The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have often drawn attention to the fact that the spiritual life of the first four Christian centuries has been completely buried, that everything written today about the views and knowledge of human beings living at the time of the mystery of Golgotha and during the four centuries thereafter is based on sources which have come to us essentially through the writings of the opponents of gnosticism. This means that the “backward seeing” of the spiritual researcher is necessary to create a more exact picture of what actually took place during these first four Christian centuries. In this sense I have recently attempted to present a picture of Julian the Apostate.¹

Now, we cannot say that the following centuries, as presented in the usual historical descriptions, are very clear to people today. What we could call the soul life of the European population from the fifth on into the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries remains completely unclear in the usual historical portrayals. What do we find, then, basically represented in these usual historical portrayals? And what do we find even if we look at the writings of facile, so-called dramatists and authors, writers such as Ernst von Wildenbruch,² whose writings are, in essence, nothing more than the family histories of Louis the Pious or other similar personages, garnished with superficial pageantry, and then presented to us as history?

It is extremely important to look at the truth concerning European life during those times when so much of the present originated. If we want to understand anything at all concerning the deeper streams of culture, including the culture of recent times, we must understand the soul life of the European population in those times. Here I would like to begin with something which will, no doubt, be somewhat remote from many of you; we need, however, to address this subject because it can only be seen properly today in the light of spiritual science.

As you know there is something today called theology. This theology—basically all our present day European theology—actually came into being—in its fundamental structure, in its inner nature—during the time from the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ through the following very dark centuries up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it was brought to a certain conclusion through scholasticism. From the point of view of this theology, which was really only developed in its essential nature in the time after Augustine, Augustine himself could no longer be understood; or, at best, he could barely be understood, while all that preceded him, for example, what was said about the mystery of Golgotha, could no longer be understood at all.³ Let us consider the essence of this theology which developed precisely during the darkest times of the Middle Ages, darkest, that is, for our external knowledge. Above all, it becomes clear to us that this theology is something entirely different from the theology that came before it—if indeed what came before can be called theology. What theology had been before was actually only transplanted like a legacy into the times in which the theology I have just characterized arose. And you can get an impression of what earlier theology was like if you read the short essay on Dionysius the Areopagite in this week's edition of the Goetheanum,⁴ There you will find a portrayal of the way in which human beings related to the world in the first Christian centuries, a way altogether different from that which came to prevail by the time of the ninth, tenth, and following centuries.

In contrast to the later, newer theology, the old theology—the theology of which Dionysius the Areopagite was a late product—saw everything that related to the spiritual world from within and had a direct view of what happens in the spiritual worlds. If we want to gain insight into the way adherents of this old theology actually thought, into the way the soul of this theology inwardly regarded things, then once again we can really only do so with the methods of present-day anthroposophical spiritual science.

We then come to the following results. (Yesterday, from another point of view I characterized something very similar.)⁵

In the ascent to Imagination, in the entire process of climbing, ascending to imaginative knowledge, we notice more and more that we are dwelling suspended in spiritual processes. This “hovering” in spiritual processes with our entire soul life we experience as if we were coming into contact with beings who do not live on the physical plane. Perceptions from our sense organs cease, and we experience that, to a certain extent, everything that is sense perception disappears. But during the whole process it seems as if we were being helped by beings from a higher world. We come to understand these as the same beings that the old theology had beheld as angels, archangels, and archai. I could, therefore, say that the angels help us to penetrate up into imaginative knowledge. The sense world “breaks up,” just as clouds disperse, and we see into what is behind the sense world. Behind the sense world a capacity that we can call Inspiration opens up; behind this sense world is then revealed the second hierarchy, the hierarchy of the exusiai, dynamis, and kyriotetes. These ordering and creative beings present themselves to the inspired knowledge of the soul. And when we ascend further still, from Inspiration to Intuition, then we come to the first hierarchy, the thrones, cherubim, and seraphim. Through immediate spiritual training we can experience the realities that the older theologians actually referred to when they used such terms as first, second, and third hierarchy.

Now, it is just when we look at the theology of the first Christian centuries, which has been almost entirely stamped out, that we notice the following: in a certain way that early theology still had an awareness that when man directs his senses toward the usual, sensible, external world, he may see the things in that world and he may believe in their existence, but he does not actually know that world. There is a very definite consciousness present in this old theology: the consciousness that one must first have experienced something in the spiritual world before the concepts present themselves with which one can then approach the sense world and, so to speak, illuminate it with ideas acquired from the spiritual world.

In a certain way this also corresponds to the views resulting from an older, dreamlike, atavistic clairvoyance, under the influence of which people first looked into a spiritual world—though only with dreamlike perceptions—and then applied what they experienced there to their sense perceptions. If these people had had before them only a view of the sense world, it would have seemed to them as if they were standing in a dark room with no light. However, if they first had their spiritual vision, a result of pure seeing into the world of the spirit, and then applied it to the sense world—if, for example, they had first beheld something of the creative powers of the animal world and then applied that vision to the outer, physical animals—then they would feel as though they were walking into the dark room with a lamp. They would feel that they were walking into the world of the senses and illuminating it with a spiritual mode of viewing. Only in this way was the sense world truly known. This was the consciousness of these older theologians. For this reason the entire Christology of the first Christian centuries was actually viewed from within. The process which took place, the descent of Christ into the earthly world, was essentially seen not from the outside but rather from the inside, from the spiritual side. One first sought out Christ in spiritual worlds and then followed him as he descended into the physical, sensible world. That was the consciousness of the older theologians.

Then the following happened: the Roman world, which the Christian impulse followed in its greatest westward development, was permeated in its spiritual understanding with an inclination, a fondness, for the abstract. The Romans tended to translate perceptions, observations, and insights into abstract concepts. However, the Roman world was actually decaying and falling apart while Christianity gradually spread toward the west. And, in addition, the northern peoples were pushing from the eastern part of Europe into the west and the south. Now, it is remarkable that, at the very time Rome was decaying and the fresh peoples from the north were arriving, a college was created on the Italian peninsula, a collegium concerning which I spoke recently, which set for itself the task of using all these events to completely root out the old views and modes of seeing, to allow to survive for posterity only those writings which this college felt comfortable with.⁶

History reports nothing concerning these events; nevertheless, they were real. If such a history did exist, it would point out how this college was created as a successor to the pontifical college of ancient Rome. Everything that this college did not allow was thoroughly swept away and what remained was modified before being passed on to posterity. Just as Rome invented the last will and testament as a part of its national economic order so that the dispositions of the individual human will could continue to work beyond the individual's life, so there arose in this college the desire to have the essence of Rome live on in the following ages of historical development if only as an inheritance, as the mere sum of dogmas that had been developed over many generations. “For as long as possible nothing new shall be seen in the spiritual world”—so decreed this college. “The principle of initiation shall be completely rooted out and destroyed. Only the writings we are now modifying are to survive for posterity.” If the facts were to be presented in a dry, objective fashion they would be presented in this way. Entirely different destinies would have befallen Christianity—it would have been entirely rigidified—had not the northern peoples come pushing into the west and the south. These northern peoples brought with them their own natural talent, a predisposition entirely different from that of the southern peoples, the Greeks and the Romans—different, that is, from that earlier southern predisposition that had originated the older theology.

In earlier times at least, the talent of the southern peoples had been the following: Among the earlier Romans and even more among the earlier Greeks there were always individuals from the mass of the people who developed themselves, who passed through an initiation and then could see into the spiritual world. With this vision the older theology arose, the theology that possessed a direct perception of the spiritual world. Such vision in its last phase is preserved in the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. Let us consider one of the older theologians, say from the first or second century after the mystery of Golgotha, one of those theologians who still drew wisdom from the old science of initiation. If he had wanted to present the essence, I would like to say, the principles of his theology, he would have said: In order to have any relationship to the spiritual world, a human being must first obtain knowledge of the spiritual world, either directly through his own initiation or as the pupil of an initiate. Then, after acquiring ideas and concepts in the spiritual world he could apply these ideas and concepts to the world of the senses. Those were more or less the abstract principles of such an older theologian. The whole tendency of the older theological mood predisposed the soul to see the events in the world inwardly, first to see the spiritual and then to admit to oneself that the sensible world can only be seen if one starts from the spiritual. Such a theology could only result as the ripest product of an old atavistic clairvoyance, for atavistic clairvoyance was also an inner seeing or perception, though only of dreamlike imaginations.

But to begin with, the peoples coming down from the north had nothing of this older theological drive, that, as I said, was so strong in the Greeks. The natural abilities of the Gothic peoples, the Germanic, did not allow such a theological mood to rise up directly in the soul in an unmediated way. To properly understand the drive that these northern peoples brought into the development of Europe in the following ages (through the Germanic tribes, the Goths, the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, and so forth) we must resort to spiritual scientific means, for recorded history reports nothing of this. Initiates, able to see directly into the spiritual world in order to survey from that vantage point the sense world, could not arise from within the ranks of these peoples storming down from the north because their inner soul disposition was different. These peoples were themselves still somewhat atavistically clairvoyant; they were actually still at an earlier, more primitive stage of humanity's development. These peoples—Goths, Lombards, and so forth—still brought some of the old clairvoyance with them. But this old clairvoyance was not related to inner perceptions—to spiritual perceptions, yes—but rather to spiritual perceptions of things outer. The northern peoples did not see the spiritual world from the inside, so to speak, as had the southern peoples. The Northerners saw the spiritual world from the outside.

What does it mean to say that these peoples saw the spiritual world from the outside? Say that these people saw a brave man die in battle. The life in which they saw this man spiritually from the outside was not at an end for them. Now, with his death, they could follow him—still from the outside spiritually speaking—on his path into the spiritual world. They could follow not only the way this man lived into the spiritual world but also the ways in which he continued to be active on behalf of human beings on the earth. And so these northern peoples could say: Someone or other has died, after this or that significant deed, perhaps, or after his having been the leader of this people or that tribe. We see his soul, how it continues to live, how (if he had been a soldier) he is received by the great soldiers in Valhalla, or how he lives on in some other way. This soul, this man, is still here. He continues to live and is actually present. Death is merely an event which takes place here on the earth. Such an experience, having come with the northern peoples, was present in the fourth and fifth on through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before being essentially buried. This was the perception of the dead as actually always present, the awareness that the souls of human beings who were greatly venerated were still present, even for earthly human beings. They were even still able to lead in battle. People of that time thought of these souls as still present, as not disappearing for the earthly. With the forces given them by the spiritual world these souls continued, in a certain sense, the functions of their earthly lives. The atavistic clairvoyance of the northern peoples was such then, that, as they saw the activities of people here on the earth, they also beheld a kind of shadow world directly above people on earth. The dead were in this shadow world. One needed only to look—these people felt—to see that those from the last and next to last generation actually continue to live. They are here, we experience community with them. For them to be present we need only to listen up into their realm.

This feeling, that the dead are here, was present, was incredibly strong, in the time that followed the fourth century, when the northern culture mixed with the Roman. You see, the northern peoples took Christ into this way of perceiving. They looked first at this world of the dead, who were actually the truly living. They saw hovering above them entire populations of the dead, and they beheld these dead as being actually more alive than themselves. They did not seek Christ here on the earth among people walking in the physical world; they sought Christ there where these living dead were. There they sought him as one who is really present above the earth. And you will only get the proper feeling concerning the Heliand, which was supposedly written by a Saxon priest, if you develop these ways of perceiving.⁷ The descriptions in the Heliand follow these old German customs. You will understand the Heliand's concrete description of Christ among living human beings only if you understand that actually the scenes are to be transplanted half into the kingdom of shadows where the living dead are dwelling. You will understand much more, if you truly grasp this predisposition, this ability, which came about through the mixing of the northern with the Roman peoples.

There is something recorded in literary history to which people should actually give a great deal of thought. However, people of the present age have almost entirely given up the ability to think about such clearly startling phenomena found in the life of humanity. But pursuing literary history, you will find, for example, writings in which Charlemagne (742–814) is mentioned as a leader in the Crusades. Charlemagne is simply listed as a leader in the Crusades.⁸ Indeed, you will find Charlemagne described as a living person again and again throughout the entire time that followed the ninth century. People everywhere called upon him. He is described as if he were there. And when the crusades began, centuries after his death, poems were written describing Charlemagne as if he were with the crusaders marching against the infidels.

We only understand such writings properly if we know that in the so-called dark centuries of the Middle Ages, the true history of which is entirely obliterated, there was this awareness of the living multitudes of the dead, who lived on as shadows. It was only later that Charlemagne was placed in the Untersberg. Much later, when the spirit of intellectualism had grown strong enough for this life in the shadows to have ceased, then Charlemagne was transplanted into the Untersberg (and, as another example, Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, into Kyffhaeuserberg).⁹ Until that time people knew that Charlemagne was still living among them.

But wherein did these people, who atavistically saw the dead living above them, wherein did these people seek their Christianity, their Christology, their Christian way of seeing? They sought it in this way: they directed their sight toward what results when a living dead person like Charlemagne, who was revered in life, came before their souls with all those who were still his followers. And so through long ages Charlemagne was seen undertaking the first crusade against the infidels in Spain. But he was seen in such a way that the entire crusade was actually transplanted into the shadow world. The people of that time saw this crusade in the shadow world after it had been undertaken on the physical plane; they let it continue working in the shadow world—as an image of the Christ who works in the world. Therefore, Christ was described riding south toward Spain among the twelve paladins, one of whom was a Judas who eventually betrayed the entire endeavor.¹⁰ So we see how clairvoyant perception was directed toward the outside of the spiritual world—not, as in earlier times, toward the inside—but rather now toward the outside, toward that which results when one looks at the spirits from the outside just as one looked at them earlier from the inside. Now, the splendor of the Christ event was reflected onto all the most important things that took place in the world of shadows.

From the fourth to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there lived in Europe the idea that people who had died, if they had accomplished important deeds in life, arranged their afterlife so as to enable themselves to be seen with something like a reflected splendor, an image, of the Christ event. One saw everywhere the continuation of the Christ event—if I may express myself so—as shadows in the air. If people had spoken of the things they felt, they would have said: Above us the Christ stream still hovers; Charlemagne undertook to place himself in this Christ stream and with his paladins he created an image of Christ with the twelve apostles; the deeds of Christ were continued by Charlemagne in the true spiritual world.

This was how people thought of these things in the so-called dark time of the Middle Ages. There was the spiritual world, seen from without, I would like to say, as if imaged after the sense world, like a shadow picture of the sense world (whereas in the earlier times, of which the old theology was only a weak reflection, the spiritual world was seen from within). For merely intellectual human beings the difference between this physical world and the spiritual world is such that an abyss exists between the two. This difference did not exist in the first centuries of the Middle Ages, in the so-called Dark Ages. The dead remained with the living. During the first period after their death, after they had been born into the spiritual world, especially outstanding and revered personalities underwent a novitiate to become saints.

For the people of those times to speak of these living dead as if they were real personalities after they had been born into the spiritual world—this was not unusual. And you see, a number of these living dead, especially chosen ones, were called to become guardians of the Holy Grail. Specially chosen living dead were designated as guardians of the Holy Grail. And the Grail legend could never be completely understood without the knowledge of who these guardians of the Grail actually were. To say: “Then the guardians of the Grail weren't real people” would have seemed laughable to the people of that time. For they would have said: Do you who are only shadow figures walking on the earth really believe that you are more real than those who have died and now are gathered around the Grail? To those who lived in those times it would have appeared laughable for the little figures here on the earth to consider themselves more real than the living dead. We must feel our way into the souls of that time, and this is simply how those souls felt. Their consciousness of this connection with the spiritual world meant much for the world, and much for their souls. They would have said to themselves: To begin with, the people here on the earth consist of nothing more than what they are, right now, directly here. But a human being of the present will only become something proper and good if he takes into himself what one of the living dead can give him.

In a certain sense, physical human beings on the earth were seen as though they were merely vehicles for the outer working of the living dead. It was a peculiarity of those centuries that one said: If the living dead want to accomplish something here on earth, for which hands are needed, then they enter into a physically incarnated human being and do it through him. Not only that, but there were, furthermore, people in those times who said to themselves: One can do no better than to provide a vehicle for human beings who were revered while living on the earth and who have now become beings of such importance in the realm of the living dead that it is granted to them to guard the Holy Grail. And the view existed among the people of those times that individuals could dedicate themselves to the Order of the Swan. Those people dedicated themselves to the Order of the Swan who wanted the knights of the Grail to be able to work through them here in the physical world. A human being through whom a knight of the Grail was working here in the physical world was called a Swan.

Now, think of the Lohengrin legend.¹¹ When Elsa of Brabant is in great need, the swan comes. The swan who appears is a member of the Knights of the Swan, who has received into himself a companion of the circle of the Holy Grail. One is not permitted to ask him about his secret. In that century, and also in the following centuries, princes such as Henry I of Saxony were happiest of all when, as in his campaign into Hungary, he was able to have this Knight of the Swan, this Lohengrin, in his army.¹²

But there were knights of many kinds who regarded themselves primarily as only outer vehicles for those from the other side of death who were still fighting in the armies. They wanted to be united with the dead; they knew they were united with them. The legend has actually become quite abstract today. We can only evaluate its significance for the living if we live into the soul life of the people alive at that time. And this understanding, which, to begin with, looks simply and solely upon the physical world and sees how the spiritual man arises out of the physical man and afterward belongs to the living dead, this understanding ruled the hearts and minds of that time and was the most essential element in their souls. They felt that one must first have known a human being on the earth, that only then can one rise to his spirit. It was really the case that the whole understanding was reversed, even in the popular conceptions of the masses, over against the older views. In olden times people had looked first into the spiritual world; they strove, if possible, to see the human being as a spiritual being before his descent to earth. Then, it was said, one can understand what the human being is on earth. But now, the following idea emerged among these northern peoples, after they had mixed with Roman civilization: We understand the spiritual, if we have first followed it in the physical world, and it has then lifted itself out of the physical world as something spiritual. This was the reverse of what had prevailed before.

The reflected splendor of this view then became the theology of the Middle Ages. The old theologians had said: First one must have the ideas, first one must know the spiritual. The concept of faith would have been something entirely absurd for these old theologians, for they first recognized the spiritual before they could even begin to think of knowing the physical, which had to be illumined by the spiritual. Now, however, when in the world at large people were starting from the point of view of knowing the physical, it came to this, even in theology. Theologians began to think in this way: For knowledge one must start with the world of sense. Then, from the things of the senses one must extract the concepts—no longer bring the concepts from the spiritual world to the things of sense, but now extract the concepts from the things of sense themselves.

Now imagine the Roman world in its decline; and then imagine, within that world, what still remained as a struggle from the olden time: namely, the fact that concepts were experienced in the spiritual world and then brought to meet the things of the senses. This was felt by such a man as Martianus Capella, who in the fifth century wrote his treatise, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, wherein he wrestled still to find within the spiritual world itself that which was becoming increasingly abstract in the life of ideas.¹³ But this old view went under because the Roman conspiracy against the spirit—in that college or committee I have told you about—had destroyed everything representing a direct human connection with the spirit. We see how that direct connection gradually vanished. The old vision ceased. Living in the old conception a human being knew: When I reach over into the spiritual world angels accompany me. If they were Greeks they called them “guardians.” A person who went forth on the path of the spirit knew he was accompanied by a guardian spirit.

That which in ancient times had been a real spiritual being, the guardian, was grammatica, the first stage of the seven liberal arts, at the time when Capella wrote. In olden times men had known that which lives in grammar, in words and syntax, can lead up into imagination. They knew that the angel, the guardian, was working in the relationships between words. If we read the old descriptions, nowhere would we ever find an abstract definition. It is interesting that Capella does not describe grammar as the later Renaissance did. To him grammar is still a real person. So, too, rhetoric at the second stage is still a real person. For the later Renaissance such figures became mere allegories—straw figures for intellectual concepts. In earlier times they had also been spiritual perceptions that did not merely edify as they did in Capella's writings. They had been creative beings, and the entry that they had initiated into the spirit was felt as a penetration into a realm of creative beings. Now with Capella they had become allegories; but nevertheless, at least they were still allegorical. Though they were no longer stately, though they had become very pale and thin, they were still ladies: grammatica, rhetorica, dialectica. They were very thin and weak. All that was left of them, as it were, was the bones of spiritual effort and the skin of concepts; nevertheless, they were still quite respectable ladies who carried Capella, the earliest to write on the seven liberal arts, into the spiritual world. One by one he made the acquaintance of these seven ladies: first the lady grammatica, then the lady rhetorica, the lady dialectica, the lady arithmetica, the lady geometria, the lady musica, and finally the heavenly lady astrologia, who towered over them all. These were certainly ladies, and as I said, there were seven of them. The sevenfold feminine leads us onward and upward, so might Capella have concluded when describing his path to wisdom. But think of what became of it in the monastery schools of the later Middle Ages. When these later writers labored at grammar and rhetoric they no longer felt that “the eternal feminine leads us onward and upward.” And that is really what happened: Out of the living being there first came the allegorical and then the merely intellectual abstraction.

Homer, who in olden times had sought the way from the humanly spoken word to the cosmic word, so that the cosmic word might pass through him, had to say: “Sing me, O muse, of Peleus' son, Achilles.” From the stage when a spiritual being led a person on to the point in the spiritual world at which it was no longer he himself but the muse who sang of the wrath of Achilles, from that stage to the stage when rhetoric herself was speaking in the Roman way, and then to the mingling of the Roman with the life that came downward from the north—was a long, long way. Finally, everything became abstract, conceptual, and intellectual. The farther we go toward the east and into olden times the more we find everything immersed in concrete spiritual life: the theologian of old had gone to the spiritual beings for his concepts, which he then applied to this world. But the theologian who grew out of what arose from the merging of the northern peoples with the Roman said: Knowledge must be sought here in the sense world; here we gain our concepts. But he could not rise into the spiritual world with these concepts. For the Roman college had thoroughly seen to it that although men might angle around down here in the world of sense, they could not get beyond this world. Formerly men had also had the world of the senses, but they had sought and found their concepts and ideas in the spiritual world; and these concepts then, helped them to illuminate the physical world. But now they extracted their concepts out of the physical world itself, and they did not get far—they only arrived at an interpretation of the physical world. They could no longer reach upward by an independent path of knowledge. But they still had a legacy from the past. It was written down or preserved in traditions embodied and rigidified in dogmas. It was preserved in the creed. Whatever could be said about the spirit was contained therein. It was there. They increasingly arrived at a consciousness that all that had been said concerning the realms above as a result of higher revelation must remain untouched. The revelations could no longer be checked. The kind of knowledge that can be checked now remained down below—our conceptual life must be obtained here in the physical world.

