric World.
• 34. Johann Freidrich Oberlin. Protestant priest in Steinthal.
• 35. Oberlin. A novel by Fritz Lienhard. (Stuttgart, 84th ed., 1920.)

In the lecture yesterday I drew your attention to the fact that very diverse Powers intervene in the course of human evolution. For this reason, and also because one mighty stream of influence intersects another, certain periods of ascent and equally of decline occur in definite spheres of civilisation. While older civilisations are still waning, while they are so to say passing over into external forms, the creative impulses which are to inaugurate later civilisations, to inspire them and bring them to birth, are being slowly and gradually prepared. So that in a general way the course of man's cultural life may be described briefly as follows.—We find cultural life rising from unfathomed depths and ascending to certain heights; then it ebbs, and indeed more slowly than it ascended. The fruits of a particular civilisation-epoch live an for a long time, penetrate into later streams and into folk-cultures of the most diverse character and lose themselves like a river which instead of flowing into the sea trickles away over lowlands. But while it is trickling away the new civilisations—which were still imperceptible during the decline of the old—are in preparation, in order eventually to begin their development and ascent, and to contribute in the same or a similar way to the progress of humanity. If we want to think of an eminently characteristic example of progress in culture we can surmise that it must be one in which the principle of the universal-human, the weaving of the ego in the ego, appeared in the most striking form. This, as we have shown, was the case in the culture of the ancient Greeks. We have there a clear illustration of a civilisation running its own characteristic course; for the achievements of the three preceding civilisation-epochs and of the epoch following that of Greece are modified in a quite different way by forces outside man. Hence what lies in the human being himself, whereby he makes his mark upon the world, everything which, proceeding from super-sensible powers, is able to express itself in him in the most characteristically human way—this is exemplified in the middle, the Fourth civilisation-epoch.

But in regard to this Greek civilisation, the following must also be said. It was preceded by the Third epoch, which then ebbed away, and during this period of decline Greek culture was being prepared. During the decline of the Babylonian culture, which streamed from the East towards the West, there was enshrined in the little peninsula of Southern Europe we know as Greece the seed of what was to sink into humanity as the impulse of a new life. True though it is that this Greek life brought pre-eminently to expression the essentially human element, that which man can find entirely within himself, it must not be thought that such things need no preparation. What we call the essentially human element—that, too, had first to be taught to men in the Mysteries by super-sensible Powers, just as now the still higher freedom which must be prepared for the Sixth civilisation-epoch is sustained and taught in super-sensible worlds by the Beings who lead and guide human evolution.

We must therefore realise that when Greek culture appears to outer observation. as if everything sprang from the essentially human element, it already has behind it a period when it was, so to speak, under the influence of the teachings of higher spiritual Beings. It was through these higher spiritual Beings that Greek culture was able to rise to the heights it achieved in bringing the essentially human element to expression. For this reason Greek culture too, when we trace it backwards, is lost sight of in the darkness of those prehistoric ages when, as its basis, there was cultivated in the Mystery-sanctuaries the wisdom which then, like a heritage, was clothed in majestic poetic form by Homer, by Aeschylus. And so, in face of the grandeur of there unparalleled figures, we must conceive that these men did indeed elaborate something that was entirely the product of their own souls, of the weaving of the ego in the ego, but that it had first been laid by higher Beings into these souls in the temple-sanctuaries. That is why the poetry of Homer and of Aeschylus seems so infinitely profound, so infinitely great. The poems of Aeschylus should not on any account, however, be judged from the translation by Wilamowitz, for it must be realised that the full greatness of what lived in Aeschylus cannot be conveyed in modern language, and that there could really be no worse approach to an understanding of his works than that tendered by one of the most recent translators.

If, therefore, we study Greek culture against the deep background of the Mysteries, we can begin to divine its real nature. And because the secrets of the life in super-sensible worlds were conveyed in a certain human form to the artists of Greece, they were able in their sculptures to embody in marble or in bronze, what had originally been hidden in the secrecy of the Mysteries. Even what confronts us in Greek philosophy clearly shows that its highest achievements were in truth ancient Mystery-wisdom translated into terms of intellect and reason. There is a symbolic indication of this when we are told that Heraclitus offered up his work, On Nature, as a sacrificial act in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This means that he regarded what the weaving of the ego in the ego enabled him to say as an offering to the spiritual Powers of the preceding epoch with whom he knew himself to be connected. This is an attitude which also sheds light an the profound utterance of Plato, who was able to impart a philosophy of such depth to the Greeks and yet found himself compelled to affirm that all the philosophy of his time was as nothing compared with the ancient wisdom received by the forefathers from the spiritual worlds themselves.³⁶ In Aristotle everything appears as though in forms of logic—indeed, here one must say that the ancient wisdom has become abstraction, living worlds have been reduced to concepts. But in spite of this—because Aristotle stands at the terminal point of the ancient stream—something of the old wisdom still breathes through his works.³⁷ In his concepts, in his ideas, however abstract, an echo can still be heard of the harmonies which resounded from the temple-sanctuaries and were in truth the inspiration not only of Greek wisdom but also of Greek art, of the whole folk-character. For when such a culture first arises, it takes hold not only of knowledge, not only of art, but of the whole man, with the result that the whole man is an impress of the wisdom and spirituality living within him. If we picture Greek civilisation rising up from unknown depths even during the decline of Babylonian culture, then, in the age of the Persian Wars we can clearly perceive the effects of what the Greek character had received from the old temple-wisdom. For in these Persian Wars we see how the heroes of Greece, aflame with enthusiasm for the heritage received from their forefathers, fling themselves against the stream which, as an ebbing stream from the East, is surging towards them. The significance of their violent resistance, when the treasures of the temple-wisdom, when the teachers of the ancient Greek Mysteries themselves were fighting in the souls of the Greek heroes in the battles against the Persians, against the waning culture of the East—the significance of all this can be grasped by the human soul if the question is asked: What must have become of Southern Europe, indeed of the whole of later Europe, if the onset of the massive hordes from the East had not been beaten back at that time by the little Greek people? What the Greeks then achieved contained the seed of all later developments in European civilisation up to our own times.

And even the outcome in the East of what Alexander subsequently carried back to it from the West—albeit in a way that from a certain point of view is not justifiable—even that could develop only after what was destined to decline in respect also of its physical power had first been thrust back by the burning enthusiasm in the souls of the Greeks for the temple-treasures. If we grasp this we shall see how not only the teaching concerning Fire given by Heraclitus, not only the all-embracing ideas of Anaxagoras and of Thales, work on, but also the actual teachings of the guardians of the temple-wisdom in prehistoric Greek civilisation. We shall feel all this as a legacy of spiritual Powers who imbued Greek culture with what it was destined to receive. We shall perceive it in the souls of the Greek heroes who defied the Persians in the various battles. This is how we must learn to feel history, for what is offered us in the ordinary way is, at its best, only an empty abstract of ideas. What works over from earlier into later times can be observed only when we go back to what was imparted to the souls of men through a period lasting for thousands of years, taking definite forms in a certain epoch.

Why was it that in this upsurge of the old temple-treasures something so great could be imparted to the Greeks The secret lay in the universality, the comprehensiveness, of these temple treasures, and in their aloofness from anything of lesser account. It was something that was given as a primal source, something that could engross the whole man, bringing with it, so to say, a direct forte of guidance.

And here we come to the essential characteristic of a culture which is rising towards its peak. During this period, everything that is an active stimulus in man—beauty, virtue, usefulness, purposiveness, what he wishes to achieve and realise in life—all this is seen as proceeding directly from wisdom, from the spiritual. Wisdom embraces virtue, beauty and everything else as well. When man is permeated by, inspired by, the temple-wisdom, the rest follows of itself. That is the feeling which prevails during these times of ascent. But the moment the questions, the perceptions, fall asunder—the moment when, for example, the question of the good or the beautiful becomes independent of the question of its divine origin—the period of decline begins. Therefore we may be sure that we are living in a period of decline when it is emphasised that, independently of a spiritual origin, this or that must be especially cultivated, this or that must be the main consideration. When man lacks the confidence that the spiritual can bring forth of itself everything that human life requires, then the streams of culture, which an the arc of ascent form a unity, fall apart into separate streams. We sec this where interests outside wisdom, outside the spiritual impetus, begin to infiltrate Greek life; we see it in the political life, we see it, too, in that part of Greek life which especially interests us, in the spiritual life immediately preceding Aristotle. Here, side by side with the question: What is the true?—which embraces the question: What is good and practically effective?—the latter question begins to be an independent one. Men ask: How should knowledge be constituted in order that one can attain a practical goal in life? And so in the period of decline we see the stream of Stoicism arising. With Plato and Aristotle the good was directly contained in the wise; impulses of the good could proceed only from the wise. The Stoics ask: What must man do in order to become wiser in the practice of living, in order to live to some purpose? Goals of practical life insert themselves into what was formerly the all prevailing impetus of truth.

With Epicureanism comes an element that may be described as follows.—Men ask: How must I prepare myself intellectually in order that this life shall run its course with the greatest possible happiness and inner peace? To this question, Thales, Plato and even Aristotle would have answered: Search after the truth and truth will give you the supreme happiness, the germinating seed of love.—But now men separate the one question from the question of truth, and a stream of decline Sets in. Stoicism and Epicureanism are a stream of decline, the invariable consequence being that men begin to question truth itself and truth loses its power. Hence, simultaneously with Stoicism and Epicureanism in the period of decline, Scepticism arises—doubt in regard to truth. And when Scepticism and doubt, Stoicism and Epicureanism, have exercised their influence for a time, then man, still striving after truth, feels cast out of the World-Soul and thrown back upon his own soul. Then he looks around him, saying: This is not an age when Impulses flow into humanity from the on working stream of the spiritual Powers themselves. He is thrown back upon his own inner life, his own subjective being. In the further course of Greek life, this comes to expression in Neo-Platonism, a philosophy which is no longer concerned with external life, but looks within and strives upwards to truth through the mystical ascent of the individual. One stream of the cultural life is mounting, another declining, stage by stage. And what has developed during the ascent peters slowly and gradually away, until with the approach of the year 1250 there begins for humanity an inspiration not easy to observe but no less great for all that, which I characterised yesterday in a certain way. This again has been petering away since the 16th century. For since then all the specialised questions have again arisen by the side of those concerning truth itself; again an attitude is taken which wants to separate the question of the good and of the outwardly useful from the one supreme question of truth. And whereas those leading personalities in whom the impulses of the year 1250 were working contemplated all human currents in their relation to truth, we now see coming into prominence the fundamental separation of the questions of practical life from those that are intrinsically concerned with truth. At the portal leading to the new period of decline, the period which so clearly signifies the downward surge in spiritual life—at this portal stands Kant. In his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he says expressly that he had to set limits to the striving after truth in order to make room for what practical religion requires.³⁸ Hence the strict separation of Practical Reason from Theoretical Reason: in Practical Reason, the postulate of God, Freedom and Immortality is based entirely on the element of the good; in Theoretical Reason, any possibility of knowledge penetrating into any spiritual world is demolished. That is how things are, when viewed in the setting of world-history. And we may be sure that the striving for wisdom in our age will follow in the wake of Kant. When our own spiritual Movement points to the ways in which the capacity for knowledge can be so extended and enhanced as to enable it to penetrate into the super-sensible, we shall for a long, long time continue to hear from all sides: “Yes, but Kant says! ...” The historical evolution of mankind takes its course in antitheses of this kind. In what arises instinctively, like a dim inkling, we can see that underneath what is pure maya but accepted as the truth, underneath the stream of maya, human instincts do hit upon things which to a great extent are right. For it is extraordinarily interesting that in certain inklings arising out of folk-instincts for practical life, we can perceive the descending course of human evolution until the Greco-Latin epoch and the re-ascent now demanded of us.

