The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In our deliberations over the past three hours, we have included as an episode the description of our building here, its facilities and the goal associated with it. Today, we will now have a lot to tie in with these building deliberations, which I would like to see in the broadest sense as a consideration of time. We have indeed had to emphasize that this building, as a representative of our anthroposophical spiritual science, should at the same time be a manifestation of the times, so to speak, in its forms, in its entire design, it should express that which wants to and must be part of our contemporary development from the present into the near future. When we speak today of the great tasks of our time and in particular when we must point out that a certain inclination to receive spiritual things must arise in a larger part of humanity and that this is a special demand of the time, then such an indication is directly derived from all that the Science of Initiation and Initiation Wisdom can currently gain from the spiritual world. But there is no need to approach the spiritual world directly to convince oneself of the necessity of a spiritual impact in our time. In one of the last lectures here, I spoke of the fact that we are indeed facing a major transformation of the world, including its outward appearance. Today it can already be more or less apparent to everyone that, as a result of current events, the outer world domination is falling to the English-speaking population. We do not want to talk about this falling into world domination, but we do want to talk about, and have already talked about, the fact that this is linked to a fundamental sense of responsibility, a sense of responsibility that is quite clear about the fact that wherever there is the possibility of exercising a certain domination over the world, the urge to permeate what one can do with the spiritual impulse that is currently demanded by the development of humanity must take hold. For not to penetrate what one can do, or not to want to penetrate it, means to lead human development towards its decline.

It is really not without significance, especially at this time, to engage in retrospective reflection, and from the abundance of what could be unrolled here before you from such retrospective reflection, I would like to present one thing to you. A remarkable coincidence of events led to a subtle man giving a lecture in a German city in 1870, just as the Battle of Sedan was being fought – but this was not yet known in the city – where this man, whom I call a subtle man, gave his lecture and was already able to point out certain successes that Germany had at the time. But this reference to these successes was at the same time accompanied by the demand that a spiritual deepening must take place among those who have the success. And soon after, after fuller successes had been achieved, the same man wrote an essay on the necessities of the development of the times. In this essay, which now lies almost fifty years behind us, there are remarkable things, things that bear witness to a twofold aspect. Firstly, it explicitly states that it is urgently necessary to avoid two one-sidedness. One of these consists in turning only to the abstract spiritual, the other in turning only to the contemplation and worship of the material. And what the man in question demanded of his contemporaries and their descendants was something he called “ideal realism”.

It can be seen from this that such a demand was made at that time, when there was a certain longing for a renewal of spiritual life. But if one follows everything that was put forward at that time out of this longing for a renewal of spiritual life, then one sees the complete powerlessness to find anything that could represent a connection between spiritual striving and material striving, that could arise as a reality for the concept of ideal realism. So it was an important demand, but one that was voiced out of a mere intuited yearning, out of a profound impotence, out of the impossibility of finding any real content. It was an indefinite feeling, nothing more. But the explanation of this feeling was connected with something else. The man in question, and in agreement with many others who at that time felt something of a longing for a renewal of spiritual life, pointed out that if a new spirit did not come, the broad masses of Europe would storm and destroy everything that had so far been surrendered to humanity in the way of culture. At the time, a man who spoke a lot here in Switzerland, Johannes Scherr – I ask you to bear in mind that what was said was said fifty years ago! He pointed out the great danger that the broad masses of humanity would become self-aware in a certain sense, but this at a time when the bearers of education had turned away from a spiritual world view and turned to materialistic concepts and ideas. In those days, such things were spoken of in sharp and serious words.

What followed? The time came when a materialistic wave swept over the whole of Europe. It was a time when it was easy to delude oneself about the great dangers inherent in not wanting to know anything about a spiritual impact. Only now and then did one or the other arise to point out that, despite the conscious persistence in comfortable everyday life in the subconscious depths of human souls, the yearning for spiritual life is more present than at any time in world-historical development.

But all such voices were taken as the voices of the feuilleton. Such voices were not appreciated in their full seriousness. And basically, we are still living in that time today. Basically, the wave of the most terrible misfortunes of the last five years has passed through most European souls at most in such a way that they reflect on and empathize with the external consequences, but do not want to go into what needs to be addressed if there is to be any further development of humanity in the future in any favorable sense at all.

What we are facing today in Europe has been decades in preparation. But the souls of men have not prepared themselves. The souls of the majority of people today are as unreceptive as possible to the impact of a spiritual wave from the spiritual world, which is beating at the gates of life, which wants to come in and which people do not want to accept in their souls and hearts. What is necessary is that people turn to a spiritual view of the world, above all to a real knowledge of man himself. The human being cannot be recognized without recognizing the spiritual world, because man lives with two-thirds of his being in the spiritual-soul world, only with one-third in the physical-material world. And without seeking to understand spiritual life, man remains without knowledge of his own nature. In a much more comprehensive sense than is even suspected by most people today, we must ask: What is the nature of the realm of human soul life that we encompass with the word thinking? What kind of essence is the realm of human soul that we encompass with the words willing or acting? Between the two lies the soul, the life of feeling. Knowledge of the life of feeling or soul would arise if one were only to turn one's attention to the life of thoughts and actions, to the life of will.

Please follow me for a short time in a contemplation of what our thinking is. Man is, of course, aware that he inwardly accompanies with his thinking the life that makes an impression on him from there or from over there. This thinking — one lives in it. But one should also become aware that the greater part of life is filled with the fact that this thinking is permeated by all kinds of dream-like elements. Most people are not aware of how much of their thinking is an involuntary element. All involuntary thinking is basically of a dream-like nature. Try to realize, in a superficial self-knowledge, how far you direct your thoughts from the center of your will in everyday life. Try to realize how far you have the aspiration to direct thoughts inwardly, to shape thoughts yourself. Try to realize to what extent it is the case that the soul lets thoughts come, lets them break in. They give themselves up to it, the thoughts, one weaving itself together with the other, and man comfortably surrenders himself to this involuntary play of thoughts. There is no great difference between this everyday play of thoughts and between the dreams that dawn from sleep.

Dream-like elements also intrude into human thinking from other sides. Today, one participates in the outer life. How does one participate in this outer life? One informs oneself about what is going on in the world; one informs oneself in such a way that one allows oneself to be carried into one's experience, so to speak, by what comes into life through this or that impulse. One surrenders to some popular agitation. Just examine how much of this devotion to a popular agitation arises from one's own will and how much can simply be attributed to being carried along by the surges of life! And I could tell you many, many things that rush into thinking and dominate it, without the will of the human being itself having a direct effect on this thinking.

The specific historical task in writing my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” was to point out how human freedom is only possible at all if this involuntary, dreamy thinking is not present, but rather impulses from the fully conscious will assert themselves. This thinking - what nature is it then? When is it real thinking? When it really comes from the fully conscious will, when we grasp the thought in such a way that it is we ourselves who grasp the thought. At the moment when the thought grasps us, we are no longer free. Only when we can grasp the thought out of our own power, out of our own being, are we free. But then the thought can be nothing but an image. If the thought were anything other than an image, it would be a reality, and then it could not leave us free. Everything that is a reality weaves us into the stream of the real. Only that which is an image leaves us free. Imagine how everything you see in a room has a real effect on you. You are only completely free in relation to the images that look back at you from the mirror. These cannot harm you on their own, you cannot be offended by these images. If you are to do something in response to these images, then it must be you who takes action. If a fly lands on your nose – it is, after all, an insignificant animal – you are not free, you make a reflexive movement. And so it is with everything that is there. You are only free in relation to what you can perceive as an image that is not reality, that is an image. Why are the contents of our thinking images? Well, we need only recall from my 'Occult Science in Outline' how man was connected with a previous embodiment of our earth planet, with the development of the moon. If you read everything that is said there about the development of the moon, you will say to yourself: During this development of the moon, man was connected with quite different entities and also with quite different natural forces than he is in his earthly existence. He has gone through this moon existence. The after-effect of it is in him. He has developed from this moon existence to the earthly existence. And if you read more carefully what I have discussed there, you will say to yourself: During the time on the moon, man did not yet think in the same way as he does as an earth human being. He lived in unconscious imaginations then, and these unconscious imaginations were not at his disposal, any more than the images in dreams are at his disposal today. Only the thoughts are at our discretion, to which we as human beings are only now gradually developing in the fifth post-Atlantic period. What we have today as thinking is a further development of what we had as pictorial experiences of the soul during our lunar existence.

If you understand this quite clearly, then you will also see that everything that creeps into thinking, as I have just characterized the dream-like aspect of thinking in everyday life, is a remnant of what the human being had as soul life during the moon-end. If today man abandons himself to his surging thoughts, if he shuts out his will from his thoughts, if he lets what is dream-like in nature play into his thinking, then the conditions of the moon-life somehow play into his thinking.

You will see that this influence of the moon's existence on our everyday thinking has a wide, very, very wide scope. Everywhere you can feel how the involuntary element of what arises purely and shoots up mingles with thinking and imagining. This is a remnant of the moon's existence. So you have two opposing forces at work in human nature itself. The one kind of thing draws us towards letting our will dominate our thinking, towards becoming free in our thinking element. The other power constantly wants to mix into this free thinking that which is a remnant of the old moon culture: a Luciferic element. The Luciferic element constantly mixes into our everyday thinking. We cannot reject it. We would have to reject everything that we cannot yet reach with our conscious free thinking, but we must strive for knowledge. We must be clear about this in our consciousness. It is merely a phrase when someone says they want to escape Lucifer. That is nonsense, because the Luciferic constantly plays into everyday existence. But today, if one really wants to engage with the demands of the development of humanity in the present, one must have the good will to know within oneself that these two powers, the actual earthly powers and the luciferic powers, interact in our soul existence. Only in this way can one gain a real knowledge of what is inside the human soul.

In this way, I have, I would say, outlined one pole of the human soul. Take the other pole, which lies more on the side of the will. The will also plays a part in thinking; but we have now considered thinking permeated by the will. Now let us consider the volition that is permeated by thinking. How does volition, which leads to action, play a role in the ordinary everyday life of a human being? We can realize this by considering the connection between our everyday real actions and the whole of cosmic existence. Just think: when you take a single step, when you walk from here to there [forward], you bring about, even if only to a very small extent, a different state of equilibrium in the whole earth. When you step here [backwards], you step to a different place than when you step here [forwards]. You influence the balance of the earth in a different way when you step here [backwards] than when you step here [forwards]. But when you look at it properly, you will see that you yourself are constantly influencing the balance of the earth through your movements, and you will come up with yet another way of influencing it. Just imagine you take something that comes purely from nature. If, for example, there is a tree branch on a tree trunk, this tree branch, the way it is attached to the tree trunk, has a certain relationship to the whole earth. It has a certain equilibrium relationship to the whole earth. The whole earth and the branch together form a whole. The moment you break off the branch and lay it down beside it, you have changed the whole equilibrium of the earth, even if only to a small extent. The tree weighs less, and the broken branch weighs differently in a different place. You change the balance to a different degree if you lay the branch there or if you lay it there.

This is something that you bring into the whole earthly existence of your own accord. But at least initially you are only bringing out the relationship between your human being and the surrounding world. But you can do more. For example, you can shape something out of this tree branch. What I mean is, you can artificially shape it into something that is an object for some use. You have thought up the form, and you have carved away the other parts that do not belong to this form. Now you exert a completely different influence with your object, not only by breaking off, not only by putting aside, but by giving a certain form to what you have taken from nature. Just think how much people in the technical and artistic fields do in this direction, how they shape what they wrest from nature, and how they influence the earthly through this!

And now I ask you: When man does this, when he changes nature, when he takes what he takes from nature and forms it into his machines, into his works of art, does he do this out of his thinking? — Let us consider it in so far as he does it out of his thinking: He does it out of the pictorial nature of thinking. To the earthly, it is absolutely unimportant what happens, just as the images that arise in the mirror make no particular impression on the objects in the room. But the human being gives reality to these things. That is the other side of things when the human being, after having developed out of the lunar existence, surrenders to thinking: When man forms something and places it into the world, just as the dreamlike plays into our thinking and, in the dreamlike, the old lunar state, the Luciferic, plays into all our mechanization, into all our reshaping of the world, that which is not yet connected with earthly existence, what we ourselves place into this earthly existence. What is that actually?

What we place out of our free soul life into earthly existence does not follow from the old moon existence, but is added to the present earthly existence. It will only have full significance when something else has entered into earthly existence. Just as the child that is carried in the womb of the mother, or perhaps is not yet carried but is only waiting in the spiritual world for its embodiment, is still a future event, so everything that a person forms is actually destined for the future and is still in its embryonic state in the present. And we only look at it truthfully when we look at it in its embryonic state, in its significance for the future. When we shape something in life today, we do not take nature as it is, but change it out of our thoughts, thus creating for the future. But if we regard what we create for the future as belonging to the present, if it becomes so ingrained in our lives that we consider it solely in terms of its usefulness for the present, then the future becomes ingrained in our actions, just as the past becomes ingrained in our thinking in dream-like thinking; then the Ahrimanic takes hold of our actions.

In human life, only the child, who, when playing, also shapes objects but shapes them without purpose, not seeking utility, is protected in his unconsciousness from taking what he does in life for the present and not in preparation for the future. We should be aware that we shape the machines and works of art we produce for the next existence, for the existence on Jupiter, that the earthly existence must first be shed and that only a future existence will give meaning to our actions.

This is the great error of modern times: that people place what they produce in the mechanical and artistic spheres directly in their present earthly usefulness and do not want to be aware that we have to work for our future earthly existence. The Ahrimanic can thus creep into our volition by applying a mere utilitarian point of view to what we do mechanically or artistically or otherwise in life.

But we must ask ourselves: Has this utilitarian point of view always been there? — This utilitarian point of view was not present as such in the older times of Greek culture, for example, and even less so in the older cultures. There was, if only as an atavistic presentiment, an awareness that man creates beyond earthly existence. Particularly since the fifteenth century, the striving for mere utility in what man produces has grown strong. And today, world programs are already being made from the mere point of view of utility.

Just as it is impossible to exclude from our thinking the realm of dream-thoughts, so it is impossible to exclude the utilitarian point of view. Therefore no one should speak the thoughtless words that he wants to flee from Ahriman. That is nonsense. He cannot. Ahriman plays a part in all our actions, with the exception of our child's play, in which we strive for no purpose, no use, but which is done for the sake of the action itself. In all our other actions we can only strive for some kind of ideal. But how? We must be clear about how two forces play into our human existence here again. What forces? One is the force that makes us act for reasons of utility, but the other is this: when we do something in life where we do not just let ourselves be carried by life like puppets, when we do something in life without leading such a puppet existence, then something is always going on with ourselves: we become more skillful, we become wiser, we can do things better afterwards. That is the other power. Most people today pay no attention to it, especially after they have passed the age of eighteen, when they are already “quite wise” and “quite clever” for their present-day view of life, that one can become more and more skillful in what one does throughout one's life. One is a sense of usefulness, the other is a constant self-discipline to pay such attention to what one does that one observes how one enhances one's human existence by doing this or that, by experiencing this or that. What plays into our human existence has a completely different meaning than the mere external point of view of usefulness and the moment. Take a more elevated example, I might say, and consider Raphael's pictures. Raphael worked on his pictures throughout his short life. The time will certainly come when none of Raphael's pictures will remain, perhaps after-images, but having nothing directly to do with Raphael. A time will surely come when the earth will no longer have any of these images of Raphael's, when no embodied earthly human being will be able to see Raphael's images. But Raphael will still be there, and that which Raphael has become by creating these images will also be there. By creating these images, Raphael has been furthered in a corresponding incarnation. He carried this through life between death and a new birth, appeared in a new earthly incarnation, did something there that he carried through life, that remains, even when the earth perishes in the cosmos. That which Raphael became through his paintings is what remains. One can even define the utilitarian point of view so subtly that one includes the fact that pictures exist in this utilitarian point of view. If you think about it, you will not find much difference between gross utility and the utility that is created by the fact that Raphael's pictures exist. But something else is that Raphael's individuality and soul have been transformed by the fact that he made his pictures. This is carried over from earthly existence into the existence on Jupiter. This is what develops.

Here, I would like to say, we have a more exalted example of what becomes of human souls, which can be distinguished from external action. This distinction must be borne in mind in a comprehensive sense. One must realize that the earth will one day be shattered in the cosmos, that nothing will remain but human souls. When nothing remains but human souls, the harvest of the development of human souls will be what distinguishes this earthly existence at its end from the earthly existence at its beginning. From this point of view, what one can call an obligation to further oneself in earthly development begins. There begins the obligation to make something of oneself, so that one can be something for the Cosmos. And there begins the thought: The earth will shatter, the earth will split apart, the human souls will be alone!

The strength needed to bear this thought, I would say to grasp it in all its poignancy, this strength will be completely lost to people. And thus the evolution of the earth will cease to make sense if people do not contrive to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha spiritually. For basically, the mystery of Golgotha, properly understood, contains the germ of such thoughts, to be grasped from a correct, spiritual world view that is appropriate for today. Consider just one very specific popular saying that the Gospels ascribe to Christ Jesus: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” That which He gives to the human soul will remain, will be there even when the earth has shattered and shattered in the cosmos.

Now I ask you – and now I come back to my consideration of time – can that which religions and theology have gradually made of the Mystery of Golgotha still give man this perspective? No, that is impossible! Theology and religions have also become materialized. But a materialized mystery of Golgotha does not extend in its meaning beyond earthly existence. Anyone who is serious about Christianity today - I have explained it to you from different points of view, and today you have heard it again from a new point of view - cannot help but seek a spiritual understanding of this mystery of Golgotha.

In other words, however, this means that spiritual science, real knowledge of the spirit, is necessary for humanity today. As I said at the beginning of today's reflection, fifty years ago people were powerless to fill their ideal realism with anything that had reality. Hence the sailing into European misfortune. But today the question arises: Do those who can avert a new disaster, where spiritual science speaks today, want to continue living as those to whom spiritual science has not yet spoken had to live fifty years ago? — Then, indeed, earthly catastrophes will come, against which what is happening now is a trifle. Today it is not possible to say anything other than this. Fifty years ago, when people demanded a new spiritual life, they were unable to create it because the time had not yet come. Today the time has come. Today, not wanting to turn to this spiritual life means not being serious about the development of humanity! This is the responsibility I must speak of, which must be spoken of today, especially to those who can take on this responsibility today for the reasons already stated. Today, man must look at the horizon of world-historical observation. He cannot reduce his existence. Imagine you have a cupboard. The cupboard breaks apart. You have its pieces in front of you, you look at them. The cupboard has broken apart due to some natural event, and you have its pieces in front of you. What do you do? You take the pieces, take nails, and put the pieces together to make the old cupboard again. But it will fall apart again very soon if the pieces are rotten, if the nails can no longer hold, or if the pieces are torn in other places. Europe has fallen apart like an old cupboard: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, German-Austria, the former Germany, the former Russia, Ukraine – these are the pieces, the debris of the cupboard. And the Western powers are trying to hammer these rotten pieces of the cupboard back together with nails that will not hold. People do not realize that they are dealing with rotten pieces. They want to glue the old together, whereas what is needed is to bring a completely new substance into human development. That is the idea at stake. Only spiritual science can draw our attention to this idea in a penetrating way today. And the question is: should the world, after what has seized Europe today, and what will very soon seize Asia and, beyond Europe, America, be glued and nailed together merely from its old rotten pieces for the sake of humanity's comfort, or should the connection be sought to renew the whole human being from the spiritual? — We will talk about this further tomorrow.

I would like to start today by drawing your attention to something that may be connected with the assessment of what is now being associated socially with our anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement. You know the inner connection; I have spoken of it often. I have also drawn your attention to the fact that a spiritual movement would be in very little shape to meet the challenges of our time if it were to withdraw from the great questions that must occupy humanity and had nothing to say about the most significant demands of the present and the near future.

Yesterday I pointed out how dream-like elements creep into human thinking, and I pointed out the various ways, or at least some of the various ways, in which dream-like elements creep into human thinking. We must be particularly attentive to such creeping in when we are confronted with ready-made judgments from the outside world. A large part of what we think is thought by us in such a way that it is not first examined, that it is not first brought to life within us, but that it is repeated, re-evaluated, re-thought. You need only consider the numerous judgments that people of the most diverse nations have made in the last four to five years about the fate of the world, about the value of individual nations, about the causes of the war, and so on, and you cannot help but say to themselves: Of all the judgments that have been passed, even by people of whom one would have liked to assume a completely different one, very few have actually been examined; they have been repeated, re-judged, re-thought.

Perhaps I may also take this opportunity to remind you that when I have spoken here about contemporary phenomena, I have never given ready-made judgments, but have always characterized things that could serve to help people form their own judgments. In general, there should be more and more emphasis on giving the world the foundations for forming judgments, not ready-made judgments. But people today are very much inclined, when they hear something here or there, especially if it is said with great self-confidence, when it is imbued with a perhaps not quite perceptible fanaticism, to then reflect on, think about, repeat such judgments. And especially in view of the fact that some of our English friends are still here, I must touch on the following, which may also be of importance for the other friends sitting here from over there or over there.

For example, it has now been judged from a certain quarter that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has its representative seat in Dornach, is now dealing with politics, and such a movement should not deal with politics. Among other things, it is said to have been pointed out that the Catholic Church had indeed come into its times of disaster by dealing with matters that are usually considered political.

When such a judgment arises, it echoes many things that one is accustomed to thinking. And when someone hears such a judgment, it seems somewhat plausible. He then says to himself: Yes, there is something to it, it is perhaps nonsense after all, when a spiritual scientific movement starts dealing with such questions, as the threefold social organism is one now.

Now, both the original judgment about this matter in the direction that I have just characterized it, and the repetition of it, belong to the class of superficial methods of thinking that are now emerging in large numbers. Our time very much believes that one has particularly advanced in thinking. Yes, we have the task of raising thinking to a certain level if humanity is not to perish in disaster. But what is demanded of humanity with regard to clear, sharp thinking, above all with regard to inwardly truthful thinking – because thinking that is unclear is always somewhat dishonest – what is demanded of humanity in terms of clear, sharp, inwardly truthful thinking, is confronted today with the urge to think unclearly, to think incompletely, to think half-way, to repeat what one hears here or there, or to think it again. But I also say: originally, the saying that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has strayed into the political sphere, which does not belong to it, on the issue of threefolding, is based on an extraordinary superficiality. For anyone who judges in this way judges in a completely abstract way. He simply takes something that may be right for the Catholic Church and applies it to something that is quite different. This is just as if someone had learned that something is good for a shoe that you put on your foot, and then applied the judgment that he had formed about the shoe to the glove; that is how clever such a judgment is. Why? What is the original aim of the threefold social order? It is to create a clear division in the social order between spiritual life, which should have its own administration; legal or state life, which should stand in the middle between the other two with its full independence; and economic life, which should be clearly separated from the other two as the third link.

Now let us not think superficially, as does the person who says that anthroposophy should not concern itself with politics, but let us think through the matter objectively: What is the aim of such a strict separation? Well, spiritual life should stand on its own, spiritual life should develop on its own ground, spiritual life should only emphasize that which comes from its own impulses. The aim is therefore to achieve a spiritual life that is no longer dependent on the life of the state and the economic life, but can be free and independent, just as the Catholic Church has never been, always confounding itself with the state and the economic life. So it is a matter of creating precisely that through which one is in a position to assert all the impulses of this spiritual life. Therefore, think how frivolous, how superficial it is when someone says that anthroposophy should not venture into the field of politics, while it is precisely demanding that such a social order should be created that will make it possible for spiritual life to no longer deal with politics. What is to be created is a policy through which spiritual life has its own administration, its own internal organization. And it should no longer be necessary to turn to the political authority or to the state curriculum when one wants to found a school or develop a curriculum; because that is precisely how one becomes dependent on politics. From this example you can see what clear, sharp thinking means and how those think who today make judgments about what has been drawn from the impulses of spiritual life simply from things that have come their way. For the idea of threefolding is drawn from the Science of Initiation. And anyone who says that spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy should not deal with the idea of threefold social order does not understand how to think clearly; his thinking is confused. But secondly, he understands nothing whatever of the real impulse of spiritual science, for he does not know that this matter, in connection with the great demands of our time, has been brought out of the impulse of spiritual science.

But today, numerous judgments that are made publicly and that are simply repeated, re-judged and re-thought by a large number of people are based on such self-contradictions. Our most important task is to try to arrive at a pure, straightforward, inwardly truthful thinking, independently of all national chauvinisms. We will not achieve this if we do not first admit that the present is far from it. For if we have no sense of how far the judgments that are flying around today are from objectivity, then we will not even experience the drive within us to arrive at clarity, at an inner truthfulness of thought.

I wanted to use an obvious example of the misunderstanding of the position of threefolding in relation to the actual spiritual-scientific problem to make it clear to you what confused judgments are flying around the world today, and I know very well that such judgments have a blinding effect on many people because they do not think about it, because they believe that when the person in question says that anthroposophy should not deal with the threefold social order, there is something to be said for it, because it is subject to the fact that a spiritual movement can only flourish if it is self-contained. But that is precisely what is being sought. So anyone who judges as I have characterized it stops halfway.

On the basis of such premises, I would like to encourage self-examination to see where unfinished judgments are sitting in the mind, judgments for which the documentation is completely missing. It is, in fact, all too easy to criticize superficially what is given by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. If you do not feel the depths from which things are created, then you can judge anthroposophy from the most superficial daily moods. That is why we so often see people who have hardly even sniffed into the field of anthroposophy, but who are clever, immediately saying: “I can agree with that, I cannot agree with that” and so on. The task for those who can really feel is always to penetrate deeper and deeper into the matter, to get a feeling for how initiation truths are actually drawn from the depths of being. For if we now take a somewhat deeper look at what I have touched on in terms of its outward appearance, the following emerges.

In modern history, we have seen more and more aspects of public life merge into a social organism: intellectual life, legal life, economic life. Modern parliaments strive to make their decisions on their own initiative through majority votes by people who may not understand the issues at hand, which can only be decided if you understand something about them. The unified parliaments are supposed to decide on everything: intellectual life, legal life, economic life. But the moment intellectual life — let us take this first — is separated from the other two elements, from the legal-state and economic spheres, intellectual life is brought entirely to the people themselves. Intellectual life becomes a separate organism. Spiritual life must be administered on the basis of the same principles from which it is constantly drawn. Those people who have this or that to teach must also administer the way teachers are employed and schools are run. Spiritual life should be completely free to rely on itself. In this way, individual human abilities are constantly called upon, especially in the field of intellectual life. Thus, what is to be decided in the field of intellectual life is constantly made dependent on the abilities of the people, on the abilities of those people who happen to be around in any given age. But that is how it should be. Those who are individually capable of this or that in any age should not be prevented by any state or parliamentary instruments from bringing their abilities to bear. In this way, spiritual life is made completely dependent on man. But because nothing else works in the development of spiritual life except human beings themselves, what I characterized yesterday, that element of spiritual life that develops itself, is at work. I have quoted Raphael as an example of the outstanding but also characteristic type. When his works have long since been lost, there will be in the world that he has developed through the works. This inward principle of development is applied to that which is active in spiritual life, that is to say, all that is Luciferian is eliminated from spiritual life precisely through its separation from the state. And only by this separation can the Luciferic be eliminated. Every spiritual life that depends on the state is permeated with Luciferic impulses. Then into spiritual life come into play the decisions of the majority or the like, which always cover up what comes from human individuality, but thereby blur the sharp thinking, the sharp volition that comes from human individuality. But it is precisely this blurring of clarity that gives rise to the Luciferic element in human thinking and human volition. So we can say that all spiritual life that is connected with the life of rights bears the Luciferic character. And it is precisely in order to overcome the Luciferic character, which must be overcome in public spiritual life, that it is necessary to separate from the life of rights. The individual human being cannot overcome it, because dream-like elements — I pointed this out yesterday — must always play a part in his spiritual life. But these are repelled by the fact that the human being is part of the social spiritual life, but this spiritual life is separate from the state.

Similarly, Ahrimanic elements play a part in economic life when it is administered by the state. These Ahrimanic elements, which play a part in economic life and in the administration of economic life when the state is involved in that economic life, can only be eliminated if economic life, as I have often emphasized here, is built on the life of brotherhood in corporations, associations and so on.

You see, it is a matter of applying truly great principles to this threefold order. In the middle then remains the actual structure of the state, everything that relates only to public law.