So in the course of time what had still been present in the first dark centuries of the Middle Ages persisted merely as a written legacy. For it had become quite another time when the medieval, atavistic clairvoyance of the Saxon “peasant,” as he is called (though, as the Heliand shows, he was, in any case, a priest, born of the peasantry) still existed in Europe. Simply looking at the human beings around him this Saxon peasant-priest had the faculty to see how the soul and spirit goes forth at death and becomes the dead and yet alive, living human being. Thus, in the train of those that hover over the earthly realm, he describes his vision of the Christ event in the poem, the Heliand.

But what was living here on the earth was drawn further and further down into the realm of the merely lifeless. Atavistic clairvoyant abilities came to an end, and people now only sought for concepts in the sense world. What kind of a view and attitude resulted? It was this: There is no need to pay heed to the super-sensible when it comes to knowledge. What we need is contained in the sacred writings and traditions. We need only refer to the old books and look into the old traditions. Everything we should know about the super-sensible is contained there. And now in the environment of the sense world, we are not confused if for knowledge we take into account only the concepts contained in the sense world itself.

More and more this consciousness came to life: The super-sensible is preserved for us and will so remain. If we want to do research we must limit ourselves to the sense world. Someone who remained entirely within this habit of mind, who continued, as it were, in the nineteenth century this activity of extracting concepts out of the sense world that the Saxon peasant-priest who wrote the Heliand had practiced, was Gregor Mendel.¹⁴ Why should we concern ourselves with investigations of the olden times into matters of heredity? They are all recorded in the Old Testament. Let us look, rather, down into the world of sense and see how the red and the white sweet peas will cross with one another, giving rise to red, white, and speckled flowers and so forth. Thus you can become a mighty scientist without coming into conflict or disharmony with what is said about the super-sensible, which remains untouched. It was precisely our modern theology, evolved out of the old theology along the lines I have characterized, that impelled people to investigate nature in the manner of Gregor Mendel, whose approach was that of a genuine Catholic priest.

And then what happened? Natural scientists, whose science is so “free from bias,” subsequently canonized Gregor Mendel as a saint. Although this is not their way of speaking, we can describe Mendel's fate in these terms. At first they treated him without respect; now they canonize him after their fashion, proclaiming him a great scientist in all their academies. All this is not without its inner connections. The science of the present time is only possible inasmuch as it is constituted in such a way as to regard as a great scientist precisely one who stands so thoroughly upon the standpoint of medieval theology! The natural science of our time is through and through the continuation of the essence of scholastic theology—its subsequent proliferation, its diversification. It is the continuation into our time of the scholastic era. Hence it is quite proper for Johann Gregor Mendel to be subsequently recognized as a great scientist; that he is, but in the good Catholic sense. It made good Catholic sense for Mendel to look only at sweet peas as they cross with one another, it was following Catholic principle, because all that is super-sensible is contained in the sacred traditions and books. But we see that this does not make sense for natural scientists, none in the least—only if they are bent on stopping short at the stage of ignoramuses and giving themselves up to complete agnosticism would it make any sense to limit research to the sense world.

This is the fundamental contradiction of our time. This contradiction is what we must be attentive to. For if we fail to look at these spiritual realities we shall never understand the source of all the confusion, of all the contradictions and inconsistencies, in the endeavors of the present day. But the easygoing comfort of our time does not allow people to awaken and really to look into these contradictory tendencies.

Think what will happen when all that is said about today's world events becomes history. Posterity will get this history. Do you think they will get much truth? Certainly not. Yet history for us has been made in this very way. These puppets of history, which are described in the usual textbooks, do not represent what has really happened in human evolution. We have arrived at a time when it is absolutely necessary for people to learn to know what the real events are. It is not enough for all the legends to be recorded as they are in our current histories—the legends about Attila and Charlemagne, or Louis the Pious, where history begins to be altogether fabulous. The most important things of all are overlooked in these writings; for it is really only the histories of the soul that make the present time intelligible.

Anthroposophical spiritual science must throw light into the evolving souls of human beings. Because we have forgotten how to look into the spiritual, we no longer have any history. Anyone of sensibility can see that in Martianus Capella the old guides and guardians who used to lead people into the spiritual world have become very thin, very lean ladies. But those whom historians teach us to know as Henry I, Otto I, Otto II, Henry II, and so on—they appear as mere puppets of history, formed after the pattern of those who had grown into the thin and pale ladies, after grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and the others. When all is said and done the personalities who are enumerated in succession in our histories have no more fat on them than those ladies.

Things must be seen as they really are. Actually the people of today should be yearning to see things as they are. Therefore, it is a duty to describe these things wherever possible, and they can be described today within the Anthroposophical Society. I hope that this society, at least, may some day wake up.

• 1. Julian, the Apostate (332–363), Roman Emperor (361–363). Steiner is referring to his lecture of July 16, 1922 (GA213). Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Occult History (Lecture Four), Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (Lecture Seven), World History in the light of Anthroposophy (Lecture Six).
• 2 . Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), German writer, author of historical dramas, novels, and verse.
• 3 . St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430). Early Latin church father. Exerted tremendous influence on later Christian thought. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Christianity as Mystical Fact, Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, (Lecture Seven).
• 4 . Steiner is here referring to an essay by Günther Wachsmuth on Dionysius the Areopagite and the doctrine of the hierarchies that appeared in Das Goetheanum, July 23 and July 30, 1922.
• 5 . Lecture of July 22, 1922 (GA213).
• 6 . Lecture of July 16, 1922 (GA213).
• 7 . Heliand, a poem in alliterative verse on the Gospels written between 825 and 835 A.D.
• 8 . E.g., Pèlerinage de Charlemagne (eleventh century), Gran Conquista de Ultramar (thirteenth century).
• 9 . Charlemagne (724–814), King of France and Roman Emperor. The Untersberg is a mountain ridge, full of caves, near Salzburg, Austria. Frederick Barbarossa (Redbeard) or Frederick I (1123–1190), Holy Roman Emperor. Esteemed by Germans as one of their greatest kings.
• 10. Peers of Charlemagne's court.
• 11. Lohengrin, a knight of the Grail, son of Parsifal. Led by a swan to rescue Princess Elsa of Brabant, he then marries her. When she asks his name, in violation of her pledge, he must return to the Grail Castle without her. Tale ascribed to Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1285–90); basis for Richard Wagner's opera, Lohengrin (1847).
• 12. Henry I (c. 876–936), first German king from the House of Saxony, campaigned in Hungary in 933.
• 13. Martianus Minneus Felix, Latin author of the fourth-fifth century, author of The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, the encyclopædic work in verse and prose that introduced the Seven Liberal Arts to the Middle Ages.
• 14. Johann Gregor Mendel. Augustinian priest and botanist, creator of Mendelian genetics. Mendel did his famous breeding experiments in the monastery garden in 1856. Results published 1866. Not widely recognized until after 1910.

In various and complicated ways, we have already seen that the human being can only be understood within the context of the entire universe, out of the whole cosmos. Today we will consider this relationship of the human being to the cosmos from a rather simpler standpoint in order to bring the subject to a certain culmination in later lectures.

The most immediate part of the cosmos surrounding us is, to begin with, what appears to us as the physical world. But this physical world actually comes to meet us as the mineral kingdom, at least it confronts us only there in its intrinsic, primal form. Considering the mineral kingdom in the wider sense to include water, air, the phenomena of warmth and the warmth ether, we can study within the mineral kingdom the forces and the essential being of the physical world. This physical world manifests its workings, for instance, in gravity and in magnetic and chemical phenomena. In reality we can only study the physical world within the mineral kingdom. As soon as we come to the plant kingdom, the ideas and concepts we have formed for the physical world are no longer adequate. In modern times no one has felt this truth as intensely as Goethe.¹⁵ As a relatively young man he became acquainted with the plant world from a scientific point of view and sensed immediately that the plant world must be understood with a very different kind of thought and observation than is applicable to the physical world. He encountered the science of plants in the form developed by Linnaeus.¹⁶ This great Swedish naturalist developed botany by observing, above all, the external and minute forms to be found in the individual species and genera. Following these forms he evolved a system in which plants with similar structural characteristics are grouped into genera, so that the various genera and species stand next to each other in the same way as the objects of the mineral kingdom are organized. Goethe was repelled by this aspect of the Linnaean system, by this grouping of individual plant forms. This, said Goethe to himself, is how one observes the minerals and everything of a mineral nature. A different kind of perception must be used for plants. In the case of plants, said Goethe, one would have to proceed in the following way: Here, let us say, is a plant which develops roots, then a stem, then leaves on the stem, and so forth (drawing 1). But it does not always have to be that way. For example, Goethe said to himself, it could be like this (drawing 2):

Here is the root—but the force that in the first plant (drawing 1) began to develop right in the root is held back here (drawing 2), still enclosed in itself, and therefore does not develop a slender stem that immediately unfolds its leaves but a thick bulbous stem instead. In this way the forces of the leaves go into the thick stem structure and very little remains over to start new leaves or, with time, blossoms. Or again, it may be that a plant develops its roots very sparingly; some of the forces of the roots are left. Such a development would look like this (drawing 3):

Then there would be few stalk and leaf starts developing from the plant. All these examples are, however, inwardly the same. In one case the stem is slender and the leaves strongly developed (drawing 1); in another (drawing 2), the stem becomes bulbous and the leaves grow sparingly. The basic idea is the same in all the plants but the idea must be kept inwardly mobile in order to be able to move from one form to the other. Here I must create this form: weak stem, distinct leaves, concentrated leaf force (drawing 1). With the same idea I get a second form: concentrated root force (drawing 2). And again with the same idea I find another, a third form. And so I must create a flexible, mobile concept, through which the whole system of plants becomes a unity.

Whereas Linnaeus set the different forms side by side and observed them as he would observe mineral forms, Goethe, by means of mobile ideas, wanted to grasp the whole system of plant growth as a unity—so that he slipped out of one plant form, as it were, into another form by metamorphosing the idea itself. This kind of observation with mobile ideas was, in Goethe, doubtless the initial impulse toward an imaginative way of observing. Thus we may say that when Goethe approached the system of Linnaeus, he felt that the usual object-oriented way of knowing, although very useful when applied to the physical world of the mineral kingdom, was not adequate for the study of plant life. Confronted with the Linnaean system he felt the necessity for an imaginative means of observation.

In other words, Goethe said to himself: When I look at a plant it is not the physical that I see or, at any rate, that I should see; in a manner of speaking, the physical has become invisible, and I must grasp what I see with ideas very different from those applicable to the mineral kingdom. It is extraordinarily important for us to appreciate this distinction. If we see it in the right way we can say that in the mineral kingdom nature is outwardly visible all around us, while in the plant kingdom physical nature has become invisible. Of course, gravity and all the other forces of physical nature are still at work in the plant kingdom; but they have become invisible while a higher nature has become visible—a higher nature that is inwardly mobile all the time, inwardly alive. What is really visible in the plant is the etheric nature. And we are wrong if we say that the physical body of the plant is visible. The physical body of the plant has actually become invisible. What we see is the etheric form.

How then does the visible part of the plant really come into being? If you have a physical body, for instance, a quartz crystal, you can see the physical in an unmediated way. But with a plant you do not really see the physical, you see the etheric form. This etheric form is filled out with physical matter; physical substances live within it. When the plant loses its life and becomes carbon in the earth you see how the substance of physical carbon remains. It is contained in the plant. We can say, then, that the plant is filled out with the physical but dissolves the physical through the etheric. The etheric is what is actually visible in the plant form. The physical is invisible.

Thus the physical becomes visible for us in the mineral world. In the world of the plants the physical has already become invisible, for what we see is really the etheric made visible through the agency of the physical. We would not, of course, see the plants with our ordinary eyes if the invisible etheric body did not carry within it little granules (an overly simplified and crude expression, to be sure) of physical matter. Through the physical the etheric form becomes visible to us; but this etheric form is what we are really seeing. The physical is, so to speak, only the means whereby we see the etheric. So that the etheric form of a plant is an example of an Imagination, but of an Imagination that is not directly visible in the spiritual world but only becomes visible through physical substances.

If you were to ask, what is an Imagination?—We could answer that the plants are all Imaginations, but as Imaginations they are visible only to imaginative consciousness. That they are also visible to the physical eye is due to the fact that they are filled with physical particles whereby the etheric is rendered visible in a physical way to the physical eye. But if we want to speak correctly we should never say that in the plant we are seeing something physical. In the plants we are seeing genuine Imaginations. We have Imaginations all around us in the forms of the plant world.

But if we now ascend from the world of plants to that of animals, it is no longer sufficient for us to turn to the etheric. Here we must go a step further. In a sense we can say of the plant that it nullifies the physical and makes manifest the being of the etheric.

Plant: nullifies the physical and manifests the being of the etheric.

But when we ascend to the animal, we are not allowed to hold onto the etheric; we must imagine the animal form with the etheric now also nullified. Thus we can say that the animal nullifies the physical (the plant does this too) and also nullifies the etheric: the animal manifests that which can assert itself when the etheric is nullified. When the physical is nullified by the plant the etheric can assert itself. If then the etheric too, is only a filling, granules (again, a crude expression), then the astral, which is not within the world of ordinary space but works in ordinary space, can make its being manifest. Therefore we must say that in the animal the being of the astral is made manifest.

Animal: nullifies the physical, nullifies the etheric, and manifests the being of the astral.

Goethe strove with all his power to acquire mobile ideas, mobile concepts, in order to behold this fluctuating life in the world of the plants. In the plants the etheric is before us because the plant, as it were, drives the etheric out onto the surface. The etheric lives in the form of the plant. But in animals we must recognize the existence of something that is not driven to the surface. The very fact that a plant must remain at the place where it has grown shows that there is nothing in the plant that does not come to the surface and make itself visible. The animal moves about freely. There is something in the animal that does not come to the surface and become visible. This is the astral in the animal, something which cannot be grasped by merely making our ideas mobile, as I explained previously, by merely showing how we move from form to form in the idea itself. This does not suffice for the astral. If we want to understand the astral we must go further and say that something enters into the etheric and is then able, from within outward, to enlarge the form—for example, to make the form nodular or tuberous. In the plant you must always look outside for the cause of the variation in form, for the reasons why the form changes. You must be flexible with your idea. But the merely mobile is not enough to comprehend the animal. To comprehend the animal you have to bring something else into your concepts. If you want to understand how the conceptual activity appropriate for understanding animals must differ from that for plants, then you need more than a mobile concept capable of assuming different forms; the concept itself must receive something inwardly, must take into itself something that it does not contain of itself. This something could be called Inspiration in the forming of concepts. In the organic activity that takes place below our breathing we remain in the activity, so to speak, within ourselves. But when we breathe in, we receive the air from outside; so too if we would comprehend the animal we not only need to have mobile concepts but we must take into these mobile concepts something from the “outside.”

Let me explain the difference in another way. If we really want to understand the plant, then we can remain standing still, as it were; we can regard ourselves, even in thought, as stationary beings. And even if we were to remain stationary our whole life long we would still be able to make our concepts mobile enough to grasp the most varied forms in the plant world. But we could never form the idea, the concept of an animal, if we ourselves could not move about. We must be able to move around ourselves if we want to form the concept of an animal. And why?

When you transform the concept of a plant (drawing 1) into a second concept (drawing 2) then you yourself have transformed the concept. But if you then begin running, your concept becomes different through the very act of your running; you yourself must bring life into the concept. That infusion of life is what makes a merely imagined concept into an inspired concept. When it is a plant that is concerned, you can picture yourself inwardly at rest and merely changing the concepts. But if you want to think a true concept of an animal (most people do not like to do this at all because the concept must become inwardly alive; it wriggles within) then you must take the Inspiration, the inner liveliness, into yourself, it is not enough to externally weave sense perceptions from form to form. You cannot think an animal in its totality without taking this inner liveliness into the concept.

This conception of the animal was something which Goethe did not achieve. He did reach the point of being able to say that the plant world is a sum total of concepts, of Imaginations. But with the animals something has to be brought into the concept; with the animal we ourselves have to make the concept inwardly alive. In the case of a plant the Imagination is not itself actually living. This can be seen from the fact that as the plant stands in the ground and grows, its form changes only as the result of external stimuli, and not because of any inner activity. But the animal is, in a manner of speaking, the moving, living concept; with the animal we have to bring in Inspiration, and only through Inspiration can we penetrate to the astral.

When, finally, we ascend to the human being we have to say that he nullifies the physical, the etheric, and the astral and makes the being of the I manifest.

Humanity: nullifies the physical, nullifies the etheric, nullifies the astral, and manifests the being of the I.

With an animal we must say that what we see is really not the physical but a physically appearing Inspiration. This is the reason why, when the inspiration or breathing of a person is disturbed in some way it very easily assumes an animal form. Try sometime to remember some of the figures that appear in nightmares. Very many of them appear in animal forms. Animal forms are forms filled with Inspirations.

The human I we can only grasp through Intuition. Truly, in reality, the human I can only be grasped through Intuition. In the animal we see Inspiration; in the human being we actually see the I, the Intuition. We speak falsely when we say that we see the physical body of an animal. We do not see the physical body at all. It has been dissolved away, nullified, it merely makes the Inspiration visible to us; and the etheric body has likewise been dissolved away, nullified. With an animal we are actually seeing the astral body externally by means of the physical and the etheric. And with the human being we perceive the I or ego. What we actually see there before us is not the physical body, for it is invisible—and so too are the etheric body and the astral body. What we see in a human being is the I externally formed, formed in a physical way. And this is why people appear to visual, external perception in their flesh color—a color found nowhere else, just as the I is not found in any other being. Therefore, if we want to express ourselves correctly, we should say that we can only completely comprehend the human being when we think of him as consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I. What we see before us is the I, while invisibly within are astral body, etheric body, and physical body.

Now, we really only comprehend the human being if we consider the matter a little more closely. What we see to begin with is merely the “outside” of the I. But the I is perceptible in its true form only inwardly, only through Intuition. But something of this I is also noticed by the human being in his ordinary, conscious life—that is, in his abstract thoughts which the animal does not have because it does not have an I. The animal does not have the ability to abstract thoughts because it does not have an I. Therefore, we can say that in the human form and figure we see externally the earthly incarnation of the I; and when we experience ourselves from within, in our abstract thoughts, there we have the I. But they are merely thoughts; they are pictures, not realities.

If now we consider the astral body, which is present although nullified, we come to the member that cannot be seen externally but that we can see if we look at a person in movement and out of their movements begin to understand their form. Here we need to practice the following kind of observation: Think of a small, dwarflike, thickset person who walks about on short legs. You will understand his movement if you observe his stout legs, which he thrusts forward like little pillars. A tall, lanky man with very long legs will move very differently. Observing in this way you will see unity between movement and form. You can train yourself to observe this unity in other aspects of human movement and form. For example, a man with a forehead sloping backward and a very prominent chin moves his head differently than someone with a receding chin and a strikingly projecting forehead. Everywhere you will see a connection between the form and movement of a human being if you simply observe him as he stands before you and get an impression of his flesh, of its color, and of how he holds himself when in repose. You are observing his I when you watch what passes over from his form into his movements and back again into his form.

Study the human hand sometime. How differently people with long or short fingers handle their tools. Movement passes over into form, form into movement. Here you are visualizing, as it were, a shadow of the astral body expressed through external, physical means. But, you see, as I am describing it to you now, it is a primitive inspiration. Most people do not think of observing people who walk about, as, for example, Fichte walked the streets of Jena.¹⁷ Anyone who saw Fichte walking through the streets of Jena could also have sensed the movement and the formative process which were in his speech organs and which came to expression particularly when he wanted his words to carry conviction although they were in his speech organs all the time. Inspiration, at least in an elementary form, is required in order to see this.

But when we see from within what we have thus seen from without, which I have told you is perceptible by means of a primitive kind of inspiration, what we find is, in essence, the human life of fantasy permeated with feeling. It is the realm where abstract thoughts are inwardly experienced. Memory pictures, too, when they arise, live in this element.

Seen from without the I expresses itself, for example, in the flesh color but also in other forms, for example, in the countenance. Otherwise we would never be able to speak of a physiognomy. If, for example, the corners of one's mouth droop when one's face is in repose, this is definitely connected karmically with the configuration of one's I in this incarnation. Seen from the inside, however, abstract thoughts are present here. The astral body reveals itself externally in the character of the movements, inwardly in fantasy or in the pictures of fantasy that appear to the human being. The astral body itself more or less avoids observation, the etheric body still more so.

The etheric body is really not visible from outside, or at most only becomes visible in physical manifestation in very exceptional cases. It can, however, become externally visible when a person sweats—when a person sweats the etheric body becomes visible outwardly. But you see, Imagination is required in order to relate the process of sweating to the whole human being. Paracelsus¹⁸ was one who made this connection. For him, not only the manner but the substance of the sweat differed in individual human beings. For Paracelsus, the whole human being—the etheric nature of the entire human being—was expressed in this way. Generally speaking, then, there is very little external expression of the etheric. Inwardly, on the other hand, it is experienced all the more, namely in feeling. The whole life of feeling, inwardly experienced, is what is living in the etheric body when this body is active from within, so that one experiences it from within. The life of feeling is always accompanied by inner secretion. To observation of the etheric body in the human being it appears that the liver, for instance, sweats, that the stomach sweats—that every organ sweats and secretes. The etheric life of the human being lives in this process of inner secretion. Around the liver, around the heart, there is a cloud of sweat, all is enveloped in mist and cloud. This needs to be understood imaginatively. When Paracelsus spoke about the sweat of the human being he did not say that it is only on the surface. He said rather that sweat permeates the whole human being, that it is his etheric body that is seen when the physical is allowed to fall away from sight. This inner experience of the etheric body is, as I have said, the life of feeling.