What picture, then, must have come before the minds of men who had a feeling for such things When they looked back to the great figures of history in pre-Christian times—or, we had better say, pre-Grecian times—how must they have thought of all those whom we described as the instruments of Beings of the higher Hierarchies They must have said to themselves—and even the Greeks still did so: This has come to us through men who were played into by superhuman, divine forces.—And in all the ages of antiquity we find that the leading personalities, down to the figures of the Hermes, and even Plato, were regarded as “sons of the gods”; that is to say, when men looked back to olden times, heightening their vision more and more, they saw the divine behind there personalities who appeared in history; and they regarded the beings who appeared as Plato and in the Hermes as having come down, as having been born from, the gods. That is how they rightly saw it—the sons of the gods having united with the daughters of men, in order to bring down the spiritual to the physical plane. In those ancient times men beheld sons of the gods—divine men, that is to say, beings whose nature was united with the divine. On the other hand, when the Greeks came to feel: Now we can speak of the weaving of the ego in the ego, of what lies within the human personality itself—then they spoke of their supreme leaders as the Seven Sages, thus indicating that the nature of those who once were sons of the gods had now become purely and essentially human.

What was bound to come about in the instincts of the peoples in post-Grecian times? It was now a matter of indicating what man elaborates on the physical plane, and how he carries the full fruit of this into the spiritual world. Thus, while the feeling in much earlier times was that the spiritual must be recognised as taking precedence of the physical man and the physical man regarded as a shadow-image, and while during the Greek epoch there were the sages in whom the ego works in the ego, in the epoch after Greece attention was turned to personalities who live on the physical plane and rise to the spiritual through what is achieved in the physical world. This concept developed out of a certain true instinct of knowledge. Just as the pre-Grecian age had sons of the gods and the Greeks had sages, the peoples of the post-Grecian age have saints—human beings who lift themselves into the spiritual life through what they carry into effect on the physical plane. Something is alive there in the folk-instinct, enabling us to glimpse how behind maya itself there is a factor which impels humanity forward.

When we recognise this, the impulses at work in the epochs of time throw light upon the individual human soul, and we understand how the group-karma is inevitably modified by the fact that men are at the same time instruments of the process of historical evolution. We are then able to grasp what the Akasha Chronicle reveals—for example, that in Novalis we have to see something that goes back to Elijah of old. This is an extraordinarily interesting sequence of incarnations.³⁹ In Elijah the element of prophecy comes strongly to the fore, for it was the mission of the Hebrews to prepare that which was to come in later time. And they prepared it during the period of transition from the Patriarchs to the Prophets, via the figure of Moses. Whereas in Abraham we see how the Hebrew still feels the working of the God within him, in his very blood,⁴¹ in Elijah we see the transition to the ascent into the spiritual worlds. Everything is prepared by degrees. In Elijah there lives an individuality already inspired by what is to come in the future. And then we see how this individuality was to be an instrument for preparing understanding of the Christ Impulse. The individuality of Elijah is reborn in John the Baptist.⁴⁰ John the Baptist is the instrument of a higher Being. In John the Baptist there lives an individuality who uses him as an instrument, but in order to enable him to serve as such an instrument, the lofty individuality of Elijah was necessary.

Then, later on, we see how this individuality is well fitted to pour impulses working towards the future into forms that were made possible only by the influence of the Fourth Post-Atlantean culture-epoch. However strange it may seem to us, this individuality appears again in Raphael, who unites in his paintings what is to work in all ages of time as the Christian impulse, with the wonderful forms of Greek culture. And here we can realise how the individual karma of this entelechy is related to the outer incarnation. It is required of the outer incarnation that the power of an age shall be able to come to expression in Raphael; for this power the Elijah-John individuality is the suitable bearer. But the epoch is only able to produce a physical body bound to be shattered under such a power; hence Raphael's early death.

This individuality had then to give effect to the other side of his being in an age when the single streams were dividing once more; he appears again as Novalis. We see how there actually lives in Novalis, in a particular form, all that is now being given us through Spiritual Science. For outside Spiritual Science nobody has spoken so aptly about the relation of the astral body to the etheric and physical bodies, about the waking state and sleep, as Novalis, the reincarnated Raphael.⁴² These are things which show us how individualities are the instruments of the onflowing stream of man's evolution. And when we observe the course of human development, when we perceive this enigmatic alternation in the happenings of history, we can dimly glimpse the working of deep spiritual Powers. The earlier passes over into the later in strange and remarkable ways.

To some of you I have already said⁴³ that a momentous vista of history is revealed by the transition from Michelangelo to Galileo. (Mark well, I am not speaking of a reincarnation here; it is a matter of historical development.) A very intelligent man once drew attention to the striking fact that the human spirit has woven into the wonderful architecture of the Church of St. Peter in Rome what he calls the science of mechanics. The majestic forms of this building embody the principles of mechanics that were within the grasp of the human intellect, transposed into beauty and grandeur. They are the thoughts of Michelangelo! The impression made by the sight of the Church of St. Peter upon men expresses itself in many different ways, and perhaps everyone has felt something of what Natter, the Viennese sculptor,⁴⁴ experienced, or what was experienced in his company. He was driving with a friend towards St. Peter's. It was not yet in sight, but then, suddenly, the friend heard Natter exclaim, springing from his seat and as though beside himself: “I am frightened!”At that moment he had caught sight of St. Peter's ... afterwards he wanted to obliterate the incident from his memory. Everyone may experience something of the kind at the sight of such majesty And now, in a professorial oration, a very clever man, Professor Müllner, has made the point that Galileo, the great mechanistic thinker, taught humanity in terms of the intellect what Michelangelo had built into spatial forms in the Church of St. Peter. So that what stands there in the Church of St. Peter like crystallised mechanics, principles of mechanics grasped by the human mind, confronts us once again, but now transposed into intellectuality, in the thoughts of Galileo. But it is strange that in this oration the speaker should have called attention to the fast that Galileo was born on the day Michelangelo died (18th February, 1564). Hence there is an indication that the intellectual element, the thoughts coined by Galileo in the intellectual forms of mechanics, arise in a personality whose birth occurs on the same day as the death of the one who had given them expression in space. The question therefore inevitably arises in our minds: Who, in reality, built into the Church of St. Peter, through Michelangelo, the principles of mechanics only subsequently acquired by humanity through Galileo?

My dear friends, if the aphoristic and isolated thoughts that have been presented in connection with the historical development of humanity unite in your hearts to produce a feeling of how the spiritual Powers themselves work in history through their instruments, you will have assimilated there lectures in the right way. And then it could be said that the feeling which arises in our hearts from the study of occult history is the right feeling for the way in which development and progress occur in the stream of time. To-day, at this minor turning-point of time, it may be fitting to direct our meditation to this feeling of the progress of men and of gods in the flow of history. If in the heart of each one of you this feeling for the science of occult progress in time were to become clear perception of the weaving, creative activity in the becoming of our own epoch, if this feeling could come alive within you, it might perhaps also live as a New Year's wish in your souls. And at the close of this course of lectures, this is the New Year's wish that I would fair lay in your hearts: Regard what has been said as the starting-point of a true feeling for time. In a certain way it may be symbolical that we should have been able to use this minor transition from one period of time to another as an opportunity for allowing ideal which embrace such transitions in their sweep, to take effect in our souls.

• 36. Timaeus, 22, 23. “In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the River Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais. ... To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them an to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world. ... Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. ... just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilised life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. ...”
• 37. World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, p. 102.
• 38. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). “I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief”Preface to the 2nd ed. of the Critique of Pure Reason. (Tr. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, p. xxxv. London, 1860.)
• 39. See Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture IV.
• 41. See Rudolf Steiner, Deeper Secrets of Human History in the light of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Lectures II and III.
• 40. See Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture IV.
• 42. See inter alia, Hymns to the Night, the most recent translation of which is by Mabel Cotterell, with an introduction by August Closs, published by the Phoenix Press, London, 1948. Translations were made at the end of the 19th century of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Disciples at Sais, of many “Fragments,” and other “Songs.” Carlyle's Essay on Novalis is well known. Apart from there publications, however, the English reader will have some difficulty in finding works in his own language that will enable him to acquire any real insight into the writings of Novalis. A great deal, of course, has been and is continuing to be written in Germany of the one of whom Tieck wrote in 1846: “Few authors have ever produced so great an impression on the world of German thought as Novalis.” The biography by Friedrich Hiebel, Novalis, der Dichter der blauen Blume, is of great value. Students of Spiritual Science will be particularly interested in Novalis in anthroposophischer Betrachtung by Monica V. Miltitz, published in 1956. But Rudolf Steiner alone was able to unveil the mystery enshrouding the personality of Novalis. Among many passages occurring in his lectures, the following is of outstanding importance: “... A deeply shattering event in life made him (Novalis) aware, as by a magic strike, of the relation between life and death and, as well as the great vista of past ages of the earth and cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before his eyes of Spirit. ... In the rase of Novalis we cannot really speak of a self-contained lifc, for his was actually like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The initiation he had received as it were by Grace, brought to life within him experiences of an earlier incarnation; there was a certain mysterious consolidation of the fruits of insight acquired in an earlier life. And because he looked back through the ages with his own awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to say that to him nothing in life was comparable with the momentous event when in his inmost self he had discovered what Christ truly is. This experience was like a repetition of the happening at Damascus, when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of Christ and rejected their message, received in higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is present! ...” This quotation is from Rudolf Steiner's lecture entitled, The Christinas Mystery. Novalis the Seer. Not yet printed in English. Berlin, 22.XII.08.
• 43. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit, Berlin, 17.XI.10.
• 44. Heinrich Natter 1846–92).

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

In the course of our spiritual reflections, which often lead us to very special heights of existence, it is perhaps sometimes good to take a look at everyday life from our spiritual-scientific point of view, at the life that constantly surrounds us. For if one brings some good will and the right perspective, then it is precisely by applying spiritual science to everyday life that one can gain the most important insights into the truth and the conclusiveness of what is sought in this very field.

Among the most significant teachings that we encounter in the field of spiritual science is undoubtedly that of the cause of a later life on earth being determined by the one that preceded it, what we call karma. Now, in most cases when karma is mentioned, the 'theosophist' certainly thinks of the causes that lie in the lives of previous lives. Then people who are still far removed from spiritual scientific endeavors can easily raise the objection: How can such things be proven? Of course we know how impossible, how childish such an objection is. If a person takes the trouble to penetrate more deeply into what is given through spiritual science, he will notice how well-founded everything is that can be said about karma. But it is also good to point out the experiences and observations that are already accessible to people who are still far from clairvoyance or other theosophical methods of observation. Karma, if we understand it correctly, does not only work from one life to another, but already in one life that we go through between birth and death. Of course, what people usually observe in life is actually such a short period of a person's life that not much can come from the working over of earlier causes into later effects. If we look at five or six years, not much comes of it. But if we also consider longer periods between birth and death, as far as this is always possible, then we can see a great deal of the manifestation of karma. This can also be seen in very external things.

I do not want to present this as something particularly theosophical, but only to show that even for the most ordinary things, larger periods of time are necessary to arrive at a connection between cause and effect. For those who take an interest in observing life, I may point out that I have had many opportunities to observe children. It has been a long time since I taught children. But when you have taught four boys in a family over many years, you not only have the opportunity to observe these four children, but also the children of acquaintances and so on. There are always many opportunities to observe what these or those children do, or what can be done with them. Now, in those days, there was a very particular medical practice, which, thank God, is now rapidly declining: it was considered necessary to give little tots a glass of red wine if they were to grow strong, not just with one meal but with several. This was considered to be something quite excellent. I was able to observe many children who were raised with red wine and other children whose parents had refused to follow suit. Today, these children, who were two and a half to four years old at the time, are people who are over thirty or approaching forty years old. The little ones who were forced to drink red wine to keep them going back then can be seen to have become very fidgety and nervous people. They differ very clearly from those who did not drink red wine as children, if one is willing to observe. Almost a quarter of a century can be considered in order to be able to observe this.