Now you will remember something that I have already explained to you here, but which I will repeat for those who have not heard it. Man, by living here on earth between birth and death, is not just this being that lives here between birth and death, but he carries within himself the echoes of what he has lived through, firstly in previous incarnations, but especially of what he has lived through between the last death and the birth that preceded his present life. In this time between death and a new birth, we have experiences in the spiritual world, and these experiences resonate in the present life. And how do they resonate in public social life? - So that everything that people bring into public life through their talents, through their special gifts, in other words, what public intellectual life actually is, is not at all from the earth, but is all the resonance from the pre-earthly life. What Goethe achieved as Goethe between 1749 and 1832 was all influenced by what he had experienced in the spiritual world before 1749; he had brought it down with him. And all the art, science and religious impulses that are developed by people here on earth, that is, all that is developed as earthly spiritual life, is an echo of the supermundane spiritual life, which people bring here through the portal of birth. If you take literature, if you take art, everything that is in it has been sent down from the spiritual worlds. So in this social life, in terms of forces, we have an element within us that is simply sent down to us from the spiritual worlds. Human beings bring it down by entering through the gate of birth into this world between birth and death. But what is worked in economic life through brotherliness or unbrotherliness, what people do for one another in their economic lives, has, strange as it may sound, not only a significance for this life between birth and death, but a very great significance for life after death. For example, it makes a difference whether I act as a grumbler all my life and behave in such a way that envy is my guiding principle, or whether I act out of love for my fellow human beings. Actions that influence public life, that bring people into contact with each other, are not only important here on earth, but their effects are carried through the gateway of death and are significant throughout the entire life between our death, which occurs after this life on earth, and the next life on earth. So that we can say: What takes place here as economic life is the cause of how people will live between death and a new birth.

If, for example, an economic order is based solely on selfishness, it means that people will become highly reclusive between death and a new birth, that they will have great difficulty in finding other human beings. In short, how a person behaves economically here has a huge significance for their life between death and the next birth.

Therefore, the only thing that remains purely earthly is the life under the rule of law or the life of the state. This has no significance for prenatal life or for the life after death, it only has significance for what happens here on earth. If we strictly separate the life of the rule of law from the other two areas, we separate the earthly from everything supernatural that plays a role here on earth. Thus, in this respect, there are also great principles in the threefold social organism. We divide into three parts because we must separate the most diverse areas that have something to do with the supersensible from that which has only to do with the sensual between birth and death. What the human being can decide on the path that alone makes majority decisions possible can only have significance here for the earth. What a person accomplishes through his talents, through his abilities, which are said to be innate but are actually acquired in the way I have just characterized, he accomplishes as a human individuality. And in that moment, to use an old expression, the “prince of this world” reigns when individuality is somehow compromised by majority decisions. Majority decisions can only and alone relate to that which, let it be said once more, has significance for earthly conditions; for that which has significance after death, again requires human love, humanity, goodwill, which in turn is and can only be entirely individual, to unfold its power.

In this way, I am pointing out to you that which can only be gained from the science of initiation to reinforce the idea of threefold social order. But what is the actual basis for the intrusion of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic into our world? The intrusion of all that is Luciferic and Ahrimanic into our world is due to the fact that something flows into our world from other degrees of consciousness than are the normal degrees of consciousness. When we pass through the gate of birth, we enter this earthly stage of consciousness from a normal stage of consciousness that is quite different from the earthly one here. Just now, for our fifth post-Atlantic period, the dream consciousness is abnormal: the day consciousness, which is permeated by the images of the dream. If we let dreams into our thinking, we mix up what we should have only through our prenatal life with what happens between birth and death. And this mixture is particularly suitable for Lucifer to achieve his goals with us, not the normal divine goals of the earth. All the abnormal dream-like elements that enter into the present world of consciousness can therefore only lead to the Luciferization of humanity. It is normal for our consciousness to be educated in a dreamy way as long as our consciousness is still dreamy, namely during childhood. If we continue this same relationship to the world, which is quite good during childhood, where we are supposed to learn to speak, for example, in a dream-like state, beyond childhood, which a large part of today's humanity does, then we open the doors and windows and everything we can possibly open to Lucifer in our consciousness. Therefore, if we do not accept public judgments more deeply than something is founded when we dream it, then we continually open the gates to Lucifer. If, for example, we are ordered from some quarter to regard such and such a person as a “great statesman” or a “great prince” or as “innocent of war” or as a “great military leader,” without our examining the matter, then the reason why we form such a judgment is no different from the reasons why we dream anything at all.

A large part of the present human race has until recently considered Woodrow Wilson a great man because he sent the nonsense of the “Fourteen Articles” into the world. If you ask with what inner conviction people did that, you will find no difference between the conviction they felt in considering Woodrow Wilson a great man and the conviction you feel when you dream something. The dream comes to you with the same inner arbitrariness or involuntariness as the judgment about Woodrow Wilson and his “Fourteen Nonsenses” came to you. There is no difference between dreaming fully consciously in this way and dreaming while asleep. There is no difference between considering Ludendorff a great general or Clemenceau a great statesman in response to the voices of the outside world and dreaming this or that in the night. But humanity must become aware of these things. For in noticing such things, judgment enters into us at the same time, as we are seized by the Luciferic in the world. For we are seized by the Luciferic in the world in that we dream consciously, especially in dreams. In relation to this public judgment, a large part of humanity today has been and continues to be truly childish.

These are things that must be considered more seriously today than many people think. And on the other hand, it is important that we learn from life. Because in relation to our will, we are constantly asleep, as I have often said. I have explained to you: you have ideas about what you are doing, but not even about what the hand is actually doing when it moves; usually, people have no idea about that. People have as little idea about this strange process, which is connected with human will, as they have about what they do when they are deeply asleep. As a rule, will is an awake sleeping. This volition must be raised more and more to consciousness. This will be a long process, as volition is raised to consciousness in the understanding of the earth time. It is partially raised to consciousness in a small area, in other areas too, but most outstandingly in one area - for example, through our eurythmy. In it, movements are carried out with full consciousness. In it, full consciousness truly permeates the will. That is why I have often emphasized in the introduction to the eurythmic performance that it is important that eurythmists in particular fight against any drowsiness and work towards the opposite of dreaminess. It is a great mistake if eurythmy is not performed in a fully conscious state, but if it is performed in such a way that one believes one can also “mystify” into eurythmy. “Mystifying” comes from mysticism. It is very bad to mystify into ordinary life, and it is even worse when something that is supposed to be intentional, that is supposed to be the counter-image of the dream, is thoroughly mystified. But the will permeated by full consciousness must also be striven for more and more in the rest of life.

Once again we have a case here where a large part of humanity is working towards the opposite, towards the opposite of what should be before our eyes as a basic demand of our time. A basic demand of our time is this: to permeate life with consciousness, not just with intellect. The intellect is something very one-sided. Today people even believe that they can gain supersensible truths in a mystical way by using mediums, that is, they tune their consciousness down as much as possible. There is no more luciferic-Ahrimanic path to the spiritual world than the spiritualistic one. On the one hand, it brings the medium close to Lucifer, and on the other hand, it brings those who allow themselves to be told their “truths” by the medium close to Ahrimanism. And the content of such truths, of these so-called truths, is also accordingly. For what the medium has to say about the extrasensory is not something higher than the sensory. The sensible has a certain meaning throughout the whole of earthly time. What mediums have to say is only meaningful for a very short period of time, if it is based on truth, of course. It is only of significance for certain elementary spiritual effects over a short period of time, so that even if one does nothing but see with one's healthy eyes and hear with one's healthy ears throughout one's entire life, one still experiences something higher than that through mediums.

From these and similar things you can see that on the one hand there are great demands in our time for the renewal of spiritual life, but that there is also what can be called a strong resistance to the real sources of spiritual life that have grown in our time. People today resist the intrusion of the spiritual into the physical-sensual world. This resistance is what can confront you in all possible fields and what you should recognize from the various attacks on spiritual science as it is meant here. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, is clear about the fact that everything that is to enter into public social life in the future must flow entirely from the sources of initiation. What is being asserted there, such as the threefold social order, may not appeal to certain people today. There are people who say: I don't like this or that about it. These people should in turn learn to understand what whole thinking is. In life, it does not depend on what we like or dislike. I once knew a lady - I have told this story before - who had many things told to her about spiritual science. Then she said: Yes, but re-incarnation, the repeated lives on earth, that is something I don't like; I don't want to come back to earth. Little by little she could be made to understand that it did not depend on whether she wanted to or not, especially not whether she wanted to in this life or not, because she did not yet know what she would want between death and a new birth; then she would want to come back. Now she seemed to gradually understand that and also left, saying that she now understood. It was in Berlin. From Stettin she wrote a card saying that she did not believe in it after all; she did not like the idea of coming back to earth after all. — Then the thinking breaks off dynamically; it can also break off mechanically. We have already experienced an example of this on our own soil. The example is very plausible; but that it can be applied to much of what people think is less plausible. Once at a meeting I had to explain how human beings come back in reincarnation, how they reappear with their individual human souls. I had to say that animals have a group soul; and while it is the case with man that he has an individual soul, preserves this individual soul for the time between death and a new birth, reappears with his individual soul and so on, it is the case with animals that has a group soul, it is so that it is taken into the whole group at death, that each individual animal is then separated again at birth and, as it were, drawn back into the group soul after death through a tentacle. Then a lady began to polemicize: Yes, she could see that for all animals, only not for her dog - which she had particularly liked; because she had raised him so much that he had such a strong individual soul that he would reappear as an individuality! — Afterwards I had a conversation with another lady who said: How stupid the lady was to believe that her dog, who only has a group soul, will return as an individuality. I realized right away that that cannot be. But my parrot, he will surely return as an individuality, that is something else!

Of course, these things make you laugh; but it is precisely in these things that you notice when you make the thinking mistakes. From what I have told you regarding the alleged conflation of threefolding with spiritual science, one does not notice one's short thinking! I have seen how, in the last five years, numerous judgments have been made entirely according to the pattern of this parrot judgment, how people in one region of the country have grasped how things are everywhere else, but for them it was always something different, entirely according to the pattern of the parrot's return. The point is that we really take these things seriously in the present and that we can see: initiation science must be able to flow into social life, and that we must not deceive ourselves about the difference between what we would like to think and what is real. That is why many people today may find it unpleasant to propagate threefolding. But there are two things in the world today, and anyone who looks at the world honestly and sincerely, who has no illusions, can see that there are these two things: either Bolshevism over the whole world or threefolding! You may not like threefolding; then you decide in favor of an old world order! But just consider what has been left of a large part of Europe in the last four to five years! Take the individual parts. There you have, for example, German-Austria; apart from the efforts of a few prominent individuals whom I have singled out in my book 'Vom Menschenrätsel' (The Riddle of Man), the substance of the whole derives from the Catholic principles of the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. That still existed there, and could be artificially preserved under the principle of cohesion of the so-called House of Habsburg, which was only natural at the time, and then under the entire unnatural principle of cohesion of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Or take, for example, what the former lands of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen are, Hungary: it is, in its entire constitution, what it became in the year 1000! And so we could indicate from all the individual areas what the essence of this overall substance actually is. It is not even convenient to say these things to people in the present, because people do not want to look at such circumstances impartially. But how can we expect that simply by piecing together these ruins, which have become old and decrepit because their entire substance dates from the 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th centuries and so on, they can be welded together into lasting structures today! No, only a real renewal of the soul life will do. But that must actually be grasped. Therefore, one must always appeal to people's sense of responsibility to take a look at this soul life. If it is looked at, then it will also be attended to.

I will continue speaking about these matters tomorrow, especially about the relationship between what I have said today and the particular view of the Christ principle.

In what I shall say today as a further elaboration of the considerations given last, it will be necessary to bear in mind that something very definite must also apply in spiritual scientific terms to the work of the individual personality in history. It is usually imagined that a personality, whether artistic, statesmanlike, religious or any other personality that is effective in history, works through that which spreads through consciously unfolding impulses, and that such a personality only works in this way. And then questions that are related to it are considered in such a way that one looks at them: What did such a personality do, what did he say, how did that reach people, and the like?

In the most significant cases of historical development, things are not so simple. Rather, what is effective in the development of humanity depends on the driving spiritual forces behind historical development. Personalities are, so to speak, only the means and ways through which certain driving spiritual forces and powers from the spiritual world work into our historical earthly development. This does not contradict the fact that much of the individuality and subjectivity of such leading personalities also has an effect on wider circles. That is self-evident. But one only acquires a correct concept of history when one is clear about the fact that when here or there a so-called great man expresses this or that, it is the leading spiritual powers of human evolution that speak through him, and that he is, so to speak, only the symptom that certain driving forces are present. He is the gateway through which these forces speak into the historical process.

If, for example, a personality from a certain historical period is mentioned and one tries to characterize this person's influence on the entire configuration of the time, this does not mean that one wants to awaken the belief, when speaking spiritually, that this man has only worked through the power of his personality, as is the case. I will give an example. Let us assume that for some period of time — as we will have to do shortly — a philosophical personality has to be cited as particularly characteristic. Then someone could come and say: Yes, this personality has written philosophical works, but they only had an effect on a certain circle; a wider circle of people did not experience any influence from this personality.

It would be quite wrong to raise this objection, because the personality in question, even if it is a philosophical personality, is merely the expression of certain forces that stand behind it, and it is these forces that have influenced and impressed the wider circles. In this personality one sees only what is working in time. For example, the following could be the case. At a particular time, some intellectual trend or school of thought could be operating in the subconscious of wide circles of human souls. This could find expression in a personality in such a way that what wide circles, perhaps entire nations, only sense, this individual personality formulates particularly characteristically clearly, but does not write down at all, perhaps only telling five or six other people or saying nothing at all. So it could happen that after centuries have passed we discover the memoirs of some personality and find things in them that were not spread by literary means, and yet these memoirs might contain the most characteristic ideas and forces of that particular time. In this sense I have always given characteristics when I have attempted to give such characteristics. I never wanted to give the impression that ideas of personalities only work through the usual channels of propaganda, but I always wanted to point out that one finds the effective ideas formulated in the individual personalities. Of course, the effective influence of such personalities can come in between. But the opposite can also be the case. A broad effect can emanate from a personality; but the other must be stated explicitly so that certain things are not taken to mean that one says, for example, that when someone characterizes a personality as significant for some time, he is characterizing something that is happening only in some corner, whereas one is interested in hearing what is going on in the broad masses. From these points of view, I ask you to consider what I will say today.

I have often discussed how there is a certain strong leap in the historical development of humanity in the 15th century. He who studies the soul life of civilized humanity finds that this soul life in the 16th, 17th century is radically different from the soul life in the 10th, 11th, 12th century. I have often pointed out how it is one of the most untrue statements, but it is repeated over and over again: nature or the world, world events do not make leaps. Such leaps are present precisely at the most significant points of development. And one such leap in the development of civilized humanity is precisely the transition from the fourth post-Atlantic period, which comes to an end in the 15th century, to the fifth, in which we now still live, at the beginning of which we are actually only just standing. In a certain sense, the whole mentality, the thought forms of European civilized humanity will be different after the 15th century; but it will be different in a different way for different nations, for different peoples. Certain transitional phenomena occur in a different way in different peoples.

Now, we cannot understand the spiritual life in which we live today if we do not have an idea of what has been gradually emerging in our spiritual life since the 15th century. We must grasp characteristic points of this newly emerging spiritual life. But of course one can only ever characterize individual currents and individual points of view. If we consider the time that precedes this fifth post-Atlantic period, from the Mystery of Golgotha to the 15th century, we must say that a large part of civilized humanity in Europe is trying to gain an understanding, a religious understanding of Christianity. Anyone who makes the attempt to study the individual views that have emerged in relation to Christianity in Europe from the 3rd, 4th century up to the 15th century will find that the people of this civilized Europe have applied all their conceptual capacity , their intuitive perception, everything they could draw from their soul, to understand Christianity in their own way, to gain an understanding of what had become of the world through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now, after the 15th century, very special circumstances arise. It is only now that what is called scientific thinking in the broadest circles today is emerging. Before that, something quite different was actually there. What is regarded today as the true science only begins in this fifth post-Atlantic period. And a very specific configuration is imposed on it, and indeed, one can say, it is imposed in different ways. It is always the same imprint, but it is imprinted differently in the West, in areas of Western civilization, and somewhat differently in areas of Central European civilization. And the time has now come when these things should be considered quite impartially, without nationalist ideas influencing the way they are considered in the unfavorable sense that I characterized yesterday.

And so, if we want to look at a characteristic personality manifestation of how this newer time has acquired its spiritual signature, we come across such a personality as the one who is particularly characteristic of the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, the English philosopher Baco of Verulam. Among those people who consider themselves scientific, Bacon is considered a kind of innovator of human thinking. But this Bacon is an exponent, a symptom of something that has emerged in modern times in the sense in which I have just expressed it. The whole Western world is basically permeated by a certain wave of thinking, and Bacon is only the one who has most clearly formulated this wave of thinking in the Western world. Without people knowing it, this wave of thinking lives in individuals. The way they think, the way they express themselves about the most important matters of life, is in some areas of Western civilization Baconian, even if people fight Bacon when they say something contrary. What matters is not so much the content that one gives to any world-view idea, but the way in which such a world-view idea first presents itself to the heart of man, and then how it presents itself in the impulses of world-historical becoming.

To make what I have just said clearer, I would like to say, through a paradox: in our time, someone could be a blatant materialist and another a blatant spiritualist, and both could express their ideas quite well from our materialistic time - the difference would not be great. It does not depend so much on whether someone today professes spiritualism or materialism in the literal sense of the words, but rather on the spirit in which he does one or the other. For it is not the literal content that actually has an effect, but the spirit from which something is done. That is what has an effect; only if one is an abstraction does one give something solely and exclusively to the literal content.

Now it should be noted that if one really goes into what the spirit of Bacon's way of thinking is, Bacon has attempted to use the intellectual powers that had emerged particularly since the mid-15th century to found knowledge of humanity, to found science. The powers of knowledge that have been available to humanity in modern times should become sciences. It was an important time, the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, when Bacon emerged. It was, so to speak, the time when everything was really called into question; for one could no longer spin any ideas about the riddles of the world in the old way, with the means of old alchemy, old astrology, with all the other old means, nor with the old religious way of thinking. There was an urge for renewal. How did this urge express itself most characteristically? — This urge expressed itself in the fact that just at this time there was a low point for all of humanity's real spiritual powers of comprehension.

Until the 15th century, it would have seemed impossible to want to grasp something like the Mystery of Golgotha with a mere intellect directed towards the sensual. It was rather taken for granted that something like the Mystery of Golgotha must be grasped only as the highest manifestation among others, grasped with higher powers of knowledge than those with which what extends around us as nature is grasped. These powers of knowledge were still at a certain height when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. They declined more and more in the evolution of mankind. And when the newest time began after the 15th century, people no longer had any spiritual powers of comprehension; they only had a mind directed towards the sensual.

With this mind directed towards the sensual, Bacon now sought to establish a scientific attitude. And so he rejected all those methods of research that had previously been recognized as legitimate, and first established the experiment as the only thing on which science should be built in the main. A large part of the world still takes this view today: you have to experiment, you have to create the equipment and experiment, and from the experiments you have to arrive at views about nature. Seen before the forum of the spirit, it means: I have a butterfly here; it is too complicated for me to examine this butterfly, I make a very deceptive reproduction out of papier-mâché and then examine the papier-mâché model. — That is basically the same as observing living nature through the dead experiment, which is nothing more than replacing living nature with the corpse for the purpose of observing nature. Even when we work in a physics laboratory, we should be aware that we are experimenting on the corpses of nature. Of course, experiments have to be carried out, and investigations have to be made on the human corpse. But with the human corpse, there can be no illusion that one is dealing only with a corpse. In the case of experiments, however, one succumbs to the illusion that the truth is handed over to one. But no one who does not already have the spiritual intuition within themselves to infuse the experiment with the living nature of the matter at hand can extract anything from the experiment, the dead experiment, that applies to the living nature.

This suggests, however, that Bacon's way of thinking was based from the outset on the idea of making the dead the explanatory principle of the world's nature. Now the peculiar thing is that in that imitation of the living, which one still achieves in the experiment, one has starting points for explanations of non-human nature, but one should not be under any illusion that one can really gain anything through any experimental method that sheds light on man himself. All experimentation leads away from the human essence.

Therefore, in the centuries that have passed since then, and in which the spirit of thinking, which reached a certain height in Bacon, has spread, understanding of the actual human being and his nature has been lost. Understanding of what is actually contained as a driving, active being at the very core of human nature has been lost.

Now no one can find the great impulses of moral and social will without going into the essence of human nature. Therefore, the understanding for the impulses of moral and social will has also disappeared in these centuries, disappeared precisely because of Bacon's thinking. Therefore, parallel to the killing of the understanding of the world, as it starts from Bacon, goes the mere utilitarian morality. It is almost a Baconian definition: good is that which is useful to man, either to the individual human being or to humanity as a whole.

Thus, proceeding from the Baconian attitude — and it was much more widespread than anyone today can imagine — on the one hand we have a scientific, thinking attitude that can only grasp what is extra-human, and on the other hand we have a morality that only focuses on the Ahrimanic useful. In Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Bacon, this was expressed to an even greater extent than in Bacon himself. But then this wave of utilitarian morality poured out into the mere sense of understanding the extra-human world, poured out into all the philosophers from Locke and Hume and so on up to Spencer and into the natural scientists from Newton to Darwin. Whoever wants to study most characteristically what came out of the leading Western world to constitute the latest wave of European sentiment must begin there, must start from the Baconian way of thinking.

But there is something very definite connected with this Baconian way of thinking and moralizing. With it one can grasp only what is extra-human; one can morally find only what is useful to man and to humanity. That is to say, with the means by which one here strives for science and natural morality, one does not at all enter into the region in which religion is found!

What is the consequence? The consequence is that among those who are the bearers of this attitude, there arises an endeavor to leave religion as it was before, that is, to develop it historically without adding new elements from a new science of the spirit. Bacon, of course, put forward the most characteristic view: science must not be brought together with religion in any way, because that would make science fanciful; and religion must not be brought together with science in any way, because that would make religion heterodox. - So religion is to be kept well away from the kind of striving that asserts itself in man as scientific striving. The new forces that have been active in civilized humanity since the 15th century are attributed to scientific endeavor. No new forces are added to religion. It is to be preserved along with the forces that were previously added to it, because people are afraid of the new forces that could be added to it. They fear that it would become heterodox, that it would lose its true content.

What had to happen under the influence of such a thinker's attitude? What happened? What happened was that out of a certain human truthfulness, science was sought for the extra-human world, out of a certain truthfulness, a utilitarian morality was sought, but that out of what science was sought, religion was not to be sought. It was not to be touched by it at all. It should have nothing to do with actual scientific endeavor, at most only to the extent that it is considered historically. This is how one can distinguish between science and revealed religion. This distinction can also be expressed somewhat more strongly, as follows. It is only more strongly expressed and therefore more unpleasant for people who do not like to hear the truth; it can be characterized as follows: One strives honestly for science, namely for that science that only extends to the extra-human. One also strives honestly, truly, for a utilitarian morality; but one does not apply this honest, truthful striving to religion, it must remain untouched, science must not touch it. Honest extra-human science, honest utilitarian morality – religion as hypocrisy, religion arising from dishonesty: this is only stated somewhat more sharply, and is therefore unpleasant for those people who do not want to hear the truth unvarnished, the difference between science and revealed religion. But it is only by stating such a thing very clearly and sharply that one gets to its essence. And so the most characteristic feature of this line of thinking is that one shrank from applying science to religion, that one did not want the power of knowledge, which one applies in natural science and the like, to play into religion.

This kind of thinking was, so to speak, natural to Western civilization. It is so natural to it that many people in this Western civilization do not understand anything other than that one should not use the same principle with which one wants to understand nature to turn to the religious. This is characteristic of the Western world, and it is quite appropriate for it.

But now let us imagine the same impulse transported to Central Europe. I can show this by a characteristic example. It does not always happen that this way of thinking is opposed as sharply as Goethe opposed Newtonism. Instead, it also happens that Darwinism, which is directed entirely towards the extra- and which at the same time can never found anything other than a utilitarian morality, has now been conceived by a man who was as quintessentially European, even Prussian-Central European, as Ernst Haeckel was. The matter does not remain what it is with Darwin. In Darwin we see the thinking of Bacon continuing to have an effect. He regards the natural world through Darwinism, but he remains a believer, just as Newton remained a believer. He quietly preserves the old way of thinking with regard to mere religion. But what about Haeckel? Haeckel takes Darwinism into his very soul. For him, there is no possibility of dichotomy; for him, there is no possibility of leaving religion untouched. He takes Darwinism, which can really only be used to understand things outside of humanity, but he applies it with a furor religiosus to precisely the human, and he makes a religion out of it. It becomes a unity, it becomes a religion out of it.

And so the impulses that are there work everywhere. The impulses are the same, but they work in a differentiated way, specified according to the different areas. In the West, Darwinism and religion are served together quite well in world development. Ernst Haeckel, the Central European, has to stir them up together and turn them into a unified dish because it is not possible for him to have them side by side. Bacon and his descendants up to Spencer and Darwin are afraid that religion will become heterodox if science is applied to it. Haeckel is not afraid of this. He makes religion as good as possible because he applies the same truthfulness that he asserts in science to his entire view and must also carry it into religion. This is the case in many fields. Goetheanism in Goethe himself already opposed the understanding of the merely extra-human. You only have to take the prose hymn 'Nature', which Goethe at least thought of around the 1880s, even if he did not write it down himself at the time. It has also been presented here in eurythmy. If you look at it, you will see that for Goethe, nature does not exist in the same sense as it does for Newton or Darwin. Rather, it is inwardly ensouled. It even has an active effect on him with humor: ' she has thought and is constantly pondering.” And so, throughout his life, Goethe only expanded on the maxims he set out in his “Fragment” about nature in more and more concrete terms. A strange essay was recently published here in a newspaper, which I believe was even continued in this Sunday paper. It said that when I published the “Fragment” about nature in the nineties in the new edition of the “Tiefurter Journal” in the writings of the Weimar Goethe Society, I had published the “Fragment” about nature with an explanation, I had emphasized too strongly that the properties that Goethe had processed in the prose hymn “Nature” then play a role in his scientific works. It is really funny what objection is made in that essay. It is said that this “Fragment” does not contain any natural philosophical ideas at all, but religious ideas, and one should not find the religious ideas of this prose hymn in Goethe's later scientific ideas in the way I have found them. — So there was a pedant – one doesn't know what else to call him – who took pleasure in splitting the human search for understanding by trying to persuade people to believe that Goethe's scientific ideas are different from his religious ideas. From the outset, the deduction is such that one can see how this gentleman, who wrote this essay, is steeped in Baconism in every limb!

Can we see from something else, I would now like to ask, that there is a differentiation in modern civilization between science and religion? - We can see it from something else. Of course, in England, in the land of Bacon, there was a Wycliffe and the like; but that did not have any influence on the actual configuration of civilization. In Central Europe, on the other hand, something asserted itself to a very special degree that did not have a significant influence to the west, for example, in France. This is because, when the more recent period, the fifth post-Atlantic period, emerged, in Central Europe there was no opposition of the kind that occurred in the western countries, where science was really founded in a very appropriate way, but this science was not allowed to encroach on the religious sphere, which was supposed to continue to , only the religion revealed in the old sense is to remain. But in Central Europe, in the religious sphere, the opposition arises in a sharp way, and from it all the misfortunes in the Central European development, the instigation of the Thirty Years' War by the Jesuits, everything else that happened as a result of this unfortunate war, and again everything that has come later. In this Central Europe, we see directly in the religious sphere that the impulse from the age after the 15th century was effective.