And the external experience of the physical body—this, too, is by no means immediately perceptible. True, we become aware of the physical part of human corporeality when, for example, we take a child into our arms. It is heavy, just as a stone is heavy. That is a physical experience; we perceive something which belongs to the physical world. If someone gives us a box on the ears there is, apart from the moral experience, a physical experience, too—a blow, an impact. But as something physical it is actually only an elastic blow, as when one billiard ball impacts another. The physical element must always be kept separate from the other, the moral element. But if we go on to perceive this physical element inwardly, in the same way we inwardly perceive the external manifestation of the life of feeling, then in the merely physical processes we experience inwardly the human will. The human will is what brings the human being together with the cosmos in a simple, straightforward way.

You see, when we look around us for Inspiration we find it in the forms of the animals. The manifold variety of animal forms is the basis for our perceptions in Inspiration. You will realize from this fact that when Inspirations are seen in their pure, original form, without being filled with physical corporeality, that these Inspirations can then represent something essentially higher than animals. And they can, too. But Inspirations that are present in the spiritual world in their pure state may also appear to us in animal-like forms.

In the times of the old atavistic clairvoyance people sought to portray in animal forms the Inspirations that came to them. The form of the sphinx, for example, was intended to create a picture of something that had been seen in Inspiration. We are dealing, therefore, with superhuman beings when we speak of animal forms in the purely spiritual world. During the days of atavistic clairvoyance—and this continued in the first four Christian centuries, in any case, still at the time of the mystery of Golgotha—it was no mere symbolism in the ordinary sense, but a genuine inner knowledge that caused men to portray, in the forms of animals, spiritual beings who were accessible to Inspiration.

It was in complete accordance with this practice when the Holy Spirit was portrayed in the form of a dove by those who had received Inspiration. How must we think of it today when the Holy Spirit is said to have appeared in the form of a dove? We must say to ourselves: Those people who spoke in this way were inspired, in the old atavistic sense. They saw him in this form as an Inspiration in that realm of pure spirit where the Holy Spirit revealed himself to them.

And how would the contemporaries of the mystery of Golgotha who were endowed with atavistic clairvoyance have characterized the Christ? Perhaps they had seen him outwardly as a man. To see him as a human being in the spiritual world they would have needed Intuition. And people who were able to see his I in the world of Intuition were not present at the time of the mystery of Golgotha. That was not possible for them. But they could still see him in atavistic Inspiration. They would, then, have used animal imagery, even to express Christ. “Behold the Lamb of God!” was true and correct language for that time. It is a language we must learn to understand if we are to grasp what Inspiration is, or to see, by means of Inspiration, what can become manifest in the spiritual world. “Behold the lamb of God!” It is important for us to recognize once again what is imaginative, what is inspired, and what is intuitive, and thereby to find our way into the language that echoes down to us from olden times.

In terms of the ancient powers of vision this way of language presents us with realities. But we must learn to express such realities in the way they were still expressed, for example, at the time of the mystery of Golgotha, and to feel that they are justified and natural. Only in this way will we be able to grasp the meaning of what was represented, for example, over in Asia as the winged cherubim, in Egypt as the sphinx, and what is presented to us as a dove and even as Christ, the Lamb. In ancient times Christ was again and again portrayed through Inspiration, or better said, through inspired Imagination.

• 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 16. Karl von Linne (Linnaeus) (1107–1778), Swedish naturalist, father of modern systematic botany.
• 17. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), German idealist philosopher. Important for the development of anthroposophy. See Rudolf Steiner: Truth and Science and The Riddle of Man.
• 18. Paracelsus (1493–1541), Renaissance alchemist, doctor, and philosopher. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Origins of Modern Science (Lecture Eight).

Yesterday I tried to show you how a simple way can be found to envisage the human being's relationships to the cosmos in terms of body, soul, and spirit. Through the way in which I concluded yesterday's lecture by building up to certain imaginative pictures, I wanted to draw attention to certain things. I wanted to show how in such an imaginative picture as that of Christ as the Lamb of God, inspired Imaginations are truly and correctly expressed. I wanted to show that in the times when such pictures were formed, when indeed they were voiced with complete understanding and used for the life of the human soul, a real consciousness was present of how the human being works upward from his ordinary consciousness to conscious experiences in his soul, experiences that connect him to the spiritual world. I have drawn your attention to the fact that in the first four Christian centuries what we could call the Christian teaching still carried the impression that it was everywhere based on a real perception of the spiritual, that even the secrets of Christianity were presented as they could actually be seen by those who had developed their soul life to a vision of the spiritual. After the fourth century A.D., understanding of direct expressions of the spiritual faded away from ordinary consciousness more and more. And with contact between the Germanic peoples from the north and the Latin and Greek peoples of the south during those early days of growth for Western culture we see how these difficulties of understanding constantly increased. We must be fully aware that in the times immediately following the fourth century, people still looked with reverent devotion at those imaginations from earlier times in which Christian views were presented. Tradition was revered, and so too were the pictures that had come down to posterity through tradition. But the progressing human spirit continued to take on new forms. Therefore, the human being was led to say: Yes, tradition has handed down to us pictures such as the dove for the Holy Spirit and the Lamb of God for Christ himself. But how are we to understand them? How do we come to understand them? And out of this impossibility, or rather, out of the faith that was born with the conviction of the impossibility of the human spirit's ever achieving perception of the spiritual worlds through its own powers, there arose the Scholastic doctrine that the human spirit can achieve knowledge of the sense world by its own power, can also reach conclusions directly derived from concepts of the sense world, but that the human being must simply accept as uncomprehended revelation what can be revealed to him of the super-sensible world.

But this, I would like to say, twofold form of faith in the human soul life did not develop without difficulties. On the one hand there was knowledge limited to the earthly, while on the other hand there was knowledge of the super-sensible attainable only through faith or belief. Nevertheless, it was always felt, although more or less dimly, that the human being's relationship to super-sensible knowledge could not be the same as it was in olden times. Concerning this feeling, people said to themselves in the first period after the fourth century: In a certain sense the super-sensible world can still be reached by the human soul, but it is not given to all to develop their souls to such a height; most people have to be content with simply accepting many of the old revelations.

As I said, people revered these old revelations so much that they did not wish to measure them against a standard of human knowledge that no longer reached up to them. At least, people did not believe that human knowledge was capable of rising to the level of revelation. The strict Scholastic doctrine concerning the division of human knowledge was actually only accepted gradually; indeed it was not until the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries of the Middle Ages that this Scholastic tenet was fully admitted. Until that time there was still a certain wavering in peoples' minds: Could it be possible after all to raise this knowledge, which human beings could achieve at this late date, up to the level of what belongs to the super-sensible world?

The triumph of the Scholastic view meant that, in comparison with earlier times, a mighty revolution had taken place. You see, in earlier times, say, in the very first Christian centuries, if someone had struggled through to Christianity and then approached the mystery of divine providence, or the mystery of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, he would have said: This is difficult to understand, but there are people who can develop their souls so that they understand these things. He would have said: If I assume the omniscience of the Godhead, then this omniscient being must actually also know whether one human being is damned for all time or whether another will enter into blessedness. But this—such a person might have said—hardly seems to agree with the fact that people need not, inevitably, sin. And that if they sin they will then be damned; that if they do not sin they will not be damned; that no one will be damned if they do penance for a sin. One must say, therefore, that a person, through the way he or she conducts their life, can either make themselves into one of the damned through sin or into one of the blessed through sinlessness. But again, an omniscient God must already know whether an individual is destined for damnation or blessedness.

Such would have been the considerations of someone so confronted in the earliest Christian centuries. However, in these early Christian centuries that person would not have said: Therefore I must argue whether God foresees the damnation or the blessedness of a human being. He or she would rather have said: If I were initiated I would be able to understand that although an individual may or may not sin, God knows nevertheless who will be damned and who will be blessed. Thus would someone living in the first centuries of Christendom have spoken.

Similarly, if someone had told that person that through transubstantiation, through the celebration of the Eucharist, bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, he would have said: I don't understand that but if I were initiated I would. For in olden times a person would have thought: What can be observed in the sense world are mere appearances; it is not reality: the reality lies behind, in the spiritual world. As long as one stands in the sense world, in this world of illusions, it is a contradiction to say that someone can either sin or not sin and that the omniscient God nevertheless knows in advance whether an individual will be damned or blessed. But as soon as someone enters the spiritual world it is no longer a contradiction. There one experiences how it can be that God, nevertheless, sees ahead. In the same way, a person would have said: In the physical world of sense it is contradictory to say that bread and wine—which in outward appearance remain the same—become the body and blood of Christ after the transubstantiation. But when we are initiated we will understand this, because then, in our soul lives we are within the spiritual world. Thus would people have spoken in olden times.

And then came the struggles in human souls. On the one hand the souls of human beings found themselves more and more separated, torn away from the spiritual world. The whole trend of culture was to grant authority to reason alone, and reason, of course, did not reach into the spiritual world. And out of these struggles developed all kinds of uncertainties concerning the super-sensible worlds. If we study the symptoms of history we can find the points at which such uncertainties enter the world quite starkly. I have often spoken of the Scottish monk Scotus Eriugena, who lived in France at the court of Charles the Bald during the ninth century.¹⁹ At court he was regarded as a veritable miracle of wisdom. Charles the Bald, and all those who thought as he did, turned to Scotus Eriugena in all matters of religion and also of science whenever they wanted a verdict. Now the way in which Scotus Eriugena stood opposed to the other monks of his time shows how fiercely the battle was then raging between reason, which felt itself limited to the world of sense, along with a few conclusions derived from that world, and the traditions that had been handed down from the spiritual world in the form of dogmas. Thus in the ninth century we see two personalities confronting one another: Scotus Eriugena and the monk Gottschalk,²⁰ who uncompromisingly asserted the doctrine that God has perfect foreknowledge of an individual's future damnation or blessedness. This teaching was gradually embodied in the formula: God has destined one portion of humanity for blessedness and another for damnation. The doctrine was formulated as Augustine himself had formulated it. Following his teaching of predestination, one part of humanity is destined for blessedness, another part for damnation.²¹ And the monk Gottschalk taught that it is indeed so: God has destined one portion of the human race for blessedness and another for damnation, but no portion is predestined for sin. Thus, for external understanding, Gottschalk was teaching a contradiction.

In the ninth century the strife was extraordinarily fierce. At a synod in Mainz, for instance, Gottschalk's writing was declared heretical, and he was scourged because of this teaching. However, although Gottschalk had been scourged and imprisoned on account of this doctrine he was able to claim that he had no other desire than to reaffirm the teaching of Augustine in its genuine form. Many French bishops and monks, in particular, realized that Gottschalk was not teaching anything other than what Augustine had already taught. And so a monk such as Gottschalk stood before the people of his time teaching from the traditions of the old mystery knowledge. However, those who now wished to understand everything with the dawning intellect were simply unable to understand and therefore contested his teaching. But there were others who adhered more to reverence for the old and were decidedly on the side of a theologian like Gottschalk.

It is extremely difficult for people today to understand that things like this could be the subject of bitter strife. When such teachings did not please parties with authority their author was publicly scourged and imprisoned even though he might be, and in this case was, eventually vindicated. For it was precisely the orthodox believers who ranged themselves on the side of Gottschalk, and his teaching remained the orthodox Catholic doctrine. Charles the Bald, because of his relationship to Scotus Eriugena, naturally turned to him for a verdict. Scotus Eriugena did not decide for Gottschalk's teaching but as follows: The Godhead is to be found in the evolution of mankind; evil can actually only appear to have existence—otherwise evil, too, would have to be found in God. Since God can only be the Good, evil must be a nothing; but a nothing cannot be anything with which human beings can be united. So Scotus Eriugena spoke out against the teaching of Gottschalk.

But the teaching of Scotus Eriugena, which was more or less the same as that of pantheists today, was in turn condemned by the orthodox Church and his writings were only later rediscovered. Everything reminiscent of his teaching was burned and he came to be regarded as the real heretic. When he made known the views he had explained to Charles the Bald, the adherents of Gottschalk—who were now again respected—declared: Scotus Eriugena is actually only a babbler who adorns himself with every kind of ornament of external science and who actually knows nothing at all about the inner mysteries of the super-sensible.

Another theologian wrote about the body and blood of Christ in De Corpore et Sanguine Domini.²² In this writing he said something that, for the initiates of old, had been an understandable teaching: that in actual fact bread and wine can be changed into the real body and the real blood of Christ. This writing, too, was laid before Charles the Bald. Scotus Eriugena did not write an actual refutation but in his works we have many a hint of the decision he reached, namely, that this, the orthodox Catholic teaching of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, must be modified because it is not understandable to the human mind. This was how Scotus Eriugena was able to express himself, even in his day.

In short, the conflict concerning the human soul's relationship to the super-sensible world raged fiercely in the ninth century, and it was exceedingly difficult for serious minds of that time to find their bearings. For Christian dogmas contained everywhere deposits, as it were, of ancient truths of initiation, but people were powerless to understand them. What had been uttered in external words was put to the test. These words could only have been intelligible to a soul that had developed itself up into the spiritual world. The external words were tested against that of which people at that time had become conscious as a result of the development of human reason. And the most intense battles ensued within the Christian life of Europe from the testing of that time.

And where were these inner experiences leading? They were tending in the direction of a duality entirely absent in former times. In earlier times the human being looked into the sense world and, as he looked, his faculties enabled him simultaneously to behold the spiritual pervading the phenomena of this sense world. He saw the spiritual along with the phenomena of the world of sense. The people of olden times certainly did not see bread and wine in the same way people in the ninth century A.D. saw them, that is, as being merely matter. In ancient times the material and spiritual were seen together. So, too, the people in olden times didn't have concepts and ideas as intellectual as those already possessed by people living in the ninth century. The thinness and abstraction of the concepts and ideas in the ninth century were not present earlier. What people experienced earlier as ideas and concepts was still such that concepts and ideas were like real objects with essential being. Concepts and ideas in olden times were not thin and abstract, but full of living reality, of objective being. I have told you how subjects such as grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology gradually became entirely abstract. In olden times the human being's relationship to these sciences was such that as he lived into them, he entered into a relationship with real, actual beings. But already by the ninth century, and still more in later times, these sciences of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and so forth had become wholly thin and abstract without living content of being—almost, one might say, like mere pieces of clothing in comparison with what had formerly been present. And this process of abstraction continued. Abstraction increasingly became a quality of concepts and ideas while concrete reality increasingly became nothing more than the external sense world. These two streams, which we see in the ninth century, and which influenced men to fight such devastating soul battles—these two streams have persisted into modern times. In some instances we still experience their conflict sharply, in other instances the conflict receives less emphasis.

These tendencies in the evolution of humanity stand with a living clarity in the contrast between Goethe and Schiller.²³ Yesterday, I spoke about the fact that Goethe, having studied the botany of Linnaeus, was compelled to evolve really living concepts and pictures of the plants—concepts capable of change and metamorphosis, which, for this reason, came near to being Imaginations. But I also drew your attention to the fact that Goethe stumbled when his mind tried to rise from plant life to the animal world of sentient experience. He could reach Imagination but not Inspiration. He saw the external phenomena. With the minerals he had no cause to advance to Imagination; with plant life he did, but got no further because abstract concepts and ideas were not his strong point. Goethe did not philosophize in the manner customary in his day. Therefore, he was unable to express in abstract concepts what is found at a spiritual level higher than that of the plants.

But Schiller philosophized. He even learned how to philosophize from Kant, although the Kantian way ultimately became too confused for him and he left it.²⁴ Schiller philosophized without the degree of abstraction that prevents concepts from reaching actual being. And when we study Goethe and Schiller together this is precisely what we feel to be the fundamental opposition never really bridged between them, the opposition that was only smoothed over through the greatness of soul, the essential humanity that lived in both of them. However, this fundamental difference of approach showed itself in the last decade of the eighteenth century when Goethe and Schiller were both occupied with the question: How can the human being achieve an existence worthy of his dignity? Schiller set forth the question in his own way in the form of abstract thought, and he what he had to say about it appeared in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He says there: The human being is, on the one hand, subject to the necessity implicit in logic and reason. He has no freedom when he follows the necessity of reason. His freedom goes under in the necessity of reason. But neither is he free when he surrenders himself wholly to the senses, to the necessity implicit in the senses; in this sphere, instincts and natural urges coerce him and again he is not free. In both directions, actually, toward the spirit and toward nature, the human being becomes a slave, unfree. Schiller concludes that the human being can only become free when he views nature as if it were a living being, as if nature had spirit and soul within it—in other words, if he raises nature to a higher level. But then he must also bring the necessity implicit in reason right down into nature. He must, as it were, regard nature as if it had reason; but then the rigidity of necessity and logic vanish from reason. When a human being expresses himself in pictures he is giving form, creating, instead of logically analyzing and synthesizing; and as he creates in this way he removes from nature the element of necessity caused by the mere senses. But this achievement of freedom, said Schiller, can only be expressed in artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation. One who simply confronts nature passively is under the sway of the necessity implicit in nature, of instincts, natural desires, and urges. If he sets his mind to work he must follow the necessity implicit in logic—if he does not wish to be untrue to the human. When we combine the two, nature and logic, then the necessity implicit in reason subsides, then reason yields something of its necessity to the sense world and the sense world of nature yields something of its instinctual compulsion. And the human being is represented in works of sculpture, for instance, as if spirit itself were already contained in the sensible world. We lead the spirit down into the sensuality of material nature while leading the sensuality of material nature up to the spirit, and the creation through images, the beautiful, arises. Only while creating or appreciating the beautiful does the human being live in freedom.

In writing these Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller strove with all the power of his soul to find out when it is possible for a human being to be free. And the only possibility of realizing human freedom he found in the life of beautiful appearances. We must flee crude reality if we desire to be free, that is to say, if we wish to achieve an existence worthy of a human being. This is what Schiller really meant, though he may not have stated it explicitly. Only in appearance, in semblance, can freedom really be attained.

Nietzsche, who was steeped in all these matters, nevertheless could not penetrate through to an actual perception of the spirit. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,²⁵ he wanted to show that the Greeks created art in order to have something through which, as free human beings in dignity, they might be able to rise above the reality presented by the external senses, the reality in which the human being can never achieve his true dignity. They raised themselves above the reality of things in order to achieve the possibility of freedom in appearances, in artistic appearances. Thus did Nietzsche interpret Greek culture. And here Nietzsche merely expressed, in a radical form, what was already contained in Schiller's letters on the aesthetic education of man. Therefore, we can say that Schiller lived in an abstract spirituality, but that at the same time there lived within him the impulse to grant the human being his true dignity. Just look at the sublimity, the greatness, of his letters on aesthetic education. They are worthy of the very highest admiration. In terms of poetic feeling, in terms of the power of soul, they are really greater than all his other works. When we think of the sum total of his achievements, these letters are the greatest of them all. But Schiller had to struggle with them from an abstract point of view, for he too had arrived at the intellectualism characterizing the spiritual life of the west. And from this standpoint he could not reach true reality. He could only reach the shining appearance of the beautiful.

When Goethe read Schiller's letters on the aesthetic education of man it was not easy for him to find his way around in them. Goethe was actually not very adept at following the processes of abstract reasoning. But he, too, was concerned with the problem of how man can achieve true dignity, how spiritual beings must work together in order to give the human being dignity so that awakened to the spiritual world, he can live into it.

Schiller could not emerge from the picture, or image, to the reality. What Schiller had said in his letters, Goethe also wanted to say, but in his own way. He did so in the pictures and imagery in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.²⁶ In all the figures in this fairy tale we are to see powers of the soul working together to impart to man his true dignity, in freedom. But Goethe was unable to find the way from what he had been able to express in Imaginations up to the truly spiritual. Hence, he got no further than the fairy tale, a picture, a kind of higher symbolism. It was, it is true, full of an extraordinary amount of life; still, it was only a kind of symbolism. Schiller formed abstract concepts, but remaining with appearance he could not get into reality. Goethe, trying to understand the human being in his freedom, created many pictures, vividly concrete pictures, but they could not get him into reality either. He remained stuck with mere descriptions of the world of sense. You see, his description of the sense images in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. are wonderfully beautiful, yet it cannot be said that the final freeing of the crippled prince is intuitively obvious and real; it is only symbolically real. Neither of the two contrasting streams expressed in the personalities of Goethe and Schiller, could find a way into the real experience of the spiritual world. Both were striving from opposite sides to penetrate into the spiritual world, but could not get in.

What was really going on? What I am going to say may seem strange. Nevertheless, those who approach these matters without psychological bias will have to agree with the following.

Think of the two streams present in Scholasticism. For one, there is the knowledge from reason, creating its content out of the world of sense but not penetrating through to reality. This stream flows on through manifold forms, passing from one personality to another, also down to Schiller. Scholasticism held that one can only obtain ideas from the world of sense—and Schiller was drawn into this way of knowing. But Schiller was far too complete a human being to regard the sensuality of physical matter as compatible with true human dignity. Scholastic knowledge merely extracts ideas out of the world of sense. Schiller's solution was to let go of the world of sense so that only ideas remain. But with ideas alone he could not reach reality—he only reached beautiful appearances. He struggled with this problem: What should be done with this scholastic knowledge which man has produced out of himself, so that he can somehow be given his dignity? His answer was that one can no longer stay with reality, that one must take refuge in the beauty of appearances. Thus you see how the stream of scholastic knowledge from reason found its way to Schiller.

Goethe did not care much for this kind of knowledge. Actually he was much more excited by knowledge as revelation. You may find this strange; nevertheless, it is true. And even if he did not adhere to those Catholic dogmas, the necessity of which became clear to him as he was trying to complete Faust, and express them artistically, even if he did not adhere to the Catholic dogmas of his youth, still he held to things pertaining to the super-sensible world at the level he was able to reach. To speak to Goethe of a faith—this, in a way, made him furious. When, in Goethe's youth, Jacobi spoke to him about belief, about faith, he replied: I keep to vision, to seeing.²⁷ Goethe didn't want to hear anything about belief or faith. Those who claim him for any particular faith simply do not understand him at all. He was out to see, to behold. Furthermore, he was actually on the way from his Imaginations to Inspirations and Intuitions. In this way he could naturally never have become a theologian of the Middle Ages, but he could have become like an ancient seer of the divine, a seer of super-sensible worlds. He was certainly on the way, but was simply unable to ascend high enough. He only got far enough to see the super-sensible in the world of the plants. When he studied the plant world he was actually able to see the spiritual and the sensible next to one another as had the initiates in the ancient mysteries. But Goethe got no further than the plant world.