Thus, it is particularly important to consider longer periods of time for the moral, ethical qualities of a person in relation to karmic effects. Today I would like to point out several qualities that can be observed, how they affect the soul, the mind, and how the effects of karma are already actively manifesting themselves in one lifetime. I would like to list some good and some bad qualities: envy, enviousness, untruthfulness, then goodwill and what we find so often in younger people, amazement, wonder, and similar things. First, let us take the bad qualities, envy and untruthfulness. Let us assume that we can observe envy and enviousness in childhood. We know from spiritual scientific observations that in the limbs of a person's being, which he is usually not aware of, special powers are at work in the astral body and etheric body: in the astral body the luciferic powers, in the etheric body the ahrimanic powers, which are opponents of human development. Everything that has to do with the astral body, such as envy, comes from the temptations of Lucifer. Everything that has to do with the etheric body, such as untruthfulness, comes from the temptations of Ahriman. In an envious child, the astral body has been seized by Lucifer to a certain extent; this is where the Luciferic beings have their points of attack. Something very significant applies to envy and lies: from the most primitive people to the most developed leaders of humanity, envy and mendacity are considered to be very reprehensible qualities. As soon as a person realizes that he is envious or mendacious, a sense of the reprehensibility of these qualities arises in his soul. One wants to get rid of them with all one's might. Envy and lying, in particular, are instinctively recognized as reprehensible. Goethe says that he must admit to many faults, but that he does not find envy in the depths of his soul. Benvenuto Cellini says the same about lying. If someone realizes, “I am an envious person,” then he instinctively works to get rid of this trait. But it can be very deeply rooted, so deeply that he can indeed strive to overcome envy, but he is not strong enough, morally not strong enough. Then something very peculiar happens. Envy is a Luciferic quality. When a person realizes that he has a tendency to envy and works to overcome it, Lucifer says to himself: There is a danger that this person will escape me. Lucifer and Ahriman are equally hostile to man, but they are good friends among themselves. Then Lucifer calls on Ahriman for help, and he transforms envy into another quality. Envy undergoes a metamorphosis that manifests itself in the human soul in such a way that a person who previously did not want this in another person now becomes a busybody, looking for everything possible in his fellow human beings in order to find fault. This craving to find fault is nothing more than envy in disguise. If this is the case, then Ahriman has you in his claws. This envy in disguise is very widespread. If it did not exist in the form of carping and the craving to say all kinds of nasty things about people, many a morning and evening gathering and many a coffee party would have no subject matter at all.

Strangely enough, the same thing happens in terms of karma whether you let envy arise originally or in a transformed form as carping. If you follow a person who was envious in his youth or a carper into later life, you will see that people who were consumed by envy in their youth develop insecurity in old age. They cannot gain a firm hold on life, cannot come into a right relationship with other people, cannot advise themselves, and are glad if they can say, “Such and such advised me.” This is a karmic result of envy or of transformed envy in this very life.

Dishonesty is an attribute of the etheric body and has its source in Ahriman. If, at a certain age, a person habitually displays dishonesty, or if he lies a great deal as a result of bad education, then in later life he will always show a certain shyness, an inability to look people in the eye. Certain proverbial rules in the moral sphere are very apt here. When one says, “This person cannot look me in the eye,” then there is an effect of dishonesty. Shyness and a lack of independence arise as soul qualities in the same life. If one wants to observe life in the same way that the physicist observes the external course of the world, then one can observe such things. This makes life clear.

What follows from such a quality remains in the one life as a soul; it remains as a soul. Let us assume that we follow one life spiritually into the next. What appeared as a karmic effect in one life will gain greater power in the next life. Thus we can prove that the lack of independence, which initially appears as a mental effect of envy in one life, and the shyness as an effect of untruthfulness, that these become organizing in the building of the body in the next life. There they reach into the physical.

Someone who has developed a lot of envy in a previous life will be reborn as a person who already has what makes him or her helpless in the external organization of the body. Those who have been untruthful will reappear in such a way that they have no right relationship to their environment. They cannot be loved by the people around them, they feel repelled by them, love is difficult to come by. Spiritual science is to be understood as a way of life. What has now been said becomes an immediate way of life.

Let us suppose that a child like this is born in our neighborhood. If we notice that this child cannot enter into a relationship with us, that it shyly withdraws, or that this child is weak and pale, a theosophist will say to himself: the pallor, the disposition to all kinds of illnesses must be traced back to an envious disposition in the previous incarnation, the shyness to a tendency to tell lies. It is no coincidence that this child was born into our circle, for an individuality can only be placed where it belongs. It will not be long before people will accept the law of karma as a matter of course. People are born into the circumstances in which they belong. Weakness and helplessness are the result of former envy, and we meet this child because it envied us. And with its shy nature it comes to us because it is we who were so often lied to by this being in a previous incarnation. How should we behave in such a case? There is no need to think about this for long. We should behave in the most moral and ethical way, as we would in our ordinary lives.

A person who envies us or criticizes us in everything is best treated when we show them goodwill and love. This is the best behavior. Of course, this cannot be done everywhere in our unnatural, materialistic time. But it is the best behavior towards a child who is born into life with these particular dispositions. We do not just tell ourselves: the child envied us and lied to us in a past incarnation, but we make the firm decision to show this child a great deal of goodwill. Let us immerse ourselves in a warm feeling. Try to observe this and you will find that a child like that can redden in the cheek and become strong and robust. It is only necessary to repeat such behavior over and over again. It is the same with mendacity. The best way to convert a person who lies to us every moment is to do everything we can to give him as much of a sense of what love of truth is. If we behave in this way towards a shy child, we will find that we do everything to counteract the escalation of the conflict.

Thus we see that we can serve life to an enormous extent. This is an example of how spiritual science can become a life practice. We should never forget that we can have the evidence for karma in our hands all the time. But we should also not forget, especially when we have to educate such people, that it is up to us to prove that spiritual science has become part of our flesh and blood.

We can also look at other qualities in the light of spiritual science, for example, wonder and amazement. The ancient Greek philosophers, guided by a fine instinct, said: Philosophy takes its starting point from wonder and amazement. What is this sense of wonder, this amazement? There is a certain relationship to the phenomena that confront us that leads us to be amazed, to be in awe. Then sometimes, instead of amazement, there comes something else into it, into which amazement and awe no longer mix. This is namely the case when we begin to understand the facts in question. We would now like to raise the question: what about this sense of wonder, this amazement? We encounter a phenomenon, it compels us to marvel. It cannot be a relationship to the intellect, to intelligence, because these seek understanding, do not express themselves in amazement. It is a much more direct relationship. Understanding has to deal with the individual parts; amazement arises directly in the face of the whole thing. This is because in understanding the I relates to the thing, but in marveling the astral body faces the thing. It does not have full consciousness, but a kind of subconscious. When the astral body has a relationship to the thing and this relationship is not yet elevated to the I, then wonder arises. The fact that a person can be amazed at something makes it possible to enter into a connection with the object that lies below the threshold of consciousness. This is very important in many cases, this subconscious connection, just as it is important for philosophy according to the view of the ancient Greeks that there is amazement first.

It is good for people to spread their astral body over a subject before they apply their intelligence to it. This creates an emotional and mental basis into which understanding is then immersed. This is quite different from approaching the subject abstractly with the mind. It has the effect of broadening the basis of our understanding. A richer understanding is the result. That is why it is so important for the educator to first develop a sense of holy awe in the face of the child, in the face of the individual emerging from the darkness; when we keep an open mind about what we cannot grasp with our intellect: the infinity of an individuality. We artificially place ourselves in a state of wonder in the face of this individuality. It will come, for there are abundant opportunities for wonder and amazement in the presence of each individuality. These feelings are not tainted by our narrow intellect; they are sometimes much more certain, richer, and more correct than what is recognized by the narrow intellect. The foundations for knowledge applicable to practical life are to be gained through amazement, through the life of the soul. Something very important depends on this: the trust that one person has in another. How often does it happen in life that a person has trust or even mistrust in another — because the negative applies just as much as the positive — before they have encountered the person in terms of concepts and everyday understanding? Sometimes trust and mistrust arise quite suddenly. How many people there are who often break out in a kind of lament: If only I had trusted my first impression! I spoiled the true impression that I had sensed before. — Such people are sometimes very right. Our social relationship, our relationship to life, should grow out of our emotional life. There are people who do not have much of an inclination to feel this vagueness, this sense of foreboding, in people. There are people who can gaze in wonder at the starry sky for hours without understanding much astronomy, and there are others who remain fixed on the starry sky until they get hold of books in which they can dissect it all. These are the people who cannot have this basic disposition. Such people, like sticks, often pass people by until they have had enough time to dissect people.

This is also evident in the behavior of spiritual science. One can actually speak to the intellect only in the very earliest youth. Later it is impossible for the reason that Goethe indicates: one could not convince people of the untruthfulness of their claim, because their view was based on the fact that they thought the untruthful was true. If someone feels that there is something in spiritual science that fulfills all their longings, they will always find logical evidence that can be found everywhere. Basically, things are extremely clear; they just have to be seen in the light of a spiritual worldview. Suppose a person in youth experiences a kind of sacred awe in the presence of an older person, one that they may not even be able to say why it arises. When we notice such a broad-minded disposition in a person, we find that such people remain young for a long time, indeed, remain young at all, that a young heart beats in them even when their hair has long since turned grey. They retain a certain agility in life. In particular, they retain the ability throughout their lives to quickly find their way into situations, to be adept in all circumstances. Those who open themselves up to life in this way in their youth will find that life opens up more and more for them in later epochs. They are increasingly able to see into things, more easily achieve the ability to feel the spiritual behind things, and become more and more spiritual. It is different for a person who has particularly developed the intellectual side in their youth. Such people tend towards premature old age. This is not the fault of the individual, but the karma of the community. The person who is a rational being separates himself more and more from the world, it becomes more and more incomprehensible to him. Hence the criticism of many people about everything that is in their environment. In my youth, they say, everything was beautiful, now everything is spoiled. This grumpiness, this dissatisfaction with everything, this withdrawal, this living only in childhood memories, is something that is connected to the intellectuality of the soul in youth. Therefore, we cannot do enough to build education on the broad basis of the mind, especially on imagery.

In our time, humanity in general is sailing in the opposite direction. Children are not told the stork tale, for example. Only one image is used, and it is truer than what people today want to teach children, namely that a child comes only from its father and mother. The stork image — or any other — indicates that there is something in the child that comes down from the heights of the clouds. The child sees into regions that are beyond triviality and builds up what is to grow into the truth of later life. To consider the stork picture to be untrue is just a lack of imagination, an inability to find a suitable image for the process that cannot be described to children as reincarnation, to clothe this process in an appropriate image. But, it is objected, children do not believe in it today. That is because the people who tell children such things do not believe in them themselves. As soon as we ourselves do not believe in what the image expresses, children cannot believe in it either. But if we ourselves have a picture of the real and true that is behind it, if we have enough imagination to translate the truth into a picture, then children will believe it too. And it is really beautiful to tell the child: A part comes from the father and a part from the mother, but a third is carried down from the heights of heaven by other beings, who carry it in their wings, bringing it to the father and mother. When we say this, the image is very appropriate and we are speaking the truth. A child to whom we teach rich, pictorial ideas is helped in relation to the conditions of the astral life, and we give him the blessing of a youthfulness that extends well into old age. This pictorial element in the educational activity, which above all also underlies play, is so infinitely important. Here too it can be seen in one life how karma works.

Thus spiritual science, when it intervenes in culture, will show its truth in the way in which life thrives and blossoms, while materialism shows its untruth by making life desolate and prematurely old.

Today and tomorrow evening, we will have much to talk about, in reference to Goethe, that may interest the student of spiritual science with regard to the inner workings of the human soul, its development and its relation to the world. Since our task in these two lectures will be to consider the above questions only in the light of Goethe, it seems to me expedient to speak now, independently of Goethe, as we are accustomed to doing, from the sources of spiritual science, about the inner life of the human soul, its development, and its relationship to the world. It will be necessary for me to assume that you are somewhat familiar with the basic elements of the human soul life.

When we consider the human soul in its development, we must objectively distinguish between the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. When we speak of the sentient soul, we do not just mean that part of our soul that is able to connect with the outside world through perception, through sensory impressions, but we also mean the seat of everything we can call instincts, desires, passions, and also the seat of everything that are impulses of will in the human soul. It is most useful, if we want to form an idea of what the sentient soul actually is within our mental life, to imagine how everything volitional, everything that gives us impulses from within , is seeking a relationship with the outside world, is the essential part of the sentient soul, and how it is attached to the sentient soul that it is the most important mediator of receiving external impressions of perception. That is why it is called the sentient soul. When a person receives a sound or a color impression, the sentient soul is in control. Even when passions arise, in the case of affects, anger, fear, anxiety, it is essentially the sentient soul that rules.