In the smallest and in the greatest historical phenomena, one sees that the same impulse is present, but shifted, welling up from the human soul, from the human heart, in a different way. But gradually the Western world is taking the lead, and gradually something very significant is happening. The further we see the intellectual life of Central Europe developing in the post-Goethean period, the more it moves away from Goethe. Goethe is still studied by literary historians and other people, well, there is even a Goethe research emerging. But Goethe does not live in all this. What Goethe actually wanted to bring as an impulse into Central European civilization, Goethe and his people, that gradually seeped away in the 19th century. And into this Central European world seeps slowly, just as Darwinism has become Haeckelism, that which is the impulses of the Western world. The Western world tolerates these impulses quite well, but the Central European world does not tolerate them. The Central European world is receptive to Western impulses, it absorbs them, but it cannot tolerate them. On the one hand, we see Darwin, who, although he drew a conclusion for humans from the principle that actually only applies to the non-human in his last work, did not by any means push this conclusion to the extent that Haeckel did. In Darwin's work, the scientific principle is, as it were, left behind in the extra-human realm. In Central Europe, however, the situation is the same as that of Haeckelism in relation to Darwinism: there is an attempt to permeate all of life with such an impulse. One does not want to leave aside the unpermeated religious realm, for example; one also wants to permeate that with the impulse. And so it is with the other areas, which follow the same path. Those who are now older have indeed experienced it themselves, how parliamentarism of English coloration has spread throughout Europe, with the exception of Prussian Germany, and how it has been received in Europe like Darwinism through Haeckelism. Parliamentarism, as it exists in England, is quite good for England. For those countries of Central Europe to which it has been transferred, it has been associated with such consistency as Haeckel has associated with Darwinism. Under such influence, the modern times have surrendered.

But one can go deeper and characterize the phenomena much more deeply as they have unfolded. In the Western world, we have, in addition to Bacon, a personality in Shakespeare who has a great influence on modern civilization. For those who are able to study spiritual life, Baconism and Shakespearianism point to the same extraterrestrial source, but one that is represented in the earthly. Both take the same path into the newer development, and it is known that the inspiration for Bacon and Shakespeare comes from the same source. In modern times, when everything is taken roughly, this has even led to the well-known Bacon theory being put forward, which, of course, is complete nonsense as it has been put forward. But the source from which the inspiration of Bacon and Shakespeare originates for Central Europe is the same, and the same initiates personality is the source of the spiritual currents of Jakob Böhme and the South German Jacobus Baldus. And much more than one would think lives in Central European spiritual life that comes from Jakob Böhme – again, a personality who only formulated that which was already working as fact in the widest circles, even if it did not happen in Jakob Böhme's words. One must only be aware that a good deal of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis comes from Jakob Böhme, that a good deal of what is in Goethe's entire organic system came to him via Jakob Böhme, in certain roundabout ways that can easily be proven. And even if Jacobus Baldus lived in lonely Ingolstadt, he is just such a personality who did not influence many contemporaries, but who expressed in a characteristic way what was thought and felt in the broadest circles of this newly emerging modern age.

But let us consider the remarkable depth that lies in these things: Baconism and Shakespeareanism, Böhmetum, Balderum, all come from the same source of inspiration. What comes from Jakob Böhme is still noticeable at the bottom of Central European striving today, but it is seeping away. On the other hand, Baconism, whether in its own form or in the form of the later Darwin, has had a significant influence in Central Europe, and Shakespeare has also had a significant influence. Consider, for example, that the entire second half of the eighteenth century, at least the latter part of it, was strongly influenced by Shakespeare, and that in the nineteenth century, Central European intellectual life was strongly influenced by Shakespeare. Goethe was deeply impressed by Shakespeare in his youth and only from the 1880s onwards did he emancipate himself from Shakespeareanism.

The same path can be seen everywhere, the impulses are the same everywhere. But they work in different ways. In Central Europe, the impulses work in such a way that they seep away; the western impulses pour out over the non-human. They make religious life, in the first instance, a hypocritical thing alongside scientific striving. And since this Western element pours out over the whole of modern civilization, we see how people have not yet come to apply the spiritual forces - spiritual science, which in recent times has to present itself as coming from human nature, just like the scientific forces that go beyond the human - to the religious. Christianity is to be newly comprehended, because one can never continue to work with what has been left untouched. The old spiritual powers have been exhausted, and anyone today who thinks they can somehow grasp Christianity with the old spiritual powers that are recognized in the West for religious matters is living in the most terrible illusions. This must be said today: that a new epoch of humanity must come, through which the mystery of Golgotha itself must be grasped anew with new spiritual powers. For everything that has been said about it has been used up, has reached its own absurdity, can be glued here or there, treated here or there in such a way that it is treated as a scientific “don't touch me”, but humanity cannot go on living with these things. Mankind needs the strength to draw from its own inner being the new spiritual forces that will now grasp the mystery of Golgotha in a new way.

The Western world has realized that it is incumbent upon it to look around for these new spiritual forces. For in this Western world, people have limited themselves to a mere understanding of the extra-human. This extra-human will never be able to reach people. A new spiritual science will have to be understood by people, but only then will new perspectives on the Mystery of Golgotha open up. A mere utilitarian morality can be applied to the mere extra-human world; but such a utilitarian morality will never bring man to his own dignity. Only a morality that man knows is poured into him through supersensible forces that work in his soul can bring him to this dignity. But these can never be grasped with the means that have been left to religious revelation in Western countries. A renewal is necessary.

The questions that I have touched upon here seem to live in areas very, very far removed from everyday life, but they are not. These questions are the basis of the most important, world-shaping questions of today, and no one will be able to answer the big question: What is the relationship between East and West, between Europe, Asia and America? — who does not want to go back to these things. Because what we are experiencing today is ultimately the consequence of what has been going on in human souls over the centuries.

It is only human convenience to not want to go back to these things. Therefore, one can experience what I would call that terrible heartbreak that overcomes one when one hears people today talk about the great misfortunes of the time, about other configurations of the present political or economic or other life, about the affairs of Asia, Europe and America – but hear them speak as the blind speak of color, because they do not want to enter into what actually underlies these great questions as the inner pulsation.

In our recent reflections here, we have been speaking of the necessities of the time. Today, man must be content to absorb the impact that wants to enter the physical world. We have seen how, for about sixty years, there has been a struggle in the most intense way in European life, which began in the last third of the 19th century and contains the causes of all the confusions of these last times. I have pointed out to you the fact that what is happening is still being taken too lightly, in that people do not want to admit that old Europe has led a sham existence in the 20th century, has broken up and cannot be glued back together. This crisis can be compared to a crisis such as occurred in the ancient Roman Empire, when Christianity gradually broke into this Roman Empire and swept away everything that existed. Something completely new has developed. Anyone who has insight into life will realize that everything that has been built up since the first Christian century has been shattered.

Let us now take a look at what has been built up. The Mystery of Golgotha was there. But the Mystery of Golgotha and its understanding are two different things. Let us make this clear by means of a comparison. Suppose you look at a person who has this or that as the content of his soul or as the impulse for his actions. If a child looks at such a person, it forms a judgment; but this is a childlike view. A person who has learned something, who is an adult, will then also be able to form an opinion about this person; this will be a more mature view. But not everyone who has a mature view will be able to have sufficient knowledge or insight into the person in question, if that person is, for example, a genius. For this it would be necessary that in turn a genius would have formed his view about this person.

So we have a fact in this case: a person can be there, and there can be different understandings of this fact. — This is how it is in the course of time with the event that Christianity brought into the world. This event as such was once there, it stands at the starting point of our modern civilization. The understanding that has been shown for Christianity until now is rooted essentially in the views, in the ideas, in the concepts that people could have from those soul foundations that had taken the place of the soul foundations of the old Roman Empire. To substantiate this, you need only look at the lost Austria, which, with the exception of a few outstanding personalities, had a culture – not just a spiritual culture, but a culture in the full breadth of life – that basically went back to the first Christian centuries.

There the seeds of decay begin. People did not want to believe it, but anyone familiar with the circumstances could see it. And so it was in the rest of Europe. Europe was built on very old ideas, and thus in an old spirituality. And out of these ideas the Mystery of Golgotha was also understood. But these ideas are now worn out. They are no longer sufficient to convey an understanding of the event of Golgotha to the present-day human being. Man wants to stick to the old ideas because of his conservative tendencies. But in the depths of the soul there are definitely demands for a re-creation of Europe and the whole civilized world. This is the great struggle that has been evident at the basis of European culture for about sixty years. Something wants to be formed, but the preserved ideas of people are pushing it back. When a river current is dammed up somewhere, a rapid will eventually appear. This rapid has come to European culture. These are the years of terror that have befallen us, that are by no means over yet, and that are actually only just beginning. What is needed today is to establish a new conception of life based on spiritual principles. Those who today oppose such a conception of life are like those who, when Christianity spread from south to north, opposed it. The wave of evolution sweeps over such people.

But such people can cause much harm, and much harm will still be caused by such people. Let us take a concrete example. If you look at how the situation developed that could be seen before 1914 and also, in a sense, during the last few years, when the catastrophe began, you will see that there were certain so-called state borders on the map of Europe. Why these state borders have developed in this way over the centuries can be traced through history. But it is precisely from a true, unprejudiced consideration of history that you will gain the insight that these states, from the great Russia to the smallest entities, came into being under the influence of the understanding of Christ, that is, the understanding of Christ as it took hold in Europe at the time of the so-called migration of peoples, at the time of the decadence of the Roman Empire. In 1914, to give a date, these conditions, which found expression in these 'strokes' that demarcated states on the map of Europe, were all already unnatural. There was nothing true about these borders. There was nothing there that had any inner hold. And anyone today who believes that anything can be held together by what was no longer true in 1914 has clearly gone down the wrong path. Even that which has been or wants to be formed on the basis of these conditions is no longer tenable.

What do the people of Europe with their American appendage now want to do with the civilized world? Let us take an unbiased look at what the people of Europe with their American appendages currently want to do with the civilized world. They want to do what might have emerged in the first centuries A.D., in the migrations of nations, from the ideas that the Goths, the Vandals, the Lombards, Heruls, Cherusci, and so on had, and that the Romans had before they were seized by Christianity. It did not come about, although at that time people did not even resist the course of events as strongly with their consciousness as they do today. But let us hypothetically assume that in those days they would not have allowed Christianity to spread, but would have wanted a Europe glued together from the ideas of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Vandals, the Lombards and so on, with the remnants of ancient Roman civilization – an impossibility, pure and simple! A possible Europe only arose from the fact that a spiritual impact came to this Europe. And this spiritual impact came through Christianity. Without this spiritual impact, which has made everything different, nothing would have come of Europe for the centuries from the 4th, 5th to the 20th century. Imagine Europe without the impact of Christianity in the past centuries: you could not imagine it. Just think of what remains of the Goths, the Heruls, the Langobards and so on in Europe. You have to admit: the impact of Christianity was enormous and everything changed.

If, in those days, the Lombards had rejected every new impulse just as much as, for example, the Czechoslovaks or the Poles or the French reject it today, then what I hypothetically assumed, the impossible, would have happened. And just as the Lombards would have behaved if they had said, “We do not want Christianity, we want to remain Lombard,” so today the Czechoslovaks, the Magyars, the French, the English and so on are behaving. They do not want a new spiritual impact.

But Europe is at rock bottom without a new influence. Nothing comes of it. Just as little comes of Europe as of a Goth, Lombard, or Vandal Europe when Christianity was ripe to make its impact on European civilization. This thought is one that the vast majority of people today fear. You may be surprised if I say that they are afraid, because you believe that it is for these or those reasons of life or logical or other reasons that they resist this thought. That is not the case. The reason why they resist is subconscious fear. When you have subconscious fear, you do not understand things. One invents logical reasons, one invents all kinds of observations that one believes one has made in order to refute this thought, while one is actually afraid of it. But man does not admit to fear! But the time is so great that it is necessary to look into these circumstances without fail. And it is necessary to speak words today that will certainly sound paradoxical to a large proportion of people. When it first spread, Christianity also sounded paradoxical to people. You should just imagine what it sounded like when the spreaders of Christianity came, say, to Alsace or Switzerland, where they still worshipped the images of Odin, the god Saxnot and so on. It was something paradoxical. Today it is paradoxical for people when one speaks to them of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as a new impact and at the same time as a new understanding of Christianity. Only today everything must become conscious, only today everything must be more willed than people in those days were capable of wanting. Above all, one thing must be grasped by humanity today with all its sharpness. We have a so-called scientific, intellectual life. In my last Sunday lecture I characterized one aspect of this intellectual life; I pointed out to you the character that this intellectual life has acquired through the English-speaking population. Do not believe that this intellectual life leaves anything to chance. What our children learn at school, from the age of six, shapes their souls, shapes the whole person, and people today walk around as they are shaped by our school system, which in its lower levels is strongly influenced, especially today in the age of the proliferation of the newspaper industry, much more than one might think, is influenced to a great extent by what is so-called science in the upper echelons of intellectual life. Science has had its great external successes. It has brought about the telephone and air travel, and it has brought about wireless telegraphy. In all these fields, it has made great achievements. But I have repeatedly drawn your attention to a peculiarity of this science, a peculiarity of our entire knowledge. This peculiarity consists in the fact that we can understand everything. We can understand machines, we can understand minerals, we can understand plants, we can understand animals, but we can least of all understand the human being through what our science presents. That one infers man directly from animality, that one says he is only a higher stage of development of animality, that comes only from the fact that one does not know anything about man. Not because man really comes from the animal, but because one does not know anything about the true man, but can only reveal the idea that one has, one leaves man coming from the animal kingdom. It is only a prejudice of the age that has no science with which to judge man. Therefore, we are also incapable in the present time of acquiring a real knowledge of human nature from our own education. By knowledge of human nature cannot be meant that conglomeration of all sorts of ideas that man today has of himself. A true knowledge of human nature could only arise out of the realization of what the true human being, the genuine human being, is made of.

Even if we study everything we have on earth, study with the means of today's science, we can build machines with it, we can design mechanisms with it, but we can never understand the human being with it. That is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science is for: to make man comprehensible from extraterrestrial conditions. People feel this, but in their current ideas they do not admit that man today must be understood from extraterrestrial, from supersensible conditions. And so there is no science for this man. For centuries the world has been deluding itself about this fact in a strange way.

I would like to show you, using one example (of which there are many), how this fact has been ignored over the centuries. When the time had come to present to you, as an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, what has been developed here over the past few years, some people who had come close to what I, for example, had given on the basis of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, said: We prefer to delve into the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, into the mysticism of Johannes Tauler. There everything is much simpler; there one can comfortably say: I immerse myself in my inner being, I grasp the higher human being in me, my higher self has grasped the divine human being in me. — But that is nothing more than sophisticated egotism, nothing more than a retreat into the egoistic personality, a running away from all humanity, an inward self-deception. When, in the 14th and 15th centuries, people began to fail to understand their fellow human beings, it was clear that spirits such as Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart would have to arise to point to the human soul in order to seek the human being. But today that time is over. Today this deepening and sinking into the inner being is no longer good. Today it is about really understanding a Christ-word correctly - that is the example I mean - this one Christ-word, which is one of the most important, the most significant, that is: “If two or three are united in my name, then I am in the midst of you.” That means that if someone is alone, the Christ is not there. One cannot find the Christ without feeling connected to all of humanity. Today, one must seek the Christ through the path that all of humanity is walking. That is to say, inner satisfaction leads away from the Christ impulse.

This is the misfortune, especially for 19th-century Protestant theology, that the impulse arose to have a mere individualistic, egoistic inner Christ experience. There is a crowned head in Europe, one of those who are still crowned, who always replied when it came to contemporary spiritual knowledge: “I have my personal Christ experience!” This crowned head was satisfied with that. But many say similar things. That, however, is precisely the misfortune of the present time: people do not want a general interest in the impersonal human. You only get to know yourself when you know the human being as such. But you cannot get to know the human being as such without seeking his origin in extra-terrestrial conditions.

Consider how, in my book Occult Science, I describe the search for the origin of what we call man in extraterrestrial conditions. People dislike this “Occult Science” for no other reason than because all confused knowledge about humanity is rejected and man as such is derived from the whole universe, namely from the extraterrestrial universe. But this is precisely what is needed in today's world. The present time must decide to add the other, the spiritual sources of knowledge to all that is loved as sources of knowledge today.

Here lies, call it guilt, call it ignorance – either word may be used, words are not important – what must be characterized as emanating from our scientific universities, from those people who set the tone when it comes to what man can and cannot know. The so-called human wisdom, but also the social wisdom, the technical wisdom, etc., that emanates from our European and American universities regards the world with the exclusion of all those factors that, after all, include the human being as a matter of course. Anyone who seeks access to any leading position today, even a lowly one, has no opportunity to get to know anything that would enable him to gain knowledge of human nature. And without knowledge of human nature there can be no social life, and without knowledge of human nature there can be no renewal of Christianity. Today one can become a theologian without having the slightest idea what the Mystery of Golgotha means, for most theologians today have no idea who Christ is. Today one can become a lawyer without having the slightest idea what the human being actually is. One can become a physician today without having the slightest idea of how the human being is constructed out of the cosmos, without having the slightest idea of how a healthy and a sick body relate to each other. Today one can become a technician without having the slightest idea what influence the construction of any machine has on the whole course of earthly development, and today one can be a brilliant inventor of a telephone without having the slightest idea what the telephone means for the whole development of the earth. People lack an overview of the course of human development. And so every person has the need to form a small circle and acquire a routine within this small circle, to apply this routine in the sense of their own selfishness, so that they can distinguish themselves without considering how what they are inserting as a part into the whole world will turn out in this whole world. If we were to build houses in the world using the same method by which we establish our existence today, they would collapse immediately. If we were to form bricks and build houses using the same method by which we educate our theologians, our lawyers, physicians, philologists and so on, and in particular our philosophers, these houses would not be able to survive for a week in the whole of the world. In the grand scheme of things, people do not notice the collapse. It has been collapsing continuously since the last third of the 19th century. People know nothing about it; on the contrary, they talk about the great upturn, and some still talk about building a new world with the same bricks that have long since become unusable. A new world cannot be built in any other way than by bringing a new spiritual impact into the whole civilized world from the ground up. You can make a mockery of something, but you cannot build without this spiritual impact.

There are people - well-meaning people - who are terribly afraid of such an intensity of knowledge, of such an intensity of knowledge as is sought through spiritual science. They are afraid for a reason – I am not telling you something I made up, only things that correspond to facts – they say to themselves: How boring it will be when people will know everything that spiritual science claims to know; then one can no longer hope that the future will bring new knowledge, then one cannot even know that knowledge will help. They still think that it would be a terrible prospect for the future if everything were already known!

I am not saying that this is convenient information for those who are too lazy to approach knowledge, but I would like to point out that the moment man is seen as he can be seen through spiritual science, the possibility of thinking about social construction really begins. You cannot establish social construction in any other way than by first bringing human knowledge into the clear, so to speak. To make this clear, one must only say the following: Take everything that leads to our present-day communities. People do not owe it to their enlightenment; they do not owe it to the ideas that they have fully absorbed into their consciousness, they owe it to those spiritual forces that shine through the blood, which have sprung from the old blood connections, blood relationships. Even today we still have something that enters our world as a remnant of that old blood relationship, which is given to us by the national principle and comes to the fore in it. The reason why one person calls himself an Englishman, another a Frenchman, and a third a Pole, stems from all those relationships between people that have always been based on blood ties. This blood relationship had its good justification through the thousands of years of human development, because through this blood relationship that which brought people together, that which founded human communities, rose up into humanity. And as you can see from my “Occult Science”, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people were not at all so uniform. The human souls came to earth from the most diverse places, as you know, and did not truly love each other. They only learned to love each other by being born as souls into blood-related bodies. In earlier lectures I repeatedly showed how the beneficence of this blood relationship, blood community, has been fought by the powers opposed to man, by the luciferic-ahrimanic powers. That was in ancient times. Then people were dependent on having human communities founded on blood ties. Today, to believe that one only needs to translate the old principle of blood relationship into the abstract language and that one can say, by clothing the abstractness in “Fourteen Points”: To every single, even the smallest people, its right to self-determination! One must be Woodrow Wilson in his unworldliness, in his abstraction, if one can do such a thing. Today one must realize: that was once. Blood relationships once established human communities. Today, however, other forces are at work in the ahrimanic and luciferic powers that are opposed to humanity. Today, blood relationship is to be used to seduce people. Just as the Christ did not come into the world to abolish the law, but to take it up into Himself, so blood relationship is not to be done away with. On the contrary, blood relationship must first be guided in the right way. But whereas in ancient times the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in human hearts opposed blood relationship and sought to split human beings into egoistic individuals, today the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers seek to seduce human beings are to be seduced into building only on the blood relationship. Today the time has come to recognize that every human being who really has body, soul and spirit and stands before us comes down from the spiritual world. He comes down from the spiritual world in such a way that he has gone through a pre-earthly life. He seeks out for himself the blood through which he wants to embody himself on earth. And a feeling for this spiritual community must gradually arise. In pre-Christian times, reincarnation existed as a feeling, for it was only a realization before the year 1860 before Christianity; after the year 1860 it was only an instinctive feeling in all of Egypt, in the Near East, in Roman times. But now the time is coming when the view of man as a spiritual being undergoing a development between death and a new birth will become a living feeling, a living sensation, when one must live with the idea of the supermundane significance of human souls. For without this idea, the culture of the earth will be killed. It will not be possible to develop a practical activity in the future without being able to look up to the spiritual significance of the fact that every human being is a spiritual being. And one will have to add, as paradoxical as this may still appear to today's man – less paradoxical in theory, for I do not want to theorize, but to parallelize, in terms of feeling, but it is nevertheless so – that one will have to learn not only to say to oneself: We as parents rejoice that a child is born to us, we rejoice at this addition to our family because this child is born to us – but one will have to say: No, we are merely the instrument through which a spiritual individuality, waiting to continue its existence on earth, finds the opportunity to do so through us! The aristocratic idea of the “Stammhalter” (the son who continues the family line) and the aristocratic idea of the mere continuation of the family bloodline, for example, will have to be among the antiquated things. And the feeling will have to extend to all humanity. Even today, aristocrats still have the attitude that their primary task is to continue their family line so that the physical person has descendants with the same name. The feeling will have to be reversed to the effect that one must have these successors in the service of all humanity, so that certain individualities, who want to descend to the world, can continue their existence here on this earth. The old sentiments in aristocracy, in family aristocracy, extend into our present time. The feeling of that general human knowledge must be opposed to this; then we will also be able to understand the Christ anew. For He did not come to earth for the sake of family egoism, but for the sake of all mankind. Nor did He come for the sake of any nationality, but for the sake of all mankind. He did not come so that those who call themselves the victors could establish nation-states, but so that the universal human element could be cultivated on earth within the framework of nationality.

These things are at the root of what is happening now. And they are so rooted that what is being sought in earthly existence today is opposed by what the majority of people still say and want today. But if people continue to want things, they will only establish things that lead themselves ad absurdum, that lead themselves into impossibility. Either one will realize this, or one will have to wade in the European chaos for a long time to come. It is the best means to continue wading in this European chaos by founding nation states.

For this reason, we had to speak of the great responsibility to those who will soon fall outwardly to world domination. This responsibility is there. The English-speaking population has this terrible responsibility before the world, no longer to reject the spiritual, no longer to be Baconian or Newtonian, but to take up the spirit in its new form. Picture to yourself today Newton, who formulated that astronomical world view of which Herman Grimm rightly says: “As one imagines it in the sense of this astronomical world view, that the earth and the planetary system of the sun emerged from a haze, a thin mist, that transformed and transformed, that then from this vortex also animals, man and plants also arose from this vortex, and that one day the whole will fall back into the sun, is a carrion bone around which a hungry dog circles, a more appetizing piece than this world view; and times to come will have a hard time understanding the cultural and historical madness of the Newtonian, Kant-Laplacean system that is taught in school today. People will ask: How could an entire age once be so insane as to praise this view? Today it is still considered madness to side with Goethe against Newton, to occupy oneself with Goethean conceptions about physical phenomena. But everything that lies within the tasks of our time is connected with these things. A few people are beginning to see these connections today, and it was a pleasant surprise for me when, in the last issue of our journal 'Die Dreigliederung', it was explained how what is in my book 'Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage' about the social understanding of the world means the same as what Goetheanism once meant for natural science. But just as people turned away from Goethe because he had to contradict the science of his time, so people today turn away from the threefold social order. Why? It contradicts what is customary, just as Goetheanism once did, so that it is also contradicted by this threefold social order.

These things can lead you to ask: But what should the individual do then? — First of all, it depends on one's attitude towards the matter, on a clear and objective examination. It is important that one really begins to develop a deep interest in the affairs of all humanity. You can look back on what you have experienced in the last four to five years, and never have you had more opportunities to meet a certain kind of know-it-all in the world over and over again, because basically every person was a know-it-all. Then the Germans came and knew exactly who was to blame for the war and that they were actually highly innocent; then the French came and knew exactly how everything was; then the Italians at least still stood for “sacro egoismo”. — People always knew exactly what it was all about. They all had their views, they had their thoughts, their ideas. It is indeed convenient to gain these ideas without any basis. One is French by blood, one is Polish by blood, one is Czechoslovakian by blood, and one has a certain view of life as it must develop in Europe. One does not need to do anything other than this or that, to feel it within oneself, and one judges, judges as one is confronted with the judgments. That is the great misfortune of our time: that people, without really making an effort, without taking an interest in the affairs of humanity, judge from their subconscious, consider this or that to be right, consider this or that to be indispensable. But the time is no longer there when one can consider this or that to be indispensable from one's subconscious. The time has come when we must judge only on the basis of facts, when we must make an effort to really get an overview of the necessity of the time and of what the time demands of us. Today it constricts one's heart when one meets people who are only interested in themselves. For that is the great misfortune of our time, while the only redemption of time could consist in people saying to themselves now, after the terrible things that have happened in recent years: We must take an interest in the affairs of all humanity, we must not stop at what is happening directly around us in the sphere of our own nation.

These things arise directly from spiritual science as intuitive perceptions, and I am speaking of them today in preparation for certain concluding thoughts. You see here this building, which is the representative of our Anthroposophical spiritual science. One can have feelings for one or other of the elements in this building, and one will be right. But the only person who has the right feeling for this building is the one who sees something in every single line that is demanded by the most urgent needs of our time. The person who sees that the building must stand because our time demands this or that, because this or that must be sensed in these or those columns, in these or those rows of windows; because it is necessary for humanity today to take this building, what it wants to be, out of the whole configuration of time. And anyone who feels this new style at the same time, once they have felt it through, will recognize that this style has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is specified for this or that, but that it has only to do with the most general human aspects. There is nothing about this entire structure that the American, the Englishman, the German, the Russian, the Japanese, or the Chinese cannot say yes to, because it is not shaped from the sensibilities of a single person. I will not be able to be portrayed, at least not by those who know me, as an immodest person when I say: I myself know of nothing that is currently being made of this kind that is as independent of differentiated human will and would merge into the most general knowledge and understanding of human nature as this building.

But this must be taken up if the things that arise from our motives for the future of humanity are to serve that future well.

Today I shall again insert a kind of episode into our reflections, which will serve to further the actual theme tomorrow. I shall be obliged to use a somewhat more aphoristic mode of presentation today in order to discuss certain things with you. We have, of course, taken the most diverse symptoms and phenomena from current events in order to recognize how these events are leading humanity to a grasp of spiritual realities. And it was my endeavor to make clear that this taking hold of spiritual realities cannot be merely a matter of man's continuing to take hold of the spiritual world in the future, so to speak, in order to have something from it, I might say, for his Sunday hours. That was precisely the pernicious thing in the civilization that has developed in recent centuries, that spiritual life has gradually become something so detached and abstract. In answer to the question that I posed in a public lecture in Basel some time ago: What connects the world view, the view of the spiritual or the unspiritual, that someone has as a civil servant, lawyer, factory owner, or merchant, with what one does every day? One could say: The thoughts that he has as a worldview have no influence on his professional and everyday affairs, or rather, on how he conducts them. On the one hand, one is a person of external practical life, and on the other, one has a purely abstract worldview, whether it is more or less religious or more or less scientifically colored. This has become common practice in the course of the last few centuries and has reached a climax in our so ominous time. And what underlies this is expressed in another, even more fatal circumstance, that people who have the good will to acquire a spiritual worldview are virtually absorbed in the content of this spiritual worldview, that this spiritual worldview has nothing to do with their practical life. Because practical life is the real thing, it is what one devotes oneself to externally; one has spirituality for Sundays, it is set apart from life, and life is not worthy of absorbing this spirituality. I have always endeavored to make it clear that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here, while seeking to ascend to the highest heights of spiritual life, should then cultivate in man, through this ascent into the spiritual worlds, a way of thinking, a way of imagining, that makes him suitable, adept, and practical in every aspect of everyday life. One should have something for one's business, for daily practical life, from what one also works for spiritually in the higher worlds.