What, then, was the only thing he could do? He could only apply to the whole world of the super-sensible the pictorial method, the symbolism, the imaginative contemplation which he had learned to apply to the plants. And so, when he spoke of the soul life in his fairy tale he was only able to achieve an imaginative presentation of the world.

Whenever the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. mentions anything concerning plant life, anything that can be approached with Imaginations such as those developed by Goethe for the world of plants, then the writing is particularly beautiful. Just allow everything expressed in the style of Imaginations of the plant world in this fairy tale to work on you and you will feel a wonderful beauty. Actually, the rest of the fairy tale's contents also have a tendency to become plantlike. The central female figure, upon whom so much depends, he names Lily. Goethe does not manage to imbue her with real, potent life; he manages only to give her a kind of plant existence. And if you look at all the figures appearing in the fairy tale, actually they all lead a kind of plant existence. Where it becomes necessary to raise them to a higher level, they become mere symbols, and their existence is mere appearance at that level.

The kings that appear in the fairy tale aren't properly real either. They, too, only manage to achieve a plantlike existence; they only claim to have another kind of life as well. Something would have to be in-spired into the golden king, the silver king, and the bronze king before they could really live in the spiritual world.

Thus Goethe lived out a life of knowledge as revelation, as super-sensible knowledge, which he has only mastered up to a certain level. Schiller lived out the other kind of knowledge, knowledge as reason, which was developed by Scholasticism. But he could not bear this knowledge because he wanted to follow it into reality and it could only lead him as far as the reality of the beauty in appearances.

One can say that the inner truth of the two personalities made them so upright that neither one said more than he was truly able to say. Thus Goethe depicts the life of the soul as if it were a kind of vegetation, and Schiller portrays the free individual as if a free human being could only live aesthetically. An aesthetic society—that, as the social challenge, is what Schiller brings forward at the end of the letters on the aesthetic education of man. If the human being is to become free, says Schiller, let him so live that society manifests itself as beauty. In Goethe's relationship to Schiller we see how these streams live on. What they would have needed was the ascent from Imagination to Inspiration in Goethe, and the enlivening of abstract concepts with the imaginative world in Schiller. Only then could they have completely come together.

If you look into the souls of both of them you would have to say that both possessed qualities which could lead them into a world of spirit. Goethe struggled constantly with what he called “religious inclinations” or “piety.” Schiller, when asked, “To which of the existing religions do you confess?” said “To none.” And when he was asked why, he replied—“For religious reasons!”²⁸

As the super-sensible world flows into the human soul from knowledge that is actually experienced, we see how, especially for enlightened spirits, religion itself also flows into the soul. Thus religion will once again have to be attained—through the transformation of the merely intellectual knowledge of today into spiritual knowledge.

• 19. John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810–877), Neoplatonizing Celtic Christian philosopher. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Occult History, Origins of Modern Science.
• 20. Gottschalk of Orbais, Benedictine monk, also at Fulda. Caused great controversy with teachings on the predestination of the elect. Condemned for heresy by the Synod of Mainz (848).
• 21. Cf. St. Augustine, City of God, Books XII, XIII.
• 22. Ratramnus of Corbie (d. 868+), Theologian and controversialist.
• 23. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German poet, dramatist, historian, and philosopher. Schiller's friendship with Goethe is celebrated. Strongly influenced by Kant, his idealism and hatred of tyranny were a powerful influence in modern German literature. Wrote Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).
• 24. Imanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher of the Enlightenment. Published Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
• 25. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher and poet. Professor of classical philology, Basel (1869–79). Known for denouncing religion, and for espousing the perfectibility of human beings through forcible self-assertion. Published The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872).
• 26. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1979).
• 27. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), president of the Munich Academy. In opposition to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he recognized only two types of people: Christian believers and those who trusted their reason. Reason, Jacobi taught, is not the way to arrive at ultimate truth.
• 28. Schiller, Votiftafeln: Mein Glaube.

Once again we want to look back at those principles of initiation described in yesterday's lecture as having been paralyzed by the advancing intellectualization of culture. Looking back we shall see how those people, in whom these older, atavistic principles of initiation were still alive, confronted Christianity. Out of their perceptions they formulated what subsequently became the contents of dogma and, as such, could no longer be understood after about the eighth or ninth century.

We need only to remember that before the mystery of Golgotha the impulse of the true principle of the human self, the I, was essentially missing in human civilization. The human being was, of course, always organized in such a way as to have the I principle within him; furthermore, he or she was created to shape outer and inner being out of the I principle. But only slowly and by degrees did people come to feel and be conscious of the essence and power of the I. Thus we can say that although the human being, even in the times preceding the mystery of Golgotha, consisted of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I, human consciousness did not include within it this I being. The I was more or less unconscious. In those olden times people walked on the earth who basically did not live with full consciousness of the I. But it is actually only possible for the I to be active in the human being when the physical body is no longer developing in its full, original freshness. Those human beings who were still unconscious of their I developed their physical bodies in greater freshness than those who had entered into a full consciousness of the I. This arrival of the full consciousness of the I did not occur suddenly; it was taking place both before and after the mystery of Golgotha, but it is clearly perceptible to a spiritual-scientific observation of history.

That which can be maintained in its full freshness in the human physical, etheric, and astral bodies—that can only be maintained as long as something from the divine, spiritual nature is flowing into the human being out of the cosmos. But we could never have become free beings if the I had not appeared on the scene, if the divine-spiritual had not ceased to flow into us in the old sense. Human beings only became free through at the same time achieving mastery of the I within their consciousness. But that was only possible when humanity became involved in the sphere of abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are, however, actually the corpses of the spiritual world. I have already pointed this out in these lectures. Just as a corpse is left over from our physical nature when we die on the earth, so too, there remains a corpse left over from the being of soul and spirit that we were in the spiritual world before coming down into the physical world. However, this has only been the case since the human being has been equipped with consciousness of his I. And thoughts, abstract thoughts, represent this corpse. When we become able to take hold of abstract thoughts, we take hold of the corpse of our spiritual and soul being as it was before our descent into the earthly world. But a precondition for our taking hold of the corpse of our spiritual and soul being is that something of the dying and paralyzing principle of death must enter our physical body.

Indeed, the evolution of the human being is such that his nature has changed in the course of his development on earth. The bodies of human beings in olden times were different from those of the newer bodies. The bodies of old were such that within them the human being was unfree, but as he moved about, all the freshness of primal being was manifested in his physical, etheric, and astral activity. Thus one can say that in the civilized world we already live in a period of the evolution of humanity when the body is beginning inwardly to decay. And we attain our freedom precisely through this decaying body, which is the base for our intellectual, abstract thoughts. Through this decaying body the human being has attained all that which a person, as an intellectually imbued scientist, is so proud of today.

Considering this, we must say that before the mystery of Golgotha full consciousness of the self as an I was not yet present in human beings on the earth. Nevertheless, in those times there were a few people who had already developed this full I consciousness, who had developed it through the mystery cults. These people were called initiates. We have already said much concerning what happened to those who underwent initiation in the places of the ancient mysteries, how they ascended to the experience of the fully conscious I at a time when it was the general condition of humankind not yet to have a fully conscious I. But the initiate of old could ascend to this fully conscious I because something entered into him through the sacred enactments in the mysteries, something which had been felt and experienced in all ancient civilizations as the eternal Father in the cosmos. And when the initiate, the mystic, had reached a certain point of his initiation in the ancient mysteries he had an experience that allowed him to say to himself (if we were to imagine such an initiate within the ancient Hebrew civilization): The Father lives in me.

This initiate would characterize what had happened within him through his initiation in the following way: The nature of human beings in general is such that the Father indeed sustains and bears them, but the Father does not enter their consciousness and does not kindle their consciousness to an experience of the I. To ordinary human beings the Father gives only the spirit of breath; he breathes in the human being the breath which is the living soul. But the initiate felt that the living soul that had been breathed into a person was a special spiritual reality, the living Father principle of the cosmos which also entered into the human being. And then when this divine Father principle had entered into such an initiate of the ancient Hebrew world and he had become conscious of it, then he could say, with full justification, what the I meant to him: “I am the I am.” Such a person who went about among ancient peoples and, through the divine Father principle dwelling in him, was qualified to speak the I—which in the entire ancient world was the unutterable name of the Godhead, of the Father God—such a person was seen as the representative of the Father on the Earth. These initiates were called the Fathers who walked among the peoples. They were called Fathers because they represented the divine principle of the Father to other human beings. It was said of them that the divine Father had entered into them in the mysteries. Thus the mysteries were seen as the places within the earthly world where the principle could develop that otherwise only weaves and surges externally through the entire cosmos. Within the mystery centers and through the mystery centers, a tabernacle was built in the human being for the divine Father principle. The human being himself became a tabernacle for the divine Father principle.

Through the mysteries human beings felt the surge of God the Father through the earthly world; and looking out into the cosmos, into the great world beyond, they called it the macrocosm, the great world, inasmuch as they thought of it as permeated by and woven through and through by the divine Father principle. They looked then to the mystery centers, within which a tabernacle had been built for this Father God, within which human beings had themselves become tabernacles of the Father God through initiation; and they called the mysteries, and what a human being had become through the mysteries, the little world, the microcosm. This distinction persisted even into the days of Goethe, for when Goethe became a member of certain lodges he picked up the phrase, “The great world and the little world.” By “great world” he understood the macrocosm and by “little world,” the lodge that was, for him, an image of the “great world.”²⁹

All of this entered into another phase when the mystery of Golgotha was drawing near in the evolution of humanity. Hence, something essentially different had to be considered. During the mystery of Golgotha there were human beings walking on the earth who experienced within themselves something of the independent I. The consciousness of the I had begun to enter into human beings. But at the same time something else began to appear: The human physical body began to be inwardly brittle, to decay. And so at this time, in the middle of earth evolution, human evolution faced a great danger. There was the danger of more and more losing connection with the spiritual world and now there was the danger that the physical body could increasingly decay and fall apart.

To help with this danger the being we know as the Christ resolved to pour himself into Jesus of Nazareth just as the divine Father principle had poured into the initiates in earlier times. This divine Father principle had poured into the initiates. In this way the I was enkindled in, and added to, the physical body, etheric body, and astral body. As I have already said, only those into whom the divine Father had entered were allowed to speak the I, which was itself the unutterable name of God.

But now, in the middle of earth evolution there lived human beings who were beginning to say I of themselves, human beings who had raised the I into consciousness. The Son principle, the Christ principle, now entered into just such a human being, into Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ principle now entered into the I. Whereas in earlier times the Father principle had entered into physical body, etheric body, and astral body, now the Christ principle entered into the human being who had developed himself to that stage further in evolution.

Now remember how I described the human being in the second lecture. I said to you that the plant nullifies within itself physical nature. One might also say that the plant corrupts physical nature. The animal then corrupts the physical and the etheric. And the human being corrupts the physical, the etheric, and the astral. The human being did not corrupt them completely in the period of human development before Golgotha. But thereafter he corrupted them completely as the I really entered fully into our being. Of course, the initiate of the ancient mysteries freed himself entirely from physical body, etheric body, and astral body when he let the divine Father principle flow into him and, already in those days, became an I.

In entering into Jesus of Nazareth, Christ nullified, through his entrance, not only the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, but also the I, to the extent that it was developed in Jesus of Nazareth at that time. So that in Jesus Christ there dwelt the higher Christ principle, which is related to the I in the same way the I of the human being is related to the astral body.

The Christ event was something that the old initiates, in whom higher faculties of vision had developed, were still just able to perceive. When these ancient initiates observed the human being as he was in their time they found him uniting within himself all the forces of the other beings of nature and, as it were, standing above them uniting them all. They saw how one can find in the human physical body the mineral kingdom, in the human etheric body the plant kingdom, in the human astral body the animal kingdom, and then they saw what is actually human. When tidings of this Christ event, of the approaching event of Golgotha, came to the initiates who had achieved clairvoyant seeing in ancient times, to these Fathers of the peoples, at least to those few who were still present—when these tidings came, these initiates could see a being in Christ in whom still more was contained, in whom not merely had earthly being been elevated to the human level but in whom humanity itself had been elevated to the level of being that is spiritual and divine.

If we bear in mind how there is present in the human being something that lives in the external physical body as an expression of essential humanity then we can understand how these initiates saw more in Christ Jesus than a mere man, how they saw walking around on the earth something that went beyond the human, beyond humanity. These initiates saw Christ Jesus in a special radiance. They saw him covered not only with the color of human flesh but with a special shimmering radiance.

Initiates in ancient times could, of course, see this special shining radiance in their fellow initiates. It was the power of the Father principle that dwelled within them. But now they perceived not only that which lived in the old initiates as the divine Father principle; now they perceived something that radiated forth from Christ Jesus in a special way, because not only had physical body, etheric body, and astral body been nullified in him, but also the I—to the extent that the I could be present in a human being at that time.

For this reason not only initiates but also other specially gifted people were able to see Christ Jesus as an especially radiant being. And this was the radically new reality at the time of the mystery of Golgotha—new even to the initiates: that other human beings, though perhaps few in number, who were only endowed with natural powers, not with powers otherwise acquired only in the mysteries, could recognize in Christ Jesus this higher nature.

From this fact came the realization that now, with the mystery of Golgotha, something was supposed to happen that, in earlier times, had taken place only within the mysteries themselves. Something that had formerly taken place only within the mysteries—within the microcosm, the “little world”—had been carried out into the macrocosm, the “great world.” And it is actually the case that, to begin with, the Christ mystery was proclaimed in its clearest and most pure form in the last remaining mystery centers of antiquity. And precisely this proclamation of the mystery of Christ was lost to later civilization in the course of the first four centuries of European evolution. Because in Christ Jesus there lived, not the Father principle alone, but also the Son principle, the old initiates knew that he represented something absolutely unique in earthly development. It was unique in this respect: In the further advance of the earth never again could another mystery of Golgotha appear, never again could such an indwelling of the Son principle in a human being take place, an indwelling such as had occurred in Jesus of Nazareth.

And these initiates knew that Christ had entered into humanity as the healer, as the great healer, as the being who prevents the human body from suffering damage caused by the brittleness which was brought about through the entrance of the I. For what would have happened if Christ had not appeared as the healer? If Christ had not appeared as the healer, then when human beings die, when they lay aside the decaying body, the products of this decay would radiate back into the soul being that the human being unfolds after death. The dead would have been disturbed, tortured, by what the decaying physical body represented in earth existence. These souls who had passed through death would have been forced to see how the earth itself suffers injury when it has to take in a decaying body. And the old initiates knew how those who called themselves Christians in the true sense of the word, who had filled themselves inwardly with the Christ principle, how such men could now look down upon the body taken from them by death, and say: Because we received Christ into ourselves while we were children of the earth we have healed the physical body to the extent that it can be placed into the earth without becoming a principle of decay for the earth itself. What the human being needed in order to become an I had to be healed for the sake of the earth. For in order to become an I he had to have a decaying body; but if this decaying body had persisted the earth would have been harmed. And after death the souls, looking down upon the physical bodies now received by the earth, would have been tormented because they could feel the harm being inflicted upon the earth itself by their decaying physical bodies.

What entered through the mystery of Golgotha was this, that the souls of human beings could say to themselves after they had passed through the gate of death: Yes, we carried this fallen physical body on the earth and we can thank it for the possibility of developing a freer I in our human being. But Christ through his dwelling in Jesus of Nazareth, has healed this physical body so that it is no longer harmful to the earth's existence; and we can calmly look down into earthly existence knowing that after the mystery of Golgotha bad seed is not falling into the earth with the physical body that the human being otherwise needs for the development of the I. And so Christ passed through the mystery of Golgotha in order to heal and sanctify the human physical body for the earth.

But now think what would have happened in the course of earth evolution if things had remained as they were after the Christ event. If things had remained that way then the following could have been said: In ancient times the Father God entered into human beings so they, as souls, could rise up to the I and as initiates could proclaim to others the actual essence of the human being, the being of the I. Then the Son, the Christ, entered into the being of humanity. Those who raise themselves so that Christ can dwell in them rescue their bodies for the earth. Just as through the Father principle, and the indwelling of the Father principle made possible by the mysteries, the human soul nature was rescued—so now the bodily nature of the human being has been saved through the healer, the savior-redeemer, through Christ who went through the mystery of Golgotha.

If this had remained the situation, then those who knew of the redemption of their bodies would have had to bear Christ as the being who is actively working within them, as the being who is even actively working on their bodily nature. And then again human beings could not have become free beings. When inner freedom would have arrived in the fourteenth century A.D., human beings would have evolved so that they could receive the Christ into themselves for the peace of their souls after death, so that their souls would be able to look down upon the earth as I have just described. But they could not have become free. If they had wanted to become good then they would simply have had to let Christ work within them in the same way that the Father worked in ancient times in human beings who were not initiates. In those times human beings became free when the I was developed within them. The initiates became free human beings in ancient times whereas others were unfree, because the Father lived in them beneath their consciousness. If Christians had been beings who were merely conscious of the Christ within them, then whenever they wanted to be good they would have had to extinguish their own I consciousness in order to let Christ awaken within them through the extinguishing of their own I-consciousness. They themselves actually would not have been able to be good; it would only have been Christ in them who was good. Human beings would have had to walk about upon the earth with the Christ dwelling within them, and inasmuch as Christ would have availed himself of the bodies of human beings, the healing of these bodies would have occurred. But the good deeds accomplished by human beings would have been the deeds of Christ, not the deeds of human beings.

That was not the task, the mission, of the divine Son, who had united himself with the evolution of the earth through the mystery of Golgotha. He wanted to live within humanity without clouding the dawning I consciousness of human beings. He did this once—in Jesus, in whom, from the baptism onward, the consciousness of the Son God lived in place of the I consciousness of Jesus. But this was not to happen in the human beings of the times to come. In the people of future times the I was to be able to raise itself to full, clear consciousness, while Christ nevertheless continued to dwell within them.

For this to happen it was necessary for Christ, as such, to disappear from the immediate sight of human beings. Although he remained united with earthly existence, he disappeared from the direct view of human beings. A saying common in the ancient mystery centers became also applicable to him. In the mysteries it was said that when a physically visible being, a being whose existence can be followed by human beings with their perception in the physical world, ceases to be visible—it was said that such a being had “ascended to the heavens,” and passed into those regions where physical visibility no longer exists. And so Christ ascended to heaven and became invisible. In a certain sense he would have retained his visibility if he had dwelled in human beings and eliminated the I, so that they could have become good only because, in reality, the Christ was acting in them.

The kind of vision that enabled the apostles, the disciples, to behold Christ even after his resurrection—that kind of vision disappeared. Christ had ascended to the heavens. But he sent to human beings that divine being who does not extinguish I consciousness. This is the being to whom the human being raises himself, not with earthly perception, but with imperceptible spirit. Christ sent humanity the Holy Spirit.

So actually it is the Holy Spirit who is sent by Christ in order that man might retain his consciousness of self, of his I, while Christ himself lives in the unconsciousness of human beings. Thus, if he realizes in the full sense of the word what his being really is, the human being will say: When I look back to what the ancient initiates knew, then I see that in me lives the Father principle which fills the cosmos and which arose in these initiates and developed the I in them. That is the principle that lives within us before we come down into the physical world. Through the Father principle dwelling in them, the ancient initiates remembered, with complete clarity, the way they had lived before they descended into the physical world. They sought the divine in the realm of being that precedes birth, in the realm of preexistence: Ex deo nascimur.

After the mystery of Golgotha human beings could no longer say, “I behold the Christ.” Otherwise they could not have become good through themselves, only Christ within could have done the good. And the truth could only have been In Christo morimur. The human being could die in Christ, through the principle of death within him he could unite with Christ. But the human being's new consciousness could be awakened through the Holy Spirit, the being sent to him by Christ: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

There you have the inner connection of the Trinity. This shows you, too, something else that is definitely a part of Christianity. Even without perception of Christ within, a human being can achieve the awakening of the spirit. By sending the Holy Spirit Christ gave humanity the ability to raise itself to an understanding of the spiritual out of the life of intellect itself. Hence it should not be said that the human being cannot grasp the spiritual, the super-sensible, through his own spirit. A man could only justify his inability to understand the spirit if he ignored the Holy Spirit, if he spoke only of the Father God and the Christ God. For those willing to see and read it is also clearly indicated—for it is a revelation in and of itself—that the human being can understand the super-sensible through the spirit dwelling within him, if he only inclines himself to Christ. It is for this reason that we are told that the Holy Spirit appeared at the baptism of Christ. And with the appearance of the Holy Spirit these words resound through the cosmos: “This is my beloved Son; this day I have begotten him.”

The Father is the unbegotten begetter who places the Son into the physical world. But at the same time the Father uses the Holy Spirit in order to tell humanity that in the spirit, the super-sensible is comprehensible, even if this spirit is itself not perceptible but only works inwardly to elevate the merely abstract intellect to the realm of the living. In the spirit the super-sensible can be understood when the corpse of thoughts that we have from our pre-birth existence is raised to life through the Christ dwelling within us. And when Christ sent the Holy Spirit to his disciples—this imparting occurred through the Christ, through the Son. For this reason it was an ancient dogma that the Father is the unbegotten begetter, that the Son is the one begotten by the Father, and that the Holy Spirit is the one imparted to humanity by the Father and the Son. This is not some kind of arbitrarily asserted dogma but rather the wisdom of initiation living in the earliest Christian centuries; only later was it covered over and buried along with the teachings concerning the Trichotomy and the Trinity.

The divine principle working as Christianity within evolving humanity cannot be understood without the Trinity. If, in the place of the Trinity, some other teaching concerning God were to enter, then basically speaking it would not be a fully Christian teaching. One must understand the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit if one would understand the teaching concerning God concretely and in a genuine way.