What we call the intellectual or mind soul first works its way out of the sentient soul and is, in certain respects, somewhat more serene than the sentient soul. The abilities to clothe in ideas what is felt in the sentient soul, to clarify what is experienced as instincts, as affects, into a more human form of soul life, are already present in the mind soul. When, for example, affects that otherwise only aim at self-preservation are clarified into goodwill, or even loving behavior towards the environment, we are already dealing with the soul of understanding or mind. In the soul of understanding, the I reveals itself to us as the actual center of our soul life.

In the further development of the I, where we feel ourselves to be truly inwardly human beings, asserting ourselves in the center, we form our perceptions and thoughts into great ideas with which we comprehend nature, or into ideas of duty or moral ideas. We speak of the consciousness soul in everything with which we relate to ourselves in this way. There are no dividing walls between the individual soul members, but it is necessary to distinguish between these three members because each relates to the outside world in a different way.

If you take the consciousness soul first, for us humans this is the highest soul element for the time being, but at the same time it is the soul element that has, to a certain extent, separated itself the most from the whole rest of the world. It is the most independent soul element.

When a person delves into the consciousness soul, he can be most lonely in his soul life, shutting himself off from the outer world. It is the soul element that, by its very nature, has erected the most barriers to the environment, so that it is most strongly predisposed to fall into error and error. It is most detached from the universe. But this part of the soul can only fall into error to a limited extent. This is the most important thing in what we call the consciousness soul. It expresses itself above all as logical thinking, as the dissection of concepts, and also proceeds as computational thinking, as everything that man has in a certain respect as an ability of his own, and which is not found in animals.

The powers of the sentient and rational soul play up into the consciousness soul. The drives, desires and passions, the volitional impulses of the sentient soul, the feelings and intellectual judgments of the rational soul penetrate into it. But in the consciousness soul, all this is processed by logical thinking. That is why it is excellent in the consciousness soul that we form our opinions. And because the consciousness soul is the most isolated, people are so very separate from each other in terms of opinions. When we speak of what we have in common because it is formed within our community, our family circle, because it is common practice in our environment, we speak of such things that are located in the intellectual or emotional soul. But even the things that are only located in the consciousness soul migrate into the intellectual soul, for example, an opinion we have formed can become a habitual opinion. Or an ability can be transformed into skill, into habit. Then they have descended into the mind soul.

The consciousness soul is also the most isolated because through the consciousness soul, the human being directly extends the horns of feeling into the environment. When we consider what we want to do, we live in the mind soul. When we look at what is around us, we extend the horns of feeling of the consciousness soul directly through the senses and come back to what makes us the most isolated being. Because of what our senses offer us, we become the most isolated beings. Thus man isolates himself precisely because, through the consciousness soul, he must relate to the outside world in a very local and temporary way. But opinions cling most intensely to the consciousness soul. An opinion asserts itself first and becomes firmly established in the consciousness soul. Therefore, in terms of opinions, man is an isolated being. In terms of habits, people understand each other better. Man is most independent, but also most isolated, in the consciousness soul, therefore we cannot really find access to what is in the consciousness soul of another person. We do not even know whether everyone sees the color red or blue in the same way as we do.

But leaving that aside, let us now just assume the content of the consciousness soul, which consists of opinions. If we take something that may seem extremely logical, something that we can imagine we base these opinions on in the most logical way possible, these logical reasons cannot be applied to our fellow human beings. Logical arguments do not initially have an effect on external life, and it is even normal for them not to have an effect. Therefore, it is easy to convert people to our opinions at a young age, in childhood. Later on, this is less and less the case. This is because the child not only confronts us with his consciousness soul, but also with his mind soul and his sentient soul. He confronts us with his entire personality. And the way we convince them depends more on all the other soul aspects than on the consciousness soul. The will and feelings are involved. If people's direction of will and feelings differ, then the most diverse points of view can be justified in the most logical way. Nevertheless, in the present cycle of human development, people are only truly independent with regard to the consciousness soul, and less so with regard to the other soul aspects. Consider how opinions are formed: the human being is completely free to form this or that conceptual context as his opinion. He is less free when the content of the intellectual soul comes into play. Here the human being does not feel at all free, otherwise his feelings and perceptions could not play many tricks on him. We can be completely in agreement with ourselves in our opinions that this or that should actually displease us, but the mind speaks differently, allowing us to take pleasure in the matter after all. The fact that the mind can be in discord with opinions can show us that man is not as free in terms of feeling as he is in terms of opinions. The strongest unfreedom the human being feels is in regard to everything concerning the will and so on, everything that is in the sentient soul. The discord is sometimes very great between the most glorious intentions, between the opinion that this or that is not good, and the urge, the affect towards it. A drastic example is the following: A teacher who has an angry child realizes in the soul of understanding that the anger must be expelled. Since he does not succeed in doing so in a good way, he throws the inkwell at the child's head, and he himself becomes angry. There we have the most beautiful discord.

What is it in the life of the soul that happens, that this discord can come about? It is the case that we are actually only isolated and independent in relation to the consciousness soul in our present state of development, but that between the consciousness soul, at the boundary to the mind or feeling soul, there is an influence on the soul, an influence of higher superhuman beings. And again, at the boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul, we have such an influence of external forces of superhuman entities, likewise between the sentient soul and the sentient body.

I am now describing the state that presents itself in our time, in our century. It is different for other times. Man can also easily be convinced that other forces come into play where the will comes into play. When we think, we are with ourselves. We can sit down in a corner and be with ourselves in thought. When a person has to exercise a volitional impulse, he has to move his hands and feet, he has to produce a physical action, an act. If you move from one thought to another, your consciousness remains present. Today, people have no idea of the transition that takes place when, for example, they grasp the thought: I want to grab the watch – and then carry out this thought. Here we have a completely different context than in the transition from one thought to another, where the whole sequence can be followed by the consciousness. This is an example of how other forces intervene to help us. At the boundary between the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, entities intervene that we call angels or angeloi. They are the ones who condense what would otherwise only be conscious in opinions and concepts, and condense them into what can be called sensations and feelings. The term 'sensation' fluctuates somewhat. What is felt and sensed internally is already a condensation of thought. There are forces behind us that help us.

Let us now turn to the other boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul. Here we have even higher beings that intervene. They are the ones who stir our will, who strengthen our thoughts into willpower: they are the archangels or archangeloi. But when we enter into relationship with our environment on our own initiative, then it is the spirits of personality; there we already feel the resistance of the world when we intervene in its structure. Thus, in the intermediate realms between the individual soul forces, there are guiding spiritual entities that permeate us and have the task of transforming into deeds and forces what, left to himself, a person can only experience within himself as thoughts.

Now, when we enter into these subconscious regions of the soul's life, there is indeed the possibility that the struggles that take place and must take place within the spiritual world will also enter the arena of our consciousness. Where the angelic beings intervene, the luciferic beings, who are the opponents of the angels, are also close behind. If only the angels were to intervene, our minds would reach out to what is beautiful, only to what corresponds to our human dignity. The luciferic beings lead us to what we ourselves do not agree with in calm reflection, but which carries us away. Where the archangels intervene, the Ahrimanic beings can also intervene, leading us to transform our judgment into error and our search for truth into falsehood. As human beings, we are given free will to think logically. But the moment we develop feelings and impulses of will, other beings, including those that counteract the emerging beings, intervene. This is the point that everyone who is in any way familiar with occult research should basically educate themselves about.

Where man stands in normal life today, it is already so arranged that the forces of the luciferic and ahrimanic entities, which counteract the angels and archangels, are nevertheless directed towards the good in all their effects. We need not seek to be wiser than the Ruling Power of the World and ask: Why do human beings need the entities of Lucifer and Ahriman? Man could not be so free if he were not given a counterpoise in these two powers to balance the angels and archangels. Man must have the opportunity to tell a lie so that he can arrive at the truth independently. As an independent being, he must gain truth for himself, and so Ahriman must be there. Man must resist Ahriman and take the path to truth. In this way man has become an independent being, in whom the sense for truth is inherent. The highest rulers of the world have already arranged matters so that the opponents, Lucifer and Ahriman, do not have too much to deal with. They are there to drive people to a strong degree of impure urges, desires and also incorrect judgments for the sake of their freedom and development of consciousness, but these can be balanced out in the course of karma and cannot disrupt the earthly mission. It is one of the most beautiful and profound insights that man gradually comes to through occult studies and esotericism, that he realizes: that everything that is untrue and bad can ultimately be transformed into good.

The question that everyone must ask is: apart from this circumstance, is there any reason why man must go through all incarnations and only reach perfection through every error? Yes, there is a reason. It would be going too far to show that man has become such through his previous lives on earth that he can only mature gradually. Now he is only independent with regard to the consciousness soul. But a time will come when, despite all his tendency to err, man will have a firm direction in his actions and work. If people did not yet have this, they would be in constant dispute and quarrel. As humanity is now, it is ripe to acquire the freedom for the consciousness soul, but people are not yet ripe to become free in relation to the mind soul and sentient soul. Progress arises from the fact that development can never take place in a completely straight line. We can see in all cultures how some souls are ahead of the pack, taking the lead, anticipating what other souls will only be able to acquire in later times. Today, human souls are only mature enough to become free in relation to the consciousness soul. But spiritual wisdom gradually leads to the mind and sentient soul also being freed and isolated, so that people no longer have to look to tradition and habit to find the good, but that the impulse for good flows from their own soul. This is also a necessary interpretation of Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me.” When the Christ lives in people, they will also be allowed to be free in relation to the intellectual and sentient soul. People have already achieved a certain dispassion when it comes to the most trivial logical matters and mathematical calculations. Here passion has already been banished so far from the human heart that people can find the truth for themselves. But for that which is within the mind and sentient soul, people are still very much in tune, even considering the tuning as the essential, because there Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play a role everywhere.

You will understand that with such a movement, which is built on the foundation of spiritual wisdom and where the deeper powers of the human soul are to be awakened for the purpose of isolation, not only curiosity about the spiritual worlds may be connected – that may not actually be the impulse for spiritual research – but also a sense of responsibility. Through this movement, every ability of human beings to shape the future is brought into our time. A germ of the future is being called forth that is not yet ripe in the general public. We must bear this in mind and be clear about how we have to be careful to ensure that, even if the soul may be beautiful and sympathetic within the spiritual movement, we must still be vigilant in the face of impending dangers and must awaken the feeling of responsibility. If the soul approaches spiritual things immaturely, there is still danger. Not everyone notices this danger. Those who are a little more deeply involved in the movement know and must know – if they do not want to break down under the unbearable – how they must always be on guard to say only what has passed through their soul not once or ten times, but a hundred times! It is difficult to find words that are adequate with regard to spiritual matters. A definite opinion must form in the whole circle of Anthroposophists: the opinion that they demand of those who represent the movement that they take the truth in this sense seriously. One must not believe that as a speaker every evening one can simply stand there without letting these truths pass through one's soul again and again, so that they are properly shaped down to the last word. The difficulty that lies in being able to open one's mouth only for spiritual truths is one thing. The other is that those who are in such a movement must, in a certain way, even make sure that this feeling is present in the representatives of the movement. But even those who are not yet deeply involved have to be careful that certain things do not happen to their soul, and people should ask themselves again and again: Am I mature enough to represent a spiritual movement? Do I have to place myself in the movement in such a way that the things of the spiritual world have an even stronger effect on me? No one should be discouraged, but everyone should awaken the feeling in themselves: Even if I have done what is good and right through the compulsion of tradition and education, there is a limit beyond which not only the angels, archangels and spirits of the personality stand when the right is represented, but where Lucifer and Ahriman also stand. Time and again, we see people who were truthful begin to tell lies when they are confronted with spiritual truths, because they have not sufficiently said to themselves: Above all, you must prepare yourself, you must let the spiritual truths take effect on you, you must not let yourself speak! — One must be aware of such responsibility. But it would be cowardly to say: Then I do not want to place myself in the spiritual movement. It is not by evading the duty to observe caution that one behaves correctly, but by observing this duty correctly. Much of what has been said at all times characterizes the progressive spiritual movement.