This work for the spiritual world should not tempt one to say: This spiritual world is the other world, it must not be touched by the coarse everyday life; the coarse everyday life is separate, it is despised, the spiritual world is the high, the exalted. I have often pointed these things out very sharply in earlier years and have said that, over the years, many a person has come to me and said: Oh, I have such a prosaic profession, I want to leave this prosaic profession and devote myself to more ideal things. That is the worst maxim one can have in life. I have often said that anyone who, by fate or karma, is a postal worker, and a decent postal worker at that, certainly serves the world more by properly fulfilling their profession than someone who is a bad poet or even a bad journalist or the like, which one sometimes craves. The point is, when one approaches the spiritual, to take this spirituality into one's mind in such a way that it does not make one unskillful, but skillful for the outer life.

Because this maxim has disappeared from life since the 15th century and, to a certain extent, life has split into these two currents, into the outer practical life despised by idealists and mystics, and into the mystical, religious, idealistic life regarded by practical people as somewhat dreamy and starry-eyed, we now find ourselves in the deadlock of life described to you yesterday. That is the deeper reason why we are stuck in this impasse. As a result, on the one hand, in practical life, each individual stands in a small circle, as I said yesterday, working without an overview and also without a warm interest in the whole, and on the other hand, if one is idealistic enough to devote oneself to a spiritual world-view, one then wants to have this spiritual world-view in such a way that one is not educated in this spiritual world-view, for example, in practical leadership, let us say, of a proper ledger or a proper journal. There are people who consider it an advantage if someone does not understand and cannot grasp how to keep a journal or a cash book. This is the great damage that has gradually become more and more widespread over the past few centuries.

It is not an advantage to have no idea of how to keep ledgers and cash books, and it is not a blessing for humanity when there are as many people as possible who want to be idealists by not understanding anything practical and only wanting to devote themselves to spiritual contemplation. The only healthy thing in life is when these two maxims in life go so far together that one supports the other. But what has gradually emerged more and more as a life-damage in the smallest circles over the past few centuries is also expressed in the great affairs of life, in that no one, really, one can say, no one except a few people who have done it quite impractically, has actually worried about it: How can something really healthy arise from the structures that are outdated – I characterized them for you yesterday in terms of how they look on the map – that were used before the war, until 1914, to describe the states of the world? – Yes, even after the trials of the last four to five years, unfortunately we have not yet come far enough to think about these things in a healthy way. Take just one thing. When we have a cool head to consider the more distant causes of the terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half or five years, we will find that these causes lie in the industrial and commercial conditions between Central Europe and the western regions, including America, in those industrial and commercial conditions that have long since come into conflict with national borders. The state structures, which have developed out of quite different conditions and which are a relic of medieval conditions, have been used artificially as a framework for what are only commercial and industrial interests. They were not suited for that purpose at all, but they could be used for it. And today one notices that so little that a social-democratic movement, which is hopeless for longer periods of time but extremely disruptive for shorter periods, does not do it any differently. We are experiencing today that socialist theories are emerging everywhere, even in the Asian world, and they are becoming particularly radical. These socialist theories want to create something practical. Before the war they wanted to use the framework of the old states, now they want to use the framework of what has emerged from the catastrophe of war, that is to say, we say Russia, as it has emerged from the war, should be used as a framework for Bolshevik theories. If you can think according to reality, you cannot think of anything more nonsensical than this attempt. There is no greater nonsense than this construct, which initially arose out of purely medieval forces, combined then with the unnatural results that arose more and more in the war that had come to Versailles, that is, to an unpeaceful state. That this structure in the east of Europe should now take up the fantasies of Lenin and Trotsky is nonsense in the long term, and in the short term it is a tumult that must enormously delay the healthy development of Europe's humanity. This is the result if one has a sense of reality.

But this sense of reality is lacking today, one might say, in the whole of humanity's public judgment. The whole of humanity's public judgment is not formed out of a sense of reality, but actually out of abstractions, out of abstract theories. And when something arises that is not based on abstract theories, such as threefolding, something that is taken from life and, because one cannot write thirty volumes about it, which people would not read anyway, one has to summarize it briefly, then people do not recognize the spirit of reality in it, but, because they are completely filled with theories today, they consider it to be a theory all the more. One no longer has any sense of what is taken from reality, because one has become completely estranged from reality.

It must happen that people today can become practical in the most eminent sense and yet still look up to the spiritual world. For only in this way will the human mind develop healthily into the future, that these two elements in the human mind can go side by side. When the time comes that he who says: Over in the East live souls who, due to the special historical circumstances of Asia, have developed in such a way that today they have little sense for the outer world and could easily become the prey of the Europeans, who are attached to the mere material world, but that they have been able to preserve their gaze into the spiritual world. Then one will see that in the Orient we have such souls. I have often mentioned Rabindranath Tagore as an especially important representative. But this Rabindranath Tagore, who is not even an initiate but merely an Asian intellectual, has within him, I might say, the whole spirit of Asia, and you can learn much about this striving Asian spirit from his collection of lectures, 'Nationalism'.

But the souls that are over there lack any inner relationship to what has been achieved in Europe and America in relation to the outer life. Let me remind you once again of something that I have already said before you. It is only in the last few centuries that we have developed what can be called a purely mechanistic culture. Even today you will find in geography books that the entire earth is populated by about fifteen hundred million people. But that is not true if you take into account the work that is done on the earth. If, let us say, a Martian were to come down to Earth and assess the Earth's population in the following way, first asking: How much does a person work on Earth, taking into account the amount of labor they can apply? – and then asking: How much work is done altogether? — let us take the figures that existed before the war, the current figures cannot be used for this, they are not yet available either, then if we were to note how much work is done by people on earth, not fifteen hundred million would come out, but two thousand million or even two thousand two hundred million people as the earth's population. Why? Because the work done by machines on earth is actually so great that it is the equivalent of about seven hundred million human workers. If the machines did not work and if what the machines do were to be done by human labor, there would have to be seven hundred million more people on earth. I have calculated this from the amount of coal used on earth, based on an eight-hour working day. What I have said applies approximately to the coal consumption at the beginning of the 20th century and to an eight-hour working day, so that one can say: judging by what is being done on the earth, there are actually two thousand two hundred million people on the earth. But what is achieved by purely mechanical instruments of labor is more or less done entirely in Europe and America; not much of it is done in Asia today. It has begun there, but it is still in its early stages, because the Asian has no sense of this mechanization of the world. He completely lacks the sense for what has been absorbed in the Occident since the last century or even since the middle of the 15th century. But we must not just think about the fact that mechanical work is being done; we must also think about the fact that people's entire way of thinking is turning to this mechanization of the world. Today, someone can say: So-and-so many workers were needed to build the Gotthard tunnel. But today you can't build a Gotthard tunnel without knowing differential and integral calculus, and that comes from Leibniz, the English say from Newton; we won't argue about that. So the Gotthard tunnel or the Hauenstein tunnel near here could not have been built if Leibniz had not discovered differential and integral calculus in his study one day. All of European thought since Copernicus and Galileo is directed towards this mechanization of the world. Read up on Rabindranath Tagore and how much he hates this mechanization of the world.

But what will this have to lead to? In the mirror of the spiritual world view, it can be said: All those souls that are embodied today in the East, in what we call the East, will seek their next embodiment in the West. Western people will seek their next embodiment more in the East. The middle will have to form a mediation. But if you say something like a cultural-historical demand, that the whole education system and the like should be designed so that this intersecting wave of souls passes over the earth, you say something like that to the very clever people of the present, let us take the cleverest, those who are chosen by the nations to come into parliaments, then you will hear that you are a fool, that this is quite mad! But the recognition of these truths must also move people as much as what is now called anthropological truths moved people in earlier times; the mixing of races, the mutual distribution of races and so on. We must begin to look at everything from a spiritual point of view, instead of regarding it merely from an external physiological point of view, as we have done in the past. There are, of course, good Theosophists who, in moments of solemnity in their lives, think that man lives in repeated lives on earth; it is a creed for them. But that is not enough. If one merely believes in reincarnation and karma as an article of faith, it is no more valuable than making a laundry list. These things only take on value when they are integrated into the whole way of thinking about the world and also into the way of acting and behaving in the world. These things only have value when they are considered in terms of cultural history. And if you do not see these things as something you only devote yourself to in the festive moments of life, but as something you permeate with life, and if you really have such thoughts in earnest - theosophically you can of course play with these thoughts a lot with these thoughts, then one will also have a sense for the proper keeping of a cash book or a ledger, for the shaping of a proper workbench; one will also not disdain it if one is put in the position of having to do cobbling work oneself. For only in the case of someone who is able to engage practically in life, who can be dexterous in circumstances where it comes down to taking hold everywhere, in the case of such a person the whole human organism is so imbued with inner skill that this inner skill also finds expression in truly viable thoughts.

This is what should penetrate our minds. It will permeate our culture if we familiarize ourselves with what people today fear most.

One could say that there are two things today that point to two states of fear in contemporary humanity – I do not think that you, if you look at the situation with an inner sense of truthfulness, can refute me. The first is that, throughout the civilized world, there is a terrible fear of getting to the real causes of war. They do not want to look into it, or even stick their nose into it, at most with the opponent, but certainly not at home! With a few exceptions, people avoid dealing with the actual causes of the terrible human catastrophe of recent years, they are terribly afraid of it. During the war, this was even idealized. There were people who took the view: From this war will emerge a new human life, a new fertilization of the ideals of humanity and so on. - One will be able to study the events of recent times a lot to get behind the real cause of this horror catastrophe. But then nothing positive will arise as the content of this war, but it will arise that the old forms of culture and civilization have become rotten, that they have led themselves ad absurdum in this war catastrophe, that this war means nothing more than the leading ad absurdum of civilization as it was until this war. That is one thing that people are terribly afraid of, afraid of an external event. They are so afraid that today they have generally given up even thinking in terms of tomorrow. Because no reasonable person, from either side, could believe that what is called the Treaty of Versailles could ever give birth to reality. And yet, because people think only for today, not for tomorrow, this strange instrument has come into being. That is an external event.

But there is something else, and that is the fear people have of advancing into ever greater and greater awareness of the soul life. If it seems to people somehow justified to flee from consciousness into the unconscious, then they are glad. When a world view such as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes along, which strives for a complete development of consciousness and wants to arrive at its truths from this complete development of consciousness, then people do not want to approach it. It is too difficult for them. It requires activity, it requires that one really engages in flexible spiritual life. That is too difficult.

But people strive for revelation in their lower states of consciousness: first, of what spiritual life is, and second, of what lives within the human being. How many people, much more than you think, do not want to engage with spiritual truths grasped with a healthy soul sense today. But if something from the spiritual worlds is proclaimed to them by a medium, then they fall for it. One does not need to make an effort to understand it. It comes about unconsciously, and one wants to believe the unconscious. The other thing that follows directly from this is the blatant spread of psychoanalysis. It is hard to believe how this psychoanalysis has taken root in people's minds with breakneck speed. What does it consist of? It consists of the fact that all kinds of medical people are opening up today and – it's hard to say in a nutshell, I've often analyzed psychoanalysis here – setting up something that brings what is subconscious in the human psyche up into consciousness. People are made to tell their dreams, and they explore earlier experiences of disappointment, of unfulfilled desires and so on, which have then been forgotten and formed islands in the soul and so on. In this way, they try to get a clear picture of what actually lives in the human being. Particularly clever people have found out that a great deal lives in the human soul, which takes root in the soul during early childhood in the form of unnatural feelings and sensations, which are then pushed down into the subconscious; but they continue to live in the human being, the human being is their slave. These people trace the Oedipus myth back to the unnatural feelings that every child is supposed to have towards its mother and so on. These people are clear in their view that every little girl is actually jealous of her mother because she loves her father, and every little boy is jealous of his father because he loves his mother. From this arises a complex of feelings, which, transformed into myth, appears in the Oedipus myth and the like. People do not want to believe that spiritual things play a role, but spiritual things that must be permeated with the light of consciousness, people are afraid of that. They are afraid of bringing these things into the light of consciousness. They would prefer to keep everything shrouded in a nebulous darkness. I have already pointed out to you a splendid example, which keeps cropping up time and again when psychoanalysis is discussed: a lady is invited to an evening entertainment at a house where the lady of the house is ailing and the farewell party is being celebrated because she has to travel to a spa. The master of the house stays at home, the lady of the house has to go to the spa. The evening entertainment is over. The lady of the house has already been sent to the train station, the evening party is leaving and is on its way home. A cab, not a car, is driving around the corner, and the evening party is moving out of the way to the left and right. But the one lady I am actually eyeing does not move to the left or to the right, but remains in the middle of the street and runs in front of the horses. The coachman naturally makes a terrible din, but the lady runs and runs, and the coachman has the greatest difficulty in holding the horses back, because he could run over the lady. They come to a bridge. The lady, quite an object for the psychoanalysts, throws herself into the stream, and of course the evening party follows suit to save her. What do you do with her? Well, of course, take her back to the host's house, that's the next step.

The psychoanalyst now has this lady in front of him. He lets her tell him everything she went through in her youth, and he now also happily comes to the conclusion that when she was a very little girl, she was crossing the street and a horse came around the corner; she was very frightened. That has sunk down into the subconscious. It is down there. Since then she has been so afraid of horses that she ran away from them on the street, not dodging to the right or to the left. That is the isolated province of the soul that she has, the fear of horses, which dwells in the subconscious.

There is something in this subconscious, but one must penetrate this subconscious with the light of spiritual research. Then one comes to the conclusion that this subconscious is very clever under certain pathological conditions, that under the ordinary individual human consciousness, however, it is not exactly the foundations of the Oedipus myth, not exactly the fear of the horse that once crossed one's path, but rather a certain sophistication. Because the lady who was invited to that evening party naturally wanted nothing more than to spend the night in that house after the lady of the house had been sent off to the bath, and the best way for the subconscious to arrange things was to seize the next best opportunity – had it not been the steed, had it been something else – that the evening party would have to bring her back to the house. That is how she had achieved her goal. Of course, according to her upbringing, according to what she had absorbed, she would never have violated her morality to such an extent as to do something like that. In the superconscious, she is not that clever; but in the subconscious, there are many sophisticated impulses that can be very clever.

This whole spreading psychoanalysis, which takes on such blatant forms today, in which, more than you think, today in particular the more hopeful intellectuals believe - I say this not in a derogatory sense, but even with the tone of truth -, in which even today theologians would like to base religion, this psychoanalysis is the other fear product of the present. People are afraid of consciousness. They do not want things to be seen in the clear light of consciousness, but they want the most important thing to dwell down there in the subconscious, and for man to be dominated in regard to his most important things, especially in regard to his religious feelings. Read about this in William James, the American. Because whether it is called psychoanalysis in some areas of Europe or whether it is called it as William James, the American, expresses these things, it is all the same. There is a fear of the conscious. One does not want the most important thing that lives in man to be in his consciousness. After all, man would have to think more if he were to direct himself with his conscious will. It is important that the human being has justified that he thinks less.

Our eurythmy is worked out entirely from the consciousness. It is the opposite of everything dreamy. People are afraid that it is less artistic because they associate the artistic with the dreamy. But that is nonsense. In the artistic, it does not matter whether it comes from this or that region, but that it is artistic in its forms and in its development. This eurythmy, which is based entirely on the superconscious, on the opposite of the subconscious, was recently appraised by a gentleman, as I was told, who is now also a doctor: He noticed a lot of unconsciousness in it. — Of course, this is proof that the gentleman did not understand eurythmy at all. Precisely that which is the lifeblood of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been noticed very little. And it will only be fully noticed when one can really undergo such an inner education of thinking, feeling and will through this spiritual science that it makes one more skillful for life, not less. I do not want to claim that today all those who have made anthroposophy their creed are skilled in life. A creed does not mean much in this respect. I really dare not claim that all anthroposophists are skilled in life. But you see, what is expressed in the real movement of the Anthroposophical Society is often what is brought into it from outside. And only then will anthroposophically oriented spiritual science be able to be what it should be for the world, not only when mystical tendencies, unworldliness, false idealism, and a kind of spiritualism — I could also say “uncleism”; no, I mean similar things — are brought into it , but when what can be gained in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is carried out: a stimulation of the soul life that passes into the limbs, that takes hold of the whole human being - not just the creed - and thereby enables people to intervene in the affairs of the world. That is what it is mainly about. In this one should seek the whole seriousness of life.

It is perhaps not well known, given how the whole make-up of the human soul changes over time, but also how what is considered necessary for the human being in the social life is subject to transformation. I have already repeatedly included such things in previous considerations. For example, I mentioned how it was by no means a general requirement in the ancient Roman Empire that all children learn the basics of arithmetic, but that it was a general requirement that every child who grew up knew the Twelve Tables of the Law. The view of what should be the general opinion, general knowledge within humanity, has changed a great deal over time. These things are connected with the whole development of humanity. In order to understand the necessary things about this, it is necessary to visualize the true nature of the developmental processes of humanity.

Before there was a population, as we now know it, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and also in America, there was an extensive continent where the Atlantic Ocean is now. So essentially, the earth's surface was once the area between Europe, Africa on one side, and America on the other, at a time when most of Europe, Africa, Asia and America were underwater.

We know that this Atlantic continent, as we call it, was submerged as a result of a significant catastrophe, and we have already mentioned several times that migrations took place from this Atlantic continent, which gradually became more and more uninhabitable, to the gradually rising lands that now make up Europe, Asia and Africa. In essence, the population of Europe, Asia and Africa consists of the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans.

Now, however, significant distinctions arose among these populations, and the after-effects of these distinctions are still present. The after-effects of these distinctions can be understood by considering the following: there were certain sections of the population that migrated from the Atlantic continent to the east. We will ignore America for the moment, which was also populated from the Atlantic continent at that time, but we will ignore that. So certain parts of the population moved east. A number of them moved far into Asia, and among the populations that had moved from west to east in this way, those cultures emerged that we have described as ancient Indian culture, ancient Persian culture, ancient Egyptian- Chaldean culture, then the Greek-Latin contemporary culture, and now in Europe the fifth post-Atlantic culture, in which we ourselves live, which began around the middle of the 15th century. But these cultures arose in the following way: certain sections of the population, because of their psychological and physical make-up, found themselves drawn to go furthest across to Asia, while others remained behind in Europe. Later, of course, those migrations took place, of which external history also speaks, through which in turn certain sections of the population of Asia moved across to Europe. But what now forms the European population is partly, but not merely, the descendants of those who later moved over from Asia. Rather, what populates Europe today is also the descendants of those who originally remained behind during the migration from the Atlantic continent to the East. And much of what lives in the European human being can be traced back to the constitutions of body and soul of those who remained behind in Europe, who did not migrate to Asia. In Europe, we are dealing with a confluence of the most diverse population elements. But the fact that certain parts of the population moved over to Asia, while others remained behind in Europe, brought about a significant difference, a significant differentiation of the European-Astatic population. The populations that had originally migrated to Asia in the 8th, 7th, and 6th millennia were of such a nature that they incorporated human spiritual culture, which was able to spread, very strongly into the soul element. Now, one can still see in the population of Asia, which has indeed degenerated in certain respects, that this population has developed the spiritual and also the intellectual element essentially in the soul realm. It can be said, and this is not a figure of speech, but is actually the absolute truth: this eastern population, of which the Asian population is the most outstanding member, has allowed the body to take little part in its development. All that has been invented, that has lived and, to a certain extent, still lives in the culture of Asia, even in its decadence, depends little on the physical properties of the human being; it depends strongly on the properties of the soul. That is why the spiritual culture that emerged in Asia, which no longer exists today and is not appreciated today because the historical documents say little about it, can only be admired by those who are able to truly empathize with the tremendous spiritual insights that the Asian population was once able to achieve thousands of years ago.

What has been handed down historically, what can be recognized from the historical records, does not give a picture of what was once present in this Asia as an ancient wisdom of man. What is dug up today as Chaldean astronomy, as Indian Brahmanic wisdom, as Egyptian wisdom, through these or those documents, through these or those monuments, is all a late product. All these things lead back to a wonderful, magnificent, powerful insight into the spiritual world, lead back to a magnificent, powerful scientific connection that people have seen through, between the earth and the whole cosmos, the whole world of stars. People in Europe today are not at all inclined to understand, even in retrospect, what was known in those ancient times, nor do they appreciate it, because, so to speak, they cannot do anything with it. They have no way of orienting themselves by these things.

But all that wonderful wisdom that once existed in the East lived by the fact that these people received spiritual knowledge with pure souls, with little involvement of the physical body. Then, as you know – and you will find more about this in my book “Mysticism: The Foundation of Christianity” – from all the wonderful wisdom that the ancient Orient possessed, the view that was gained through Christianity emerged. For essentially, what the view of Christianity is, is a legacy of the Orient. But part of the original oriental wisdom came to Europe through the Greeks, and part of it came through the transformation that it underwent through the mystery of Golgotha.

And now please note what is extremely important: that which has been developed in the soul without the physical organization in the East, that wanders over the south of Europe, over Africa, into the rest of Europe, where it meets the population that, with the exception of those who have withdrawn from Asia, were essentially the people left behind during the migrations from Atlantis to the East. And the question must arise among us: what particular constitution did these people who had remained in Europe have, precisely because they had not moved across to Asia, because they had remained in Europe?

This brings us to something tremendously significant. We come to realize or to have to realize that this population, which was left behind in Europe during the migration from Atlantis to the East, received its external and internal knowledge, its insights into the spiritual world and into the social, economic and commercial order of the world through the function of the physical organization. The population of Europe is essentially characterized by the fact that the main part of these Europeans absorbed what they absorbed primarily through the instrument of their body. The people who migrated further east were such that they absorbed more with the soul; they neglected, because it was not given to them to develop the physical function, everything that was to be grasped directly from the world and from the human order through the physical. The Europeans used the physical tools of their brain and the rest of their physical selves to create what they considered their culture. And so we have the strange phenomenon that that which in Asia also developed as Christianity out of a wonderful primal wisdom migrated to Europe and was received under very different conditions in Europe than it was formed in Asia. In Asia it was only formed by the soul; in Europe it was received by the body. Why could it be received by the body? It could be absorbed by the physical because the European bodies were actually formed in such a way that they could become the right tools for the spiritual. The bodies of the Asians were not formed in this way. The population of Europe had retarded in order to make the body receptive to the assimilation of knowledge, of will impulses and so on, under the climatic and other cultural conditions of old Europe.

In the context of the world as a whole, one must have this view of one thing and that of another; but the less good also has its rightful place. Some people cannot understand this. We also try to prove the harmfulness of materialism; but on the other hand, we must recognize that materialism had to come into the 19th century. But now it must be overcome. Some people would like to take the easy way out on such questions. They say: the human body is just the tool in which the soul dwells; the soul is heavenly, the body is earthly, let us stick to the soul. That is a comfortable view of life. But it is to materialism's credit that it has taught people that the physical also has a share in the spiritual, that the body was organized under certain elements of the human race precisely to receive the spiritual. And the most outstanding people were those whom Christianity encountered. In the early days, when Christianity spread in Europe, the bodies of these European people were good instruments for receiving Christianity, because the physical brain, having developed in a certain way from the spiritual world, was a good receiving organ for Christianity. And while in Asia Christianity emerged after centuries or millennia of development in a culture that was only for souls, in Asia this Christianity encountered a decadent culture that was dying out, a soul culture that was good for ancient times but no longer good for the time in which Christianity took hold. In Europe, this Christianity encountered receptive people who were organized through their bodies to grow into this Christianity and to make their bodies into instruments for receiving Christianity; for there was still much spirit in these bodies, cosmic spirit, nature spirit. That is precisely the significance of the native population of Europe in the post-Atlantic period, that there was spirit in the bodies and that Christianity was received with this spirit in the bodies. But this spirit gradually disappeared, this spirit ceased. This spirit did not remain with the European bodies. And that is precisely the most essential thing about the transition that took place in the middle of the 15th century of the Christian era, that essentially the natural spirit that was in the human European bodies began to fade, that the bodies gradually became incapable of understanding from within what they had first received with fresh strength, because with physical strength, as Christianity. As a result, understanding of Christianity gradually declined from the 15th century onwards. Only tradition remained. The underlying conditions are actually misunderstood in ordinary external science. One believes that a human being is a human being, and one believes that one can study this human being by carrying corpses to clinics and anatomizing them. But that is the very least one can learn about a person, for the delicate constitution of these people changes almost from century to century. The human race of one century is fundamentally quite different in terms of its delicate constitution from the human race of the previous century. Because this does not occur in broad terms and cannot be established by rough scientific means, people do not want to know about it. But this human being is a very fine organization, and that which develops in succession over the course of time remains side by side. For gross anatomy, there is a belief, but it is only a belief: if you draw blood from a Westerner and draw blood from an Easterner, you are just drawing blood; blood is blood. But this view that blood is blood is complete nonsense before a truly deeper knowledge of humanity. I can only speak schematically about this matter and today I can only, I would like to say, state the results of extensive research. But these results are extremely important. If I were to draw something schematically – which, of course, would be different if it were drawn schematically rather than in real life – I would have to draw it in the following way. If I were to draw the blood clot in the living human body of a Westerner, I would draw it like this (see drawing a). If I were to draw the blood clot in the vein of a Russian person, I would have to draw it like this (see drawing b).

The relationship between the two line forms reflects the relationship between the inner, material character of the blood in the eastern population and the character of the blood in the western population. But what I have characterized as physical receptivity is connected with blood development. This physical receptivity, as I said, has been exhausted; today, at least for the Western European population and its American followers, the physical no longer yields anything spiritual. Therefore, the spiritual must be sought in another way, in the way that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science indicates. Roughly speaking, we can say that the spiritual substance that emerged from the physical materiality, which essentially served to open up understanding for Christianity in the centuries up to the middle of the 15th century, has dried up. Today, especially in Western culture, we live with dried-up bodies, and what asserts itself is a mere mechanistic culture because it comes from inanimate, dried-up bodily organizations. This change is therefore not just one that today's abstract historians paint, it is one that goes deep into the physical being of the human being.

Most people today are closed to what I have just told you. But just as the Romans learned the Twelve Tables, just as it was later customary to regard the multiplication table as something necessary for a human being, so in the not too distant future, which we must work towards, it will be necessary to have such elementary concepts of human development in general education. Otherwise, every fifteen years or so, there will be a catastrophe in the development of civilized humanity, such as we have had in the last five to six years. The fact that people have closed themselves off to what is about to break in as a new development in civilized humanity is the real reason for the confusion that has arisen in the last five to six years. And if people want to continue living out of their dried-up materialized bodies, then they will, all by themselves, concoct properties out of this dried-up, materialized body, which every fifteen to twenty years lead to such confusion as the confusion we had in Europe in 1914. Today there are only two possibilities: either we come to terms with this influx of a new formation into humanity, and thus also with the influx of a new understanding of Christianity, supported by spiritual science, or we have to reckon with destructive elements entering human social life to a terrible extent.

Our English friends will now go back to England – hopefully not for a while yet – but when they do, they will meet a man whom I once characterized here as a representative of the present time in a special way, because, despite being much older today, he has not progressed beyond the developmental stage of twenty-seven throughout his entire life. There you will meet Lloyd George, who set the tone there, probably still does, a man who was able to set the tone precisely because he remained capable of development only until the age of twenty-seven, then was of course elected to Parliament and has not been capable of development since, so that now, as an old man, he still thinks like a twenty-seven-year-old, that is, immaturely. You will find that such a mind has given rise to particular ideas, for example: So far we have sided with the Russian counter-revolution, it has been defeated; it is no longer profitable to side with the Russian counter-revolution, so we try to come to terms with the Bolsheviks, we try to come to a tolerable peace with them.

This is the typical thinking of a man who is far removed from any understanding of the real laws of life, who has no idea of what is real in the world, and this is how other so-called “statesmen” think - I note that I now always write “statesmen” only in quotation marks. In this context, one must not forget that this “statesman” still towers head and shoulders above the abstract dilettante Woodrow Wilson, by whom the whole world allowed itself to be seduced at a certain moment in European development. In such matters one was indeed, in certain periods, a “preacher in the wilderness”. In the times when the whole world worshipped Woodrow Wilson, I here in Switzerland repeatedly said exactly the same things about Woodrow Wilson that I am saying to you today. Now the world is beginning to realize, too late, how unrealistic Woodrow Wilson's policies are. And people who sat with him at the Versailles Conference were amazed at how little even the most rudimentary instinct for reality this man brought with him from America to Europe.