The Gospel itself was no longer understood when Scholasticism decreed that the human being has revelation only in faith, that he cannot reach the super-sensible through his own human knowledge. This decree concerning human knowledge, which was separated off from faith, was itself a sin against Christianity: it was a sin against the proclamation of the Holy Spirit through the Father at the baptism of Jesus and through Jesus himself when he sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Thus within the development of European civilization many sins were committed in what continued to call itself Christianity, many sins were committed against the original impulses of Christianity. Today it is really necessary for humanity to turn back to these original impulses of Christianity. In many ways these original Christian impulses have hardened into dogmas. But if one penetrates into the living spirit then what is essentially true in these dogmas can catch fire. Then they will cease to be dogmas. What is false in the Church is not that it has propagated the dogmas but that it has frozen and crystallized them, has taken them away from the realm of human knowledge. Because human knowledge was limited to only what is in the world of the senses the dogmas had to be crystallized, had to become no longer understandable. For it is an impossibility that faith alone could ever really bring understanding. What must be rescued within humanity is knowledge itself; knowledge must be led back to the super-sensible.

Fundamentally speaking, this challenge reaches to us from Golgotha when we rightly understand it, when we know how, after going through the mystery of Golgotha, Christ sent into humanity, in addition to this divine Father principle, the Holy Spirit. Whoever beholds the cross on Golgotha must at the same time behold the Trinity, for in reality Christ shows and makes manifest the Trinity in all the ways he is interwoven with the earthly evolution of humanity.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to bring to you today, which will provide us with the basis for further studies in the future.

• 29. Goethe was a member of the secret fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons. Not restricted to stoneworkers, it retains much of the spirit and code of the medieval mason's guild.

I would like to respond to your kind invitation to speak here this evening by telling you something about how, through unmediated research, one can come to spiritual knowledge, and I would like to explain the educational consequences of that knowledge. At the outset today I would also like to say that I will be speaking primarily about the method for entering and researching super-sensible worlds; perhaps on another occasion it will be possible to impart some of the results of super-sensible research. Everything I have to say today will refer to the researching of spiritual, super-sensible worlds, not to the understanding of super-sensible knowledge. Supersensible knowledge that has been researched and communicated can be understood by ordinary healthy human understanding if this ordinary understanding has not lost its unbiased perspective. A biased view is present when the understanding takes as its starting point the proof or logical deduction appropriate for dealing with the outer world of sense. Because of this hindrance alone it is often said that the results of super-sensible research cannot be understood by anyone who is not a researcher of the super-sensible.

What will be imparted here today is the object of what is known as initiation knowledge. In previous ages of humanity's development this knowledge was cultivated in a form different from the form appropriate for today. As I have already said in other lectures, the things of the past are not to be brought forward again; rather the path of research into super-sensible worlds is to be entered upon in a way appropriate to the thinking and feeling of our age. When it comes to initiation knowledge, everything depends on the individual's ability to undergo a fundamental reorientation or revisioning of his entire soul configuration.

An individual possessing initiation knowledge is distinguished from those who have knowledge in the present-day sense of the word, not merely because his initiation knowledge is a step above ordinary knowledge. Of course, it is achieved on the foundation of ordinary knowledge; this foundation must be present; intellectual thinking must be fully developed if one wants to acquire initiation knowledge. However, a fundamental reorientation is then necessary. The possessor of initiation knowledge must come to see the world from a point of view altogether different from the way it was seen without initiation knowledge.

I can express the fundamental difference between initiate and ordinary knowledge in a simple formula: In ordinary knowledge we are aware of our thinking; indeed, we are altogether aware of the inner soul experience through which we, as the subject of knowing, acquire knowledge. For example, when we think and believe that we know something through thought we think of ourselves as thinking human beings, as subjects. We are looking for objects when we observe nature or human life or perform experiments. We always look for objects. Objects are supposed to present themselves to us. Objects should surrender themselves to us so we can encompass them with our thoughts, so we can apply our thinking to them. We are the subject and that which comes to us is the object.

With a man who strives for initiation knowledge an entirely different orientation comes into play. He must become aware that as a human being, he is the object; then, for this object, this human being, he must seek the subject. A situation exactly the opposite of ordinary knowing must occur. In ordinary knowledge we experience ourselves as subject and look for the object outside of us. In initiation knowledge we ourselves are the object, and we seek the corresponding subject; in other words, genuine initiation knowledge leads us to find subjects. But that would be the object of a later knowledge.

It is as though the mere definitional concepts already force us here to see that in initiation knowledge, we must actually flee from ourselves; we must become like the plants and stones, like thunder and lightning, which are, for us, objects. In initiation knowledge we slip out of ourselves, so to speak, and become objects that seek the corresponding subjects. If I may express myself somewhat paradoxically, I would like to say that from the point of view of thinking the difference is as follows: In ordinary knowing we think about the things; in initiation knowledge we seek to discover how we are being thought by the cosmos.

This is nothing more than an abstract guiding principle. But you will find that this abstract guiding principle is followed everywhere in the concrete methods of initiation. To begin with, if we want to receive initiation knowledge appropriate for today we must proceed from thinking. The life of thought must be fully developed if we want to come to initiation knowledge today. This life of thought can be especially well schooled through an immersion in the natural scientific development of the last centuries, the nineteenth century in particular.

People react in different ways to natural scientific knowledge. Some listen to the pronouncements of science with what I would like to call a certain naïveté. They hear, for example, how organic beings have developed from the simplest, most primitive forms up to the human being. They think about this development but have little regard for their own involvement in these ideas. They do not stop to consider the fact that they themselves unfold something in the seeing of external processes, something which belongs to the life of thought.

But someone who receives natural scientific knowledge with critical consideration of his own involvement must ask himself: What does it mean that I myself can follow the development of beings from the imperfect to the perfect? Or he could say to himself: When I do mathematics I create thoughts purely out of myself. Properly understood, mathematics is a web spun out of myself. I then apply this web to the outer world and it fits. Here we come to the great question, I would like to say the really tragic question: How do things stand with respect to thinking itself—this thinking that is involved every time I know something?

No matter how long we think about it we cannot find out how things stand with thinking; for thinking remains always stuck in the same place. We merely spin, so to speak, around the axis we have already built for ourselves. We must accomplish something with our thinking. With our thinking we must carry out what I described as meditation in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.³⁰

We should not think mystically about meditation but then neither should we think of it lightly. It must be completely clear what meditation is in the modern sense. It also requires patience and inner energy of soul. Above all there is something else that belongs to meditation, something that no one can ever give to another human being: the ability to promise oneself something and then keep that promise. When we begin to meditate we begin to perform the only really fully free act in human life. We always have the tendency toward freedom within us. We have also attained a good measure of freedom. However, if we stop to think about it, we will find we are dependent upon our heredity, our education, and our present life situation.

To what extent are we in a position to suddenly leave behind all we have acquired through heredity, education, and life? We would be confronted with nothingness were we to suddenly leave that all behind.

Although we may have decided to meditate mornings and evenings in order gradually to learn to see into the spiritual world, we can, in fact, on any given day, leave this undone. There is nothing to prohibit this. And experience teaches us that most people who approach the meditative life, even those with the best intentions, soon leave it again. In this we are completely free. Meditation is an essentially free act.

If we are able to remain true to ourselves despite this freedom, if we promise ourselves, not another but ourselves, that we will remain faithful to this meditation, then that is, of itself, an enormous power in the soul.

Having said that, I would like to draw your attention to how, in its simplest form, meditation is done. I can only deal with the basic principles today. This is what we are dealing with: An idea or image, or a combination thereof, is moved into the center of our consciousness. Although the content of this thought complex does not matter, it should be immediate and not represent anything from our memory. For this reason it is good if the thought complex is not retrieved from our memory but rather given to us by someone experienced in such things. It is good for it to be given to us, not because the one who gives the meditation wants to exercise any suggestion but because we then can be certain that what we meditate is, for us, something entirely new.

We could just as well find a passage for meditation in any old book that we know we have not read. What is important is that we not pull a sentence out of our subconscious or unconscious, which would then overwhelm us. We could never be absolutely certain about a sentence like that. All kinds of things left over from past feelings and sensations would be mixed in. It is essential that the meditation be as transparent as a mathematical equation.

Let us take something very simple, the sentence: “Wisdom lives in the light.” To begin with, the truth of this sentence cannot be tested. It is a picture. But it is not important for us to concern ourselves with the content in any other way than to see through and understand it. We are to dwell upon it with our consciousness. In the beginning we will only be able to dwell in full consciousness upon such a content for a very short period of time. But this period of time will get longer and longer.

What then is essential? Everything depends upon our gathering together our whole life of soul in order to concentrate all our powers of thinking and feeling upon the content of the meditation. Just as the muscles of the arm become strong as we work with them, so too soul forces are strengthened by focusing them on a meditative content again and again. If possible the content of meditation should remain the same for months, perhaps for years. For genuine super-sensible research the forces of the soul must first be strengthened, empowered.

If we continue practicing in this way, the day will come, I would like to say, the big day, on which we make a very special observation. Gradually we observe that we are in a soul activity entirely independent of the body. We notice that whereas previously we were dependent upon the body for all our thinking and feeling—for our thinking upon the nervous system, for our feeling upon the circulatory system, and so on—now we feel ourselves in a spiritual-soul activity that is fully independent of any bodily activity. And we notice this because we are now in a position to cause something in our head to vibrate, something that had remained entirely unconscious previously. We now discover the strange difference between sleeping and waking. The difference consists in this: when man is awake there is something vibrating throughout his entire organism—except in his head. What is otherwise in movement in all the rest of the human organism is, in the head, at rest.

We will better understand what we are dealing with here if I draw your attention to the fact that, as human beings, we are not these robust solid bodies that we usually believe ourselves to be. We are actually made up of approximately 90 percent fluids; and the 10 per cent solid constituents are immersed in the fluids, they swim around in the fluids. We can only speak of the solid part of the human being in an uncertain way. We are, if I may put it this way, approximately 90 per cent water; and to a certain extent, air and warmth pulsate through this water.

If you can imagine the human being this way—to the least extent solid body and to a greater extent water and air with warmth vibrating therein—then you will not find it so difficult to believe that there is something even finer and more rarefied within us. This finer element I will call the etheric body. This etheric body is more rarefied than air. It is so fine that it permeates us without our being aware of the fact—at least in ordinary life. This etheric body is what is in inner movement when we are awake—in a regular movement throughout the entire human body, except in the head. In the head the etheric body is inwardly at rest.

In sleep it is otherwise. Sleep begins and then continues when the etheric body also begins to be in movement in the head. So that in sleep the whole human being—the head as well as the rest of the human being—has an etheric body that is in inner movement. When we are dreaming, for example, just upon awakening, we are then still just able to perceive the last movements of the etheric body. They present themselves to us as dreams. We are still able to perceive the last etheric movements in the head; however, when we awaken quickly that cannot happen.

Someone who meditates for a long time in the fashion I have indicated arrives at a stage where he can form pictures into the etheric body which permeates the head when it is at rest. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. I have called these pictures Imaginations. These Imaginations, which can be experienced in the etheric body independently of the physical body, are the first super-sensible impressions we can have. They bring us to the place where, entirely without regard for our physical body, we can behold, as in one picture, our life in its movement and its actions. What has often been described by people who were submerged in water and about to drown—that they have seen their lives backward in a series of moving pictures—that vision can be developed here systematically so that everything that has happened in our present earth life can be seen.

The first result of initiation knowledge is a view of our own soul life. This turns out to be entirely different from what one usually expects. We usually abstractly suppose this soul life to be woven from ideas and mental images. When we discover it in its true form we find that it is something creative and, at the same time, that it is what was working in our childhood, what shaped and molded our brain, what permeates the rest of the body and brings about a plastic form-building activity within the body as it enkindles and supports our waking consciousness, even our digestive activity. We see this inner activity in the organism as the etheric body of the human being. This is not a spatial body but a time body. For this reason you can describe the etheric body as a form in space only if you realize that what you are doing is the same as painting a bolt of lightning. When you paint a picture of a lightning flash you are, of course, painting only a moment of its existence. You are holding the moment in place. The human etheric body also can only be captured as a spatial form for a moment. In reality we have a physical body in space and an etheric body in time, a time body, which is always in movement. And it is only meaningful to speak of the etheric body if we speak of it as a body of time which we can behold. From the moment we are in a position to make this discovery we see it extending backward all the way back to our birth. This is, to begin with, the first super-sensible ability we can discover in ourselves.

The development of the soul, brought about through processes such as I have described, shows itself above all in a change of the entire soul mood and disposition of those people who strive for initiation knowledge. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that someone who arrives at initiation knowledge suddenly becomes an entirely transformed and different human being. On the contrary, modern initiation knowledge must leave a man standing fully in the world so that he is able to continue his life, when he returns to it, just as he once began it. But when super-sensible research is carried out man has become, through initiation knowledge, for those hours and moments someone different than he is in ordinary life.

Above all I would like to emphasize an important moment that characterizes initiation knowledge. As a person penetrates further into experience of the super-sensible he feels more and more how his own bodily nature disappears. That is, it disappears for him with respect to those activities in which this bodily nature plays a part in ordinary life.

Let us consider for a moment how our judgments in life come about. We grow up and develop as children. Sympathy and antipathy become solidly set in our lives—sympathy and antipathy for the things that appear to us in nature and for other people. Our body is involved in all of this. Of course, this sympathy and antipathy that, to a large extent, actually have their foundation in the physical processes in our body, are then placed and located in the body. In the moment when people about to be initiated rise into the super-sensible world, they live into a world in which, for the duration of the time spent in the super-sensible, the sympathies and antipathies connected with their bodily nature become increasingly foreign to them. They are lifted above that with which their bodily nature is connected. When they wish to take up ordinary life again they must again fit themselves, so to speak, into their usual sympathies and antipathies—something which otherwise occurs by itself.

When we awaken in the morning we fit into our bodies, develop the same love for things and people, the same sympathy and antipathy we had before. This happens by itself. But when we stay for a while in the super-sensible and then wish to return to our sympathies and antipathies, then we must exert an effort to submerge ourselves into our bodily nature. This condition of separation from our own bodily nature is a phenomenon that shows that we are really making progress. The appearance of wide-hearted sympathies and antipathies is, altogether, something that an initiate gradually makes a part of his being.

There is one thing that shows the development toward initiation in a particularly strong way: the working of the memory during initiation knowledge. We experience ourselves in ordinary life. Our memory is sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse; but we acquire a memory. We have experiences and later remember them. This is not the case with what we experience in super-sensible worlds. We can experience greatness, beauty, and meaning, but after it has been experienced it is gone. And it must be experienced again if it is to stand before the soul again. It is not imprinted in the memory in the usual sense. It is imprinted only if we bring into concepts what we have seen in the super-sensible, only if we can also bring our understanding along with us into the super-sensible world. This is very difficult. We must be able to think just as well on the other side but without the body helping with this thinking. For this reason our concepts must be strengthened beforehand; we must have become proper logicians before, so that we do not always forget when we look into the super-sensible world. It is just the primitive clairvoyants who, although they can see quite a bit, forget their logic when they are over there. It is just when we want to share super-sensible truths with someone else that we notice this change in our memory with respect to these truths. From this we can see how our physical body is involved in the exercise of memory, not in thinking, but in the exercise of memory, which always plays into the super-sensible.

If I may be permitted to say something personal, it is this: When I myself hold lectures it is different from the way lectures are usually held. People often speak from memory, they often develop from memory what they have learned, what they have thought. Anyone who really presents super-sensible truths actually must always produce them in the moment when he presents them. I can hold the same lecture thirty, forty, fifty times, and for me it is never the same. Of course, that would be so in any case, but it is even more so with this independence from memory that comes into play when a higher stage of memory is reached.

I have already told you about the ability to bring forms into the etheric body of the head. This then makes it possible to see through the time-body, the etheric body, all the way back to birth. It also brings the soul to a very special mood with respect to the cosmos. One loses one's own bodily nature, so to speak, but feels oneself living into the cosmos. Consciousness expands, as it were, into the widths of the ether. One can no longer look at a plant without becoming immersed in its growth. One follows it from the root to the blossom. One lives in its juices, in its blossoms, in its fruits. One can steep oneself in the life of animals according to their forms, but especially in the life of other human beings. The slightest gesture encountered in another human being leads one, so to speak, into the entire soul life of the other person. One feels as though one is no longer in oneself, but is out of oneself during this super-sensible knowing.

But it is necessary that we be able to return again and again, otherwise we are lazy, nebulous mystics, dreamers, and not knowers of super-sensible worlds. We must be able to live in super-sensible worlds while simultaneously being able to return at any time to stand firmly on our two feet. For this reason, whenever I explain such things about super-sensible worlds, I must stress that it is far more important for a philosopher to know how a shoe or a coat is made than it is to know logic, that he must really stand in life in a practical way. Actually no one should think about life unless he really stands in it in a practical way. This is even more so the case for someone seeking super-sensible knowledge. Knowers of the super-sensible cannot be dreamers or fanatics or people who cannot stand on their two feet; otherwise they would lose themselves, for one must, as a matter of fact, get outside of oneself. But this “getting outside of oneself” must not lead to the loss of one's self. The book Occult Science—an Outline was written out of knowledge such as I have described here.

Then it is important that we penetrate further into this super-sensible knowledge. This happens when we further develop our meditations. With our meditations we rest upon certain ideas or mental pictures or a combination thereof, thereby strengthening the soul life. But this is not enough to bring us fully into the spiritual world. It is also necessary that we practice the following: Beyond dwelling with our meditations upon ideas, beyond concentrating our entire soul upon these ideas, we must be able, at will, to cast them out of our consciousness. Just as, in the life of the senses, we can look at something and then away from it whenever we want, so too, in the development of super-sensible knowledge we must learn to concentrate on a content of soul and then be able to cast it out of the soul again.

Even in ordinary life this is not easy. Just think how little we have it in our power to drive our thoughts away at will. Sometimes they will pursue us for days, especially if they are unpleasant. We cannot get rid of them. This becomes much harder after we have become accustomed to concentrating on the thoughts. A thought content we have concentrated upon eventually begins to get a firm grip on us; then we really have to work hard to remove it. When we have practiced for a long time we can manage the following: We can remove, we can cast out of our consciousness, this entire retrospect of our life from birth onward, this entire etheric body, as I have called it, this time body.

This is, of course, a stage to which we must develop ourselves. We must first become mature for this step by ridding ourselves of this colossus, this giant being in our soul. The whole terrible specter that embodies life between the present moment and our birth is standing there before us. This is what we must do away with. If we can get rid of it then something will appear for us that I would like to call a more wakeful consciousness. Then we are merely awake without anything in the waking consciousness. Then it begins to fill. Just as air streams into lungs that need it, so too the real spiritual world now streams into the consciousness that has been emptied in the way described.

This is Inspiration. Now something streams in that is not a finer, more rarefied matter. It is related to matter as negative is related to positive. The opposite of matter now streams into the human being who has become free of the ether. This is the most important thing we can become aware of. It is not true that spirit is merely an even finer, more etherealized form of matter. If we call matter the positive (it really does not matter if we call it positive or negative; these things are relative), then in terms of the positive we must call spirit negative. It is as if I had the vast fortune of five dollars in my wallet. If I give one away then I will have four left. But say, alternatively, that I accumulate debts. If I owe one dollar then I have less than no dollars.

If through the methods described I have removed the etheric body then I come, not into a still finer ether, but into something that is the opposite of ether, in the same way debts are the opposite of assets. Now I know from my own experience what spirit is. Through inspiration the spirit comes into us and the first thing we experience is what surrounded our soul and spirit before our birth, that is before conception, in the spiritual world. That is, the preexistent life of our soul and spirit. Previously we had seen into the etheric realm back to our birth. Now we look back beyond birth, that is conception, into a world of soul and spirit and reach the point where we can perceive how we were before we descended from spiritual worlds into a physical body taking on a line of heredity.

For inspiration knowledge these things are not thought-out philosophical truth. They are experiences, but experiences which must only be acquired after a preparation such as I have indicated. So the first thing that comes to us when we enter the spiritual world is the truth of the preexistence of the human soul, that is, of the human spirit. We learn now to see the eternal directly.

For many centuries now European humanity has considered eternity from one side only, from the point of view of immortality. Europeans have asked only: What becomes of the soul after it leaves the body at death? Of course, it is the egotistical right of human beings to ask such a question. They are interested in what will follow after death for egotistical reasons. We will presently see that we too can speak about immortality, but immortality is usually discussed for egotistical reasons. People are less interested in what happened before their birth. They say: We are here now. What went on before has value only as history. But knowledge of history that has any value is only possible if we seek knowledge of our existence before birth, that is, before conception.

We need a word in modern languages that makes the eternal complete. We should speak not only of immortality but also of unborn-ness. For eternity consists of both immortality and unborn-ness; furthermore, initiation knowledge discovers unborn-ness before it discovers immortality.

A further stage of development in the direction of the spiritual world can be reached if we strive to free our soul and spiritual activities still further from the support given by the body. We can achieve this freeing by guiding our exercises, meditations, and concentration more in the direction of will-exercises. As a concrete example I would like to describe a simple will exercise that will allow you to study the principle under consideration. In ordinary life we are accustomed to think along with the flow of the world. We let the things come to us as they happen to come. What comes to us first we think first, what comes to us later we think later. And even if in more logical thinking we are not thinking along with the flow of time, still in the background there is the effort to stick with the external, “real,” flow of events and facts. In order to exercise our soul and spiritual forces we must get free from the external flow of events. And a good will exercise is this: We try to think back through the experiences of the day, not as they occurred, from the morning to evening, but backward, from evening to morning, paying attention to the details as much as possible.

Suppose we come to the following in this backward review: We walked up a set of stairs. First we picture ourselves on the top step, then at the one before the top, and so on down to the bottom. We descend the stairs backward. In the beginning we will only be able to visualize backward the episodes of the day's experiences in this way, say from six o'clock to three o'clock, or from twelve to nine, and so on, back to the moment of waking. But gradually we will acquire a kind of technique by means of which, as a matter of fact, in the evening or the next morning we will be able to let a tableau of the day's events, or the events of the day before, pass before our soul in reverse order.