There are the great lights that are supposed to help people move forward. But where there are strong lights, there are often very strong shadows as well. Hence the not always unjustified accusations against those who are supposed to bring down the truths of the spiritual world to the physical plane. In every such movement, those who wanted nothing more than to let spiritual truths flow down into the physical world were joined by those who did not want to exercise self-criticism, who did not want to tame pride and vanity. They became like those we see so abundantly within spiritual movements, and to whom one must say: Unfortunately, the outside world cannot always distinguish between such bearers and those who are the true bearers. The opposite also sometimes happens. Our spiritual science movement should call on people to judge freely and sweep away everything that merely relies on external authority. As long as society still feels that it depends on the mouth through which it speaks, our ideal has not yet been achieved. We should only listen to what this mouth speaks because the things make sense to us when we listen to it with a sense of truth and unbiased logic. Our movement is highly suited to nurturing and developing people's free judgment; but there is a strong tendency, which can be called 'laziness' with regard to faith, that runs through our time. The laziness of faith creates great obstacles for the spiritual science movement. Believing something because someone has said it delays free judgment, the free human soul life, and independence in relation to the mind soul. It is so convenient not to have to think and just accept some truth because someone has said it; it is much more convenient to believe the person than to examine what the person is saying.

I have often said: It is only possible to make suggestions within the spiritual movement. But take everything we can find in history, for example, about Zarathustra: none of it will be refuted by what is said here about Zarathustra, if you really take everything. It can be examined, and the more rigorously it is examined, the more pleasing it is to those who want to represent the spiritual movement in an objective way. The will to examine is what they want. But it is infinitely more convenient to believe, to simply refer to what this or that clairvoyant said. This is a danger for the real or so-called clairvoyant if he is not yet really established. There is already a temptation to say what people believe. It is easy for him to slide into that, into which it is generally easy to slide when it concerns the ascent into the supersensible world. One ascends into a world in which it really cannot be controlled as easily as in the physical world. If you want to check with the mind, the angels and archangels intervene at the border areas, so it takes quite a lot to check it out. When it comes to faith, it often depends only on the impression one has of the person. How easily people can be influenced in terms of faith can be seen from mass suggestion.

Mass suggestion is something about which the most wonderful discoveries can only be made in the future. In earlier times it was quite different because the consciousness soul was not yet free. Today man is in the liberation of the consciousness soul, but is still completely in the bondage of the mind soul. How is suggestion made? Not only by what is pleasant or unpleasant about a personality; but also, for example, by the fact that someone has taken up an office, has five children to care for and now feels compelled to remain in office. Today, people often prefer to listen to everything that is obtained from the supersensible world in a charlatan-like manner rather than to what is based on solid research. For the former has two characteristics. First of all, it is tremendously trivial. For example, what writing mediums write down is usually such that one could just as easily think of the subject oneself, only it is made credible to man by the way it is taught to him. Man then believes that something is playing into it from the spiritual world. It is precisely their triviality that makes these things pleasant for people. Or they have the other property of being so incomprehensible that no one can understand anything about them. The things that are particularly incomprehensible are then often considered particularly mystical. At the borderline between the supernatural and the sensual, the charlatanry can be combined with what is based on serious research. It must be emphasized that only he is doing his duty who is alert to his own soul, who is especially careful about everything that can dull the instincts, so that we believe we are promoting the affairs of humanity when we are only promoting our own, or that the untruth, the lie, the temptation of Ahriman, is inadvertently mixed into what we say.

Only those who are constantly vigilant with regard to all this, only those who always say to themselves: 'If you join a spiritual movement, there is a great danger that you will become vain and proud' – only they can make progress. That goes without saying. Therefore, you cannot reproach a person for that, only if the person in question does nothing at all to suppress these traits. There is a tremendous temptation not to be completely truthful when you are dealing with people who believe you. You can make up all kinds of stories if they believe on authority. Then it is easy. You must not reproach anyone for the fact that when approaching the spiritual world, the tendency to lie arises in him, but that should not excuse him from himself, rather he should make every effort to expel it from his soul. That is the meaning of: know thyself. You have to seek the lonely hours when you can come to say to yourself: there is a danger looming again, so be on your guard. If you do not have these lonely hours, if you are uncomfortable with not being able to confess something good to yourself, if they are not the starting point for fighting your faults with all your might, then you are on the slippery slope, then you will roll down instead of climbing up.

These are the things we have to face if we want to recognize our position in occult research, the research that is the highest gift of grace flowing into the physical world from the spiritual worlds, for which we should have the greatest sense of responsibility.

The duty to enter the spiritual world with a part of humanity, because only in this way is progress possible, and at the same time the feeling of responsibility should awaken in us, the feeling: it is a duty, once I have learned the matter, to participate in it. It is often said that the representatives of spiritual science do not pay enough attention to moral considerations. They are often made, as they are today, so that in the progress of our spiritual movement, through which we are to be led to the spiritual sources, we may also hear of the impulses that come from those spiritual sources.

Spiritual science, when properly recognized, gives life assurance and strength. How can it be beneficial in life? Many people believe that learning and gaining spiritual knowledge is more of a hindrance than a help to a truly good human life. Why do you actually need so much spiritual knowledge, why do you need to learn so much about the development of the earth and an entire planetary system? If you simply try to search for your higher self within yourself and thereby become a good person, then you are basically also the best theosophist. — Other, more theoretically inspired minds enjoy hearing what a person consists of, to exercise their intellect by seeing how humanity has developed through the various cultural periods, to know regular number periods, and they want to learn such things as soon as possible, preferably to be able to write down the most important teachings in a nutshell and spread them in a kind of catechism.

These two views do not correspond at all to what spiritual science can be for a person and what it becomes for someone who is able to place himself in life in the right way through spiritual science. First of all, it is certainly true that we consist of physical, etheric, astral bodies and I. But if one believes that this is all there is to it, that one can list these, then one is mistaken. One knows nothing but a schema. One only knows something about the human being when one can apply such knowledge to life. But one cannot do that if one is not clear about the fact that it is not just a matter of knowing the names of these four members, but of knowing how these four members are connected in the human being. Whether the etheric body is more or less connected to the physical body in a person, whether the etheric body and the astral body strive towards each other and seek close contact with each other, or whether they are more loosely connected, that is what matters. If we focus our attention on this, it becomes clear that in the course of human development on earth, this relationship between the limbs changes. It was different in the past and will be different in the future than it is today. If we look at the ancient Egyptians in the very early millennia of Egyptian culture, that is, at ourselves in earlier incarnations, we find in this ancient Egyptian a person in whom the connection between the physical, etheric and astral bodies is looser. If we look at present-day man, we find a much more intimate, denser connection. And in the future, this connection will become ever denser and denser. It is only in this context that the passage through the different cultural periods makes sense for us. When we speak of the fact that a person embodies himself so and so often, one can also ask: Why does he embody himself again? We do indeed encounter a different kind of outer human being each time, because the connection of the sheaths is always different. As Chaldeans, we actually had a very different bodily structure than we do today, and in the future we will have still others. Thus we have different experiences because we have different human sheaths.

Now it is a matter of forming correct ideas about how this inner human core, which goes from embodiment to embodiment, actually relates to the one in which we clothe ourselves, to the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. External science basically only examines the outer shell. It knows nothing of the deeper laws that prevail from incarnation to incarnation. But external science also misunderstands the laws of the outer shell in terms of their actual deeper meaning. We can see this for ourselves when we look at the connections that external science believes in and those it does not believe in. It is quite interesting to note that for a long time science tended to ascribe free will to man. But I have already pointed out that more recent science often denies this free will. It relies on external research. This tells us: Look at the course of external life. For example, statistics can be used to determine how many suicides occur in a particular area. A certain regularity of suicides can be observed. The statistical data show that something like this happens with a certain regularity. There are simply so and so many people doomed to commit suicide. How could one still speak of free will there? One could go much further and could point to actuarial practice. This practice consists of calculating and formulizing how many of so and so many people are still alive after thirty years. So it is numerically determined how many people born today will still be alive after thirty years. Death and life are bound in strict external natural laws.

This has been recognized by external science. But it will be forced to recognize other things as well. It is already being asserted that facts are coming to light that will force people to think spiritually. In general, science is not inclined to accept something new very quickly. It has a peculiar habit in this regard. One can hear great declamations about the fact that in the “Dark Ages” there were people who opposed the discoveries of Copernicus. His teaching had to be established with great effort against the obscurantists of that time. And those who talk most about it do not just behave in this way with regard to spiritual science, but also with regard to such facts of science that force us to seek spiritual laws. For example, a doctor in Berlin established certain numerical relationships in the course of life. This doctor, Wilhelm Fliess, began to make notes about how births were related to deaths in individual families. For example, on a certain day a female personality died in a family. 1428 days before, the first grandchild of this person was born, 1428 days after the death of the second grandchild, so that we have the death of the grandmother and symmetrically forward and backward a grandchild is born. But that's not all. In a period of 7 times 1428 days after the death of this person, a great-grandson is born. So that if you follow this, you always come across very specific numerical relationships; numerical relationships that ultimately determine the connection between deaths and births in a most wonderful way. Fließ has found this out in numerous cases.

But apparently science still does not want to recognize it today, it is still too much against its direction. Even the improvement of health conditions is subject to numerical relationships. The number of deaths from tuberculosis in a given period, compared with the number of deaths decades before, is found to be regulated by certain numbers. The doctors say they have limited the number of cases through hygienic measures. But Fliess proved that this could be calculated according to arithmetic relationships. This is very inconvenient for today's science, but it will be forced to recognize the rule of objective arithmetic. It will again come back to the old Pythagorean theorem: Number is something that rules everything, that moves and lives. While we do our calculating in our souls, the higher spirits have long since done the calculating in order to place themselves in the course of life, which corresponds to the numbers. The Pythagorean theorem: God practises mathematics by allowing life to run its course – seems to be coming into its own again. But on the other hand, this would in turn strengthen that attitude of external science, which leaves the inner life of man out of account of his life's fortunes. If it is arithmetically certain when we must die, if birth and death are so related that they are 7 times 1428 days apart, then our inner life seems to be harnessed into external violent circumstances.

We apparently have to refrain from speaking of special laws that govern our inner selves. But one can certainly cite external reasons that show us that history is not quite right after all. If it is calculated that so and so many suicides are committed or so and so many thefts are perpetrated in a particular place, does that prove that a person must commit a theft? According to the formulas of probability one can calculate the probable length of a person's life. But I do not believe that any person would admit that he must die on the day calculated by arithmetic. Nothing follows for the inner being from these laws of mathematical formulas.

What about it, when Fließ proves that 1428 days elapse between two births and death? Does this prove anything for the inner lawfulness of our ego? It is not so easy to see how the relationship between this inner core of our being and the outer course of life is. How does this fit with the idea that we follow our karma, that we have to follow our inner ego? This is not easy to understand. It can be made clear with the help of an image. It is quite possible that two events, two currents, two facts, which are very much related to each other, proceed independently of each other. Consider the following: if you want to get from here to Zurich, you take the train. But you can see when the train leaves from the timetable, which also contains a lot of numbers. So you are, in a sense, closely connected with the numbers. You feel dependent on the numbers in the timetable in what you think, strive for, and inwardly experience. But isn't it possible, alongside this series of facts, that you can study the timetable, the other one related to the development of your soul, that you want to get on the train? Studying the timetable will never tell you whether you are good or evil, wise or foolish. Just as it is unimportant for the inner workings of our soul which timetable exists, it is equally unimportant for the karma of our lives which numbers result from the calculations made by Fliess. We step into the stream of life, which is governed by laws that have nothing to do with our inner laws other than what we ourselves bring about. We must decide to get on the train. It is equally true that through the inner laws of karma we must determine to step into a stream of life, which is then governed by the laws of arithmetic. Why are all these things being said? Because the spiritual seeker should increasingly develop a feeling that life is complicated, that life is something that cannot be grasped with the most convenient thoughts. Those who think that life can be easily understood by knowing a few sentences from spiritual science are very much mistaken. One must have the will to penetrate deeper and deeper into these connections. One must develop a feeling for the fact that the thoughts according to which the world is structured also apply to the human being. If there were no connection between the external laws and human karma, then the whole of life would fall apart.