The things in which one lives today must be viewed from world horizons if one wants to have a say in the smallest things. And one will not be able to view them if one does not make it a principle that a certain education about man must become general education in the very near future, just as the multiplication table began to become part of general education in a certain period of time.

Whether or not social demands arise is not open to discussion, just as it is not open to discussion whether or not an earthquake will occur in a particular region. But how we should relate to such phenomena is open to discussion. No one will be able to gain a proper perspective on such phenomena without a sense of humanity, as indicated above. This is something with which one must penetrate oneself very deeply. And whether the life of the civilized European world will be able to continue or not will depend on whether there will be a sufficiently large number of people who see through the impossibility of a further world regiment that is particularly influenced by such people out of touch with reality as Lloyd George is. You all know that I am not speaking from some kind of jingoistic point of view, from some particular side, but I am speaking from a purely objective point of view, from the observation of objective facts. I have never had anything against Woodrow Wilson or Lloyd George as a German, as a so-called German. Compared to other people today, even Lloyd George is a “great guy”. But he is a man who remains a twenty-seven-year-old, who is incapable of assimilating that which one can only assimilate when the descending evolution takes hold, when one has passed beyond the thirties. For the dried-up European bodies, which do not want to turn to absorb something spiritual, lose the possibility of development in their thirties. They may be members of parliament, even as accomplished and as exceptionally good a member of parliament as Lloyd George, who, as is well known, carried out quite admirable reforms when he was made a minister. Isn't it true that this is what you do to opposition politicians: you take them into the ministry so that they don't cause a nuisance in parliament? At a certain moment in England Lloyd George was also made a minister, at first because they did not want him in the opposition; but he was made a minister by being given a department about which he knew nothing. That is the usual way of dealing with dangerous parliamentarians. And lo and behold, when Lloyd George was given the department he understood nothing about, he developed a feverish activity, introduced reforms that are truly admirable, and the others stood there with long noses.

All these phenomena must be judged today from the standpoint of the laws of human development. In general, it is not pleasant to judge humanity according to its peculiarities, and above all, it is not in people's nature today to respond to other people. That is why people today are happy to be labeled. There is no inclination to go to the trouble of meeting a person to find out if they have abilities, if something lives in their soul that has possibilities for effect. People do not want to get involved in judging people in this way, through direct impressions drawn from life. They need other possibilities. Someone has graduated, he has a doctorate – so he must be a wise man. You don't need to get to know him first, you just need to know: He has passed exams, or he is – I don't know whether one should say: he was – a government councilor. That's nice, he is someone to respect, you don't need to worry about whether he has any possibilities for action in his soul. A government has made one a councilor, with a C, not a fifth wheel on the wagon, with a D. So you need external possibilities. In the future, we will need a truly direct relationship from person to person. No one will acquire this who does not develop his human spiritual powers in an appropriate way. This appropriate way is through spiritual science. For example, if you read my “Secret Science,” you can read what is in it and absorb the content. If you take it in so that you can then recite it quite well by heart, then I would almost find it more useful if you read a cookbook, or if you are not women, some treatise on collective agreements or the like; it will be more useful than if you read my “Secret Science”. This “occult science” only has its significance when reading if, through the special formation of thoughts - which so annoys people that they refuse to deal with what they call “badly stylized” - this way of writing and thinking has an educational effect on the soul's entire makeup, when the how, not the what, shapes the soul. Anyone who allows the “Occult Science” — it could, of course, also be another book — to take effect on them, then goes out into life, will see that he has actually strengthened his inner vision, so that he gains knowledge of human nature from it. Things become something quite different from a mere scholastic assimilation of the subject! Nowadays, when people have read a book, they imagine that they have done what is necessary when they have the content within them, that is, they have it within them in such a way that they can possibly pass an exam. But spiritual-scientific books are never meant in this way. There the most essential thing is not done when one can count the content on the fingers, but there the necessary thing is only done when the things have passed over into the whole soul constitution, into the whole soul condition, when one has thereby developed suitable soul powers for life.

For decades I have said this again and again in the most diverse forms. But the fact that one now knows that man consists of this and this, that there are repeated earth lives and so on, is therefore considered the main thing over wide circles. — But that is not the main thing. The main thing is that through this whole way of thinking something is grasped in man that cannot be grasped by anything else in man. And that which is grasped in this way by the human being must be there. If it is not there, then all the well-meaning people who say, for example, “There must always be a Christianity,” will achieve nothing. For just as you cannot extract magnetism from a non-magnetic piece of iron, so you cannot, if nothing else occurs, extract a Christianity from what becomes of Europeans. It can remain traditional for a time, but people will accept the tradition out of dishonesty. What is needed is for something to be touched in the souls that will lead to a new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, and with that, to a new understanding of all of Christianity. In ancient pre-Christian times, as I have already mentioned today, there was a widespread, magnificent, admirable primeval wisdom, and anyone who wants to admire pagan wisdom is right to do so. And anyone who wants to admire pagan wisdom even in those times when it already echoes Christian wisdom is even more right to do so. The first Christian fathers were actually wiser, much wiser than their present-day successors. Their present-day successors forbid the reading of the anthroposophical writings. As you know, Catholics have been forbidden to do so by the decree of the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome since July 18, 1919. But the first Christian church fathers said: That which is now called Christianity was always there, only in a different form, and Heraclitus and Socrates and Plato were, in their own way, Christians before the Mystery of Golgotha. This is, of course, an extremely heretical remark for today's members of the Roman Index Congregation, even though it comes from genuine church fathers, very heretical! And yet it must be said: something is being decided. This decree of the Congregation of the Index in Rome, that the reading of anthroposophical books is to be forbidden for Catholics, is actually the right consequence of the development of Roman Catholicism, the development of the Roman Catholic Church, and one must realize that a new spiritual current must come that understands Christianity anew.

As I said, the pre-Christian world view is admirable in a way. But it did not extend to certain things of an earthly nature. And here I touch on something that is of extraordinary importance for the evolution of the earth. With regard to everything that a person bears within himself as a physical human being, human development was actually a given. In the fifteenth millennium BC, still in the old Atlantis, man had developed all the qualities of his physical constitution to a certain extent within himself, and these then hardened more or less slowly. But in terms of the main development, in terms of the development of knowledge, it was different. Something remained, like a great human manifestation, a knowledge of humanity, imparted by the leaders of the mysteries until the event of Golgotha. What the old pagan sages had within them was, so to speak, the mirror image of an even older wisdom, but of a wisdom that could still observe spiritually; but it was all a mirror image. Then the Mystery of Golgotha entered, that is to say, nothing less than something extraterrestrial: the Christ Being. Something that descended to Earth from spheres that are quite extraterrestrial united with a human physical body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus something entered into the earthly development of humanity that had not occurred throughout the entire previous evolution of the earth: something cosmic entered into humanity. From the 15th millennium until the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings have essentially lived with their physical constitution through their mental head constitution of ancient inheritance. Now something occurred that, in a certain respect, connected heaven with earth. An extraterrestrial being united with a human body.

Understanding such a mystery was still possible for the most backward people, who had remained in Europe and still had certain natural spiritual qualities in their bodies. It was not possible for the more advanced Asians to grasp this. It was, so to speak, still a gift from God for this European population to have bodies that were receptive to Christianity through their physical constitution. Since the 15th century this has ceased, and therefore spiritual knowledge must be introduced in order to comprehend anew the Mystery of Golgotha. Without insight into these processes of human development, human nature will not advance and must face its downfall, for that which has entered into earthly evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha must simply disappear. Without a renewed spiritual understanding of the connection between Earth and the extra-terrestrial world, the Mystery of Golgotha cannot live on.

Since this fact exists, those who want to remain in the traditional and the old - and you know how numerous they are, because I have always told you from time to time about the ugly attacks that come from that side — turn with particular virulence against the truth proclaimed from spiritual science that one has to do with a Cosmic Christ, with a Christ who is not merely earthly but cosmic. It is strange, but it is nevertheless the case that, for example, the Roman Catholic clergy and Jesuitism are most annoyed that spiritual science speaks of a Cosmic Christ. The fact is that a separation of the spirits is taking place today. And in the face of this, one should not close one's eyes; on the contrary, one should open one's eyes. In order to be able to set up everything that is to be set up for humanity, even in the smallest place where one stands, it is necessary today to have insight into the great circumstances of life.

Please do not say: There is no time for this. — It is also true that people say: People today are so busy, so endlessly busy, that they don't have time to look up at these spiritual truths. — I would like to add up for you how much idle chatter takes place at “five o'clock teas,” at “Jausen” (snacks), at “afternoon teas,” at “Frühschoppen” (morning drinks), in certain areas at “Dämmerschoppen” (evening drinks) — there are also such things — at “Sk and other things, and you would see that a considerable amount of time would be freed up in which people would have the opportunity, if they wanted it, to familiarize themselves with what is so urgently needed for the future development of humanity. It is not a lack of time, it is a lack of interest on the part of people, their lethargy. Encephalitis lethargica is now appearing externally in isolated cases; it has long since infected the souls of people in the wider human environment. The sleeping sickness of souls is a very widespread epidemic. For what is ultimately at issue is having the will to set one's spiritual powers in motion. With few exceptions, anyone who studies at a university today does not really have to exert their thinking. A certain amount of knowledge, mostly experimental results, is imparted, and this can be absorbed. There is no need to use one's thinking power. But this education must be replaced by the fact that the power of thought becomes mobile again, that the whole soul becomes mobile, that assiduity of the inner soul life takes the place of carelessness and drowsiness. One can be very active in the outer life and tremendously drowsy in one's soul life. But this must end in the development of humanity. That it ends is a truly deep, profound necessity. Today people say: First of all, humanity must have bread. - Of course it must have bread. But if we do not think about how to organize things spiritually so that this bread can also be produced tomorrow, then we will only eat what the earth can still produce today, and we will have no bread tomorrow or the day after. With the old way of thinking, you can still have bread today for a while. But figuratively speaking, of course, you will have no bread the day after tomorrow if you do not operate your institutions in accordance with a new spirituality.

Think about this matter, for it is a serious one.

The idea of other worlds lying beneath or behind the physical world is very familiar to us, and as an introduction to what I propose to put before you, I want to speak today of certain characteristics of these worlds. By widening and extending the knowledge we already possess, still other aspects of this subject will become clear to us.

As you know, the world bordering upon that known to our ordinary consciousness is the so-called world of Imagination. The world of Imagination is far more inwardly mobile and flexible than our physical world with its clear-cut lines of demarcation and its sharply defined objects. When the veil formed by the physical world is broken through, we enter an ethereal, fluidic world, and when we experience this first spiritual world, the feeling arises that we are outside the physical body. In this spiritual world we are at once conscious of a new and different relationship to the physical body; it is a relationship such as we otherwise feel to our eyes or ears. The physical body in its totality works as if it were a kind of organ of perception; but we very soon realize that, properly speaking, it is not the physical but the ether-body that is the real organ of perception, The physical body merely provides a kind of scaffolding around the ether-body. We begin, gradually, to live consciously in the ether-body, to feel it as a sense-organ which perceives a world of weaving, moving pictures and sounds. And then we are aware of being related to the ether-body within the physical body just as in ordinary life we are related to our ears or eyes.

This feeling of being outside the physical body is an experience similar in some respects to that of sleep. As beings of spirit-and-soul we are outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but our consciousness is dimmed during the experience, and we know nothing of what is really happening to us and around us.

You will see from this that there can be a relationship to the physical body quite different from that to which we are accustomed in ordinary life. This is a fact to which attention must be called by Spiritual Science and it is an experience which will become more and more common in human beings as evolution leads on into the future.

I have said repeatedly that the cultivation of Spiritual Science today is not the outcome of any arbitrary desire, but is a necessity of evolution at the present time. This feeling of separation from the physical body is an experience that will arise in human beings more and more frequently in the future, without being understood. A time will come when a great many people will find themselves asking: “Why is it that I feel as if my being were divided, as if a second being were standing by my side?” This feeling will arise as naturally as hunger or thirst or other such experiences and it must be understood by men of the present and future. It will become intelligible when, through Spiritual Science, people begin to understand what this experience of division within them really signifies.

In the domain of Education, particularly, attention will have to be paid to it; indeed we shall all have to learn to pay more heed than hitherto to certain experiences which will become increasingly common in children as time goes on. It is true that in later life, when the whole impression made by the physical world is very strong, these feelings and experiences will not be particularly noticeable in the near future, but as time goes on they will become more and more intense. They will occur, to begin with, in children, and grown-up people will hear from children many things which in the ordinary way are pooh-poohed but which will have to be understood because they are connected with deep secrets of evolution.

We shall hear children saying: “I have seen a being who said this or that to me, who told me what to do.”—The materialist, of course, will tell such a child that this is all nonsense, that no such being exists. But students of Spiritual Science will have to understand the significance of the phenomenon. If a child says: “I saw someone who came to me, he went away again but he keeps on coming and I cannot get rid of him”—then anyone who understands Spiritual Science will realize that a phenomenon which will appear in greater and greater definition as time goes on, is here revealing itself in the life of the child. What does this really signify?

We shall understand it if we think of two fundamental and typical experiences, the first of which was particularly significant in the Greco-Latin age, while the other is significant in our own time, when it is beginning, gradually, to take shape. Whereas the first experience reached a kind of culmination in the Greco-Latin epoch, we are slowly moving towards the second.

Experiences deriving from the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman are all the time playing into human life. In this basic experience of man during the Fourth Post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman epoch, Lucifer's influence was the greater; in our own epoch, Ahriman is the predominant influence. Lucifer is connected with all those experiences which, lacking the definition imparted by the senses, remain undifferentiated and obscure.

Lucifer is connected with the experience of breathing, of the in-breathing and the out-breathing. The relationship between a man's breathing and the functioning of his organism as a whole must be absolutely regular and normal. The moment the breathing process is in any way disturbed, instead of remaining the unconscious operation to which no attention need be paid, it becomes a conscious process, of which we are more or less dreamily aware. And when, to put it briefly, the breathing process becomes too forceful, when it makes greater claims on the organism than the organism can meet, then it is possible for Lucifer (not he himself but the hosts belonging to him) to enter with the breath into the organism.

I am speaking here of a familiar experience of dream-life. It may arise in many forms and with growing intensity. A nightmare in which the disturbed breathing process makes a man conscious in dream, so that experiences of the spiritual world intermingle with the dream and give rise to the anxiety and fear which often accompany a nightmare—all such experiences have their origin in the Luciferic element. When, instead of the regular breathing, there is a feeling of being choked or strangled, this is connected with the possibility that Lucifer may be mingling with the breathing.

This is the cruder form of the process, where, as the result of a diminution of consciousness, Lucifer intermingles with the breathing and, in the dream, takes the form of a strangler. That is the crude form of the experience. But there is an experience more delicate and more intangible than that of being physically strangled. It does not, as a rule, occur to people that a certain familiar experience is really a less crude form of that of strangulation. Yet whenever anything becomes a problem in the soul or gives rise to doubt concerning one thing or another in the world, this is a subtler form of the experience of being strangled. It can truly be said that when we feel obliged to question, when a riddle, either great or trifling, confronts us, then something seems to be strangling us, but in such a way that we do not heed it. Nevertheless, every doubt, every problem is a subtle form of nightmare.

And so experiences which often take a crude form, become much more subtle and intangible when they arise in the life of soul itself. It is to be presumed that science will be led some day to study how the breathing process is connected with the urge to question, or with the feeling of being assailed by doubt; but whether this happens or not, everything that is associated with questioning and doubt, with feelings of dissatisfaction caused when something in the world demands an answer and we are thrown back entirely upon our own resources—all this is connected with the Luciferic powers.

In the light of Spiritual Science it can be said that whenever we feel a sensation of strangulation in a nightmare, or whenever some doubt or question inwardly oppresses or makes us uneasy, the breathing process becomes stronger, more forceful. There is something in the breathing which must be harmonized, toned down and modified if human nature is to function in the right and normal way.

What happens when the breathing process becomes excessively vigorous and forceful? The ether-body expands, becomes too diffuse; and as this takes effect in the physical body, it tends to break up the physical body. An over-exuberant, too widely extended ether-body gives rise to an excessively vigorous breathing process and this provides the Luciferic forces with opportunity to work.

The Luciferic forces, then, can make their way into the human being when the ether-body has expanded beyond the normal. One can also say that the Luciferic forces tend to express themselves in an ether-body that has expanded beyond the limits of the human form, that is to say, in an ether-body requiring more space than is provided within the boundaries of the human skin.

Of attempts made to find an appropriate form in which to portray this process, the following may be said.—In its normal state, the ether-body moulds and shapes the physical form of man. But as soon as the ether-body expands, as soon as it tries to create for itself greater space and an arena transcending the boundaries of the human skin, it tends to produce other forms. The human form cannot here be retained; the ether-body strives to grow out of and beyond the human form. In olden days men found the solution for this problem. When an extended ether-body—which is not suited to the nature of man but to the Luciferic nature—makes itself felt and takes shape before the eye of soul, what kind of form emerges? The Sphinx!

Here we have a clue to the nature of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is really the being who has us by the throat, who strangles us. When the ether-body expands as a result of the force of the breathing, a Luciferic being appears in the soul. In such an ether-body there is then not the human, but the Luciferic form, the form of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is the being who brings doubts, who torments the soul with questions.

And so there is a definite connection between the Sphinx and the breathing process. But we also know that the breathing process is connected in a very special way with the blood. Therefore the Luciferic forces also operate in the blood, permeating and surging through it. By way of the breathing, the Luciferic forces can everywhere make their way into the blood of the human being and when excessive energy is promoted in the blood, the Luciferic nature—the Sphinx—becomes very strong.

Because man is open to the Cosmos in his breathing, he is confronted by the Sphinx. It was paramountly during the Greco-Latin epoch of civilization that, in their breathing, men felt themselves confronting the Sphinx in the Cosmos. The legend of Oedipus describes how the human being faces the Sphinx, how the Sphinx torments him with questions. The picture of the human being and the Sphinx, or of the human being and the Luciferic powers in the Cosmos, gives expression to a deeply-rooted experience of men as they were during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, and indicates that when, in however small a degree, a man breaks through the boundaries of his normal life on the physical plane, he comes into contact with the Sphinx-nature. At this moment Lucifer approaches him and he must cope with Lucifer, with the Sphinx.

The basic tendency of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is different. The trend of evolution has been such that the ether-body has contracted and is far less prone to diffusion or expansion. The ether-body, instead of being too large, is too small, and this will become more marked as evolution proceeds. If it can be said that in the man of ancient Greece, the ether-body was too large, it can be said that in the man of modern times the ether-body is compressed and contracted, has become too small. The more human beings are led by materialism to disdain the Spiritual, the more will the ether-body contract and wither. But because the organization and functions of the physical body depend upon the ether-body—inasmuch as the ether-body must permeate the physical in the right way—the physical body too will always tend to dry up, to wither, if the contraction of the ether-body is excessive; and if the physical body became too dry, men would have feet of horn instead of the feet of a normal human being. As a matter of fact, man will not actually find himself with feet of horn, but the tendency is there within him, owing to this proclivity of the ether-body to weaken and dry up. Now into this dried-up ether-body, Ahriman can insinuate himself, just as Lucifer can creep into an extended, diffuse ether-body. Ahriman will assume the form which indicates a lack of power in the ether-body. It unfolds insufficient etheric force for properly developed feet and will produce hornlike feet, goat's feet.

Mephistopheles is Ahriman. There is good reason, as I have just indicated, for portraying him with the feet of a goat. Myths and legends are full of meaning: Mephistopheles is very often depicted with horses' hoofs; his feet have dried up and become hoofs. If Goethe had completely understood the nature of Mephistopheles he would not have made him appear in the guise of a modern cavalier, for by his very nature Mephistopheles-Ahriman lacks the etheric forces necessary to permeate and give shape to the normal physical form of a human being.

Yet another characteristic of Mephistopheles-Ahriman is due to this contraction of the ether-body and its consequent lack of etheric force. The best way to understand this will be to consider the nature of man as a whole. Even physically, the human being is, in a certain respect, a duality. For think of it.—You stand there as a physical human being. But the in-breathed air is inside you, is part of you as a physical being. This air, however, is sent out again by the very next exhalation, so that the “man of air-and-breath” pervading you, changes all the time. You are not merely a man of flesh, bone and muscle, but you are also a “breath man.” This “breath man,” however, is constantly changing, passing out and in. And this “breath man” is connected with the circulating blood.

Within you, separate as it were from this “breath man” is the other pole: the “nerve man” with the circulating nerve-fluid. The contact between the “nerve man” and the blood is a purely external one. Just as those etheric forces which tend towards the Luciferic nature can only find easy access to the blood by way of the breath, so the etheric forces which tend towards the Mephistophelean or Ahrimanic nature can only approach the nervous system—not the blood.

Ahriman is deprived of the possibility of penetrating into the blood because he cannot come near the warmth of the blood. If he wants to establish a connection with a human being, he will therefore crave for a drop of blood, because access to the blood is so difficult for him. An abyss lies between Mephistopheles and the blood. When he draws near to man as a living being, when he wants to make a connection with man, he realizes that the essentially human power lives in the blood. He must therefore endeavor to get hold of the blood.

That Faust's pact with Mephistopheles is signed with blood is a proof of the wisdom contained in the legend. Faust must bind himself to Mephistopheles by way of the blood, because Mephistopheles has no direct access to the blood and craves for it. Just as the Greek confronted the Sphinx whose field of operation is the breathing system, so the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch confronts Mephistopheles who operates in the nerve-process, who is cold and scornful because he is bloodless, because he lacks the warmth that belongs to the blood. He is the scoffer, the cold, scornful companion of man.

Just as it was the task of Oedipus to get the better of the Sphinx, so it is the task of man in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch to get the better of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles stands there like a second being, confronting him. The Greek was confronted by the Sphinx as the personification of the forces which entered into him together with excessive vigor of the breathing process. The human being of the modern age is confronted by the fruits of intellect and cold reason, rooted as they are in the nerve-process. Poetic imagination has glimpsed, prophetically, a picture of the human being standing over against the Mephistophelean powers; but the experience will become more and more general, and the phenomenon which, as I have said, will appear in childhood, will be precisely this experience of the Mephistophelean powers.

Whereas the child in Greece was tormented by a flood of questions, the suffering awaiting the human being of our modern time is rather that of being in the grip of preconceptions and prejudices, of having as an incubus at his side a second “body” consisting of all these preconceived judgments and opinions. What is it that is leading to this state of things?

Let us be quite candid about the trend of evolution. During the course of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, so many problems have lost all inner, vital warmth. The countless questions which confront us when we study Spiritual Science with any depth, simply do not exist for the modern man with his materialistic outlook. The riddle of the Sphinx means nothing to him, whereas the man of ancient Greece was vitally aware of it. A different form of experience will come to the man of modern times. In his own opinion he knows everything so well; he observes the material world, uses his intellect to establish the interconnections between its phenomena and believes that all its riddles are solved in this way, never realizing that he is simply groping in a phantasmagoria. But this way of working coarsens and dries up his ether-body, with the ultimate result that the Mephistophelean powers, like a second nature, will attach themselves to him now and in times to come.

The Mephistophelean nature is strengthened by all the prejudices and limitations of materialism, and a future can already be perceived when everyone will be born with a second being by his side, a being who whispers to him of the foolishness of those who speak of the reality of the spiritual world. Man will, of course, disavow the riddle of Mephistopheles, just as he disavows that of the Sphinx; nevertheless he will chain a second being to his heels. Accompanied by this second being, he will feel the urge to think materialistic thoughts, to think, not through his own being, but through the second being who is his companion.

In an ether-body that has been parched by materialism, Mephistopheles will be able to dwell. Understanding what this implies, we shall realize that it is our duty to educate children in the future—be it by way of Eurythmy or the development of a spiritual-scientific outlook—in such a way that they will be competent to understand the spiritual world. The ether-body must be quickened in order that the human being may be able to take his rightful stand, fully cognizant of the nature of the being who stands at his side. If he does not understand the nature of this second being, he will be spellbound by him, fettered to him. Just as the Greek was obliged to get the better of the Sphinx, so will modern man have to outdo Mephistopheles—with his faunlike, satyrlike form, and his goat's or horse's feet.

Every age, after all, has known how to express its essential characteristic in legend and saga. The Oedipus legends in Greece and the Mephistopheles legends in the modern age are examples, but their basic meanings must be understood.

You see, truths that are otherwise presented merely in the form of poetry—for instance, the relations between Faust and Mephistopheles—can become guiding principles for education as it should be in the future. The prelude to these happenings is that a people or a poet have premonitions of the existence of the being who accompanies man; but finally, every single human being will have this companion who must not remain unintelligible to him and who will operate most powerfully of all during childhood. If adults whose task it is to educate children today do not know how to deal rightly with what comes to expression in the child, human nature itself will be impaired owing to a lack of understanding of the wiles of Mephistopheles.

It is very remarkable that indications of these trends are everywhere to be found in legends and fairy-tales. In their very composition, legends and fairy-tales which seem so unintelligible to modern scholars, point either to the Mephistophelean, the Ahrimanic, or to the Sphinx, the Luciferic. The secret of all legends and fairy-tales is that their content was originally actual experience, arising either from man's relation to the Sphinx or from his relation to Mephistopheles.

In legends and fairy-tales we find, sometimes more and sometimes less deeply hidden, either the motif of the riddle, the motif of the Sphinx, where something has to be solved, some question answered; or else the motif of bewitchment, of being under a spell. This is the Ahriman motif. When Ahriman is beside us, we are perpetually in danger of falling victim to him, of giving ourselves over to him to such an extent that we cannot get free. In face of the Sphinx, the human being is aware of something that penetrates into him and as it were tears him to pieces. In face of the Mephistophelean influence he feels that he must yield to it, bind himself to it, succumb to it.

The Greeks had nothing like theology in our modern sense, but were very much closer to the wisdom of Nature and the manifestations of Nature. They approached the wisdom of Nature without theology, and questions and riddles pressed in upon them.

Now the breathing process is much more intimately connected with Nature than is the nerve-process. That is why the Greek had such a living feeling of being led on to wisdom by the Sphinx. It is quite different in the modern age when theology has come upon the scene. Man no longer believes that direct intercourse with Nature brings him near to the Divine Wisdom of the world, but he sets out to study, to approach it via the nerve-process, not via the breathing and the blood. The search for wisdom has become a nerve-process; modern theology is a nerve-process. But this means that wisdom is shackled to the nerve-process; man draws near to Mephistopheles, and owing to this imprisonment of wisdom in the nerve-process, the premonition arose at the dawn of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch that Mephistopheles is shackled to the human being, stands at his side.

If the Faust legend is stripped of all the extraneous elements that have been woven around it, there remains the picture of a young theologian striving for wisdom; doubts torment him and because he signs a pledge with the Devil—with Mephistopheles—he is drawn into the Devil's field of operations. But just as it was the task of the Greek, through the development of conscious Egohood, to conquer the Sphinx, so we, in our age, must get the better of Mephistopheles by enriching the Ego with the wisdom that can be born only from knowledge and investigation of the spiritual world, from Spiritual Science.

Oedipus was the mightiest conqueror of the Sphinx; but every Greek who wrestled for manhood was also, at a lower level, victorious over the Sphinx. Oedipus is merely a personification, in a very typical form, of what every Greek was destined to experience. Oedipus must prove himself master of the forces contained in the processes of the breathing and the blood. He personifies the nerve-process with its impoverished ether-forces, in contrast to those human beings who are altogether under the sway of the breathing and blood processes. Oedipus takes into his own nature those forces which are connected with the nerve-process, that is to say, the Mephistophelean forces; but he takes them into himself in the right and healthy way, so that they do not become a second being by his side, but are actually within him, enabling him to confront and master the Sphinx.

This indicates to us that in their rightfully allotted place, Lucifer and Ahriman work beneficially; in their wrongful place—there they are injurious. The task incumbent upon the Greek was to get the better of the Sphinx-nature, to cast it out of himself. When he was able to thrust it into the abyss, when, in other words, he was able to bring the extended ether-body down into the physical body, then he had overcome the Sphinx. The abyss is not outside us; the abyss is man's own physical body, into which the Sphinx must be drawn in the legitimate and healthy way. But the opposite pole—the nerve-process—which works, not from without but from within the Ego, must here be strengthened. Thus is the Ahrimanic power taken into the human being and put in its right place.