When we are in a position (and everything depends on our achieving this position) to free ourselves entirely from the three dimensional flow of reality, then we will see how a powerful strengthening of our will occurs. The same effect can be achieved if we are able to hear a melody backward or if we can picture a drama of five acts running backward from the fifth, fourth, and so forth back to the first. We strengthen our will inwardly with all of these means, and outwardly we tear it free from its bondage to events in the world of the senses. Other exercises that I have mentioned in previous lectures can be added. We can take stock of ourselves and our habits. We can take ourselves in hand, apply iron will in order, in a few years, to acquire another habit in place of the old. As an example, I mention the fact that in his handwriting everyone has something that reveals his character. Making the effort to acquire another handwriting, one which is not at all similar to the former, requires a powerful, inner strength. Of course, the second handwriting must become just as habitual as the first. That is a small thing. There are many such things through which we can alter the fundamental direction of our will through our own energetic efforts.

In this way gradually we are able to do more than just bring the spiritual world as inspiration into us. With our spirit freed from the body we are really able to immerse ourselves in the other spiritual beings outside us. Genuine spiritual knowing means that we enter into spiritual beings around us when we behold physical things. If we want to know spiritual things we must first get out of ourselves. I have described this freeing of ourselves from the physical. But then we must also acquire the ability to sink ourselves again into spiritual things and beings.

We can only do this after practicing the kinds of exercises just described; then, as a matter of fact, we are no longer disturbed by our own bodies but can immerse ourselves in the spiritual side of things; then the plants no longer merely appear to us, but we are able to dive down into the color itself. We live in the process whereby the plant colors itself. By not only knowing that the chicory growing alongside the road is blue, but by being able to enter into the blossom inwardly and participate in the blue we dwell intuitively in this process. From this point we can extend our knowledge more and more.

From certain symptoms we can tell we have really made progress with such exercises. I would like to mention two, but there are really many. The first symptom consists in this, that we acquire entirely different views concerning the world of morality than we had before. For the pure intellect the moral world is something unreal. Certainly, if he has remained a decent person during the age of materialism, a man feels himself obligated to do what the old traditions prescribe. Yet even if he does not admit it, he thinks to himself that doing the good does not make something happen that is as real as what happens when lightning flashes or when thunder rolls through space. He is not thinking of reality in this sense when he thinks of morality. But when he lives into the spiritual world he becomes aware that the moral order of the world has not only a reality such as is found in the physical world, but actually a higher reality. He gradually comes to understand that this entire age, with its physical ingredients and processes, can decay and be dissolved; but the morality that flows forth from our actions continues to exist in its effects. He becomes aware of the reality of the moral world. The physical and moral worlds, being and becoming are then one. He really experiences the truth that moral laws are also objective laws of the world.

This experience intensifies our sense of responsibility with respect to the world. It gives us an altogether different consciousness, a consciousness much needed by modern humanity. Modern humanity looks at the beginning of the earth, how it was formed from a primal plasma in space, how life, man, and—much like a fata morgana—the world of ideas arose out of this primal matter. Our present-day humanity looks at the cold grave of the universe that entropy will bring us to. According to this materialistic idea, everything in which human beings live will again sink into a great graveyard. Humanity needs knowledge of the moral order in the world, the knowledge that can be achieved through super-sensible sources. This I can only touch on in this lecture.

Another symptom of our progress must be mentioned: the intensified suffering that we experience. We cannot come to intuitive knowledge, to this submerging of ourselves in things external to ourselves, without having gone through an intensified suffering. This suffering is intensified compared with the pain involved in imaginative knowledge, the pain that always arises when we must find our way again into our sympathies and antipathies. The great effort required to find our way back always hurts. The pain now becomes a cosmic co-experiencing of all the suffering that rests upon the ground of existence.

It is easy to ask why the gods, or God, created suffering. Suffering must exist if the world is to arise in its beauty. We have eyes because, to begin with, in a still undifferentiated organism something organic was, so to speak, “dug out” and transformed into the power to see and, then, into the eye. If we were still able today to perceive the tiny, insignificant processes that go on in the retina when we see, then we could perceive that even those processes represent a pain that rests upon the ground of existence. All beauty rests on the foundation of suffering. Beauty can only be developed out of pain. We should be able to feel this pain, this suffering. We can only really find our way into the spiritual by going through pain. To a lesser degree this can already be said for a lower stage of knowledge. Anyone who has acquired even a little knowledge will admit to the following: I am grateful to my destiny for the happiness and joys life has brought me, but my knowledge has only been achieved through my pains, through my suffering.

If this is felt with respect to more elementary knowledge, it can then become an even greater experience when we overcome ourselves, when we find our way through the pain that is felt as cosmic pain to a neutral experience in the spiritual cosmos. We must struggle through to a co-experiencing of the events and essential nature of all things; then intuitive knowledge is present. We are fully within an experience of knowledge that is no longer bound to the body. We can then return to and live again in the sensible world until death but with full knowledge of what it means to be real, to be real in the soul-spiritual outside the body.

If we grasp this experience of intuitive knowledge, then, in a picture, we have knowledge of what happens when we leave the physical body at death, then we know what it means to go through the gate of death. The reality we encounter, that the soul and spirit go over into a world of soul and spirit when they leave the body behind—we experience this reality beforehand when we have ascended to intuitive knowledge. That is, we know what it is like in a world where there is no body to provide support. When we have then brought this knowledge into concepts, we return to the body. But the essential thing is that we learn how to live without a body and acquire thereby the knowledge of what it will be like when we can no longer use our body, when we lay it aside at death and step over into a world of soul and spirit. Once again, this is not a question of philosophical speculation concerning immortality based upon initiation knowledge. It is, I would like to say, an experience, a pre-experience of what is to come. We know what it will be like. We do not experience the full reality of dying, but we experience immortality. This experience also becomes a part of our knowledge.

I have attempted to describe how you can rise through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition and how, through this development, you can learn to know yourself in your full reality as a human being. In the body we learn to know ourselves for as long as we are in the body. But we must free our soul and spirit from the body, for only then can the whole human being be free. What we know through the body, through our senses, through thinking based on sense experience and bound up with the body's nervous system—with all this we can know only one part of us. We only learn to know the whole human being if we have the will to ascend to the knowledge that comes from initiation science.

Once again, I would like to stress that once the research has been done, then the results can be understood—just as what astronomers and biologists say about the world can be understood and tested—by anyone approaching them with an unprejudiced mind, with ordinary, healthy human understanding. Then you will find that this testing is the first step of initiation knowledge. Because man does not seek untruth and error but truth, we must first get an impression of the truth in initiation knowledge. Then, as much as destiny makes it possible for us, we will be able to penetrate further and further into the spiritual world.

In our day, and in a higher sense, the words which stood inscribed above the Greek temple as a challenge must be fulfilled: “Man, know thyself.”

Those words certainly did not mean that we should retreat into our inner life. They were, rather, a challenge to search for our being: to search for the essence of immortality, which is found in the body, to search for the essence of unborn-ness, which is found in the immortal spirit, and to search for the mediator between earth, time, and spirit which is the soul. For the true human being consists of body, soul, and spirit. The body can only know the body, the soul can only know the soul, and the spirit can only know the spirit. Therefore, we must try to find the spirit active within us so that the spirit can also be recognized in the world.

• 30. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, vol. 10 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).

Today we would like to look at some things that will bring together for a wider circle of anthroposophists many of the truths already known to us. Perhaps you are already familiar with the description I have given in my book Theosophy³¹ I described there the worlds that the human being has to live through between death and a new birth. Today I will describe something of these worlds from a point of view somewhat different from the one given in that book.

For the most part in that book Imaginations are used for the soul and spiritual worlds through which a human being passes—after going through the gate of death—in order to develop and advance to a new life on earth. Today I will describe these things not so much from an Imaginative point of view, but rather from a point of view resulting more from Inspiration.

In order to acquire the possibility of understanding at all, we can begin with the experiences we have during earthly life. At any given point in time between birth and death we stand here in our physical body confronted with the outer world. What is contained within our skin, what is contained within our physical bodies, we call ourselves, our human being. We assume that this human being contains not only anatomical and physiological processes, but we also assume that somehow soul and spiritual processes are going on in there. We speak of “ourselves” and mean thereby what is contained within our skin. We look out into the world and see it around us; this we call our “outer world.” Now, we know that we make mental pictures of this outer world and then these mental pictures live within us. We have, then, the outer world around us and something like mirror images of the outer world within our soul life.

When we are in the life between death and a new birth we are in the very same world that is outside of us here on earth. All that you can see clearly, or only dimly sense, as an external world, becomes then your inner world. To all that you then say “my I.” Just as you now regard your lung as belonging to your I, so do you regard—in the life between death and a new birth—the sun and moon as your organs, as being in you. And the only outer world that you then have, is you yourself, as you are on the earth, that is, your earthly organs.

While on the earth we say: In us is a lung, in us is a heart; outside us is a sun, outside us is a moon, outside us is a zodiac. But during the life between death and a new birth we say: In us is a zodiac, in us is the sun, in us is the moon, outside us is a lung, outside us is a heart. Between death and a new birth everything we now carry within our skin becomes more and more our outer world, our universe, our cosmos. Our view of the relationship between world and man is exactly opposite when we are living between death and a new birth.

So it is that when we live through death, that is, when we go through the gate of death, we have, to begin with, a distinct picture of what was before, of how we were on earth. But it is only a picture. Yet you must think of this picture as having an effect on you like the outer world. At first you have this picture like a kind of appearance within you. In the first period after death, you still have a consciousness of what you were on earth as a human being—consciousness in the form of earthly memories and earthly pictures. These do not last long; in your view of the human being you advance more and more to the following: I is the world; the universe is the human being. This is more and more the case. But you must not imagine that the human lung, for instance, looks the same as it does now; that would not be a sight to compensate for the beauty of the sun and the moon. What the lung and heart will be then is something much greater, something much more wonderful than what the sun and moon are now to the human eye.

Only in this way do you really get an impression of what maya is. People speak of maya, that this present earthly world is a great illusion, but they do not really believe it. Deep down people still believe that everything is just as it appears to earthly eyes. But that is not the case. The human lung as we see it now is mere semblance; so is the heart. The truth is that our lung is only a magnificent part of our cosmos, our heart even more so. For in its true essence our heart is something much more majestic, something vastly greater than any sun.

We gradually begin to see a mighty cosmic world arising—a world in which we can say that below us are the heavens. What we actually mean is that below us is what is preparing the human head for the next incarnation. Above, we then say, is what was below. Everything is turned around. Above are all the forces that prepare man for his earthly life, so that in his next earth life he can stand and walk on two legs.

All this we can then sum up in these words: The closer we approach to a new life on earth, the more this universe that is the human being contracts for us. We become increasingly aware of how this majestic universe—it is most especially majestic in the middle period between death and a new birth—how this majestic universe, so to speak is shrinking and contracting, how, out of the weaving of the planets that we bear within us, something is created that then pulsates and surges through the human etheric body, how out of the fixed stars of the zodiac something is formed that builds our life of nerves and senses. This all shrinks together, it shapes itself to become first a spiritual and then an etheric body. And not until it has grown very, very small is it taken up into the mother's womb and clothed there with earthly matter.

Then comes the moment when we draw near to earthly life, when we feel the universe that was “ours” until recently vanishing from us. It shrinks together and becomes smaller. This experience begets in us the longing to come down again to earth and once more unite with a physical body. We long for the earth because this universe is withdrawing from our spiritual sight. We look to where we are becoming a human being.

However, we must reckon here with a very different scale of time. Life between death and rebirth lasts for many centuries. If a person is born in the twentieth century, his or her descent has been prepared for gradually, even as early as the sixteenth century. And the person himself has been working down into the earthly conditions and events.

A great, great ... grandfather of yours, way back in the sixteenth century, fell in love with a great, great ... grandmother. They felt the urge to come together, and there, in this urge, you were already working into the earthly world from spiritual worlds. And in the seventeenth century when a less distant great, great ... grandfather and great, great ... grandmother loved each other, you were, in a sense, once again the mediator. You summoned all these generations together so that finally those who could become your mother and father could emerge.

In the mysterious and indeterminate aspect of such earthly love relationships, forces are at work that proceed from human souls seeking future incarnations. Therefore full consciousness and complete freedom are never present in the external conditions that bring men and women together. These are things that still lie entirely outside the range of human understanding.

What we call history today is actually only something very external. Little is known to us in outer life today of the soul history of human beings. People today are completely unaware that the souls of human beings even in the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. felt very differently than they do now. Not as distinctly as I have just described but in a more dreamlike way, the men and women in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries knew of these mysterious forces working down to earth from spiritual worlds, working down, in effect, from human souls. In the West little was said about repeated earthly lives, about reincarnation, but there were human beings everywhere who knew about it. Only the Churches always excluded or even anathematized all thoughts concerning repeated earth lives. But you should actually know that there were many people in Europe, even into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who were aware that a human being passes through repeated lives on earth.

Then came the time during which humanity in the Western world had to develop through the stage of intellectuality. Man must gradually achieve freedom. There was no freedom in ancient times when dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. Neither is there freedom—there is, at most, belief in freedom—in those affairs of human life, governed, shall we say, by earthly love such as I have just described. For here the interests of other souls on their way down to earth are always in play.

Yet within the course of earth evolution humankind must grow freer and freer. For only if mankind becomes freer and freer will the earth reach its evolutionary goal. For this to happen it was necessary that intellectuality reign in a certain age. The age in question is, of course, our own. For if you look back into earlier times and conditions upon earth when human beings still had a dreamlike clairvoyance, you will see that spiritual beings were always living in this dreamlike clairvoyance. A person at that time could never say, “I have my thoughts in my head.” That would have been quite false. In ancient times one had to say, “I have the life of angels in my head;” and then in later times one had to say “I have the life of the spirits of elemental beings in my head.” Then came the fifteenth century; and in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries we no longer have anything spiritual in our heads; only thoughts are in our heads—mere thoughts. By not having any higher spiritual life but only thoughts in our heads, we can make pictures of the outer world for ourselves. Through the fact that we no longer have any kind of higher spirituality within ourselves, but only thoughts, we are able to form pictures of the external world within ourselves.

Could human beings be free, so long as spirits were indwelling them? No, they could not. For spirits directed them in everything; everything was due to them. We could only become free when spiritual beings no longer directed us—when we had mere pictures, mere images, in our thoughts. Thought pictures cannot compel one to do anything. If you stand in front of a mirror the reflections of other people, no matter how angry they may be, will never be able to give you a box on the ears, never a real box on the ear because they have no reality; they are mere pictures. If I decide to do something, I can arrange for this to be reflected in a mirror but the reflection itself, the picture, cannot decide on anything.

In the age when intellectuality puts only thoughts into our heads, freedom can arise because thoughts have no power to compel. If we allow our moral impulses to be only pure thoughts—as described in my book, The Philosophy of Freedom—then we can achieve true freedom in our age.³² The intellectual age, therefore, had to arise.

Yet strange as it may sound, in essence the time is already past in which it was right for us to develop mere intellectuality, mere thinking in pictures. Along with the nineteenth century, that has become a thing of the past. If we now continue to develop mere thoughts as images then our thoughts will fall prey to Ahrimanic powers. The Ahrimanic powers will then find access to us and, having just reached our freedom, we will lose it—lose it to Ahrimanic powers. Humanity is confronted with this danger right now. Human beings today are faced with the choice: either to comprehend the spiritual life—to understand that the kinds of things I have described to you today are realities—or to deny this. But if we deny the spiritual today we will no longer be able to think freely. Rather Ahriman, Ahrimanic powers, will then begin to think in mankind. And then all humanity will undergo a downhill evolution.

Therefore, in the highest degree, it is necessary that an increasing number of human beings in our time understand the need to return to the spiritual life. This feeling that we must return to a spiritual life is what people today should seek to awaken within themselves. If they fail to seek this, humanity will fall prey to Ahriman. Seen from a higher standpoint, this is how serious the situation of humankind on earth is today. We should actually put this thought before all others. All other thoughts should be seen in the light of this one. This is what I wanted to present as the first part of today's lecture.

Descriptions such as these may help illustrate the fact that the life we go through in the spiritual world between death and new birth is entirely different from what we go through here between birth and death. Therefore, pictures taken from the earthly life, however brilliantly conceived, will always be inadequate to characterize the actual spiritual life of the human being. We can only slowly and gradually be led to an understanding of the kind of reality present in spiritual worlds. Let me give some examples.

Suppose a human being leaves his earthly body and, with his life of soul and spirit, enters the world of soul and spirit. And let us suppose that someone here on earth, who has achieved initiation knowledge in the deeper sense, is able to observe human souls in their continued life after death. Much preparation is necessary for this to happen; also necessary is a certain karma that connects the human being upon earth with the one on the other side. What is of importance is that we find some means of mutual understanding with the deceased. I am speaking to you here of spiritual experiences that are extraordinarily difficult to achieve. In general it is easier to describe the world spiritually than to approach a departed soul. People like to believe that it is not so difficult to approach a deceased person. But it is actually far more difficult to really come close to the dead than to achieve spiritual knowledge in general.

I would like now to relate some features characteristic of communication with the dead. To begin with, it is only possible to communicate with them by entertaining memories of the physical world that can still live within them. For example, the dead still have an echo of human speech, even of the particular language that they spoke most of the time while on earth. But their relationship to language undergoes a change. So, for example, when conversing with a soul who has died, we soon notice they have no understanding, not the least, for nouns. The living can address such words to a dead person; a dead person, if I may use the term, simply does not hear them. On the other hand the dead retain an understanding for all verbs, words expressing action, for a relatively long time after death.

As a general rule you will only be able to converse with a deceased person if you know the right way to put your questions to him. With these questions you must sometimes proceed as follows. One day you try to live with him in something concrete and real, for he has pictures in his soul rather than abstract thoughts. Therefore you must concentrate on some real, concrete experience which he very much enjoyed during earthly life; then you will gradually get near him.

As a rule you will not get an immediate answer. Often you will have to sleep on it, perhaps for several days, before you get the answer. But you will never get an answer from the dead if the question is posed in nouns. You must try to clothe all nouns in verbal form. Such preparation is absolutely necessary. What the deceased understands most readily are verbs made as pictorial and vivid as possible. The deceased will never understand for example, the word “table,” but if you manage to imagine vividly what is happening when a table is being made, which is a process of becoming rather than a finished thing, then you will gradually become intelligible to him. He will understand your question and you will get an answer. But the answers too will always be in verbal form, or often they will not even be in verbal form; they may only consist of what we on earth would call interjections, exclamations.

Above all, the dead speak in the actual sounds of the alphabet—sounds and combinations of sound. The longer a soul has lived in the spiritual world after death, the more he will come to speak in a kind of language we on the earth must first acquire. We do this when we develop the ability to understand and distinguish the sounds of earthly language, when we go beyond the abstract meaning of words and enter into the feeling content of the sounds. It is just as I was saying in the educational lectures held here. With the sound a (a as pronounced in father) we experience something like astonishment and wonder. In a certain sense we even take this sense of wonder into our soul when we not only say a but ach (ch here pronounced as in the German or Scottish Loch. Ach is the German equivalent of the exclamation ah!). Ach signifies: A—I feel wonder, and with the sound ch the sense of wonder goes right into me. And if I now put an m in front and say mach (German for make or do) the result is a kind of following of what awakened wonder in me as if it were approaching me step by step—mmm—until I am entirely within it. The answers of the dead often come in this kind of understanding, an understanding carried by the meaning in sounds. The dead do not speak in English, they do not speak in German, nor in Russian; they speak in such a way that only heart and soul can understand them—if heart and soul are connected with the ears that hear. I said just now that the human heart is greater and more majestic than the sun. Seen from the earthly point of view the heart is somewhere inside us, and if we cut it out anatomically it will not be a pretty sight. But in reality the heart is present in the entire human being, permeating all the other organs; it is also in the ear.

More and more we must get used to the language of the heart used by the dead, if I may so describe it. We get used to it as we gradually eliminate all nouns and noun-like forms and begin to live more in verbal forms. The dead understand words of activity and becoming for a relatively long time after death. At a later stage they understand a language that is no ordinary language. What we then receive from the dead must first be translated back into an earthly language.

Thus the human being grows out of his body and ever more into the spiritual world, as his entire life of soul becomes altogether different. And when the time approaches for him to come down to earth again he must once again change his entire life of soul. For then the moment draws ever nearer when he is confronted with a mighty task, when he himself must put together, first in the astral form and then in the etheric form, the whole future human being who will be standing here physically on earth. What we do here on the earth is external work. When our hands are at work then something happens in the external world. When we are between death and a new birth our soul is occupied with the work of putting our body together. It only seems as if we come into existence through hereditary forces. Actually we are only clothed in the outermost physical sheath through heredity. But even the forms of our organs we must develop for ourselves. I will give you an example of this, but I would like to borrow a glove for this purpose.

When a human being approaches a new earthly life, he still has the sun and moon within him. But gradually the sun and moon begin to contract together. It is as though you were to feel the lobes of your lungs shrinking together within you. In this way you feel your cosmic existence, your sun- and moon-organ shrinking together. Then something detaches itself from the sun and from the moon. Instead of having the sun and moon within you as before you have before you a kind of copy or image of the sun and moon. Glistening and luminous, you have before you two, at first, gigantic spheres, one of which is the spiritualized sun, the other the spiritualized moon. One sphere is a bright and shining light, the other sphere is glimmering in its own warmth, more fiery warm, holding the light more to itself in an egotistical way.

These two spheres that separate themselves from the cosmically transformed human being—that is, from this Adam Kadmon that still exists to this day—these two spheres draw closer and closer to one another. On our way down to earth we say: Sun and moon are becoming one. And this is what guides and leads us through the last few generations of ancestors until finally we reach the mother who will give us birth. As the sun and moon draw ever closer together they guide us.

Then we see another task before us. We see, far in the distance like a single point, the human embryo that is to be. We see, like a single entity, what has become of sun and moon drawing near our mother. But we see a task before us, which I can describe as follows. Think of this glove as the sun and moon united and going before us, leading us. We know that when our cosmic consciousness has completely vanished, when we go through a darkness (this happens after conception when we become submerged in the embryo), that we will then have to turn this inside out. What is on the inside then comes to the outside. What the sun and moon have been you must turn inside out and then a tiny opening appears; through this you must go with your I, your ego, and this becomes a copy or image of your human body upon earth. And, actually, this is the pupil of the human eye. For what was one, again becomes two, as though two mirror images were to arise. These are the two human eyes; at first they were united, as the united sun and moon, and then they turned inside out.