This will be demonstrated by two facts. In spiritual science, efforts are made to provide the best possible parables. In a sense, however, the numbers on the timetable are connected with practical life. Even if it has nothing to do with the timetable whether we travel to Zurich at all or not, even if we see no connection at all, the timetable is still connected with human circumstances. People have put it together in such a way that it corresponds to life circumstances in a not altogether unskillful manner. So originally the timetable was nevertheless adapted to human living conditions in general. Something similar is the case for our karma and the stream of our life, which is regulated by it. The beings of the higher hierarchies have also determined the “timetable” according to the numerical relationships that statistics finds when it advances with regular numbers, so that these correspond externally to general human conditions. When he is re-embodied, one person finds life comfortable, while for another it is uncomfortable. This law does not apply to all families in such a way that a grandchild is always born 1428 days before the grandmother's death. But if we consider that 1428 can also be divided by 28 - it is 51 times 28 - we understand the numerical ratio a little better. We will not always get the number 1428 in these calculations, but as a rule, there is a multiple of 28 between the death of any family member and a birth. The multiplying factor may be 13 or 17 or something else, but the number 28 is in it, it is regularly arranged. So we have the opportunity to get on different trains according to the timetable. And so, according to our karma, we have the opportunity to arrange our lives, comfortably or uncomfortably.

I am not just saying this to suggest how complicated these external conditions are, but I would also like to point out that we humans can draw a moral consequence from all such insights. And that is what spiritual science gives us as something so infinitely important. We can say: I stand in this world, I find in this world numerical relationships that show how our outer life is regulated. It has taken long periods of human cultural development to discover this. But how much do we actually know about this regularity? — And here we have to say: infinitely little. Slowly and gradually we have explored some of the divine wisdom. But just when we absorb the most beautiful and important things of wisdom, it urges us to humility. It shows how little we can grasp life with the thoughts we have. This contemplation is then an incentive to strive further for the light.

This moral sense, this awe for the wisdom of the world, is what we can acquire and what makes us better people. And this sense of wisdom we acquire, it comes over us when we realize that this wisdom has been close to us in our intermediate life between death and new birth. When we need to descend to a new earthly existence, we choose which train to board in order to fulfill our karma. Then the decision presents itself to us, and we decide whether to choose this or that family tie, this or that parent. But we would not be able to answer if we were asked now which incarnation would be better for us, whether in this or that family. So we are wiser before our incarnation than in our physical existence, because back then, before our embodiment, we made the right choice. This feeling that we have not become any wiser after incarnation than before cannot give rise to pride in what we have achieved.

Why are we so much wiser before birth, when we can make the right choice? We would not be so much wiser on our own, but in our lives between death and new birth we are imbued with different forces than in the moment when we enter physical existence. When we enter physical existence, we are imbued with the substances of the earthly realms that are around us, with oxygen, nitrogen and so on; we absorb these into our bodily shells. When we discard our physical body, when we pass through the gate of death and live between death and a new birth, we are taken up by the beings of the higher hierarchies. Just as we live here in the different kingdoms, with animals, plants, and minerals, so we live there with the archai, with archangels and angels. We are integrated into their nature, just as we are integrated here into physical substances. Just as these substances assert their laws here, just as iron in the blood pulsates according to its laws, so the entities of the higher hierarchies are active in us between death and new birth, and their wisdom steers us in the right direction in existence. The entities of the higher hierarchies have wisdom within them, just as we have physical substances within us. And it is entirely justified when humility is the moral consequence that comes over us; when we truly realize what a small part of the sublime wisdom of these beings we have absorbed into ourselves in physical life. Between death and new birth we are embedded in the bosom of these entities of the higher hierarchies; we must surrender ourselves to them. To refuse to do so would be the same as wanting to live without absorbing the physical substances hydrogen, oxygen and so on. It would be absurd to want to live without full devotion to the beings of the higher hierarchies.

Those who consider that they must surrender themselves to the beings of the higher hierarchies during the time between death and a new birth will ask themselves: What is the best preparation for that time? — And they will answer: The best preparation is to develop this feeling of devotion to the spiritual world now, between birth and death. — Veneration and devotion will permeate everything we take in when we imbue ourselves with the right feelings in the right way. Humility and devotion to the spiritual world will permeate all our feelings.

When a person begins to think and live in this way, he also finds harmony with the world around him. These thoughts also regulate and harmonize his other perceptions. Many vices of the external world are carried into Theosophy. They do not come from 'Theosophy', but from the fact that people carry them in from outside. Let us imagine a person who has been hardworking and industrious in the outside world, but in such a way that those around him say: It is ambition that makes him industrious, he overdoes things, he ruins his strength, he pays no attention to the fact that this work must have limits. — Now he comes to Theosophy. There he encounters quite different ideas from those he had before. But this general characteristic, which he had outside, he can also carry into theosophy. There he hears, for instance, that a certain study is necessary to advance the soul. Well, so he studies, but he studies like a student who wants to outdo his colleagues. He should learn to exercise moderation in his efforts; he should learn to pay attention to how much he can achieve according to the karmically allotted powers; he should not overdo his theosophical studies. So he may have heard that it is good for spiritual development not to eat meat, and he does not ask himself: Is it also good for my body? He abstains from meat to accelerate his development. But we are taught by Theosophy: First I must investigate whether my karma allows me to follow the highest rules at once. We acquire calm and humble observation of our own karma, our own abilities and powers, when we engage in the right way with what spiritual science can give us. Especially those who are most advanced in occult matters observe the rule of balance most precisely. Sometimes, however, the opposite happens: when external circumstances are opposed to proper training, people want to force themselves, they push towards the set goal, they slave away in spirit to get an immediate answer to a question that arises. The advanced student never does this. He will first realize: This question is present. Then he examines himself: Are you able to get a full answer to the question right now? He says to himself: Wait a moment and see if the beings from the spiritual world will give you this answer. If he has to push and pull, he refrains for the time being. He knows he must wait. He can wait because he is imbued with the eternity of life and because he knows that karma, which he does not disregard, gives everyone what is meant to be theirs. Then at some point he will receive an inner hint and the powers of the spiritual world will reveal the answer to him. Perhaps this happens after years, perhaps only after several incarnations. This characterizes the right attitude: being able to wait, developing patience and equanimity, not rushing into anything.

Those who allow the teachings of spiritual science to take effect on them in the right way will be able to master their feelings and perceptions through these teachings in such a way that they allow such equanimity, such harmony to be observed. With this attitude, we permeate the astral body from the ego in such a way that this astral body absorbs the truths from the spiritual world, if I may use a trivial comparison, like a sponge absorbs the water in which it is immersed. The spirit-knowledge gradually enters into the astral body, and the astral body is permeated by it. We live today in an age where it is necessary and where it is becoming more and more necessary that we imbue the astral body with spiritual wisdom. The times are changing more and more in such a way that the astral body of a person who passes through the gate of death and then enters future incarnations will be immersed in darkness, so that he will no longer be familiar with the spiritual world if he is not imbued with spiritual knowledge. But when he is imbued with the spiritual knowledge that we are now absorbing, then he will become a source of light, he will illuminate his surroundings. The wisdom that we are absorbing here will become the light in the spiritual world.

If we now ask ourselves why Theosophy has only come today, why it was not here earlier, we have to say: It did not come because there was an ancient wisdom in the past that impressed itself on people without them having to do anything. It was found as a kind of heritage that people had received from the old world. With this inheritance they could penetrate into the spiritual world. It lasted until Christian times. But then man could no longer directly absorb spiritual wisdom. He must first permeate the soul with spiritual-scientific knowledge, and this will then be the power that causes man in the future to enter the spiritual world with the light of his soul. Human conditions change from epoch to epoch.

All occultism knows that there is a wisdom that comes from the old moon and still worked in its remnants until the 15th and 16th centuries, so that when people came into the spiritual world, they saw the light that shone without their doing. Today, however, we can absorb as much of this ancient wisdom, which was handed down as an ancient heritage in humanity, as we want with our soul - it no longer shines after people have passed through the gate of death. Only the wisdom that people absorb through Christ, by saying, “Not I, but the Christ in me,” only this wisdom will be a shining light for the future passage of man through the gate of death. So we absorb the Christ-centered spiritual science in order to have a source of light in the astral body when we pass through the gate of death.

But when we take in this Christ-imbued spiritual knowledge, when we permeate our astral body with it, then it does not remain mere wisdom; it permeates our feelings. We learn what happened on the old Saturn, on the old Sun and the old Moon, and what the task of the Earth is. If you read into the descriptions given in my 'Occult Science', you will feel that the description of Saturn has a completely different tone than the descriptions of the other planetary conditions. When reading about the Saturn condition, you can feel how the circumstances are described in a certain harshness. You can feel this in your soul, and that is necessary. You can feel the existence of the sun as if there were blossoming, sprouting life. You can feel the description of the moon as if a certain melancholy, gloomy trait runs through the multitude of concepts given there. A sensitive person can perceive this down to the sense of taste, down to the tongue.

Fools will say: the descriptions are uneven, the style is not fixed. But we should know that this is necessary, and for what reason. We need to know why a melody of three particular notes is necessary, which must sound from the words, and when we know it, we can also transform it into feelings and send the feelings out into the world. The feelings that we ignite within us in this way are transformed. What is taken up into the astral body as wisdom is transformed into a voluntary surrender to world conditions, and this then takes hold of our etheric body. If we are wise, we prepare the way. The forces with which we descend into the next incarnations shape and permeate the etheric body. If we have imbued our ether body with true, right devotion, and it is then dissolved into the general cosmic ether, we have given the universe an ether body imbued with devotion that benefits the whole world. But if we are unpious, materialistic, then we discard an etheric body that has a dispersing, destructive effect when it is to be dissolved in the general world ether. To the extent that we are wise, we serve ourselves directly, but indirectly we also serve the world. To the extent that we are pious, we serve the world directly, because our piety is shared with the whole world. And spiritual science can give not only wisdom and piety, but also certainty and reflection on the life forces of the body. The very awareness of the connection with the spiritual world gives such life forces.

I have mentioned before that Fichte, who stood at the gateway of Theosophy, knew something of these connections. He had such a sense of certainty of life that he could say, when speaking about the nature of man: “I lift my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging waterfall and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire and say: I am eternal and defy your power! Break down on me all, and you earth and you heaven mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last solar dust of the body that I call mine – my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe. For I have grasped my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal and I am eternal as it, “- assurance of life flows from the consciousness that man walks in the eternal of the spirit. Can a person become weak when he is rooted in the eternal of the spirit? It is spiritual knowledge that pours more and more strength into us.

What comes to us from this power? Wisdom gives the astral body that through which we increasingly overcome the inhibiting forces. Piety regulates the forces and the correct structure of the ether body. But what flows into our body through the fact that we know about our connection with the eternal is the certainty of life, and it communicates itself to us right down to the forces of the physical body. When we possess this, then maya, illusion and deception recede from us. It is an illusion when someone says: our physical body only disintegrates into dust at our death. No. How the physical body was put together, how the person formed it, is not irrelevant. When such security in the eternal permeates this physical body, then we give back to the earth what we have appropriated as security for life. We fortify our planet with what we have acquired during our lifetime. We give our life security to the world through the physical body. In the disintegrating physical body, the disintegrating is only maja. He who follows the physical body through death sees that the degree of life security that man has acquired during life flows into our earth.

Thus, through wisdom, piety and assurance of life, we strengthen that which we as human beings can work out as our best for the whole evolution of our earth in the astral body, in the etheric body and in the physical body. In this way we work on our planet Earth, but we also acquire a feeling for the fact that the human being does not stand alone, isolated, but that what he works out in his soul has value and significance for the whole. And just as no dust particle in the sun does not carry the laws of the universe within it, so no human being does not build and destroy the universe through what he does and does not do. We can give as much to the progressive world process as we take from it, as much as we can crumble away from it by not caring about the development, by not permeating ourselves with piety, by not acquiring a sense of security in life. Through these omissions, we contribute just as much to the destruction of the planet as we build it through the appropriation of wisdom, piety and life security. So we begin to sense what spiritual science can become for us emotionally when it takes hold of the whole person.