Oedipus is the son of Laios. Laios had been warned against having a child because it was said that this would bring misfortune to his whole race. He therefore cast out the boy who was born to him. He pierced his feet, and the child was therefore called “Oedipus,” i.e., “club foot.” That is the reason why, in the drama, Oedipus has deformed feet.

I have said already that when etheric forces are impoverished, the feet cannot develop normally, but will wither. In the case of Oedipus this condition was induced artificially. The legend tells us that he was found and reared by shepherds after an attempt had been made to get rid of him. He goes through life with clubbed feet. Oedipus is Mephistopheles—but in this case Mephistopheles is working in his rightful place, in connection with the task devolving upon the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch.

The harmony between ether-body and physical body so wonderfully expressed in the creations of Greek Art, everything that constituted the typical greatness of the Greek—of all this, Oedipus is deprived in order that he may become a personality in the real sense. The Ego that has now passed into the head becomes strong, and the feet wither.

The man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has quite a different task. In order to confront and conquer the Sphinx, Oedipus was obliged to receive Ahriman into himself. The man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, who confronts Ahriman-Mephistopheles, must take Lucifer into himself. The process is the reverse of that enacted by Oedipus. Everything that the Ego accumulates in the head must be pressed down into the rest of man's nature. The Ego, living in the nerve-process, has accumulated “Philosophy, Law, Medicine, and, alas, Theology too”—all nerve-processes. And now there is the urge to get rid of it all from the head—just as Oedipus deprived the feet of their normal forces—and to penetrate through the veils of material existence.

And now think of Faust standing there with all that the Ego has accumulated; think of how he wants to throw it all out of his head, just as Oedipus deprives his feet of their normal forces. Faust says: “I have studied, alas! Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medicine too, and saddest of all, Theology” ... he wants to rid his head of it all. And moreover he does so, by surrendering himself to a life that is not bound up with the head. Faust is Oedipus reversed, i.e., the human being who takes the Lucifer-nature into himself.

And now think of all that Faust does, so that having Lucifer within him, he may battle with Ahriman, with Mephistopheles who stands beside him. All this shows us that Faust, in reality, is Oedipus reversed. The Ahriman-nature in Oedipus has to get the better of Lucifer; the Lucifer-nature in Faust has to help him to overcome Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Ahriman-Mephistopheles operates more in the external world, Lucifer more in the inner life. All the misfortunes that befall Oedipus because he must take the Ahriman-nature into himself, are connected with the external world. Doom falls upon his race, not merely upon himself. Even the doom that falls upon him is of an external character; he pierces his eyes and blinds himself; similarly, the pestilence which sweeps his native city—this, too, is an external doom. Faust's experiences, however, are of the soul—they are inner tragedies. Again in this respect, Faust reveals himself as the antithesis of Oedipus.

In these two figures, both of them dual—Oedipus and Sphinx, Faust and Mephistopheles—we have typical pictures of the evolution of the Fourth and Fifth Post-Atlantean epochs.

When history, in time to come, is presented less as a narration of external happenings and more as a description of what human beings actually experience, then and only then will the significance of these fundamental experiences be fully understood. For then man will perceive what is really at work in the onflowing evolutionary process, of which ordinary science knows only the external phantasmagoria.

In order that the Ego should be strengthened, it was necessary for Ahriman-Mephistopheles to enter into Oedipus—the typical representative of the Greeks. In the man of the modern age, the Ego has become too strong and he must break free. But this he can only do by deepening his knowledge of spiritual happenings, of the world to which the Ego truly belongs. The Ego must know that it is a citizen of the spiritual world, not merely the inhabitant of a human body. This is the demand of the age in which we ourselves are living. The man of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch was called upon to strive with might and main for consciousness in the physical body; the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch must strive to become conscious in the spiritual world, so to expand his consciousness that it reaches into the spiritual world.

Spiritual Science is thus a fundamental factor in the evolution of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

In the lecture on the Kalevala, (14th November, 1914), I made a statement which you will probably not have found easy to understand. You will remember, I spoke of a “being” that stretches across Europe from west to east; and I spoke of it as having three limbs that reach out in an easterly direction. I said that for the ancient Finnish folk these three limbs were known as Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkainen, and that they were what we today, in our more materialistic language, call the gulfs of Riga, Finland and Bothnia. You will probably have wondered how I could say that these gulfs had anything to do with a being, when they are obviously nothing else than extensions of the surface of the sea. There is no body; how then can it be possible to speak of a being?

I can well imagine that this difficulty might arise in your minds, and it is typical. For again and again you will find that truths which come from the spiritual world lay themselves open to the charge of being contradictory. The very fact that they do so is significant and is quite as it should be; and the only way to arrive at a satisfactory solution of the contradiction is in every case to make a still deeper study of the matter in question. And this I want to do today in respect of certain problems in spiritual knowledge. But first let me preface what I have to say with a few introductory words.

We will glance, to begin with, at some of the prejudices concerning the nature of man that are prevalent in the materialistic thought of our time. Let us take one example. Various physical processes are to be found in man, among others processes of the brain and nervous system; and it is common knowledge that when these processes take place, processes take place also in the soul. The conclusion is drawn that the processes in the soul are no more than the expression of the physical processes. The materialist studies what goes on in the body of the human being, finds there—or rather pre-supposes hypothetically—delicate nerve-processes, and says: The thinking, feeling and willing processes are in reality only accompanying phenomena of what is going on all the time as physical processes. This view is quite commonly held today and it will undoubtedly strike deeper and deeper root into the materialistic thinking of the near future. From the point of view of logic it is about as clever as the following would be.—Suppose someone walking along a road discovers tracks on it—here, parallel ruts, and here again, marks like the soles of human feet. He thinks this over and says to himself: “The material of which the road is made has undergone certain changes and influences, with the result that it has in some places become packed together so as to form ruts, whilst at other places it has been sucked downwards and we see on the surface what looks like the impress of a human foot.”

Such a conclusion is of course a crudely mistaken one, the truth being that a wagon has passed and made the two ruts with the wheels, and a man has also been walking on the road and made the other impressions with his feet. Not the nature of the soil, but the man and the wagon are responsible for the tracks.

The case is no different with the processes that go on in our nervous system! Whenever we think or feel or will, we are setting up processes that are of the nature of soul-and-spirit. And so long as we live in the physical world, these processes are united with the physical body, they leave their tracks in it—just as the wagon and the man leave their tracks behind in the road. But these tracks in the body have no more to do with the material of which the body is made than have the tracks in the road to do with the materials of which the road is constructed. In reality, the processes that take place in the matter of the brain and in the matter of the nerves have nothing whatever to do with the actual thought-processes. The relation between them is no nearer than the relation between what the man and the wagon are doing and what is going on in the surface of the earth over which they are moving. It is really quite important to take a little trouble to consider the matter in this light. For it reveals to one that the anatomist or physiologist who investigates merely the physical processes in the organism is like a spirit-being who moves about under the earth without ever coming up to the surface, and who has never even seen men or wagons. All he can do is to observe from below that unevennesses occur in the surface of the earth; he never comes close up to them, and he sees them always from the other side. Investigating them in this limited way, he imagines the earth itself has given rise to them by its own activity. The moment such a spirit were to come out on to the surface, he would become acquainted with the true state of affairs. This is exactly how it is with the anatomist and physiologist who work from the materialistic point of view. They are always under the earth—for to know nothing of Spiritual Science is to be “under the earth!” What they investigate is the material processes, and these have nothing to do with what is happening above in the realm of soul-and-spirit. It will be man's task in the near future to free himself from this anatomical and physiological thinking and work through to a spiritual-scientific thinking. Then he will feel as an underground imp might feel who was suddenly lifted up above the earth and saw for the first time how the tracks he had observed from below had really come about. Imps burrowing under the earth—that is what the scientists are, who take account only of the spiritual that is under the earth—for even the material is spiritual! And mankind will have to experience the great shock that must inevitably come when these underground imps come out into the open—into the realm, that is, of the soul-and-spirit.

These introductory words were necessary in order to prepare you for the subject of today's lecture, which I think you will find helps to solve the contradiction of which we were speaking—that the gulfs of Bothnia, Finland and Riga are obviously mere surfaces, and yet I spoke as though they were a being, or rather limbs of a mighty being stretching from west to east.

We are accustomed to speak of ourselves as beings of space, and we are right; as human beings we are spatial beings. When, however, we come to consider what we are in reality, that is quite another matter. The fact is, man is in reality something altogether different from what we imagine him to be when we look at him only in the outer Maya, in the phantasmagoria of external appearance. There he appears of course as a being of space, spatially enclosed within his skin. But directly we try to carry our thought a little deeper, we are confronted with three great problems or riddles in respect of the human form.

The first of these riddles conceals itself under all manner of puzzling and mystifying illusions. For the external Maya of appearance deceives us again and again in regard to our own existence; and you can find traces of this deception in the science of the present day, particularly at certain points where science is quite at a loss and has been forced to construct all manner of hypotheses. Hypotheses have for example been constantly brought forward to account for the fact that man has two eyes and two ears and yet does not see or hear double. How is it that these organs are symmetrically disposed? How is it that they are present not singly but in pairs? This simple fact offers science a hard nut to crack, and you have only to glance through the literature on the subject to find what a very great deal has been written on this question of why we see with two eyes and hear with two ears.

Man is really coarsely organized; we can sometimes find evidence of this in the very way we speak. For in reality we have also two noses! Only they have grown together and are not so obvious as the two eyes and two ears. Hence we do not speak of two noses, but of one nose; crudely organized as we are, we never discover that we have two! It is nevertheless the case that in all human perception a symmetry comes to expression, a right-and-left symmetry. Had he not two ears, two eyes, and two noses, man would not attain to the perception of his own I or Ego.

Correspondingly, man needs also for the Ego experience two hands. When we clasp the hands together and feel the one with the other, we immediately get something of an Ego experience. And it is really a similar process, when we unite into one whole the perceptions of two eyes or two ears. Every time we make a sense perception, we perceive the world from two sides, from left and from right. And to the fact that we have these two directions of perception left and right, and bring them together—to this fact we owe our Ego-nature as human beings. Otherwise we would not be I- or Ego-men at all. If, for example, our eyes were situated near our ears and we had no possibility of combining the lines of vision, we would always remain beings who are involved in a Group Soul. To be an Ego-being we must make the right and the left meet. Throughout the whole realm of human perception there is always this crossing of right and left in the middle. Look at this vertical line on the blackboard. Imagine that a plane projects out here from the blackboard along this line. Everything comes, from left and right, up to this line of incision. We, my dear friends, are ourselves actually in this plane. We are not in space, we are only in this surface, this plane. We are not beings extended in space, we are surface beings, that come about through the crossing of the impulse from the left with the impulse from the right. And if to the question: Where are you? you want to find an answer, not in accordance with Maya, but in accordance with reality, then you must not point to the space where your body is standing and say: “I am here,” but you will have to say: “I am in the place where my left man and my right man meet.” In reality you are there, and only there. Just as we had surfaces in the case of the being of whom I spoke before, surfaces where air and water meet, so in man we have the left half and the right half. In that being the two halves were different, in man they are alike; but man is also a surface being, man is a plane. It is Maya that we see him as having form and figure.

Whence then has man this form and figure? He has it because he stands in the midst of a battle. A being from the left is fighting in man with a being from the right. If we were able to be entirely within our left half we would have a powerful perception of the one being, and if we were in our right half we would have a correspondingly powerful perception of the other being. Our existence as a double being arises from the fact that the Luciferic being is fighting in us from the left and the Ahrimanic being from the right.

Let us try to make a picture of it in our minds. From the left the Luciferic being fights his way through and throws up, as it were, his fortifications, and from the right Ahriman fights his way through and throws up his fortifications. And all that you can do is to stand in the middle between the two. The left part of you—your left man, as it were—is the fortification set up by Lucifer, and your right man is the fortification set up by Ahriman. And the whole art of life consists in finding the true balance between them. We do it unconsciously whenever we perceive with the senses. When we hear with the left ear and with the right ear, and then unite into a single perception the impulses that reach us in this way, or when we feel with the left hand and with the right hand and unite the two perceptions, we are placing ourselves into the surface that lies on the boundary of the conflict between Lucifer and Ahriman. As narrow as—no, narrower than—the blade of a knife is the space that is left to us in the middle, where we have to play our part. Our organism does not really belong to us; we are a battlefield for the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers—and for other powers too, of like nature with them, but into that subject we cannot enter now.

We men are thus in reality surface beings wedged between two entities that are no concern of ours! Our left man does not concern us, neither does our right man: what concerns us is the process that goes on between the two.

And now we can develop a little further the comparison I made use of before. For, as we all recognize, there are processes perpetually going on under the earth; but it is not these that make the tracks in the road. Similarly, what happens in you in the right and left half of your organism, all the processes that take place between Lucifer and Ahriman, have nothing whatever to do with the experience you have in your soul. What goes on down below the surface of the earth—the worms creeping about, the changes in temperature in accordance with the seasons of the year, and so forth—all this has no connection with the tracks that have come in the road, and it is these tracks that are comparable with what takes place in the organism of man. Our researches in physiology and anatomy reveal to us the fight that is being waged within us between Lucifer and Ahriman, but they do not compel us to give ourselves up to the superstition that the life of the soul owes its origin to these processes going on between Lucifer and Ahriman. That is a complete mistake; the life of the soul takes its course within the soul itself—that is to say, in the surface, in the plane, not in the spatial organism at all.

Now the working of Lucifer and Ahriman is not the same in all parts of the human organism, and it is interesting to observe its gradation. Beginning from the head, we find that there Lucifer and Ahriman have thrown up fairly equal fortifications; the left and right halves of the head are very similar. This means that the forces of left and right have in the head not much possibility of interplay and the surface between them is left comparatively undisturbed. There in the middle is the surface, with Lucifer on the left and Ahriman on the right; and because the left and right halves of the head are so similar in form, Lucifer and Ahriman spring back from one another, and in between them man is able to develop a quiet surface activity. Thinking, pure thought as such, is very little disturbed by Lucifer and Ahriman; because in the head they recoil from one another.

When, however, we follow the form of man further down, we find a change. On one side Lucifer works powerfully and builds up the stomach, on the other side Ahriman does the same and builds up the liver. The stomach is the means with which Lucifer fights from left to right; and no true understanding can come about of the relation between stomach and liver, until we see how Lucifer has built up the stomach as a kind of weapon of defence, and Ahriman the liver. These two—stomach and liver—are perpetually waging war one against the other, and physiology would do well to study the conflict. And if the heart of man tends to lean a little over towards the left, then that is an expression of the fact that Lucifer from one side and Ahriman from the other are trying each to grasp something for himself, The whole left and right relationship is an expression of the fight that is being waged in man between Lucifer and Ahriman. We said that in the case of man, what lies on either side of the middle surface is, generally speaking, alike. We have, however, already seen that this is true only for the upper part of man; as we follow the form of man downwards, the similarity gradually disappears. In the case of the being of whom I spoke before, with the three outstretched limbs—Lemminkäinen, Ilmarinen and Wainämöinen—the one half is air and the other water; the two halves are totally different in kind. And even in man, when we attain to clairvoyant knowledge it becomes clear to us that there are two distinct halves. For no sooner have we suggested away the physical body and turned our attention to the etheric body, than we find that the left half grows brighter and clearer than the right half. The left half is all shining and gleaming with radiant light, and the right half is wrapped in darkness and gloom. Yes, that is actually how it is with the left-right human being.

There are, however, other directions in accordance with which man takes up his position in the world of space. Expressed in the language of occultism, this means nothing else than that he is placed in still other ways into the midst of the fight between Lucifer and Ahriman. Let us go on, then, to consider how man stands in space with a forward and backward orientation, looking before and behind. Instead of observing him as a being of left and right, we will now direct our thoughts to the front and back of the human form. From this aspect also we find that man is not the being of space he appears to be. For as from left and from right Lucifer and Ahriman do battle with one another across man, and what shows in space is really only the barricades they put up one against the other, so also from behind Ahriman is fighting and from in front Lucifer. From behind Ahriman thrusts forward his activity, and from in front Lucifer thrusts forward his activity in opposition. Man stands in the middle between them. In connection, however, with the forward and backward direction in man we discover that Lucifer and Ahriman do not succeed in coming so close to one another as to leave nothing but a surface between them. We find here a somewhat different state of affairs. Ahriman comes only as far as the plane which can be drawn through the spinal column, and Lucifer as far as the plane which can be drawn through the breast bone, where the ribs end and meet. In between these two planes lies a space which separates Lucifer and Ahriman one from the other, where the effects of their working are thrown together in confusion. There they stand and fight—not at close quarters, but as though shooting at one another across the intervening space. And there stand we in the midst of the fight. Thus, in respect of the direction before and behind, man is a being that has space.

In the left-right direction the fight between Lucifer and Ahriman is waged principally in the sphere of thought. Thoughts are whirled across from left and from right and meet in the surface in the middle. Cosmic thoughts and cosmic forms of thought impinge upon one another here on the human surface in the middle. In the direction before and behind, Lucifer and Ahriman do battle more in the realm of feeling. And since here the opposing forces do not approach one another so nearly, in the space that is left between them we ourselves have room to be together with our own feelings. When we have thoughts that offer opposition to one another from left and from right, then we have the feeling that these thoughts belong to the world. With our thoughts we think the objects that are in the world outside. When we make our own thoughts, then these thoughts are a mere phantasmagoria; they do not any longer belong to the world. In our feelings, on the other hand, we belong to ourselves; for there Lucifer and Ahriman do not quite meet, there we have room to be active in between them. This is the reason why in our feelings we are so essentially within ourselves.

We human beings are creatures of the beings of the higher hierarchies, and they have created us in accordance with the manner of their working. We are beings of surface between left and right because the higher beings have made us so and placed us so into space. It is they, the Gods, who do not suffer Lucifer and Ahriman to come together in man. We are in this sense creatures of the good Gods. The good Gods, working out of their creative thoughts and purposes, took as it were this resolve. “A conflict is going on,” they said, “between Ahriman and Lucifer. We must set up a wall and enclose a region which they will not be able to enter, where they will not be able to carry on their strife at close quarters.” We human beings have thus been placed into the struggle between Lucifer and Ahriman as creatures of the good Gods; and the better we stand our ground in the struggle, the more truly are we creatures of the good Gods.

In respect of the before and behind, there the good Gods do not allow Lucifer to enter right into us; they created a barricade in the place where the ribs meet in the breast bone. And the wonderfully constructed tower that encloses the spine and the brain is a fortification the good Gods have erected against Ahriman. Ahriman cannot pass this line; all he can do is to send his arrows of feeling across to Lucifer. There in the space between stand we ourselves, separating the two from each other.

There is still a third direction in man, the direction from above downwards. Here again we have to make the discovery that the true state of affairs is not as it seems in external appearance. For from below upwards works Ahriman, and from above downwards Lucifer. Again we find that the good Gods have thrown up a barrier against Lucifer; at a certain plane in man his influence is held in check. You will find the plane by taking the skeleton and removing from it the skull. There where the skull rested on the cervical vertebrae, imagine a horizontal surface. This invisible horizontal surface is the barrier, where man can take his stand and hold up the Luciferic influence that comes from above. Lucifer can come no further, he can only shoot his arrows thence down into man. And his arrows are now arrows of will. From left to right fly arrows of thought, from front to back arrows of feeling and from above downwards as well as from below upwards, arrows of will.

Here, too, we have left to us an intermediate field of action. For about in a line with the diaphragm, you have the surface that acts as a barricade against the upward pressure of Ahriman. Ahriman can reach only as far as the diaphragm with his missiles of will, he can come no further with his will, with his essential being; and in between the two planes lies our own field of action.

You see how complicated the human being is! Take any one portion of the human figure—for example, the left side of the face. As a being of thought, Lucifer can fill entirely this left side of the human countenance; as a being of feeling he can also penetrate it up to a point; and as a being of will he can enter right into and through it from above. And you can go on to discover for every part of the body how Lucifer and Ahriman work in the human being of space by means of cosmic impulses of thought and feeling and will, remembering always that as beings of thought we are actually only surface beings, whilst as men of feeling we have a space between the before and the behind where we can unfold an activity of our own, and again as men of will we have a field of activity between the above and the below, between the surface we imagined drawn through the top of the cervical vertebrae and the surface of the diaphragm. You see, you have first to abstract all those parts that do not belong to man at all, before you can build up a true idea of the human form. Then, and only then, are you in a position to do this.

The truth is, the whole form of man has been put together by forces working from without. It receives its distinctive character from outside itself, and we do not understand the form of man so long as we consider it merely as it appears at first sight; we only understand it when we know how it is connected with the whole cosmos of space, when we are able to see how from right and left, from above and below, from before and behind, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are bearing in upon man, and giving him the character of a being of space.

And now, my dear friends, this is also the way in which you must approach something else that has been shaped and formed in accordance with the true cosmic working in the world. I mean our building here in Dornach. If you look at the Goetheanum [ The first building, destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve, 1922/23. ] merely in its outward appearance, you might be disposed to think that the actual building itself, the space occupied by the wood, was the most important part. That is, however, by no means the case. The most important part is what, judging by appearances, does not exist! Take any one of the forms; the essential part of that form is not the shaped and sculptured wood, but is where there is nothing—where the air bounds the wood. The way to obtain the true and real Goetheanum would be to take an immense mound of wax and make a model of the inside of the building, and then study this model or impression. What you go into when you enter the building, what you stand within and cannot see but can only feel—that is the thing that matters. I said once on a former occasion that our building is built on the principle of a “Gugelhopf” [ A shaped cake made in Vienna. Note by Translator. ] cake mould. Imagine you have a tin mould and you bake your cake in it. Which is the more important—the mould or the cake? Obviously the cake. What matters is that the cake should receive the proper “Gugelhopf” shape. As far as the mould is concerned, all that matters is that the mixture, when it is poured into the mould and baked, should turn into a cake of the desired form.

Similarly, in our building it is not the surrounding walls that are of importance, it is what is enclosed within the surrounding walls. And within the walls will be the feelings and thoughts of the people who are in the building. These will develop aright if those who are in the building turn their eyes to its boundary, feel the forms and then fill these forms with forms of thought. What is inside the building will be like the cake, and what we build is the mould that holds and shapes the cake. And the mould has to be of such a kind that it leads to the development of right thoughts and right feelings. This is the principle underlying the new art in contradistinction to the art of olden times. In the art of olden times the essential thing was what is outside in space; but in the new art something else is of account. What is outside is no more than the mould, and the essential thing cannot really be created by the artist at all, it is what is within.

Nor is this true only of plastic forms. It is equally true of painting. The important thing is, not what is painted, but the experience in feeling to which the painting gives rise. Painting too is no more than a cake mould!

The truth is, my dear friends, we have here touched the very heart and core of the moment in evolution in which we stand. This is the step in evolution that has now to be taken, the step forgive the trivial comparison—from the cake mould to the cake. The cake is in this case the Spiritual; to enter into the world of the Spirit—that is the direction in which all our endeavor must now be set. If we fail to recognize this fact, we shall never be able to appraise correctly what we are trying to do here in art. For if we look at this art from the standpoint of the old, we can very easily exclaim: “But I see nothing beautiful in it!” We mean, I see no beautiful cake mould—never suspecting that the mould is not what matters at all, but the cake that is to be inside it. When we once understand this principle in art, my dear friends, we shall be very near understanding the whole meaning and significance of the step forward in spiritual evolution which is to be made through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science man must learn to work his way out of the “Gugelhopf” mould into the “Gugelhopf” itself. He must, for example, get free of the superstition that the origin of thought lies in the brain processes, when as a matter of fact in the processes that go on in the brain cosmic processes are at work and conflicts are being waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. Man must learn to see that the thoughts and feelings of the human soul are tracks graven into the twistings and turnings of these conflicts and have nothing to do with the material processes—in other words, with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic processes.

Let me draw another comparison. Suppose we were to go into a beautiful garden—beautiful particularly in the whole arrangement and lay-out of the flower beds—and we wanted to pronounce an opinion on this beautiful garden. And suppose we were able to look down a hole in the earth and spied there a little underground imp who said to us: “I will tell you how it is that here are roses and over there are violets, and why you find a bush in one place and flowers in another. For I creep about all the time under the surface, and I can see the earth and the soil which has caused all these flowers—violets, roses and the rest—to spring up.” We could answer: “Yes, you describe these processes very nicely; all that you tell me is quite true and must necessarily happen. But for the garden to come into existence as I see it, something else is required—gardeners must have been at work there. They work, however, in a region which you have never seen and about which you have never troubled your head at all.”

In like manner, we must learn to say to the anatomist and physiologist: “I find your activity when I look down through a hole in the earth. Down there you are creeping about and discovering processes which certainly have to take place, but which have nothing at all to do with what takes place in the soul and spirit above ground. And you will only be able to interpret correctly what takes place down below, when you study the relationships that hold sway between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic worlds and those other hierarchies who bring Lucifer and Ahriman into balance.”

Here we must refer to another fact in human evolution, that has hitherto only had influence in man's conception of the Ego, but that we shall learn to know in a much fuller and wider way through Spiritual Science. A time will come in the future when men will say: “We are told in the Bible of the breath of Jehovah which was breathed into man. But into what part of man was the breath breathed?”

If you recall all that I have said in this lecture, you will be able to see that the region into which the breath was breathed is the intervening region that is in between the onsets from before and behind and from above and below—there, in the middle, where Jehovah created man, as it were in the form of a cube. There it was that he so filled man with His own being, with His own magic breath, that the influence of this magic breath was able to extend into the regions in the rest of man that belong to Lucifer and Ahriman. Here in the midst, bounded above and below and before and behind, is an intervening space where the breath of Jehovah enters directly into the spatial human being.

What I have been giving you in this lecture is spoken in respect of the human being of physical space. As you see, even here we can widen our outlook and learn to behold man as he stands within the cosmos. But there are also moral and spiritual aspects of what is apparently external and spatial. And in these aspects too, where the workings of the human soul are concerned—if not in so striking a way as in the case of spatial man, yet here too, what meets us at first is found to be no reality, but only a phantasmagoria. In morality, in logic and in all the activity of the soul, Lucifer and Ahriman are working one upon the other, and man stands at the boundary between them. Of this most important and significant chapter in the understanding of the human being we will speak tomorrow.

From the previous lecture you will have been able to see that the very form of man's body is a result of the co-operation of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers.

It is particularly important in the present age for man to recognize this co-operation between Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; for only by such recognition can he gradually learn to understand the forces that are at work behind the external phantasmagoria of existence. We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. We spoke on this subject at some length in Munich last year [ see Secrets of the Threshold, by Rudolf Steiner. ]; and we have also given indications in this direction in lectures here in Dornach.

When we saw last time how the physical spatial body of man owes its form to the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, we were dealing with the most external element of human life in which Lucifer and Ahriman play a part. We come a little nearer to the inner nature of man when we pass from the physical to the etheric body. The etheric body may be regarded as the shaper of the physical body. At the foundation of our physical organism—and embedded at the same time in the whole etheric world—lies this etheric organism, in perpetual inner movement. Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are active here too, as well as in the physical body. Man as etheric being—and it is important to recognize the fact—is also placed into the counterplay of these forces.

In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.

So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.

A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and willing unite in man to form a whole—to that problem none of the philosophies of modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do not know—so say the philosophers—whether the human soul in its essential nature has more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to say: “I have no idea what a ‘man’ really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much taller being, who is what is called ‘middle-aged.’ Finally a third person comes and shows me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am really at a loss to know what the being called ‘man’ is, for I have been shown three totally different beings with this name.” Of course the true answer is that they are all of them “man.” The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a knowledge of “man.” It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in our soul in these three activities.

We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time. Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling) and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of man.