This is the task that then confronts you, and you fulfill it unconsciously. You must turn the whole thing around and push what is on the inside outward and go through the tiny opening. Then it separates into two. In the embryonic state two physical images are formed. The physical embryonic eyes are two pictures representing what has become of sun and moon.

In this way we work out the formation of the several parts of the human body. We gather together what we experience as the entire universe and give to every part its destined form. Only then does what has been formed in the spirit get clothed in, and permeated by, a plastic material—matter. The matter is only taken on; but the forces that form and shape us we ourselves had to develop from the entire universe.

Say, for example, that in the time between death and a new birth we pass through the sun while it is in the sign of Leo. (It need not be at birth; it can be farther back in time.) We do not then form the eyes that are made of the sun and moon—that occurs at a different time. But during this time we unite with the interior of the sun. If we could walk in the interior of the sun it would look very different from what contemporary physicists imagine. This physical imagination of theirs lacks even a suspicion of the truth. The interior of the sun is not a ball of gas; it is something even less than space—a realm where space itself has been taken away. If you begin by imagining space as something extended, with pressure everywhere present within it, then you must picture the interior of the sun as negative space, as space that is emptier than empty, a realm of suction. Few people have an adequate idea of what this means. Now, when you pass through there, you experience something that can be elaborated and worked upon, something that can be formed into the human heart. It is not the case that only the form of the eyes is made out of sun and moon; the heart form is also fashioned from the sun. But this is only possible when the sun also contains the forces that come from the constellation of Leo.

So the human being builds his entire body from the constellations of the stars and their movements in the universe. The human organism is indeed a kind of copy or image of the world of stars. A large part of the work we have to do between death and new birth consists in this—that we build our body from the universe. Standing on the earth the human being is indeed a universe, but a shrunken universe. Natural science is so naive as to suppose that the human form is produced from the physical embryo alone. This is as naive as it would be for someone who sees the needle of a magnet pointing to the north and south magnetic poles to imagine that the forces causing it to point are only within the needle itself, not realizing that the earth itself is a magnet. It is exactly the same when someone says that the human being comes from the embryo.

The human being does not come from the embryo at all but rather from the entire universe. Furthermore, his life of soul and spirit between death and a new birth consists in working with the spiritual beings on the super-sensible form of the human being. This form is created first in the astral and etheric realms and only then shrinks and contracts in order to be clothed in physical matter. The human being is really only the arena for what the universe—and he himself with his transformed powers—achieves with his physical body.

Thus the human being gradually develops himself. It begins with language, as he no longer uses nouns but finds his way into a special language, a more verbal form of speech. He then goes on to an inner beholding of the world of stars; then he lives within the world of stars. And from the world of stars he then begins to separate out what he himself is to become in his next incarnation. This is man's path: out of the physical through the transformation of language into the spiritual, and then back again through the transforming of the universe once again into the human being. Only if we can understand how the soul-spiritual part of the human being, which thus loses itself in language, becomes one with the world of stars and then draws itself back from the world of stars—only then do we understand the complete cycle of human life between death and a new birth.

These things were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. At that time people never thought of Christ Jesus as merely the being whom they saw developing on the earth. They thought that Christ Jesus was formerly in the same world to which they themselves belonged during the life between death and new birth. They thought about the question: How did he descend and enter into the life of earth? It was the Roman world that then exterminated the science of initiation. They wanted only the old dogmas to remain. In Italy in the fourth century of our era there was a special organization, a specific body of people who made every effort to insure that the old methods of initiation should not be transformed into new ones. Only the knowledge of the outer physical world should be left to human beings on earth. Only the old dogmas could have any say concerning the super-sensible. Gradually these old dogmas were received into the intellect as mere concepts that could no longer even be understood but only believed. So the knowledge that at one time had in fact existed was split in two: into a knowledge of the earthly world and faith in another world. This faith has even shrunk to the point where, for some, it only consists of a sum of dogmas no longer understood, while for others it is nothing more than a mere basis for believing anything at all. What then is the substance of modern man's belief, when he no longer holds to the dogmas of the Trinity? He believes something altogether nebulous. He believes in a generalized, vague kind of spirituality.

We now need to return to a genuine perception of the spiritual, one made possible by living into the spiritual itself. That is, we need a science of initiation once again, a science that can speak to us about things such as the human eye, which we should look at with wonder, for it is actually a little world in itself. This is no mere picture or figure of speech; it is a reality for the reasons I have explained. For in the life between death and new birth this eye of ours was single, and this unity which was then turned inside out was actually a flowing together of the images of sun and moon.

Furthermore, we have two eyes because if we were equipped with only one, like the Cyclops, we could never develop a sense of self, an 1, in an outward and visible world; we would develop it only in the inner world of feeling. Helen Keller for example has an inner world of feeling and ideas very different from that of other people; she is only able to make herself understood because language has been taught her. Without this we would never be able to develop the idea of our I, or self. We reach the idea of 1 because we can lay our right hand over our left, or, more generally speaking, because we can bring any two symmetrical members together. We develop a delicate sense of self or I because we cross the axis of vision of our two eyes when focusing upon the outer world. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross our eyes' axes of vision whenever we look at anything.

Materially two, our eyes are one in spirit. This single spiritual eye is located behind the bridge of the nose. It is then reproduced in a twofold image—in the two outer eyes you see. By having a left and a right hand side, the human being is able to feel and be aware of himself. If he were only right or only left, if he were not a symmetrical being, all his thinking and ideation would flow out into the world; he would not become self-possessed in his own 1.

By uniting the twin images of sun and moon into one, we are preparing ourselves for the coming incarnation. It is as though we were saying to ourselves: You must not disintegrate into the widths of the whole world. You cannot become a sun man and have the lunar man there beside you. You must become a unified being. But then, so that you can also feel this oneness, this unified, single sun-moon eye of man comes into being, and metamorphoses into the eye as we know it. For our two eyes are copies, or images, of the single, archetypal sun-moon eye of man.

These are the things I wished to tell you today, my dear friends, about the entirely different kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world, so very different from our experiences in the physical. But the two experiences are related to one another. The relationship is such that we are turned completely inside out. Suppose that you could take the human being as you see him here and turn him inside out so that his inside—the heart, for instance—would become the outer surface. Then he would not remain alive as a physical human being—you can believe that. But if this could be done taking hold of him in the inmost heart and turning him inside out like a glove, then man would not remain man as we see him here; he would enlarge into a universe. For if we had the faculty to concentrate in a single point within our heart, and then to turn ourselves inside out in spirit, we could become this world that we otherwise experience between death and a new birth. That is the secret of the inner side of the human being. Only while he exists in the physical world the human being cannot be turned inside out. The heart of the human being is also a world turned inside out. That is how the physical, earthly world is really connected to the spiritual world. We must get used to this “turning inside out.” If we do not, we will never get the right idea concerning how the physical world that surrounds us here relates to the spiritual world.

• 31. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 32. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (The Philosophy of Freedom), (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

Human beings must return to the point where they can understand the mystery of Golgotha with all the forces that live in the human soul. We must understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilization but in a way that allows all the forces of our human being to be united with the mystery of Golgotha. But this will only become humanly possible if we are prepared to approach the mystery of Golgotha once more from the point of view of spiritual science. There is no intellectual knowledge in a position to do justice to Christianity and the impulse it carries for the world; for every form of intellectual knowledge reaches only as far as our thinking life. And if we have a science that speaks only to our thinking, then we must seek the sources of our will impulses (and these are the most important for a true Christianity) within our instincts; we cannot sense them within the world where they are really present, within the spiritual world. In our present time it is essential to turn our attention to the great question for humanity: How and in what sense is the mystery of Golgotha the meaning of the entire development of the earth?

What I am here speaking of I would like to express in a picture that appears somewhat paradoxical. If a being were to descend to the earth from another planet, this being—because it could not be a human being in the earthly sense—would probably find everything on the earth unintelligible. But it is my deepest conviction, arrived at from the knowledge of earth evolution, that such a being, even if it came from Mars or Jupiter, would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. Such a being would find in this painting something that says to him that a deeper meaning is associated with the earth and its development. And beginning with this meaning, which encompasses the mystery of Golgotha, a being from an entirely different world would be able to understand the earth and everything appearing on it.

We who live in the present age have no idea how far we have gone into intellectual abstraction. For this reason we can no longer feel our way into the souls of people who lived a short while before the mystery of Golgotha. Those human souls were entirely different from the souls of human beings today. We imagine human history as being more similar to the events and processes that happen today than it really was. But the souls of human beings have undergone a very significant development.

In the times before the mystery of Golgotha human souls were such that all human beings, even those with only a primitive education, could see within themselves a being of soul. This soul being could be called a memory of the time the human being lived through before descending into an earthly body. Just as we today in ordinary life can remember what we have experienced since our third, fourth, or fifth year of life, in the same way the human soul in ancient times had a memory of its life before birth in the world of soul and spirit. In terms of their souls, human beings were, in a certain sense, transparent to themselves. They knew: I am a soul and I was a soul before I came down to earth. And they also knew certain details of their life of soul and spirit before the descent to the earth! They experienced themselves in cosmic pictures. They looked up and saw the stars not merely as abstract configurations as we see them today; they saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. They saw the whole world filled with dreamlike Imaginations. They could say: That is the last glimmer of the spiritual world from which I have come. When I descended as a soul from this spiritual world I entered a human body. Human beings of ancient times never united so intensively with the human body that they lost the ability to experience real soul life.

What did these human beings in ancient times experience? They experienced something that enabled them to say: Before I had descended to the earth I was in a world in which the sun is not merely a heavenly body radiating light. I was in a world in which the sun was a gathering place for higher spiritual hierarchies. I lived not in a physical space but in a spiritual space, a world in which the sun sends out not merely light but radiant wisdom. I lived in a world in which stars are essences of beings whose wills are manifest. And for these ancient people two distinct experiences were united with this feeling: the experience of nature and the experience of sin.

Modern humanity no longer has this natural experience of sin. For us sin lives only in a world of abstract existence; for us, sin is merely something projected upon nature from the world of moral abstractions. We cannot bring sin together with the necessity found in nature. For people in ancient times these two separate streams of existence, this duality, natural necessity on the one hand and moral necessity on the other, did not exist apart. All moral necessity was a necessity of nature; all necessity in nature was also a moral necessity.

So a person in ancient times could say: I had to descend from the divine spiritual world. But in entering into a human body I have actually become sick when compared with the world from which I have descended. The concepts of sickness and sin were interwoven for the ancients. Here on the earth man felt that he had to find within himself the power to overcome sickness. Therefore, these ancient souls increasingly came to the consciousness: We need an education that is, at the same time, a healing. Education is medicine, education is therapy. And so, shortly before the mystery of Golgotha, we see the appearance of such figures as the Therapeutae, the healers. In Greece, too, the spiritual life was thought of as connected with the healing of humanity. The Greeks felt that the human being had been healthier at the beginning of earth's development and had evolved gradually in such a way as to distance himself from divine-spiritual beings. That this was the concept of “sickness” has been forgotten. But this concept was widespread throughout the world in which the mystery of Golgotha was placed in history.

In ancient times the human being felt the reality of all spiritual things by looking into the past. He said to himself: I must look back to the time before my birth if I want to seek the spirit, back into the past. That is where the spirit is. I was born out of this spirit; I must find it again. But I have distanced myself from it.

In the past the human being felt the spirit, from whom he had separated himself, as the spirit of the Father. In the mystery religions the highest initiate was an individual who had developed himself within, within his heart, within his soul forces; through this development as a human being he could represent the Father in the external world of earth. When the students of the mystery religions entered through the gates of the mystery centers, when they entered those sacred places that were institutions of art, science, and religious consecration, when they stood before the highest initiate, they saw this highest initiate as the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher initiates than the “Sun Heroes.” The Father principle ruled before the mystery of Golgotha.

Humanity felt how it had distanced itself more and more from the Father, the one to whom we can say: Ex deo nascimur. Humanity needed healing, and those who knew were expecting the healer of humanity, the healing savior, to come. Christ is no longer alive for us as the healing savior; only when we once again experience him as the world physician, as the great healer, only then will we be able to understand his true place in the world.

That was the underlying feeling that lived in human souls before the mystery of Golgotha, a feeling for the connection with the super-sensible world of the Father. In Greece it was said: “Better to be a beggar upon earth than a king in the realm of shadows.” This saying expresses what was felt at that time; it bears witness to how deeply humanity had learned to feel the distance it had placed between its own being and the being of super-sensible worlds. At the same time a deep longing for the super-sensible lived in the souls of human beings.

But if humanity had gone on evolving with a consciousness only of the Father God it could never have come to full consciousness of self, of the I, it could never have come to inner freedom. In order to come to inner freedom something that could only be seen as a sickness had to make a place for itself in the human being. It was a sickness compared to humanity's former, pristine condition. In a sense, all humanity was suffering from the Lazarus sickness. The sickness was not unto death but rather for liberation and for a new knowledge of the eternal in the human being. We can say that human beings had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. When souls in ancient times looked out through the body into the physical world surrounding them, they saw, in the stars, pictures of spiritual beings they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. They saw in sunlight the radiant wisdom that had been like an atmosphere for them in the spiritual world, an atmosphere in which they had lived and breathed. They saw in the sun itself choirs of the higher hierarchies from which they had been sent down to earth. But humanity came to forget all that.

And that is what people were experiencing as the mystery of Golgotha approached in the eighth and the seventh and the following centuries before Christ's appearance on earth. If external history says nothing of this, that is simply a failing of external history. One who can follow history with spiritual insight can see that a mighty consciousness of the Father God was present at the outset of the evolution of humanity, that this consciousness was gradually paralyzed, and that, with time, humanity was gradually supposed to see around it only nature without spirit.

Much of this process remained unspoken at the time, much was in the unconscious depths of the human soul. However, what was most of all at work in unconscious realms of the human soul was a question that was not so much expressed in words as felt in the heart: Around us is the world of nature but where is the spirit whose children we are? Where can we see the spirit whose children we are? This question lived in the best souls of the fourth, third, second, and first centuries before Christ without being consciously formulated.

It was a time of questioning, a time in which humanity felt distanced from the Father God. In the depths of their souls people felt: It must be true: Ex deo nascimur! But do we still know it? Can we still know it?

If we look even deeper into the souls of those people living at the time when the mystery of Golgotha was approaching we see the following. There were the simpler, more primitive souls who were able only to feel deep within their unconscious life how they were now separated from the Father God. They were the descendants of primeval humanity, which was in no way as animal-like as natural science today imagines. These primitive human beings carried within their animal-like form a soul that enabled them, in an ancient dreamlike clairvoyance, to know this: We have descended from a divine-spiritual world and have taken on a human body. The Father God has led us into the world of earth. We are born out of him.

But the oldest souls of humanity knew they had left something behind in the spiritual worlds from which they had just descended. What they left behind was afterward called, and we now call: the

Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian writers maintained that the most ancient souls had been Christian; they also had known how to worship Christ. In the spiritual worlds in which they had lived before descending to the earth Christ was the center of their attention. He was the central being, toward which they directed the vision of their souls. The people on earth remembered being together with Christ in their pre-earthly existence.

Then there were other regions (Plato speaks of them in a very special way) where students were initiated in the mystery religions, in which vision of the super-sensible world was awakened, in which forces were released from the being of man that allowed him to see into the spiritual worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the students of the initiates learned to know the Christ, the one with whom all human beings lived before their descent to earth. In the mysteries the students learned to know Christ once again in his full stature. But they knew him as a being who had lost his mission, as it were, in the worlds above the earth.

In the mystery religions of the second and third centuries before the mystery of Golgotha initiates looked, in a very special way, to that being in the super-sensible worlds, who was later called the Christ. In looking at him they said: We see this being in the worlds above earth but his activity in those worlds has become less and less. This is the being who had planted into human souls memories of the time before birth, memories which then came alive in earthly existence. In super-sensible worlds this being was the great teacher for what the soul could still remember after having descended to the earth. The being who was later called Christ appeared to the initiates as a being who had lost his mission. This was because human beings gradually could no longer have, could no longer even receive, these memories.

As the initiates lived on, the consciousness arose in them more and more: This being, whom primeval humanity could remember during its life on earth, this being, whom we see having an ever lessening amount of activity in spiritual worlds, will have to seek a new sphere of life. He will descend to the earth in order to awaken super-sensible spirituality in man once again.

And they began to speak of that being later known as Christ as the one who in the future would come down to earth and take on a human body—as he later took on a body in Jesus of Nazareth. Speaking of the Christ as the one who is to come formed the chief content of much of their teaching in the last centuries before the mystery of Golgotha. In the beautiful and powerful picture of the wise men from the Orient, the three kings or magi, we see representatives of the initiates who in their places of initiation had learned: the Christ will come when the time has been fulfilled; signs in the heavens will proclaim his coming. Then we must seek him at his hidden place. A deeper secret, a deeper mystery can be heard sounding through the Gospels. When the evolution of humanity is looked at with spiritual vision this deeper mystery is revealed.

Primitive human beings looked up, as if lost, to the super-sensible. In their unconscious they said to themselves: We have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of nature around them and the question rose in their hearts: How can we again find the super-sensible world? And the initiate in the mysteries knew: This being, who will later be called the Christ, will come and take on human form; what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre- earthly existence they will then experience in looking upon the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus, through the mighty fact of the greatest event ever to take place on earth—not in an abstract intellectual fashion—answer is given to the question: How can we again come to higher worlds that transcend the world of sense? The people of that time who had developed a feeling for what had happened, these people learned from those who knew that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. A God who had come down to earth. He was the God whom humanity had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving toward freedom. He appeared in a new form so that he could be seen and so that history could now speak of him as of an earthly being. The God who had only been known by human souls in the spiritual world descended and walked in Palestine. He consecrated the earth through the fact that he entered an earthly body. For this reason the great question for those souls educated according to the culture of that age was this: What path had Christ taken in order to come to Jesus?

In the earliest times of Christianity the question concerning Christ was purely spiritual. The earthly biography of Jesus was not an object of research. The object of research was Christ and how he had descended from heaven. They looked up to super-sensible worlds, saw the descent of Christ to the earth, and asked themselves: How has this supra-earthly being become an earthly being? For this reason it was possible for the simple people who surrounded Christ as disciples to speak with him as a spirit also after his death. The most important part of what he could say after his death is preserved in only a few fragments. But spiritual science can find out what Christ said to those who were nearest to him after his death when he appeared to them in his purely spiritual form.

He spoke to them as the great healer, as the Therapeut, the comforter who knew the secret, the secret that human beings had once had a memory of him because they had been together with him in super-sensible worlds in their pre-earthly existence. Now he could say to them on earth: Earlier I gave you the ability to remember your super-sensible, pre-earthly existence. Now, if you take me into your souls, if you take me into your hearts, I give you the power to go through the gate of death with consciousness of immortality. And you will no longer recognize the Father alone—Ex deo nascimur. You will feel the Son as the one with whom you can die and yet remain alive—In Christo morimur.

What Christ taught those who were near him after his bodily death was not, of course, expressed in the words I just used, but the meaning was the same. Primeval human beings had not known death, for from the moment they awakened to consciousness, they were aware of the soul that lived within. They knew about what lived in the soul and could not die. They could see people dying around them but this dying was a mere appearance, an illusion, among the facts surrounding them. They did not feel it as death. Only as the mystery of Golgotha approached did human beings begin to feel the fact of dying. By then their soul life had become so much bound up with the life of the body that they could feel doubt concerning how the soul could continue to live when the body decays. In more ancient times no such question could have arisen because human beings knew the soul.

Christ now came as the one who said: I will live with you on the earth so that you can have the power to awaken your soul with a new inner impulse. Your soul will be alive when you carry it through death. This is what Paul did not at first understand. He only understood it when access to super-sensible worlds was opened to him and he received living impressions of Christ Jesus here on the earth. Pauline Christianity is less and less valued today for this reason—that it claims that Christ can be seen as coming from supra-earthly worlds and uniting his supra-earthly power with earthly man.

Thus, in the evolution of humanity, in human consciousness, the “out of God (that is, out of the Father God) we are born” was supplemented by the words of comfort, of life, and of power: “In Christ we die.” That is: We live in him.

We will best be able to place before our souls what humanity has become through the mystery of Golgotha if I now describe, from the point of view of a present day initiate, the evolution of humanity in the present and how we must hope for human beings to evolve in the future. I have already attempted to place before your souls the point of view of the ancient initiates, the point of view of the initiates at the time of the mystery of Golgotha. Now I would like to attempt to describe the point of view of an initiate of the present day, of someone who approaches life with more than a mere knowledge of external nature, of someone in whom deeper powers of knowledge have awakened. These are powers we can awaken in the soul with the means given by spiritual literature.

When a modern initiate acquires the scientific knowledge that is the triumph of our time, the glory in which so many people feel so comfortable (a comfort subtly enjoyed even by a certain higher consciousness) when they acquire it, the initiate feels himself in a tragic situation. When the modern initiate unites his soul with forms of knowledge especially useful and valuable in the world today, he experiences a kind of dying. The more a modern initiate, in whose soul the world of supra-earthly spheres has been resurrected, is permeated with what the modern world calls science, the more he feels his soul dying. For the modern initiate the sciences are the grave of the soul. The soul feels itself living united with death when it acquires knowledge of the world in the fashion of modern science. Sometimes he feels this dying deeply and intensively. He then seeks the reason why he always dies when knowing things in the modern sense, why he experiences something like the odor of a corpse just when he rises to the heights of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he can truly appreciate, even though such knowledge brings him a premonition of death. Then, from his knowledge of the super-sensible world he says something to himself that I would like to express through a picture. We live a life that is soul-spiritual before we come down to the earth. What we experience in its full reality in the spiritual world during our pre-earthly existence we now experience on the earth in our souls as mere ideas, concepts, and mental pictures. These are in our souls. But how do they live in our souls?

Let us look at the human being as he stands in life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with living flesh and blood. We say that he is alive. Then he steps across the threshold of death. Of the physical human being only the corpse remains, the corpse which is then given over to the elements of the earth. We look at the physically dead human being. We have the corpse in front of us, the remains of the living, blood permeated human being. The human being is physically dead.