During the course of our branch of life, when we acquire the concepts of the nature of the human being and of human evolution, when we learn, for example, that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I, then we have indeed gained something over and above the knowledge that exists in the world today, but we cannot yet say that with such more or less theoretical knowledge we have acquired what 'theosophy can actually be for a human being in truth. Theosophy only becomes what it should be for the individual and for the human community when it is put into practice, when it becomes a way of life. On such occasions, when I am able to see my dear friends again, I also like to take the opportunity to draw attention to how those ideas, world and human laws that we otherwise acquire in the course of our annual lives play their great role in human life. So today we also want to do such a contemplation of the influence of Theosophy on life.

Sometimes the question arises, especially for those who know little about Theosophy: Yes, there is talk of facts and truths of a supersensible nature, but how can a person who has not yet become clairvoyant talk much about these spiritual worlds, how can he know something about these worlds, except that these things are told to him? This is a very common prejudice, but it is quite unfounded. Without being clairvoyant, one cannot see the astral body of a person, for example, but what happens in this astral body can be experienced in one's own existence, and in this respect 'Theosophy is extremely effective.

I will give an example of a case where a person can experience having an astral body. You know that in everyday life people are accustomed to doing many things without thinking about them, and that they are also accustomed to doing many things that are not at all in their own interest. Consider how much people do from morning till night without thinking, without really thinking about it, without being present with their thoughts; how much people do in such a way that afterwards they say, “I do not entirely agree with what I did.” Can we not say then that we do something that we only partially consider, only partially accompany with thoughts? In particular, our inclinations underlie those habits that we have taken on from the outside and that we would not have if we had educated ourselves.

Thus, life viewed in a materialistic sense appears as if it does not matter whether we do things that we agree with or not, things that we can justify ourselves to others for or not. For the clairvoyant eye it is not so. For the clairvoyant eye it turns out that with every deed, with every action, the part that is not so that we could morally justify ourselves with regard to it makes an impression on our astral body. Such an action has a kind of setback effect on our astral body. And so one can say of such a person: He has so many cracks, so many pits in his astral body, because he does many such things that, if he thought about them, he would not morally justify.

I am not thinking here of professional matters, but of habitual actions. Every such impact affects the astral body and because it no longer disappears as it is, it continues to affect the etheric body, leaving an imprint like a seal and remains there, so that the person walks around with seal imprints in his etheric body. Up to this point, a person who is not clairvoyant can say that he cannot know this; but what happens here is experienced by the person. In a certain way, these things remain present, actually throughout the whole of the following life, and now have an effect on the person again, so that he sometimes says: If only I didn't remember the whole of my life! — Or he shows a sullenness to all those around him, and this grumpy nature has an effect on his health. It is extremely important to be clear about such things, because it often happens, for example in our thirty-seventh year, that something occurs that makes us inwardly grumpy, upset, melancholy, without any external cause, and this then has a damaging effect on our health, destroys our digestive system and so on. In the twentieth year, the reason may have been laid that the impression of the astral on the etheric body has been effected.

So we can say: only a clairvoyant can see what is in the astral body, but a person experiences in life what becomes of it. Many a person would not go around sullen, with a certain helplessness of soul and a shattered physical system, if people would consider that what does not immediately become effective as a result of our actions in the visible world enters into our invisible part and then later becomes visible. A person who says, “I will observe whether what the clairvoyant says is correct,” can see and feel that what the clairvoyants say is true in this way.

Let us assume the opposite case, that man can consider more, think further, than is reflected in his actions. In this case, everyone is an idealist. He knows that not all ideals can be realized, but only some of them. If we have great ideas, we must be content that we can only realize a part of them. If we are capable of thinking far beyond what life allows us, this also has an effect on the astral body, but differently, so that the person is imbued with healthy powers, making him strong, inwardly firm and calm. If, for example, a person was an idealist around the age of twenty and did not listen to the materialists, if he retained faith and trust in ideals, then this is shown by the fact that at a later age he does not get worked up by every little accident, nor by being unwell, that he stands firm and lets things pass him by more than is the case with others.

What gives us strength and peace are the thoughts we have that go beyond what life allows us to realize in terms of ideals. Doctors are already officially aware of this, but they don't know how to really enable people to have positive thoughts about things that go beyond everyday life to a fairly large extent.

Of course there are popular writings that are praised as beneficial for mental health. They tell you that you have to have strength, inner peace, steadiness, not to stray with your thoughts, and the like. For some, such writings on mental health are a very good start. But you won't get very far with them if you want real nourishment for your soul. Such writings by Duboc, Ralph Waldo Trine and so on are quite good for a start. Compared to the real requirements of mental health, they are as if we were asking: How do we have to live in a physical way to be healthy? — and then get the answer: Then you have to eat food that is beneficial to your health, food whose substances can easily be absorbed into your organism. Quite right! But anyone who seriously wants to get to the bottom of the matter will ask: What kind of food is that? Please tell me in more detail what I should be eating!

Such writings, which relate to mental health in the same way as these rules relate to physical health, may be quite good for the beginning, but for the further course of mental searching, not much can be done with them. In contrast, spiritual science gives us thoughts that are formulated in the most precise way, very definite thoughts about how man has developed in every age, how he is developing in the present. This is revealed to us more and more from the theosophical wisdom, so that we can say: spiritual science gives us many opportunities to go far beyond with our thoughts what we can realize. Therefore, it is Theosophy that makes us strong people in our souls, who, when something happens in our environment that threatens to upset us, can draw from within something that gives us balance.

It is not important whether something that happens in our environment reaches our ears so that we are disturbed, but rather whether we take an interest in it and turn our attention to the process. This applies not only to external things, but also to our inner state, in which we sometimes go through the world elated and sometimes saddened to death, thereby undermining our moral and physical health. There are many painful conditions of the soul that can be compared to the clattering of the mill: the miller who works in the mill no longer hears the clattering. So you can surrender to any such pain, even the smallest, to hear the clattering of your own mill, so to speak, or you can turn your attention away. You can't get over it if you have an empty soul. You can only do that if you have something of a spiritual nature that you can draw from.

Let us take an example. There are two people, one of whom lives like this: in the morning he does his usual work in the office, in the afternoon he has a drink and entertains a small conversation, in the evening he has another drink and then goes to bed. If anything occurs to disturb his usual course of life, such a person will immediately be overwhelmed by it: he hears the clattering of his own mill or his own pain. For he has nothing in his soul, nothing that he can bring out to drown out the clattering.

Another person lives just as much in his daily duties, only he has many great thoughts within him, as given to us by spiritual science. These then resound from within him, and he no longer hears the clatter. It is not as if we have to exert ourselves or spend a long time to bring it out, but it comes out all by itself because we have developed strong feelings for it. Thus we will suffer less from the disturbances of life and find more and more comfort in what has accumulated in the soul through years of spiritual striving. This is a possession of a special kind, the only one that no one can take from us. What we otherwise acquire in the world, or what otherwise comes to us in the world, belongs to what can be taken from us. But what we acquire for the spirit is the only possession that can never be taken from us.

People are accustomed to saying: Death makes everything equal. – That is certainly true, but it is equally true that no situation can be imagined to which what has been said here does not apply equally. Nothing in the world can help, not whether one is rich or whether one is the descendant of a rich noble family – if one wants to attain this spiritual possession, one must travel the same path, one and the same path. Not only does death make everything equal, it is the spiritual life before which all are equal. This gives the spiritual life a far-reaching significance, for it gives rise to something that lifts us above the deceptive appearance of sense.

Someone may object: a brick can hit me and I can then become a cripple, or I can injure my brain so that I become an idiot. —But anyone who can make the treasures of Theosophy his own in such a way that he carries them in his soul knows that such an event is only a temporary condition. Even if the brain were broken, it would be no different than if we wanted to do something and the instrument broke; for example, if we wanted to hammer in a nail and the hammer broke. There is nothing we can do but pick up another hammer; and so we do with the brain. Consciousness can lose its tools, but in a new life we can rebuild them, so that we are not disturbed in our sense of eternity by the loss of this spiritual possession. It is not a matter of knowing something, but of how it penetrates our hearts, and it is able to penetrate our hearts in such a way that we keep the fruit of it and that it also leads us beyond the loss of this tool.

All this is a testimony to the fact that we can say in a certain respect: It affects our astral body, which we have just characterized. Only the clairvoyant can know how it works, but everyone experiences the consequences in their everyday life. A person who performs many actions for which he cannot morally answer, and who becomes grumpy as a result, will be particularly vulnerable to pain in difficult life situations. If, on the other hand, a person can say to himself in the face of the same incidents: They are of little consequence compared to my inner experiences, my ideals – then this certainty will have a healing effect. He will then always hold fast to that which lives in him as the eternal. When the spirit of eternity approaches us in this all-encompassing way, as it does in Theosophy, then we are secured for all situations in life.

Now, my dear friends, there are other things by which we can well convince ourselves that the spiritual that we take in, that we allow to permeate us, is intimately connected with our entire happiness in life, with our ability to cope with life. Just as a person can have good moods, so can he also be exposed to bad moods that may go through his whole life and never let him be happy, that dominate the whole inner soul structure. The spiritual researcher says: Such moods have an effect in the supersensible nature of man; in the etheric body such moods have an effect, are reflected in the physical body and affect the blood. The effect of a mood in the human etheric body is felt in the blood, and the result is that such a mood, which does not allow a person to be happy throughout his life, impairs blood circulation and makes his blood heavy. Here we have an example of how the effects of what is going on in the soul can be felt in the physical body. Even someone who is not clairvoyant can notice this and say to themselves: I suffer from my physicality. This comes from my overall mood. If I could change my overall mood, then a healing influence could be exerted on my whole constitution.

One might think that it is important for a person to free themselves from their physical body. But it is not about simply demanding that people recognize that the body is dependent on the spirit. Rather, it is about the reality that we do not have to be dependent on the body through the power of the spirit. We become independent by making it an instrument of our spirit.

Not the materialist who believes in the teachings of materialism is the worst, who believes in the doctrine of “power and matter,” but the worst is he who is dependent on power and matter, for example, when he can only live in this place in winter and only in that place in summer, making himself completely dependent on matter in order to avoid being neurasthenic. Therefore, it is not just a matter of not believing in this teaching of force and matter, but of becoming independent of matter. What kind of life is it when a person can only live in a big city in winter and only in the countryside in summer? For such a person, prayer does not help and faith does not help, because he is a materialist, he is dependent on “force and matter”.

When we allow thoughts that arise from spiritual research to take effect on us, our connection with the spiritual world becomes apparent. But we see something else as well. When we are really unhappy, in a way that would overwhelm anyone, it becomes apparent that a theosophist can cope with it. Let us assume, for example, that a person who has turned eighteen and has been living off his father now experiences the father going bankrupt. He is then forced to work. He can perceive this as misfortune. He will live with this for fifty years and become someone respectable. He can say, “Thank God this misfortune happened, otherwise I would have become a good-for-nothing.” If you are no longer in the midst of adversity, you can see the adversity as a tool for education. We must be able to say to ourselves: It is we ourselves who, through our karma, have brought this misfortune upon us because we need it in this life for our education. At least a person who can think in such terms will not grumble against the governance of the world in unhappy hours, but will recognize its wisdom. But little by little this prepares moods for us that work in a completely different way than those we have when we feel completely dependent on “force and matter”. Now we know that we depend on the spiritual guidance of the world. This is communicated to the mood, and then, through the influences on the etheric body, we withdraw from dependence on “force and matter”. Then we do not need to go to the Riviera to raise our spirits, but our spiritual possessions enable us to shape our tools in such a way that we can be independent of external influences.

In the soul health writings of Ralph Waldo Trine and others, you will not find how to achieve this mood. Pouring into the mood the wisdom of 'Theosophy' makes us independent of matter and force, opening up a source that elevates us above space and time. Then we withdraw from the power of matter and work back on the instrument of our body. In this way, we gradually acquire a practical knowledge of life through spiritual science. My dear friends, not everyone believes this right away, because very few people today, when everyone is so dependent on material and power, are inclined to see things this way. They should be convinced by experience that this is so, because experience will be able to provide them with more and more proof of life. This is the result of spiritual science in general, that it has an effect on the very ordinary external management of life.