These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream—for it is in the etheric body that we have to make our observations—then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic—and again Ahrimanic—activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by Luciferic activity the result is will. When the Luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a juvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

When, on the other hand, Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. Thinking, the having and holding of thoughts, is quite impossible in ordinary life unless Ahriman exerts his influence within our etheric body. We cannot get on in our life of soul, in so far as this comes to expression in the etheric body, without Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would have nothing to fire our will. If Ahriman were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would never be able to attain cool thinking. In between stands a region where Lucifer and Ahriman are in conflict. Here they interpenetrate; their activities play into one another. It is the region of feeling. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it Luciferic light and Ahrimanic hardness. If you could look at it, you would not of course see it as we might try to show it in a drawing; you would see it all in movement. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite untransparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. Forms and figures show themselves which resemble the patterns made by ice on a window pane. These are hardenings in the etheric body, and they are the result in it of the life of thought. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness—and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation—such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

Not only, therefore, is the form of the physical body of man called into being by the interplay of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces—now creating a balance, now disturbing it again—but in the whole etheric body too, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are continually active. When the Ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the Luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling. Thus do Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play into one another in the etheric body of man. We human beings are as it were ourselves the resultant of these forces, we are placed into their midst.

Now we must not imagine that we are present in this interplay with our full Ego. Our earthly Ego, the Ego that we have acquired in the course of earth evolution, can only come to its full consciousness in the physical body. Not until the time of Jupiter will the Ego be able to unfold itself completely within the etheric body. In all that takes place within the etheric body the real Ego of the human being has no immediate part. Had the progress of world evolution gone on without the intervention of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, then man would have been an altogether different being. He would, for example, have been able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not have been able to have thoughts. The capacity to have thoughts he owes to the fact that Ahriman can acquire influence over his etheric body. And he has impulses of will because Luciferic forces can acquire influence over his etheric body. These forces are therefore necessary for man, they must needs be present.

We have said that with our earthly consciousness we cannot descend fully into the etheric body. Only in the physical body can we experience our full Ego-consciousness. With the etheric body we enter a world with which we cannot fully identify ourselves. And it is so, that when Ahriman enters into our etheric body, something more enters in with him besides the thoughts he forms there. Nor is it only impulses of will that enter our etheric body with Lucifer. And the same must be said of the feelings, the realm where the two are in conflict. In so far as Ahriman lives in our etheric body we dive down with our etheric body into the sphere of the elementary Nature spirits—the Earth, Water, Air and Fire spirits. We are not cognizant of the fact because we are not able to descend fully into our etheric body with our Ego. Nevertheless it is always so. Within this etheric body not only does there live the power of the thoughts that we ourselves think, but the influences also of the Nature spirits; these enter in and make themselves felt. When a man has met with these Nature spirits he is able afterwards to tell of some experience he has had which he did not have in his ordinary Ego-consciousness. For it is when he, is in an abnormal condition that man meets the Nature spirits, namely, when the etheric body is to some extent loosened from the physical body.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen in the following way. The etheric body of man is in communion with the whole surrounding etheric world, therefore also with the whole sphere of the Nature spirits. Let us imagine, to take a simple case, that a man is walking along a road. When he is walking along a road in the daytime with his ordinary consciousness, his etheric body is properly in his physical body and he perceives with his Ego-consciousness what one is normally able to perceive with the Ego-consciousness. But now suppose that he is walking along a path by night. When we walk along a path by night, it is generally dark, and this fact will of itself produce in many persons a “creepy” feeling. And just because he gets into this condition, then the peculiar sensations that he experiences enable Lucifer to seize hold of him. His etheric body becomes loosened from the physical body, and then this emancipated etheric body can enter into relation with the surrounding etheric world.

Now let us suppose that the man comes into the vicinity of a churchyard where etheric bodies are still present over the graves of recently deceased persons. In the condition in which he is, with his etheric body loosened, he is perhaps able to perceive something of the thoughts which are still remaining in the etheric bodies of the dead persons. Suppose someone has died only a short time ago leaving debts behind him; he died with the thought that he has incurred debts. Then it can be that this thought is still present in the etheric body of the person after he has died. We do not of course ordinarily perceive the thoughts in the etheric body of a dead human being. But for a man who has come into the condition I have described it might well be possible. He could enter into relation with the etheric body of the other and perceive within it the thought: “I have incurred debts.” And then because this experience strengthens the Luciferic power in him, there arises in him the feeling: “I must pay the debt for him.” He experiences in this way in his etheric body something he would never experience in the physical body in normal life. Such an experience does not happen to us in ordinary human life, and when it comes it makes an extraordinary impression upon our consciousness. For it arouses the knowledge: “I have had a strange and singular experience. I have not had this experience within the body, nor can I ever have it within the body.” We have the feeling quite distinctly that we are somewhere else than in our body, and that is a strange, an unaccustomed feeling. We experience at the same time an overpowering desire to return once more into the body, we long for help to return again into the body.

This feeling of longing to return attracts to us certain elementary Nature spirits for whom this very feeling in us is food and nourishment. They come, because they are attracted by the feeling, “I want to be drawn into my physical body,” and they help us to find the way back to it. If one is asleep in the ordinary way, one finds the way back quite easily. But when one has undergone an experience such as I have described, it is difficult to find the way back. You must not of course imagine that we see the situation as we perceive things in the physical body; no, we see it imaginatively, in pictures. Someone comes to us—it is really a Nature spirit, appearing perhaps in the guise of a shepherd, and gives us the advice: “Go to a certain castle, I will take you there in my wagon,”—or some similar words. The situation may even be still further developed. The body which we have left and outside of which we have had the experience, may assume the appearance of an enchanted castle from which we have to release someone when we return into it. So do we “imaginate” in pictures the longing for the physical body and the help that the Nature spirits bring to us. And then we come back into the physical body—that is to say, we wake up.

People who have had such experiences will tell us that they feel they have in actual reality come into contact in this way with the thoughts of a dead man. They say to themselves: “That feeling I had was not something that was merely in myself, it was no mere dream that I dreamed, it was a feeling that communicated to me something that was taking place in the world outside. It is of course all expressed in pictures, but it does truly correspond to an event.” I will now read to you such a picture, where a man narrates what he has experienced. As you will see, it was an experience somewhat similar to the one of which I have spoken. He describes it as follows. “When I had taken leave of the soldiers I met three men. They wanted to exhume a dead person who owed them three marks. I was filled with compassion and at once absolved the debt, in order that the dead man might rest in peace and not be disturbed in his grave. I walked on a little further. A strange man with pale countenance accosted me, invited me to mount a leaden carriage, and persuaded me to go with him to a castle. In the castle, he said, dwelt a princess, who had declared she would marry only a man who came to her on a carriage of lead. He turned to the driver and said: ‘Drive in the direction of the sunrise.’ Then came a shepherd who said: ‘I am the Count of Ravensburg.’ He ordered the driver to drive faster. We came to a door and we could hear a tumult within. The door was opened. The princess asked the man whence he came and how it had been possible for him to drive in company with that old man—and behold, I saw that he who had led me thither was a spirit. Then I entered in at the door and took possession of the castle.”

That is to say, he came back into his body. There you have the description of just such an experience as I have been speaking of.

And what is such an event, when it happens to someone who then tells others of it? It is a Märchen (a fairy-tale [ see Goethe's Standard of the Soul, by Rudolf Steiner. ]).

You must not imagine that an experience of this nature is the only way in which man comes into relationship with the external etheric world through his etheric body. There is another. And that is, in an activity which is only half conscious, an activity in which the Ego only half participates—namely, the act of Speech. Our speaking is not so conscious as our thinking. It is not the case that speaking is something which belongs to us and which we have in our power. In speech live etheric Powers, and a good part of our speaking is unconscious. The Ego does not reach fully down into speech. When we speak we are in communication through our etheric body with the surrounding etheric world. We learn to think as individuals, but not to speak. We are taught to speak through the fact that our Karma places us into a particular set of circumstances in life. We have already seen how we may come into relation with the Nature spirits in abnormal conditions when the etheric body is loosened, and now we find that inasmuch as we speak and do not merely think silently, we come into relation with the Folk Spirits. The Folk Spirits enter our etheric body and live there—without our being aware of it. This life of the Folk Spirit within the human being really belongs just as little to his fully conscious Ego activity as does the “Märchen” of which I have told you. So much, then, for the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in man's etheric body.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces enter also into the astral body. When we come to study the astral body of man, we must turn our attention to what is the distinguishing mark of the astral human being as he is on earth—namely, consciousness. In the physical body form and force are the essentials, in the etheric body, movement and life: in the astral body, consciousness. Now in the body of man we have not only one consciousness, but two; the ordinary waking state and the state of sleep. But, strange to say, neither of these two states is entirely natural to us. Natural would be for us an intermediate state between the two, a state which, as a matter of fact, we never really consciously have.

If we were perpetually awake we would scarcely be able to develop in a proper, orderly manner through the various ages of life. Something is always present in us which is less awake than we are in our day-consciousness, and only by virtue of this are we in a position to evolve and develop. Ask yourselves, how much do you expect to be able to evolve through all that you experience and receive in ordinary life? For the most part, we merely satisfy thereby our desire, our curiosity, or our need of sensation. It is not often we act with deliberate intent to place what we experience in waking day life in the service of our development. The truth is, development takes place through the fact that something is continually sleeping in us, even in the daytime. I am not alluding to the habit of dropping off to sleep in the daytime! But when man is wide awake by day, something still remains fast asleep in him, and this it is which brings it about that he does not remain for ever a child, but evolves further.

The ordinary waking state is what comes to consciousness through our astral body. In this ordinary waking state we are, however, too strongly awake, we are too intensely given up to the external world; we are, in fact, quite lost in it. How does this come about?

The reason is that the waking consciousness lives under the influence of Ahriman. Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. It is quite different in the case of the sleep consciousness. In sleep consciousness we are too little awake. We are too engrossed in our own evolution; we are so completely and so powerfully within ourselves that all consciousness is obliterated. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand.

This is then how the matter stands with our astral body. When we are awake, Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer; everything becomes pictures when Ahriman is no longer busy fixing them in rigid ideas. They melt and become mobile in themselves. A state of equilibrium is induced in a pair of scales by having both scale-pans equally laden; we have, then, not a state of rest but a state of equilibrium. It is the same with the life of man. We have not in man a state of rest, but a state of equilibrium; and the two forces which hold the scales and each of which at certain times brings extra weight to bear, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman's side sinks down, in sleep consciousness Lucifer's. Only in the intermediate state, where we dream, are the two scale-pans held in poise, not at rest, but delicately poised in equilibrium.

We can go on to carry our study into still higher regions of human life. Here too we shall find evidence of how Lucifer and Ahriman fill the world with their inter-working. Two ideas play a great part in human life. One is the idea of duty. We might also say, when we consider it from a religious point of view, the idea of commandment or behest. We speak sometimes, do we not, of the “behest of duty.” The other idea, which can be placed over against it, is the idea of right (or rights).

If you will reflect a little on the part played in human life by these two ideas of duty and of right—I mean, the “right” one has to do this or that—you will very soon realize that they are polar opposites, and that men's inclinations are turned now more in the direction of duty, and now again in the direction of right. We live certainly in an age when people are more ready to speak of right than duty. All possible spheres of life claim their rights. We have Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and so on and so on.

Duty is the opposite idea of right. Our age will be followed by an age when duties will be more regarded than rights, and this will be directly attributable to the influence of the anthroposophical spiritual world-conception. In the future—certainly, in a rather distant future—we shall have movements where less and less emphasis will be laid on the demand for rights and people will inquire more and more as to their duty. The question will rather be: What is our duty as man, as woman, e.g., in this or that situation of life? The present epoch that demands rights will be succeeded by an epoch that asks after duties.

We said that right and duty play into life like two polar opposites. Whenever a man turns his thought and attention to duty, he looks right away from himself. Kant has given great and grand expression to this fact. He pictures duty as a lofty goddess, to whom man looks up: “Duty, thou great and exalted Name, thou has nought to do with fondness nor with favor; all that thou requirest is to submit thyself and serve.” Man beholds duty, so to say, raying down upon him from regions of the spiritual world. In a religious sense, he feels duty as an impulse laid upon him by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And when man surrenders himself to duty, he goes right out of himself. It is in this going-out-of-himself in the feeling of duty, that man can begin to learn how to get beyond his ordinary self.

There is, however, a danger to man in all such going-out-of his ordinary self, in all such endeavor after spiritualization. If man were to give himself up entirely to this, he would lose the ground from under his feet, he would lose his feeling of gravity. Therefore he must endeavor, when he surrenders himself to duty, to find within himself at the same time something that shall give him weight, so that he may keep his sense of gravity. Schiller expressed it very beautifully when he said that man has the best relation to duty when he learns to love duty.

This is really saying a great deal. When a man speaks of learning to love duty he no longer merely surrenders himself to duty; he rises out of himself, taking with him the love with which otherwise he loves himself. The love that lives in his body, in his egoism—this love he takes out of himself, and loves with it duty. So long as it is self-love, so long is it a Luciferic force. But when man takes this self-love out of himself and loves duty in the way that otherwise he loves only himself, he releases Lucifer. He takes Lucifer into the realm of duty and gives him, so to say, a justified existence in the impulse and feeling of duty.

If, on the other hand, a man cannot do this, if he cannot draw forth the love out of himself and offer it to duty, then he will continue to love only himself; and since he cannot love duty, he is obliged to subject himself to her, he becomes a slave to duty, he becomes, as we say, a man who “does his duty,”—hard and cold and uninspired. He hardens in an Ahrimanic sense, notwithstanding that he follows duty devotedly.

You see how duty stands, as it were, in a midway position. If we surrender ourselves to her, she annuls our freedom, we become her slaves, because Ahriman draws near on the one hand with his impulses. But if we bring ourselves—if we bring all our power of self-love—as an offering and offer it up to duty, bringing thus to duty the Luciferic warmth of love, then the result is that, through the state of balance induced in this way between Lucifer and Ahriman, we find a right relation to duty.

Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the Luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

Schiller sets himself this very question in his “Aesthetic Letters”: How is it possible to rise above slavery to duty and attain to love of duty? Of course he does not use the expressions “Lucifer” and “Ahriman,” because he does not see the problem in its cosmic aspect. Nevertheless these wonderful letters of Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man are directly translatable into Spiritual Science.

Right, on the other hand, immediately shows that it is united with Lucifer. Man does not need to learn to love his right, he loves it already! It is perfectly natural that he should do so. It is natural for Lucifer to be connected with right in man's feeling—man feels that this or that is his right. Everywhere that right asserts itself, Lucifer is speaking there too. It is very often only too evident how Lucifer makes his voice heard in the demand of some right. Here it is a question of calling in something that can be set over against right. We have to call in Ahriman to create a polarity to Lucifer. And this we can do by cultivating the polar opposite of love.

Love is inner fire, its opposite is calmness—the quiet acceptance of what happens in the world. As soon as we approach our right with this quiet and calm interest we call in Ahriman. It is not easy to recognize him here, for we set him free from his merely external existence, we summon him into ourselves and warm him with the love that is already united with right. Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity. That is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that he feels in his heart the urge to make new conditions possible, continually to let the old give place to the new. This is the revolutionary current in human life. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles.

Thus we see how right and duty show each of them a state of equilibrium between Lucifer and Ahriman. We only learn to understand how the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body manifest in life, or how duty and right come to expression in the life of duty and the life of right, when we learn to recognize the interplay of great spiritual Powers, above all of those spiritual Powers who bring about the state of equilibrium.

For just as what is in the external world stands under the influence of the spiritual forces that bring about balance, so does our moral life too belong in a world of polar opposites. The whole morale of human conduct, the whole ethical life of man with its poles of right and duty, only become comprehensible when we take into account the instreaming forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. And when we look at the life of man in history, that takes its course in an alternation between, on the one hand, revolutionary and warlike—that is to say, Luciferic—movements, and on the other hand, conservative—that is, Ahrimanic—movements, there too we find a condition of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. In no other way is the world to be understood than by recognizing in it these opposite forces and influences.

What we behold in the world outside is dualistic, it shows itself to us in opposites. And in this connection Manichaeism, correctly understood, has its complete justification. How Manichaeism is fully justified even within a spiritual monism—of that we shall have more to say in the future. The object I have had in view in these lectures is to show you how the whole world is a result of the working of balance.

Particularly evident is the result of the working of balance in the life of art. With this as our starting-point we will go on in later lectures to consider the arts and their evolution in the world, and the part that has been taken by different spiritual Powers in the evolution of the life of art among mankind.

Above all, I must ask for your forgiveness if I am unable to give the lecture I am supposed to give in one of the local languages. The fact that this lecture is being held corresponds to the wish of the friends of our Theosophical Society, for whom I was invited here, to hold a series of lectures for a fortnight, and who thought that there was a possibility of also inserting the two announced public lectures within this time. Of course, this means that I will have to apologize in advance if some of the names and terms, which are borrowed from the national epic of the Finns, are not pronounced quite correctly by me, as I am not familiar with the language. However, only next Friday's lecture will be able to introduce us to spiritual science itself. Tonight's lecture will rather concern a kind of neighboring area that can be illuminated from a spiritual scientific point of view. However, the talk will be about an area that, in the very deepest sense of the word, is one of the most interesting for human historical reflection and human historical thought.

Folk epics! We need only think of some of the better-known folk epics, the epics of Homer, which have become Greek folk epics, the Central European Nibelungen saga and, finally, Kalewala, and it will immediately become clear to us that these folk epics lead us deeper into human souls and human than through any historical research, so that important ancient times are brought to life and presented to our souls as if they were present, but in such a way that they touch us in the here and now like the fates and lives of people living around us. How uncertain and hazy are the historical times of the ancient Greek people, as told to us by the Homeric epics. And how do we look into the souls of those people when we let the content of the Iliad and the Odyssey take effect on us, people who have actually been completely removed from the usual view of history? No wonder that the study of folk epics holds something of a mystery for those who study them scientifically or literarily. We need only point out one fact about the ancient Greek epics that a spirited observer of the Iliad repeatedly expressed in a very beautiful book about Homer's Iliad that was only published a few years ago. I am referring to Herman Grimm, the nephew of the great Germanic myth, saga, and language researcher Jakob Grimm. By letting the figures and facts of the Iliad take effect on him, Herman Grimm felt compelled to say again and again: Oh, this Homer – we do not need to go into the question of the personality of Homer today – seems, when he describes something that is borrowed from a craft or an art, as if he were a specialist in this craft or art. When he describes a battle, a fight, he seems to be completely familiar with all the strategic and military principles that come into play in warfare. — Herman Grimm is right to point out that a strict judge in such matters was an admirer of Homer's factual depiction of battles, namely Napoleon, a man who was undoubtedly entitled to pass judgment on whether or not the military is directly and vividly presented to our minds in the spirit of Homer. From a general human point of view, we know how vividly Homer presents the figures to our minds, as if we had them directly before our physical eyes.

What about a national epic like this, how does it prove itself over time? For truly, anyone who observes the circumstances impartially will not get the impression that artificial arrangements of humanity, such as an artificial pedagogical discipline, have repeatedly held the interest of the centuries in the Iliad and Odyssey down to our days. This interest is a matter of course, it is a general human interest. But in a certain sense these folk epics give us a task, and if we want to study them, they immediately present us with a very specific, one might say interesting, task. They want to be taken very seriously in all their details. We immediately feel that something about the content of such folk epics will remain incomprehensible to us if we want to read them in the same way that we read a modern work of art, a modern novel or the like. We feel right from the first lines of the Iliad that Homer is speaking precisely. What is he describing? He tells us at the beginning. We know from other accounts, which are not contained in the Iliad, about events that follow on from the facts of the Iliad. Homer wants to describe only what he says succinctly in the first line: the wrath of Achilles. And if we now go through the entire Iliad and look at it impartially, we have to say: there is nothing in it that cannot be characterized as fact, that follows from the wrath of Achilles. - And further, a peculiar fact right at the beginning of the Iliad. Homer does not begin with the facts, nor with some personal opinion, but with something that modern times might be tempted to take as a mere phrase: “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles!” And the deeper we penetrate into this national epic, the clearer it becomes to us that we cannot understand the meaning and spirit and significance of it if we do not take this saying seriously at the outset. But then we must ask ourselves: what does it actually mean?

And now the way it is presented, the whole way the events are brought before our soul! For many, not only expert and scientific observers, but also for artistically comprehensive minds like Herman Grimm, it was a question these words: “Sing to me, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.” A question that went to their very hearts. In this Iliad, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs or in Kalewala, the deeds of spiritual-divine beings—in Homer's poems, first of all, the deeds and intentions and passions of the Olympian gods—intertwine with the deeds and intentions and passions of men who, like Achilles, are in a sense far removed from the ordinary human, and again with the passions and intentions and deeds of men who are already close to the ordinary human, like Odysseus or Agamemnon? When this Achilles appears before our soul, he seems lonely to us compared to the people with whom he lives. We very soon feel in the course of the Iliad that in Achilles we have a personality before us who cannot really talk about her innermost affairs with all the other heroes. Homer also shows us how Achilles has to sort out his actual heart affairs with divine spiritual beings that do not belong to the human realm, how he stands alone in relation to the human realm throughout the entire Iliad, and yet is close to supersensible, supermundane powers. And yet it is strange that when we gather all our human feeling into the way of thinking and feeling that we have acquired in the cultural process and direct our gaze to this Achilles, he then appears to us in such a way that we often have to say: How selfish, how personal! — A being in whose soul divine-spiritual impulses play, he acts entirely out of the immediate personal. For a long time, a war that was so important for the Greeks, such as the Trojan War of the legends, only progresses, and the special episodes that the thliad describes, are won by Achilles making up for himself what he has to make up for personally with Agamemnon. And we always see that supernatural powers are at play. We see Zeus, Apollo, Athena handing out impulses, so to speak, putting people in their places. It was always strange before the task came to me to approach these things from the standpoint of spiritual science, like a very spiritual man with whom I was lucky enough to often discuss these things personally, to find his way around these things like Herman Grimm. He expressed this not only in his writings but also often in personal conversations, and there much more precisely. He said: If we only consider the historical forces and impulses at work in the development of humanity, then we cannot get to grips with what lives and creates in the great folk epics. Therefore, for Herman Grimm, the brilliant observer of the Iliad and folk poetry in general, something that goes beyond the ordinary powers of human consciousness, beyond understanding, reason, sensory perception, beyond ordinary feeling, becomes a real power, a power that is creative just like the other historical impulses. Herman Grimm spoke of a real creative imagination that runs through the development of humanity, spoke of an imagination as one speaks of an essence, of a reality, of something that prevailed for people and that could tell them more in the beginning of the times we can observe, in the development of the individual peoples, than what the ordinary soul forces tell people. Herman Grimm's words always appealed to the creative imagination, which for him thus took on the role of a co-creator in the process of human becoming.

But now, when we look at this battleground of the Iliad, this representation of the wrath of Achilles, with all the interplay of divine, spiritual powers, we cannot get by with such view as Herman Grimm took it, and in his book on the Iliad we find many a word of resignation that shows us how the usual point of view, which one can take today, whether literary or scientifically, cannot deal with these things. Where does Herman Grimm come to in relation to the Iliad and the Nibelungen saga? He comes to the assumption that the historical dynasties and ruling houses were preceded by others. In fact, one might say, Herman Grimm literally thinks in such terms. He considers, for example, that Zeus and his entire entourage represent a kind of ruling house that preceded the ruling house of Agamemnon. He thinks, so to speak, of human history in a certain uniformity, thinks of the gods or heroes depicted in the Iliad or the Nibelungen saga as ancient humans, whom later humans dared to depict only by clothing their deeds and characters in the guise of superhuman myth. There are many things that cannot be understood if one takes such a premise as a basis, especially the particular way in which the gods intervene in Homer. I ask you, my dear attendees, to consider just one thing: how do Thetis, the mother of Achilles, Athena, and other divine figures intervene in the events of Troy? They intervene by taking on the form of mortal men, inspiring them, as it were, and leading them to their deeds. They do not appear themselves, but permeate living men. Living men figure not only as their representatives, but as the shells that are permeated by invisible powers that cannot appear on the battlefield in their own form, in their own essence. It would be strange to assume that ancient people of the ordinary kind should be depicted in such a way that they would have to take the representative people from the mortal race as their shell. This is just one of the indications that can prove to us all that we cannot get by with the old folk epics in this way.

But we are just as little at home with the figures of the Song of the Nibelungs, that Siegfried from Xanten on the Lower Rhine, who is transferred to the court of the Burgundians at Worms, woos Kriemhilde, Gunther's sister, and then, because of his special qualities, can only woo Brunhilde. And how strangely such figures as Brunhilde from Isenland, like Siegfried, are described to us. Siegfried is described as having overcome the so-called Nibelung race, as having acquired, conquered the Nibelung treasure. Through what he has acquired through his victory over the Nibelungs, he acquires very special qualities, which are expressed in the epic by saying that he can make himself invisible, that he is invulnerable in a certain way, and that he also has powers that the ordinary Gunther does not have, because the latter cannot acquire Brunhilde, who does not allow herself to be defeated by an ordinary mortal. Siegfried defeats Brunhilde with the special powers that come from being the owner of the Nibelungen hoard, and because he can conceal the powers he displays, he is able to present Brunhilde to Gunther, his brother-in-law. And there we find that Kriemhilde and Brunhilde, who we then see at the Burgundian court at the same time, are two very different characters, characters who are obviously influenced by things that cannot be explained by the ordinary human soul. This leads to quarrels between them, and also to Brunhilde being able to tempt Hagen, a loyal servant, to kill Siegfried. This again points to a trait that appears so peculiarly in Central European legend. Siegfried has higher, superhuman powers. He has these superhuman powers because he possesses the hoard of the Nibelungs. Ultimately, these do not make him an unconditionally victorious figure, but a figure who stands before us tragically. The powers that Siegfried has through the Nibelungen hoard are also a curse for the human being. Things become even stranger when we add the related Nordic saga of Sigurd, the dragon slayer, but this has an enlightening effect. There we are immediately confronted with Sigurd, who is none other than Siegfried, as the slayer of the dragon, who thereby acquires the Nibelungen hoard from an ancient race of dwarves. And we are introduced to Brunhilde as a figure of superhuman nature, as a Valkyrie figure.

We see, then, that there are two ways of presenting these things in Europe. One way, which directly links everything to the divine-supernatural, which still shows us how something in Brunhilde is meant that directly belongs to the supernatural world, and the other way, which legend has humanized. But we can still recognize how the divine can be found resounding everywhere in this way too.

And now let us turn our gaze from these legends, from these folk epics, to that region about which I can truly only speak as someone who can see things from the outside, only as they can be recognized if one does not speak the language in question. I ask you to bear in mind that I can only speak about everything that a Western European encounters in Kalewala as one who sees the spiritual content and the great, powerful figures and who, of course, must inevitably miss the subtleties of the epic, which only come out when one really masters the language in which it is written. But even when viewed in this way, how peculiarly the triad in the three presents itself to us, indeed, one is actually at a loss to use a name, one cannot say gods, one cannot say heroes, so let us say in the three entities: Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen. These figures speak a strange language, when we compare their characters with each other, a language from which we clearly recognize that the things we are to be told go beyond what can be achieved with the ordinary human powers of the soul. After all, if we look at them only superficially, these three figures grow into the monstrous. And yet again, which is the peculiar thing, in that they grow into the monstrous, every single trait is vividly before our eyes, so that nowhere do we somehow have the feeling that the monstrous is a grotesque, a paradox; everywhere we have the feeling that what is to be said must, of course, appear in superhuman greatness, in superhuman significance. And then: what mystery in the content. Something that inspires our soul to think of the most human of things, but which in turn goes beyond what ordinary soul forces can grasp. Ilmarinen, who is often called the blacksmith, the most artistic blacksmith of all, forges the Sampo on pins for Wäinämöinen in a realm inhabited, so to speak, by humanity's older brothers or at least by more primitive people than the Finns, for some foreign realm. And we see this strange thing happening, that far from the scene of the facts under discussion, many things take place, that time passes, and we see how, after a certain time, Wäinämöinen and Ilmarinen are again caused to retrieve what was left to them in a foreign land, the Sampo. Anyone who allows themselves to be drawn into the peculiar spiritual language that emerges from this forging of the Sampo, from this keeping away and regaining of the same, has the immediate impression – as I said, I ask you to bear in mind that I speak, so to speak, as a stranger and can therefore only speak of the impression of a stranger – that the most essential, the most meaningful in this grandiose poem is the forging, the keeping away and the later regaining of the Sampo.