I will substantiate what spiritual science teaches by means of examples; I will cite some of the trivialities of life. For example, the fact that we now live on the physical plane with external matter means that in certain cases we must have the ability to perceive the spirit everywhere around us in external matter. After all, matter is only an illusion, maya; everything is condensed spirit. So that we have to sense spirit in our ordinary life among the objects of matter. We must therefore be able to develop an external relationship with it, so that we are able to enter into intimate relationships with things, so to speak. There are people who wash their hands often, and there are those who rarely wash their hands. Now, in a certain respect, there is an enormous difference between the one and the other. Man is permeated by the supersensible in a very different way in the various parts of his body. For example, the chest and thighs are not permeated by the etheric body in the same way as the hands. Powerful rays of the etheric body emanate from the fingers. Because this is the case with the hands, we can develop a wonderfully intimate relationship with the outer world through them. People who wash their hands often have a more delicate relationship with their surroundings, are more delicately receptive to them, because the spirit materialized in the blood has the effect of making the human being more sensitive in his hands. Pachyderms, as they are called, in relation to the outer world, do not often wash their hands. You see how little such robust people are open to the peculiarities of their fellow human beings, while those who wash their hands more often enter into a more intimate relationship with their environment. If a person were to try to achieve the same thing in another place, for example on the shoulders, it would be shown that if he were to wash them as much, he would become neurasthenic. What is healthy for the hands is not healthy for the shoulders. The human being is organized in such a way that he is able to enter into this intimate relationship with the environment through the hands.

It would also be detrimental if a person were inclined to wash their face just as often. Treating the face in this way would not be beneficial to health. With other parts of the human body, the situation is quite different. People who are not properly trained in spiritual science, materialistically thinking doctors, for example, do not notice the difference and recommend cold washes to children; such things are fanatically pursued. It should be known that nothing is more mischievously done! This is the basis for a great deal of neurasthenia, that one's health is impaired in such an abstruse way. The hands can tolerate it, but the rest of the body becomes receptive to material things as a result. There you see the effect of materialism. I am speaking here of the rule. Where it is a matter of a temporary cure, the matter is different.

Not only do even the youngest children try to wash it off in a systematic way – they are tormented every morning – but people do not stop there. They walk around in the sun to take light baths, to let the material of the external world take effect on them. We should be glad that we are able to work from the inner center outwards and should not make ourselves more and more dependent on the material. This exposure of oneself with all parts is the same as when the miller would do anything to hear the clatter of his mill all the time and was not satisfied that he no longer hears it. Of course, the cases where it is a temporary cure are to be excluded. If this is practised in youth, then man is thereby made to allow the slightest influence to take effect in his organism. He hardens himself, that is, he hardens himself in such a way that he is finally quite “hardened” and no longer feels any external influences.*)

Such insights do not simply arise from ordinary life practice – that is not possible. This can only be judged when one knows the whole person. And that man is a complicated being, and that with regard to his individual members the most diverse relationships exist between the physical, etheric and astral bodies and so on, you can see that from very simple things. Today it may have seemed a little funny to you what was said in connection with the fact that man has a very special relationship with his astral and etheric bodies to the physical body. On the other hand, you may have heard that the distance or illness of a particular organ brings a person close to a condition that resembles idiocy. But if you now give such a person the thyroid juice of a sheep, for example, he will again become a thinking person instead of an idiot. This is a well-known fact. These facts are only correctly judged by the

#\ Oioha Aazii HNote on page DAR. 111 Spiritual Science. Why is that so? Yes, you see, that is so because not only in the thyroid gland, but also in the far greater number of glandular organs, there are tools that are built from the etheric body. We need our tools in the physical world to get things done. As we need a hammer to drive in a nail, so we need the tools for what they are given to us. If they are removed, we no longer have the tool. But that is no proof that the ability to replace their effect. But we must know that such an effect is only possible if the etheric body comes into function.

In the case of organs related to the astral body, we cannot possibly change anything in the organs by replacing the secretion. I have seen that people who had a defective brain ate sheep brains or the like without any improvement in their intellect, because the brain is an organ related to the astral body. There we see how spiritual science also sheds light on these things. You cannot understand people if you cannot go into these higher, supersensible aspects of people, and then you basically don't know at all what comes into consideration.

When you read medical books today, it is described as if a person loses their mind through illness or the absence of the thyroid gland. No, he only loses interest, becomes dull and does not apply his mind. You don't become stupid because you can't think. If you have no interest, your mind remains intact. What is lost is the living interest that a person takes in things, the interest to draw attention to things. A person who has no interest pays no attention to anything because he lacks the tool. We don't give him a brain with a thyroid gland, but we do give him a tool for taking a lively interest in the things of the world. People are judged quite wrongly when they know nothing at all about the transcendental world, and a great deal of what is taught in our scientific and popular books is at this level. If you read that a person becomes cleverer through the loss of the thyroid glands and through eating thyroidin, then it is not true. It is true that his attention is awakened. Everywhere it can be seen from the consequences: what is said from clairvoyant research is not fantastic. Even if not everyone can see it, one can prove that what the clairvoyants see is there. It is everywhere. I recommend that you always remember the sentence: If you cannot see for yourself what is being investigated in clairvoyant research, you can experience it in the world. - In this way you can indirectly obtain evidence for what is communicated in spiritual science.

I have now told you a number of things about the way in which the human astral body can show its influence in relation to life. I have told you how the ether body affects life. I would now also like to say a few words about the ego, from which you can build a bridge from theosophical theory to the reality of life. You are all familiar with a widespread phenomenon in life that is described in two words because it manifests itself in two ways: shedding tears and being sad.

What does it mean in human life to feel sadness caused from outside, which manifests physically in tears, or to have an inner soul experience that also manifests in tears? Man has something within him by which he can not only experience what is going on in his own body, but can also, in his ordinary, normal consciousness, experience and empathize with what is going on in his environment. We are then involved in our surroundings when we are sad about this or that loss, sad to the point of crying. What does that prove? That we can take into ourselves what lives in our surroundings and carry it within ourselves in our hearts. It means that we have an I within us that is mysteriously and magically connected to our entire environment. Through this magical connection of people with what does not live in them, a connection with the outside world is experienced. The ego can be in itself in two ways: firstly, in an egotistical way; then it comes down in particular to us gaining relief from pain through tears. Because we do not want to have any [true] part. Secondly, however, sadness can also be fully justified because we pour something that lives in our environment into ourselves. That is why tears mean the most to a person when he can be sad about things that concern him as little as possible. There are people who cry out of mere selfishness because they cannot bear what is happening in their lives or cannot bear their own loss. Of course, there are also people who cry over things that do not concern them, so that the world says: he howls like a dog over a passage in a novel or in a drama. And this possibility can create a certain splendor in him, which may also emanate from his grief to all other tears and other sadness, because the more we are moved by everything else, the greater is our sadness. And in his grief, man is in a sense led to his ego in a non-selfish way. What has no ego cannot cry or be sad. The claim that animals also cry is therefore basically nonsense. It is much more correct that animals do not cry and cannot be sad like humans. A dog only seems sad because it no longer receives everything it got when its master was still around. Psychologists are right when they say that animals can only howl, but humans can weep. For crying and sadness can be the strongest proof that the deepening of the self is within us and that through this we come into contact with what is around us. Therefore, there is a condensation of our self, which then comes out in tears. Because this is so, we can say that, basically, crying and tears are something that is connected with the innermost essence of human nature.

When a person rediscovers their inner stability, the best way for them to express this state is to give way to tears. The words spoken by Faust in 'Faust' after he returns from attempting suicide and removes the poison cup from his mouth are spoken from the depths of his soul: “The tear welled up, the earth has me again!” It is the 'I' that speaks at this moment. This is expressed in this word: “The tear wells up, the earth has me again.

Therefore, what we experience in mourning with our surroundings is connected with the innermost being of the human being. And what is connected with the innermost being demands that we take it with the right seriousness and that we can become sad about the misery in our surroundings, but never through the merely imagined misery. All those dramas that merely stage misery can only produce unnatural emotions. We can only connect all the unreal misery on the stage with our human dignity if the meaning is connected with the fact that the hero, even if he falls, emerges as a victor. We can only bear the dramas that depict misery if we see the victory of good. Then it has a right to our sadness and our tears, because it so rightly sinks into our innermost being the sorrow of reality. |

It is quite different with regard to another experience of our ego, which we can call by many names. What is expressed in laughter, merriment, joy, perhaps even in jokes – in our sense of the comic – is the other way around. To laugh at a fool in reality is inhuman, but to laugh at the imagined foolishness is actually infinitely liberating. You should experience foolishness because it has a healing effect – you can even experience this good mental healing in the circus – because it is, in turn, a discovery of your own self. When we are able to laugh, we rise above the situation. We become aware of our own inner worth, and in this way we rise up. There is something tremendously healing in the burlesque jokes of the Punch and Judy show, to the comedians who commit all sorts of follies, getting entangled in all sorts of contradictions, while laughter at folly, when it is real, betrays the monster.

The ego shows itself strangely in its healthy relationship to the environment. We are inclined to weep when faced with misery, real misery, not the depicted. The opposite is true when we laugh and joke. Here we are monsters when we laugh at the follies that reside in a person as natural characteristics. But they are healthy and contribute to the healthy education of the person when we can take pleasure in the depicted burlesque and comic. For this points to the healthy ego within us.

There you see how the healthy in the environment can also be understood when we realize that we also have an ego. Now we ask: Does this also show in our materialistic humanity in relation to art? Yes, it shows very characteristically and actually. If people were really confronted with what is presented, for example, in Hauptmann's or Sudermann's dramas, how many would faint! In the presentation they can endure what in real life would plunge them into sadness and move them to intervene. This is not possible on stage. Where does such a reversal of facts come from? It comes from the fact that in our materialistic age people live mostly on the periphery, where the I does not reveal itself. Indeed, what can make us most sad is what happened as the most terrible thing in the evolution of the world in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the suffering, in the whole tragedy of Christ Jesus. And we can be most jubilant where the victory, the victory of life over death, which was directly portrayed for the realms of eternity, was won in the resurrection. No other victory exists in which the highest hallelujah is so united with the deepest sadness, all suffering in the death on Golgotha and all the glory of the Easter season in the resurrection - there is no other event in which both the deepest sadness and the highest exultation are so expressed.

Therefore, there is no deeper wisdom than that which Paul proclaimed with regard to this event: Not I, but the Christ in me! — There we see how we find the right focus to make the I in us as firm as possible, by permeating the I with what the Christ-Revelation is. When Theosophy is permeated with Christianity, it also penetrates into our I, thus giving us the greatest possible security in life, the greatest strengthening of life. For it is only through the understanding of Christ, as we attain it through spiritual science, that we get the right center of gravity within us.

If, then, Theosophy is to have such an effect, as you will also find indicated in my “Occult Science in Outline”, then an attempt is made to give something that can pour such firmness into people as is in the saying: Not I, but Christ in me! —, by which more and more the human being can be transformed, so that that consciousness of eternity can well up in us, by which we can say: What can be taken up into us cannot be taken from us.

Then we feel such a word as that uttered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great discoverer of Theosophy, we feel what it means, what he says: When I feel and understand my connection with the Eternal - and nothing can convey this connection to us more than Theosophy - when I feel and understand my connection with the Eternal - so says Johann Gottlieb Fichte - and if we also grasp this connection, we too stand on the earth and say with him: “I look to you, you rocks, and to you, mountains; come crashing down and bury my body except for the last speck of sunlight and destroy everything that is my physical tools - and I defy you, for you are not eternal; but I am connected to the eternal, I am eternal!

Thus speaks man, who comprehends the value of the wisdom of the Eternal. Thus speaks man, who has absorbed theosophy within himself, to his corporeal, astral, and etheric totality, for the elevation of his existence, for his incorporation into the spiritual worlds, of which he must only know that he is spirit from their Spirit. For man is not only flesh of the flesh, but is spirit of the spirit of eternity.