What strikes me as particularly strange about Kalewala is the ending. I have heard that there are people who believe that this ending may be a later addition. For me, this ending of Mariata and her son, this introduction of a very strange Christianity – I say explicitly a very strange Christianity – is part of the whole. It acquires Kalevala, through the presence of this conclusion, a very special nuance, a coloring that can, so to speak, make the matter even more understandable to us. I may say that, for my feeling, such a delicate, wonderfully impersonal presentation of Christianity is nowhere to be found at all than at the end of Kalevala. The Christian principle is detached from all locality. The journey from Mariata to Herod, who in Kalevala appears as Rotus, is so impersonal that it hardly reminds us of any locality or personality in Palestine. Indeed, one is not even remotely reminded of the historical Christ Jesus. At the end of Kalewala, we find a delicate hint of the penetration of the noblest cultural pearl of humanity into Finnish culture as the most intimate affair of the heart of humanity. And linked to this is the tragic train, which in turn can have such an infinitely deep effect on our soul that when Christianity moves in and the son of Mariata is baptized, Wäinämöinen takes leave of his people in order to go to an unspecified location, leaving behind only the content and power of what he knew how to tell through his art of singing about the ancient events that include the history of this people. This withdrawal of Wäinämöinen towards the son of Mariata seems to me so significant that one would like to see in it the living interplay of all that prevailed at the core of the Finnish people, of the Finnish national soul, from ancient times until the moment when Christianity found its way into Finland. The way in which this ancient power relates to Christianity is such that one can feel everything that takes place in the soul with a wonderful intimacy. I say this as someone who is aware of the objectivity of what I am about to say, which I do not say to please anyone or to flatter anyone. In this national epic, we Western Europeans have one of the most wonderful examples of how the members of a nation stand before us in the flesh, with their whole soul, so that through Kalevala we get to know the Finnish soul in a way that allows us to become completely familiar with it.

Why have I said all this? I have said it to characterize how something speaks in the folk epics that cannot be explained by ordinary human soul powers, even when one speaks of imagination as a real power. And even if to some what is said sounds only like a hypothesis, then perhaps what spiritual science has to say about the nature of these folk epics may be adduced in this consideration of folk epics. Certainly, I am aware that what I have to say today still touches on something to which very few people can give their consent in our present time. Many may perhaps regard it as a reverie, a fantasy; but some will at least accept it alongside other hypotheses put forward about the development of humanity. For those who penetrate spiritual science in the way that I will dare to describe in the next lecture, it will not be a hypothesis, but a real research result that can be put alongside other scientific research results. The things that have to be discussed sound strange because the very science that today believes it stands firmly on the ground of the factual, the true, the only thing that can be attained, limits itself only to what the outer senses perceive, what the mind, bound to the senses and the brain, can explore of things. And that is why today it is often considered unscientific to speak of a research method that reaches to other powers of the soul, which make it possible to see into the supersensible and the way the supersensible plays into the sensory. By means of this method of research, by means of spiritual science, one is not merely led to the abstract imagination to which Herman Grimm was led in regard to the folk epic, but one is led to something that goes far beyond imagination, that represents a quite different state of soul or consciousness than that which man can have at the present moment in his development. And so, through spiritual science, we are led back to human prehistory in a completely different way than through ordinary science.

Today, ordinary science is accustomed to looking back on the development of humanity in such a way that what we call human beings today have gradually developed from lower, animal-like creatures. Spiritual science does not confront this modern research with a combative attitude, but fully recognizes the greatness and power of the achievements of this natural science of the 19th century, the significance of the idea of a transformation of the animal forms from the most imperfect to the perfect, and an attachment of the outer human form to the most perfect animal form. But it cannot stop at such a view of the becoming of man, of the becoming of organisms in general, which would present itself if one could survey with an external sensory view that which has taken place in the organic world up to man in the course of earthly events. Today, in spiritual science, the human being stands alongside the animal world. We see the variously shaped animal forms in the world around us. We see the human race spread out over the earth as a unified entity in a certain way. In spiritual science, we also have an unbiased view of how everything in the outer form speaks for the relationship between man and the other organisms, but in spiritual science, when we trace the development of humanity backwards, we cannot go back so far that we can directly place the stream of humanity into the animal series of development in some distant past. For we find, when we go back from the present into the past, that we cannot, anywhere, directly attach the present human form, the present human being, to any animal form that we know from the present.

If we go back in the development of humanity, we first find, one might say, the soul forces, the powers of mind and feeling and will, that we also have in the present, developing in ever more primitive forms in humans. Then we go back to the mists of time, of which old documents tell us only very little. Even where we can go back as far as the Egyptians or the peoples of the Near East, we are led everywhere back to an ancient humanity, which, although more primitive in some respects, also has more magnificent the same powers of mind, and will forces, which have only recently reached their present development, but which we recognize as the most important human impulses, as the most important historical impulses, as far as we can trace back humanity by considering this present soul. Nowhere do we find the possibility of placing even the most ancient race of men in a special relationship to the present animal forms. This, which spiritual science must assert for itself, is recognized today even by thinking natural scientists. But if we go further back and consider how the human soul changes when we compare how a person thinks, say, scientifically or otherwise, how he applies his intellect and how his powers of feeling work, when we trace this back — oh, we can trace it quite accurately — to a certain time when it first shone forth in humanity. We might say that it first appeared in the sixth or seventh century before Christ. The whole configuration of present-day feeling and thinking does not go back farther than the times of which we are told as the times of the first Greek natural philosophy.

If we go further back and have an unprejudiced eye, we find, without yet touching on spiritual science, that not only does all present-day scientific thought cease in the past, but that the human soul is in a completely different state altogether, in a much more impersonal state, but also in such a state that we have to address its powers much more as instinctively. Not in the sense that we are saying that people in this period acted on instincts like those of animals today, but the guidance of reason and intellect, as it exists today, was not there. Instead, however, there was a certain instinctive, direct certainty in people. They acted on the basis of direct, elementary impulses; they did not control them through the intellect tied to the brain. There we find, however, that in the human soul those powers still prevail unmixed, which we today have separately as powers of reason, and those powers, which we today carefully separate from the powers of reason and lead to science, the powers of imagination. Imagination, understanding and reason, they all work together in those ancient times. The further back we go, the more we find that we can no longer speak of what prevailed in the soul of human beings, what worked there as imagination and understanding, as we call a soul power today, when we call it imagination. Today we know very well that when we speak of imagination, we are speaking of a soul force whose expressions we cannot really apply, to which we cannot ascribe reality. The modern human being is careful in this matter, he is careful not to mix together what imagination gives him with what the logic of reason tells him. If we look at what the human mind expresses in those prehistoric times before imagination and reason appear separately, then we feel an original, elementary, instinctive power prevailing in the souls. We can find characteristics of today's imagination in it, but what – if we use the term – imagination gave the human soul back then had something to do with a reality. Imagination was not yet imagination, it was still – I must not be afraid to use the expression directly – clairvoyant power, was still a special soul faculty, was the gift of the soul through which man saw things, saw facts that are hidden from him today in his developmental epoch, when understanding and reason are to be particularly developed. Those powers that were not imagination but clairvoyant power penetrated deeper down into hidden forces and hidden forms of existence that lie behind the sensual world. This is what an unbiased consideration must lead us to: that when we look back at the development of humanity, we have to say to ourselves: Truly, we must take the word evolution, development, seriously.

That humanity in the present, in the last centuries and millennia, has come to its present high level of rational and intellectual powers, so to speak, is a result of development. These soul powers have developed out of others. And while our present soul powers are limited to what presents itself in the external sense world, an original humanity, which of course had to do without science in the modern sense, without the use of reason in the modern sense, an original human soul power at the basis of all individual peoples looked into the foundations of existence, into a realm that, as a supersensible one, lies behind the sensual. Once upon a time, all peoples possessed clairvoyant powers as part of the human soul. It was out of these clairvoyant powers that the present human powers of understanding and reason were formed, as well as the present way of thinking and feeling. These soul powers, which we may refer to as clairvoyant powers, were such that the human being felt at the same time: I am not the one who is thinking and feeling within me. Man felt as if he had been given over, with all his physicality and also with his soul being, to higher, supersensible powers that were working and living in him. Thus man felt like a vessel through which supersensible forces themselves spoke. If one considers this, one also understands the meaning of the further development of humanity. Human beings would have remained dependent beings, who could only have felt themselves to be vessels, as shells of powers and entities, if they had not progressed to the actual use of intellect and reason. Through the use of intellect and reason, man has become more independent, but at the same time, for a while of development, he has also been cut off from the spiritual world in certain respects, cut off from the supersensible foundations of existence. In the future, this will change again. The further we go back, the deeper the human soul sees into the foundations of existence through clairvoyant powers, and sees how those forces that worked on the human being himself in prehistoric times emerged from these foundations of existence until a point in time when all conditions on earth were quite different from today, when they were such that the forms of living beings were much more mobile, much more subject to a kind of metamorphosis than today. Thus we have to go back far from what is called the present human cultural period, we have to observe human forms and animal forms side by side. And much further back than is usually believed today is the separation of the animal form from the human form. The animal forms then solidified, became more immobile at a time when the human form was still quite soft and pliable and could be shaped and molded by what was experienced inwardly by the soul. In this way, we come back to a time in human development that is beyond our present consciousness, but for which another consciousness was present in the soul, one that was connected to the clairvoyant powers that have just been characterized. Such a consciousness, which could look back into the past and saw the development of humanity in its origin from the past already in complete separation from all animal life, also saw how human forces ruled, but still in a living connection with the supersensible forces that played into it. It saw what in the times when, for example, the Homeric epics were written was only present as an old echo, and what was present to a much greater extent in even earlier times. If we go back to the time before Homer, we find that people had a clairvoyant consciousness that, as it were, remembered human events from prehistoric times and was able to tell the story of the origin of man from memory. By Homer's time, the situation was such that people felt that the old clairvoyant consciousness was dwindling, but they still felt that it was there. That was a time when man did not speak of himself as an independent, egoistic being, but when gods and supersensible spiritual forces spoke through him. So we must take it seriously when Homer does not speak of himself, but when he says: Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles! Sing in me, higher being, being that speaks through me, that takes possession of me as I sing and say. This first line of Homer is a reality. We are not referred to ancient dynasties that are similar in the ordinary sense to our present humanity, but we are pointed to the fact by Homer himself that there were other people in primeval times, people in whom the supersensible lived. And Achilles is definitely still a personality from the transitional period from the old clairvoyance to the modern way of looking at things, which we already find in Agamemnon, which we find in Nestor and Odysseus, but which is then further developed into a higher way of looking at things. Only in this way do we understand Achilles when we know that Homer wanted to depict him as a member of the ancient human race who lived in a time that lies between the time when people still directly reached the ancient gods and the present time of humanity, which begins with Agamemnon.

Likewise, we are referred to a human prehistory in the Central European Nibelungen saga. The whole presentation of this epic shows us this. We are already dealing with people of our present time in a certain respect, but with such people of our present time who have preserved something from the time of ancient clairvoyance. All the qualities that Siegfried is said to have, that he can make himself invisible, that he has powers through which he overcomes Brunhilde, which an ordinary mortal cannot overcome, all this shows us, along with the other things that are told about him, that we have in him a man who, as in an inner human memory, has carried the achievements of the ancient powers of the soul, which were linked to clairvoyance and connection with nature, over into the present human condition. At what transition does Siegfried stand? This is shown by Brunhilde's relationship to Kriemhilde, Siegfried's wife. It cannot be explained in detail here what the two figures mean. But we can make sense of all these legends if we see in the figures that are presented to us pictorial representations of inner clairvoyant or remembered clairvoyant conditions. Thus we may see in Siegfried's relation to Kriemhilde his relation to the powers of his own soul as they rule in him. His soul is, as it were, a transitional soul, and this is because Siegfried, with the treasure of the Nibelungs, that is, with the clairvoyant secrets of ancient times, brings something into the new time that at the same time makes him unsuitable for his present time. The men of the old time could live with this Nibelung hoard, that is to say with the old clairvoyant powers. The earth has changed its conditions. Thus Siegfried, who still carries an echo of the old time in his soul, no longer fits into the present, and so he becomes a tragic figure. How can the present relate to what is still alive for Siegfried? For him, something of the old clairvoyant powers is still alive, because when he is overcome, Kriemhilde remains. She is brought the hoard of the Nibelungs, she can use it. We learn that later on, the hoard of the Nibelungs will be taken from her by Hagen. We can see that in a way, Brunhilde is also able to work with the old clairvoyant powers. In this way, she is opposed to those people who fit into the then-present: Gunther and his brothers, Gunther above all, for whom Brunhilde has no time. Why is that? Well, we know from the saga that Brunhilde is a kind of Valkyrie figure: in other words, something in the human soul, and specifically that with which, in ancient times, man was still able to unite through clairvoyant powers, but which has withdrawn from man, has become unconscious, and with which man, as he currently lives in the age of reason, can only unite after death. Hence the union with the Valkyrie at the moment of death. The Valkyrie is the personification of the living soul forces that are in the present human being, those soul forces that the old clairvoyant consciousness was able to perceive, but which the present human being only experiences when he passes through the gate of death. Only then is he united with this soul, which is represented in Brunhilde. Because Kriemhilde still knows something of the old clairvoyant times and the powers that the soul receives through ancient clairvoyance, she becomes a figure whose anger is described, as in the Iliad the anger of Achilles. This is sufficiently indicated to us that the people who were still endowed with clairvoyant powers in ancient times did not control with reason, did not let reason prevail, but acted directly from their most elementary, most intense impulses. Hence the personal, the directly egoistic, in both Kriemhilde and Achilles.

The whole matter becomes particularly interesting when we consider the folk epics, if we add Kalewala to the folk epics listed. We will be able to show, today, because of the limited time, that spiritual science in our present time can only point to the old clairvoyant states of humanity because it is possible today, again — albeit in a more advanced way, permeated by reason, not dream-like — to evoke clairvoyant states through spiritual training. Modern man is gradually growing into an age in which hidden powers will arise from the depths of the human soul, pointing to the supersensible. These powers will be guided by reason, not uncontrolled by it. They will point to the supersensible realm, so that we will become familiar again with the realms of which the old folk epics speak to us from the dim consciousness of ancient times. Therefore, we can say: One learns to recognize that it is possible to gain a revelation of the world, not only through the external senses, but through something supersensible that underlies the external physical human body.

There are methods – which will be discussed in the next lecture – by which man can make the spiritual supersensible inner being, which is so often denied today, independent of the sensual outer body, so that man does not live in an unconscious state as in sleep, when he becomes independent of his body, but perceives the spiritual around him. In this way, modern clairvoyance shows man the possibility of living cognitively in a higher, supersensible body, which, like a vessel, fills the ordinary sense body. Spiritual science calls it the etheric body. This etheric body rests within our physical body. When we detach it inwardly from the physical body, we can enter into the state of perception through which we become aware of supersensible facts. We become aware of two kinds of supersensible facts. Firstly, we become aware of it at the beginning of this clairvoyant state, when we begin to know that we no longer see through our physical body, we no longer hear through our physical body, and we no longer think through the brain that is bound to the physical body. At first, we know nothing of the external world. — I am telling you facts that can only be explained in more detail in the next lecture. — But the first step of clairvoyance leads us all the more to an insight into our own etheric body. We see a supersensible physicality of human nature that underlies it and that we can only address as something that works and creates like a kind of inner architect, inner foreman, that permeates our physical body in a living way. And then we become aware of the following.

We become aware that what we perceive in ourselves, what we perceive as the actual living part of our etheric body, is, on the one hand, limited and modified by our physical body, so that it is, as it were, clothed on the physical side. In that the etheric body lines the eyes and ears and the physical brain, we belong, as it were, to the earthly element. Through this we perceive how our etheric body becomes a specific, individual, egoistic human being, integrated into the sheath of our physical body. On the other hand, however, we perceive how our etheric body leads us precisely into those regions where we stand impersonally before a higher, supersensible reality, something that is not us, but that is present in us with full presence, something that works through us as spiritual, supersensible power and strength. In spiritual scientific observation, the inner life of the soul then breaks down into three parts, which are enclosed in three outer bodily sheaths, filling them. We initially live with our soul in such a way that we experience in it what our eyes see, our ears hear, our senses can grasp in general, and what our mind can comprehend. We live with our soul in our physical body. Insofar as our soul lives in the physical body, we call it the consciousness soul in spiritual science, because it is only through the complete integration into the physical body in the course of becoming human that it has become possible for the human being to become aware of himself. Then the modern clairvoyant, in particular, also gets to know the life of the soul in what we have called the etheric body. The soul lives in the etheric body in such a way that it has its powers, but the soul's powers work in such a way that we cannot say that they are our personal powers. They are general human powers, powers through which we are much closer to the hidden facts of nature as a whole. Insofar as the soul perceives these forces in an outer shell, namely in the etheric body, we speak of the mind or emotional soul as a second soul element. So that just as we find the consciousness soul enclosed in the shell of the physical body, we have the mind or emotional soul enclosed in the etheric body. And then we have an even more delicate body through which we can reach up into the supersensible world. Everything that we experience inwardly as our very own secrets, at the same time as that which is hidden from consciousness today and which in the time of ancient clairvoyance was felt as the formative forces in the human process of development, which was felt as if one could look back into the events of the dim and distant past, we ascribe all this to the sentient soul, ascribe it to it in such a way that it is enclosed in the finest human body, in what we — please, do not be put out by the expression, take it as a terminus technicus — call the astral body. It is the part of the human being that connects to the external earthly that inspires the human being, which he cannot perceive through the external senses, nor can perceive when he looks into the etheric body through his own inner being, but what he perceives when he becomes independent of himself, of the etheric body, and is connected with the forces of his origin.

Thus we have the sentient soul in the astral body, the mind or emotional soul in the etheric body, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. In the days of ancient clairvoyance, people were more or less instinctively aware of these things, for they looked within themselves and saw this threefold soul. Not that they analyzed the soul intellectually, but because they had a clairvoyant consciousness, the threefold human soul stood before them: the sentient soul in the astral, the mind or emotional soul in the etheric, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. Looking back, they saw how the outer man, the physical form, developed out of what is now before us as the threefold soul-forces. They sensed that this threefold division is born out of supersensible creative powers. They sensed that the sentient soul is born out of supersensible creative powers, which gave man the astral body, that body which he not only has like his etheric and physical bodies between birth and death, but which he takes with him when he passes through the gate of death, and which he already had before he came into existence through birth. Thus the old clairvoyants saw the sentient soul connected with the astral body and that which, so to speak, has an inspiring effect on man from the spiritual worlds and creates his astral body, as the one creative power that forms man out of the world as a whole. And as a second creative power, they saw what we have today as a result of the mind or emotional soul, and what creates the etheric body in such a way that this etheric body transforms all external substances, all external matter, so that they can permeate the physical human form in the human, not the animal, sense. The creative spirit for the etheric body, which manifests itself in our mind soul, was seen by the ancient seers as a superhuman cosmic power, working into physical matter as in magnetism, and into man. They looked up into the spiritual worlds and saw a divine spiritual power that shapes and forges the etheric body of the human being so that this etheric body becomes the master craftsman, the architect, who reshapes outer matter, confuses it, pulverizes it, grinds it, so that what otherwise exists as matter is structured in the human being and the human being acquires human abilities. The ancient clairvoyants saw how this creative power artfully transforms all matter so that it could become human matter. Then again they looked at the third, at the consciousness soul, which actually makes the egoistic human being, which is the transformation of the physical body, and they attributed those powers that prevail in this physical body solely and exclusively to the line of inheritance, to what comes from father and mother, from grandfather and great-grandfather, in short, what is the result of human powers of love, of human powers of reproduction. In this they saw the third creative power. The power of love works from generation to generation.

The ancient seers saw three powers, a creative being that our sentient soul ultimately evokes by forming the astral body in man, which powers can be inspired because it is the body that a person had before becoming a physical being through conception, the body that a person will have when he has passed through the gate of death. This formation of forces, or, as we might better say, this heavenly formation in man, lasts while the etheric and physical bodies pass away. At the same time, for the old seers this was what their direct experience revealed to them as being capable of bringing all culture into human life. That is why they saw in the Bringer of the astral body that power which brings in the divine, which itself consists only of the permanent, through which the eternal sings and sounds into the world. And the old seers, from whom — I say it unashamedly — the figures of Kalewala have sprung, have presented the living plastic embodiment of that power of creation that penetrates to us in the result of the sentient soul, that inspires the divine into the human, in Wäinämöinen. Wäinämöinen is the creator of that human limb that outlasts birth and death and that brings the heavenly into the earthly. And we see the second figure in Kalewala: Ilmarinen. When we go back to the ancient clairvoyant consciousness, we find that Ilmarinen creates everything that is an image in its living formation from the forces of the earth and from what does not belong to the sensual earth but to the deeper forces of the earth, starting from the etheric body. In Ilmarinen, we see the bringer of that which transforms all matter, that which surrounds it. We see in him the smith of the human form. And we see in the Sampo the human etheric body, forged by Ilmarinen out of the supersensible world, so that the sensual matter can be pulverized and then passed on from generation to generation, so that the human consciousness soul continues to work in the physical human body through the forces that the third divine supersensible being gives from generation to generation through the forces of love. We see this third divine supersensible power in Lemminkäinen. Thus we see deep secrets of the origin of mankind in the forging of the Sampo, we see deep secrets from the ancient clairvoyant consciousness at the bottom of Kalewala and thus we look back into human prehistory, of which we may say: Not at that time was the age when one could have dissected natural phenomena with reason. Everything was primitive, but in the primitive lived the intuition of what lies behind the sensual. Now it was the case that when these bodies of man were forged, when in particular the ethereal body of man, the Sampo, was forged, that it first had to be processed for a while, that man did not immediately have the powers that were thereby prepared for him by the supersensible powers. Once the etheric body has been forged, it must first become familiarized inwardly, as when we prepare a machine that must first be finished, so to speak, must first mature fully in order to be used. In the process of becoming human, there must always be intermediate periods between the creation of the corresponding limbs and the use of them. Thus man had forged his etheric body in distant primeval times. Then came an episode when this etheric body was sent down into human nature. Only later did it shine forth as the soul of the intellect. Man learned to use his powers as external natural forces, he brought forth from his own nature the hidden Sampo. We see this mystery of becoming human in a wonderful way in the forging of the Sampo, in the hiddenness, in the ineffectiveness of the Sampo, in the episode that lies between the forging and the recovery of the same. We see the Sampo first immersed in human nature, then brought out to the external forces of culture, which first appear as primitive forces, as described in the second part of Kalewala.

Thus everything takes on a deep meaning in this great national epic when we see in it descriptions of clairvoyantly acquired ancient processes of becoming human, of the coming into being of human nature from its various elements. I can assure you that I did not get to know Kalevala until long afterward. Once I had clearly visualized these facts about the development of human nature, it was a wonderful and surprising fact for me to rediscover in this epic what I was able to present more or less theoretically in my Theosophy, which was written at a time when I did not yet know a single line of Kalevala. And so we see how the secrets of humanity are revealed in what Wäinämöinen gives, he who is the creator of extrasensory inspiration: the story of the forging of the etheric body. But there is another secret hidden there. I understand, mind you, nothing of Finnish, I can only speak from the spiritual science. I would be able to express the word Sampo only and solely only by the fact that I would try to form a word that could arise in the following way: In the animals we see the etheric body so effective that it becomes the master builder for the most diverse forms, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. In the human etheric body, something has been forged that combines all these animal forms as if in a unity, with the only exception that the etheric body, that is, the Sampo, is forged over the earth according to climatic and other conditions, so that this etheric body has the special characteristics of the people, the special peculiarities of the people in its powers, that it shapes one people in this way and another differently. The Sampo is that for each people which constitutes the particular shape of the etheric body, which brings precisely this particular people into being, so that the members of this people have the same appearance in relation to what shines through their living and their physical being. Insofar as the same appearance is crafted out of the etheric in the human form, the forces of the etheric body lie in the Sampo. In the Sampo we thus have the symbol of the cohesion of the Finnish people, that which, in the depths of humanity, makes the Finnish nation have lived itself out in precisely this particular form.

But this is the case with every folk epic. Folk epics can only arise where culture is still enclosed in the forces of the Sampo, in the forces of the etheric body. As long as culture depends on the forces of the Sampo, the people bear the stamp of this Sampo. This etheric body therefore carries the character of the popular, the folk-like, in all of culture. When could a break in this popular, in this folk-like, occur in the course of the cultural process? It could happen when something entered the human cultural process that is not for one person, for one tribe, for one people, but for all of humanity. Something that is taken from such depths of human nature, from such subtleties and intimacies, and incorporated into the cultural process that it applies to all people without distinction of nationality, race and so on. But that was given when those powers spoke to people, not speaking to one people but to all humanity, those powers that are only so impersonal even in the sense of the folk, so finely and delicately hinted at in the end of Kalewala, in that the Christ is born of Mariata. When He is baptized, Wäinämöinen leaves the land, something has occurred that brings the special folk character together with the general human character. And here, at this point, where one of the most significant, concise, and magnificent folk epics flows into the description, into the completely impersonal – allow me the paradoxical expression – unpalestinianized description of the Christ impulse, Kalevala becomes particularly significant. It leads us particularly into what can be felt where the benefits and the happiness of the Sampo are felt as continuing to have an effect through all human development and at the same time in interaction with the Christian idea, with the Christian impulse. This is the infinitely delicate thing at the end of Kalewala. It is also what explains so clearly that what lies before this conclusion in Kalewala belongs to the pre-Christian era. But just as everything universally human will only continue to exist by preserving the individual, so the individual folk cultures, which derive their essence from the ancient clairvoyant states of the peoples, will continue to live in the universally human. And so everything that Kalewala indicates as Christian at the end will always combine and retain its special consequence through the never-ending effect that is hinted at in the inspirations of Wäinämöinen. For Wäinämöinen means something that belongs to that human part that is above birth and death, that walks with man through all human becoming. Thus, such epics as Kalevala present something to us that is immortal, that can be imbued with the Christian idea, but that will assert itself as something individual, that will always prove that the general human essence, just as white sunlight is divided into many colors, will live on in the many folk cultures. And because this general humanity in the essence of folk epics permeates the individual, which in turn shines into and speaks to every human being, that is why the individualities of the peoples live so much in the essence of their folk epics. That is why the people of old, who in their clairvoyance saw the essence of their own nationality as it is described in all folk epics, stand so vividly before our eyes. But we can get to know it in a very wonderful way when humanity is embraced in its intimacies by circumstances such as those in which the Finnish nation lives, where these, lying at the depths of the soul, are presented in such a way that they can be directly compared with what the most modern spiritual science can reveal to us about human secrets.

Thus, my dear audience, such folk epics are at the same time a living protest against all materialism, against all attempts to derive man from purely external material forces, material conditions, material entities. Such folk epics, especially Kalewala, tell us that man has his origin and primal state in the spiritual and soul. Therefore, a renewal, a re-fertilization of old folk epics can also provide immeasurably great services in the most vital sense of spiritual, of intellectual culture. For just as spiritual science today seeks to renew human consciousness in the sense that humanity is rooted not in matter but in spirit, so a close examination of an epic like Kalewala shows us that the best that man has, and the best that man is, comes from the spiritual and soul. In this sense, it was interesting to me that one of the runes, the kanteles, immediately, I would say, protests against an interpretation of what appears in Kalevala in a materialistic sense. That instrument, that harp-like instrument with which the old singers sang from the old days, is depicted as if it were made of materials from the physical world. But the old rune protested against this, protested in a spiritual-scientific sense, one might say, against the fact that the string instrument for Wäinämöinen was made of natural products that the senses can see. In truth, the old rune says, the instrument on which man plays the wise melodies that come to him directly from the spiritual world comes from the spiritual soul. In this sense, the old rune is to be interpreted entirely in the spiritual-scientific sense, a living protest against the interpretation of what man is capable of in the materialistic sense, an indication that what man possesses , what his nature is and what is only symbolically expressed in such an instrument as that attributed to Wäinämöinen, that such an instrument originates from the spirit and that the whole nature of man originates from the spirit. It can be regarded as a motto for the spirit of spiritual science, the old Finnish folk rune, which is translated into German as follows, and in which I can summarize the basic tone, the basic nuance of what the lecture wanted to explain about the nature of folk epics:

Those who believe that
And are in error,
Those who believe that Wäinämöinen
Made the kantele,
Our beautiful stringed instrument,
From the jaws of the pike,
And that he spun strings
From the tail of the hiisi horse.
It was made out of necessity,
Then sorrow bound its parts,
Bitter tears of longing span
And the sufferings their strings.

Thus all being is not born out of material, but out of spiritual-soul, so this old folk rune, so again spiritual science, which wants to place itself in the living cultural process of our time.