With the vision of initiation we now look back into our own souls. We look at our thoughts in the life between birth and death, at the thoughts arising from modern wisdom and science. And we recognize that just as the corpse of a human being is related to a fully alive human being, so too, our thoughts, the ones we revere as the highest riches knowledge of external nature can bring us, are merely the corpse of what we were before we descended to the earth. That is what the initiate can experience. In his thoughts he does not experience his real life; in his thoughts he experiences the corpse of his soul. That is a fact. That is not spoken out of any sentimentality. It is rather what comes before the soul today with all intensity just when the soul is actively seeking knowledge with energy. This is not something that a sentimental, mystical dreamer would say to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his own being.

Someone who walks through the gates of initiation today discovers these thoughts in his soul, thoughts that, precisely because they are not living, can make living freedom possible. These thoughts, which are the whole basis of human freedom, do not coerce us, precisely because they are dead, because they are not alive. The human being today can become free because he works not with living but with dead thoughts. Dead thoughts can be grasped by us and used for freedom; but they are also experienced as a tragedy, as the corpse of the soul. Before the soul descended into the earthly world, everything that is a corpse today was full of life and movement. The beings of the higher hierarchies standing above us in the spiritual-super-sensible worlds moved between the souls of human beings who had already passed through death and now lived in the spiritual world or had not yet descended to earth. Elemental beings who underlie all nature were also moving within this sphere. There everything in the soul was alive. Here the thoughts in our soul are the heritage from spiritual worlds and these thoughts are dead.

However, if as modern initiates we fill ourselves with Christ, who makes his life manifest in the mystery of Golgotha, if we understand Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” in their deepest sense, then Christ will also lead us through this death; then we can penetrate nature with our thoughts. Christ walks with us spiritually and he sinks our thoughts into the grave of the earth. In as much as we usually have dead thoughts nature becomes a grave for us. Yet, if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ in the sense of the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, clouds, mountains, and streams, then we experience in modern initiation—if for example we immerse ourselves in quartz crystal—that thought arises from nature, from the quartz crystal as a living thought. As from the tomb of the mineral world, thought is raised up again as a living thought. The mineral world allows the spirit to resurrect in us. And just as Christ leads us everywhere through the plant world of nature, here too, where otherwise only dead thoughts would be found, living thoughts arise.

We would feel sick and unhealthy if we were to approach nature, looking up into the world of stars, with only the calculating vision of the astronomers, and if we then allowed these dead thoughts to sink into the world; we would feel sick and the sickness would be unto death. But if we let Christ accompany us, if we carry our dead thoughts in the presence of Christ into the world of stars, into the world of the sun, of the moon, of the clouds, mountains, rivers, minerals, plants, and animals, into the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of nature everything comes alive. As if from a grave, from all beings in nature, the living spirit, the Holy Spirit arises, the one who heals and awakens us from death.

We must regain this in a spiritual knowledge, in a new knowledge of initiation. Then we will understand the mystery of Golgotha as the meaning of the entire earth existence; we will know that we need Christ to lead us to knowledge of nature now when human freedom is being developed through dead thoughts. We will know how Christ joined not only his own destiny to the earth with his death in the mystery of Golgotha, but, furthermore, how he gave to the earth the great freedom of Pentecost when he promised earthly humanity the living spirit—the spirit who, with his help, can arise from everything on the earth. Our knowledge remains dead, remains a sin even, if we have not been awakened by Christ so that from all nature, from all existence in the cosmos, the spirit speaks to us, the living spirit.

The idea of the Trinity of the Father God, of the Son God, and God of the Holy Spirit is not a cleverly thought-out formula. It is something deeply united with the entire evolution of the cosmos. When we bring Christ himself as the Resurrected One to life within us, then our knowledge of the Trinity is not dead but alive, for Christ is the bringer of the Holy Spirit.

We understand it is like a sickness to not be able to see the divine from which we are born. The human being must secretly be sick if he is an atheist. He is only healthy if his physical nature is so constituted that he can say, “From God I am born!” as the summation of how he feels within his own being. It is a blow of destiny if, in his earthly life, a man does not find Christ, the one who can lead him, who can lead him through death at the end of his earth life, can lead him through death to knowledge. If we feel the In Christo morimur, then we also feel what can approach us through the presence of Christ, through the guidance of Christ. We feel how the Spirit resurrects again from all things, resurrects even in this lifetime. We again feel ourselves to be alive in this earthly life. We look through the gate of death, through which Christ leads us; we look at the life that lies on the other side of death and know now why Christ sent the Holy Spirit—because we can unite with this Holy Spirit already here on earth if we let ourselves be led by Christ. Then we can say with certainty that we die in Christ when we walk through the gate of death.

Our experience of nature on earth with our natural scientific knowledge points significantly to the future. What otherwise would be dead science is resurrected through the living Spirit. For this reason, if we have understood the saying “Out of the Father are we born; in Christ we die,” then when the death of knowledge is replaced by the real death that takes away our body, then in looking through the gate of death we can also say: In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. Per spiritum scanctum reviviscimus.

Since we can come together so seldom and would like to include as much as possible in these lectures, it could easily happen that too much is included. Nevertheless, today, from a certain point of view, I would still like to try to characterize for you what could be called the other side of human existence on earth. I would then like to relate that to the significance of a deeper spiritual knowledge of our time.

How much do we finally know about our existence if we use only our senses and the intellect bound up with those senses as our source of knowledge? Ordinary sense-consciousness only allows us to spend the waking part of our existence in full consciousness. The spiritual powers that lead the world did not add the sleeping state to human existence for nothing. From falling asleep to waking up a very great deal happens to the human being. Indeed, most of what the spirit has to effect through human beings in earthly existence is actually achieved during the sleep state.

During the waking state, all that can occur on earth is what we can undertake with ourselves and the things around us. But what higher, spiritual beings undertake with the human soul in human evolution, in order to bring the soul to complete development within earthly existence—this happens during the sleep state. We should not lose sight of the fact that modern initiation knowledge can look closely at the significance of the events that occur when the human being is asleep. Of course, these events occur not only for initiates but for all people; the development of all human beings depends upon them. The initiate can only draw attention to these sleep state events. However, every human being who gives any thought at all to the meaning of earth existence should increasingly feel and sense the significance of what occurs while he sleeps.

Today I would simply like to describe all that plays into the sleeping state of the human being. As you know, when a person falls asleep we characterize what happens externally by saying that the astral body and the I are loosened from the physical and etheric bodies. The I and the astral body are then in the spiritual world; they no longer permeate the physical and etheric bodies as they did in the state between waking and falling asleep. When we look at what happens with human beings in the sleeping state our attention is drawn to the various ways they are connected to the earth during waking. To begin with, we are connected to the earth through our senses—we perceive and know the appearances of the various kingdoms of nature. However, we are also connected with the earth through what we do unconsciously while awake. For example, we breathe—for the most part, unconsciously—and the entire earth, if I may put it this way, plays into the air we breathe. Innumerable substances dispersed in a very fine state are present in the air we breathe. Precisely because they are in this finely dispersed state they have an extraordinarily significant effect when inhaled into the human organism. What enters the human being when he perceives through his senses enters consciously. But a great deal also enters the human being unconsciously when he is awake. And this unconscious element has more substance than what enters through the abstract, ideal state of perceiving and thinking. The world around enters us in a more substantial form through our breathing.

If you would only take into consideration just how dependent the human organism is upon everything that it takes in with the various substances of earthly nourishment, then you would be able to acknowledge that there is much that affects us in our waking state. But this fact is of less interest to us today. We are much more concerned with what is working on the human being in his sleeping state. The point here is this: Just as we see external earthly substances connected with us during our waking state, so too, when we enter the sleeping state, we enter into a certain connection with the entire cosmos.

That is not to say that we should imagine a human being taking on the magnitude of the cosmos every night with his or her astral body—that would be an exaggeration—but we do grow into the cosmos every night. Just as we are connected here on earth during the day with the plants, the minerals, and the air, so too we are connected during the night with the movements of the planets and with the constellations of the fixed stars. From our falling asleep until our waking the sky full of stars becomes our world just as the earth is our world in the waking state.

Now, to begin with, we can distinguish various spheres through which we pass between falling asleep and waking. The first sphere we pass through is that in which the human I and the human astral body—that is, the human soul when asleep—feels itself connected with the movements of the planets. When waking in the morning and, as it were, having slipped into our physical body we can say that we have in us our lungs, our heart, our liver, our brain. Likewise when we enter the sleep state we must say that in the first sphere with which we come into contact after falling asleep—which is also the sphere we are again in contact with just before awakening—in this sphere we have within us the forces of planetary movement.

It is not that we take the entire movements of the planets into ourselves every night. But what we carry within us as an image or copy is a small picture, in which the movements of the planets are actually copied, reflected. And this is different with every human being. We can say that, when falling asleep, every human being experiences the movements of the planets. Everything that goes on as movement “out there” in the space of the universe between the planets is experienced inwardly in a kind of globe of planets in the astral body. That is the human being's first experience after falling asleep.

Do not ask, my dear friends, what this has to do with you. Do not say that you do not perceive this. You may not see it with your eyes nor hear it with your ears. But in the moment you fall asleep, at that moment, that part of your astral body that during waking permeates and is a part of your heart—that part becomes an eye. We see with this organ, which I will call a “heart-eye.” When we enter the sleep state this organ begins to perceive what is happening in the way I have just described. This heart-eye really does perceive what the human being experiences there—even if the perception is, for present-day humanity, very dim and obscure.

What we experience there is perceived by this heart-eye in such a way that, in the time after falling asleep when the physical and etheric bodies are lying there in bed, this heart-eye looks back at us. The I and the astral body look back at the physical and etheric bodies with the heart-eye. What the I and the astral body experience in their body inwardly as a picture of the movements of the planets, radiates back to the heart eye from their own etheric body. The I and the astral body see the mirror image of the planetary movement coming out of their own etheric body.

Upon awakening, because of the way the human being is presently constituted, we immediately forget the dim consciousness provided by our heart-eye during the night. This consciousness is dim and, at the most, can only be found echoing in certain dreams; in their inner flexibility these dreams still have something of the planetary movements. As we approach wakefulness, images from our lives settle into these dreams which, fundamentally speaking, are actually dependent upon the movements of the planets. The images enter at this point because the astral body is being submerged into the etheric body, which preserves our memories of earthly life.

The following is a specific example: You wake up in the morning; you have once again gone through the spheres of planetary movement. Let us say you have experienced there a special relationship between Jupiter and Venus because such an event is connected with your destiny, your karma. This could happen. You could have experienced a special relationship between Jupiter and Venus. If you could lift what was experienced there between Jupiter and Venus into the light of your day consciousness, then much concerning your human abilities would be clear to you. For those abilities have come from the cosmos, not from the earth. How you are related to the cosmos determines how you are gifted, how you are good, or at least how you are inclined to good or to evil. You would be able to see what Jupiter and Venus discussed with one another, and what you perceived with your heart-eye. (I could just as well say heart-ear, for it is hard to distinguish such things.) But this is all forgotten because it has been perceived so very dimly. As this exchange between Jupiter and Venus continues within you it causes corresponding movements in your astral body and something else, from your etheric body, mixes in—for example, what you experienced around noon when you were seventeen, or when you were twenty-five years old, say, in Oxford or Manchester or anywhere. Such earthly images are mixed with the cosmic experiences. The pictures in dreams do have a certain significance; but the pictures arc not what is of primary importance. They are, so to speak, the fabric woven to clothe cosmic events.

Concerning the experience that thus comes into existence for the perception of the heart, we can say that it is bound up with a certain anxiety. For almost everyone there are feelings of a spiritual kind of anxiety mixed in with this experience, especially when what was experienced cosmically shines back and echoes from the human etheric body. For example, this anxiety arises for the perception of the heart if what has been brought about through the special relationship between Jupiter and Venus radiates back with a ray—which would say a lot for your heart perception—radiates back from the human forehead, and if this ray is then mixed with the sound and light from another ray, say, from the region just below the heart. This perception of anxiety leads every soul not entirely hardened to such perceptions to actually say to itself in sleep: The mists of the cosmos have taken me into themselves. It really feels like you have become as thin as the mists of the world and are swimming like a cloud, just a part of cosmic fog, within the larger mists of the cosmos. This is the experience immediately after falling asleep.

Then out of this anxiety, out of this feeling of one's self as just another mist within the cosmic fog, something comes into the human soul that could be called devotion to the divine that is weaving through the world. Those are the two basic feelings that come over the human being in the first sphere after falling asleep: first that I am within the mists of the world, and then that I would like to rest in the bosom of God so as to be safe from dissolution in these mists. These feelings must be carried by the perception of the heart when we again awaken in the morning and enter into our physical and etheric bodies. If this experience were not carried over into life then all the substances we take into our bodies for nourishment the next day, or whatever else our metabolism may process—even if we starve, for then the substances are taken from our bodies—these substances would assume solely their earthly character and would thus bring about disorder in the whole human organism.

It is simply a fact that for the human waking condition the significance of sleep is enormous. In this epoch of earth's development man is still spared the task of having to carry the divine from sleep into waking. Because of the way human beings in the present age are constituted they could hardly muster the strength to carry these things in full consciousness from the other side of existence to this side of existence.

After the experiences connected with the planetary movements, the human being goes into the next sphere. In doing so we do not leave the first; it remains for the perception of the heart. The next sphere is much more complicated and is perceived with that part of the astral body that, during the day, during waking, permeates and is a part of the solar plexus, permeates and is a part of our entire limb system. The solar plexus and limb system of the human being, that part of the astral body that penetrates and permeates the solar plexus and the arms and legs—this part of the astral body perceives what happens in the night in the next sphere.

In the next sphere we feel the forces in our astral bodies that originate in the constellations of the zodiac. These forces come in two forms, the first consisting of those forces which come directly from the constellations of the zodiac, the other form arising when these forces from the zodiac pass through the earth. It makes a very big difference whether the zodiacal signs are above or below the earth.

In this sphere the human being perceives with what I would like to call “sun perception” because that part of the astral body connected with the solar plexus and the limb system is involved in the perception. I would like to call this perceiving part of the astral body the “eye of the sun” or the “sun-eye.” Through it we become aware of our entire relationship to the zodiac and the movements of the planets. In this sphere the picture is enlarged, we grow more into the picture of the cosmos.

This experience is again mirrored to us by our own physical and etheric bodies, which we are now looking at. What comes forth from our body every night is brought into connection with the entire cosmos, with the movements of the planets and the constellations of the fixed stars. The experience with the fixed stars may occur for some people half an hour after falling asleep, for some after a longer period and for others very shortly after falling asleep. A person experiences himself in all twelve constellations. The experiences with the fixed stars are extraordinarily complicated.

My dear friends, I believe you could have visited the most important regions of the earth as a world traveler and still you would not have had the sum of experiences that your sun-eye gathers for you from a single constellation of the zodiac. Because the people who lived in ancient times still had powerful dreamlike powers of clairvoyance and perceived, in a dreamlike way, much of what I have been describing, all of this was relatively less confusing to them. Today, a person's sun-eye can hardly come to any kind of clarity—and we must come to clarity even if we forget it in the day. We can hardly come to any kind of clarity concerning what we experience in twelve-fold complexity during the night unless we take into our hearts and minds what Christ wanted to become for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Simply having felt what it means for the life of the earth that Christ went through the mystery of Golgotha, simply thinking about Christ in our ordinary life on earth brings such a tinge, such a hue, into our astral body, by the indirect path through the physical and etheric bodies, that Christ can become our leader through the zodiac from falling asleep to waking.

Once again the human being wonders: Will I be lost in the multitude of stars and their activities? But if we can look back to thoughts, feelings, and will impulses turned toward Christ during our daytime waking state, then Christ becomes a leader who helps us to bring order into the complex and confusing events of this sphere.

Only when we observe the other side of life do we realize the full significance of Christ for the earth life of humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the present, ordinary civilization, there is actually no one else who understands what Christ must still become for the life of earth. All these things, which have not yet been experienced by many people, are wrongly explained. Only when you know what I have just explained can you understand the various ways in which people who have not yet been touched by the Christ event bring their nightly experiences while asleep into waking day consciousness. When we have gone through the misty existence in the sleep state and entered the second sphere we stand before a complicated and confusing world. Only when Christ steps forward as a spiritual sun and becomes our leader is complex confusion resolved into a kind of harmonious understanding.

This point is important because our karma appears, actually appears to our sun-eye, the moment we step into this sphere of whirling confusion, this sphere of planetary movement and of the fixed star constellations of the zodiac. All human beings perceive their karma, but only in the sleeping state. The afterimage or afterglow of this perception slips into our waking state through our feelings.

Much of the condition of soul that we can find in ourselves—if, to some extent, we strive for self-knowledge—is a very dim echo of this zodiacal experience. People can receive strength for their daily lives because Christ appeared as the leader and led them from Aries through Taurus, Gemini, and so forth, and explained the world to them in the night. What we experience in this sphere is nothing less significant than this: Christ becomes our leader through the complex and confusing events in the zodiac; he stands there as the being who leads us, who leads us from constellation to constellation, in order for us to take into ourselves, in an orderly fashion, the spiritual forces that we once again need—and they are, indeed, ordered—for our waking life.

Fundamentally speaking, this is what the human being experiences every night between falling asleep and waking. He experiences this because he is related to the cosmos as a soul and spirit. Just as he is related to the earth through his etheric and physical bodies, he is also related to the cosmos with his soul, with his spirit and his astral body. When the human being has separated from his physical and etheric bodies and so grown out into the cosmic world, he then feels within himself a strong kinship to the world he is entering. He feels this kinship in his experience of the pictures reflected back to him from what has been left lying in bed. He feels a strong tendency to move out beyond the zodiac with his inner life. But this he cannot do between birth and death because another element mixes into all these experiences during the time when the human being is asleep, another element which, compared with what comes from the planets and the fixed stars, is of an entirely different nature. This is the element of the moon.

During the night the element of the moon, even during the new moon, tinges to a certain extent the entire cosmos with a special something that is like a substance. This tingeing is also experienced by us. But we experience it in such a way that these moon forces hold us back within the world of the zodiac and lead us once again to waking. With a dimly conscious awareness we already experience this moon element in the first sphere. But during the second sphere we experience the secrets of birth and death in an especially powerful way. With an organ lying even deeper than the heart-eye and the sun-eye, with an organ that is, so to speak, apportioned to the whole human being, we actually experience every night how our soul-spirit being descends—that is, has descended—from the world of soul and spirit and has entered into physical existence through birth; and we experience how the body gradually goes over into death. The human being is actually always dying. In every moment he only subdues death until death then really occurs as a single event. But in the moment we experience how the soul, so to speak, goes through earthly nature, bodily nature, in this same moment we also experience—and through the very same forces—our connection with the rest of humanity.

You have to remember this: Not even the most insignificant encounter, insignificant relationship—or even the most decisive—is without a connection to our total destiny, to the total karma of the human being. All our involvement with other human beings, all human relationships, which have, of course, an intimate connection with the mystery of birth and death, appear, I would like to say, before our spiritual eye at this point during the second sphere. This comprehension of karma happens whether the souls with whom we have ever had a connection in past lives, or with whom we now, in this earth life, have a relationship, are presently in the spiritual world or are on the earth. We feel ourselves at this point to be in touch with and living within our total life destiny.

This experience is connected with the fact that all the other forces, those of the planets and the fixed stars, want to draw us out into the cosmos while the moon wants to put us again into the world of people, basically tearing us out of the cosmos. The moon has forces that are actually opposed to the forces of the sun as well as the forces of the stars. It constitutes our kinship to the earth. For this reason every night, in a certain sense, it brings us back from the experiences of the zodiac into the planetary experiences and once again into earthly experiences, in that we are brought back into the physical body of a human being. From a certain point of view this is the difference between sleeping and dying: When a human being merely falls asleep he or she maintains a strong connection to these moon forces. Every night, in a certain sense, these moon forces also point out to us again the meaning of our life on earth. But this can only be the case because we receive everything reflected back from the etheric body.

In death we pull the etheric body out of the physical body; the backward view of memories from the last life on earth then appears. For a short while, a few days, the etheric body permeates the cloud of which I have spoken. As I said, every night we experience ourselves as a cloud, as a cloud of mists in a world of fog. But this cloud of mists that we ourselves are, this cloud is without our etheric body during the night. When we die the cloud is, to begin with, in the first days after our death, with our etheric body.

Then the etheric body gradually dissolves into the cosmos and our memory disappears. And now, in contrast to what we had earlier when our experience of the stars was only radiated back from the human being, who remained lying in bed, now, after death, we have an immediate, inner experience of the movements of the planets and the fixed star constellations.

If you read my book Theosophy³³ you will find, described from a certain point of view, what these experiences after death consist of. I describe what appears as if surrounding the human being between death and a new birth. But just as the world would have no color if there were no eyes in your body, no sounds if you were without ears, just as you could not breathe without lungs and a heart, so too, after death you would not be able to perceive what I have described as the soul world and spirit land, your environment in the spiritual world, unless you had Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth. That is then your organism: with your cosmic organism you experience all of this. The moon can no longer bring you back because it could only bring you back to an etheric body; but your etheric body has been dissolved into the cosmos.

As I described the process in Theosophy, there is still so much left of the power bequeathed to the human being by the moon that after death we must remain a while in the soul world. We keep looking at the earth intently, until we go over into what I described as spirit land. There we experience ourselves as being beyond the zodiac, beyond the realm of the fixed stars. In this way we live through the time between death and a new birth. I could describe the details of this entry into, and life within, the spiritual world—the entry made every night. But the concepts I use for this description must not be pushed too far; these things can hardly be expressed with earthly concepts. Nevertheless, I can describe it to you as follows.

Picture a meadow and picture flowers in this meadow; from every blossom in the meadow and on the trees, a kind of spiral goes forth unwinding upward into cosmic space. The spirals contain the forces through which the cosmos regulates and effects the growth of plants on the earth. For plants grow not only out of their seeds; plants grow out of the cosmic, helical forces that surround the earth. These forces are also present in winter, also in the desert, and also when there are no plants present. In order to enter into the movements of the planets every night we must use these helical forces as a ladder. Using the ladder-like quality of the spiraling forces of the plants we climb up into the movements of the planetary world. With the force that the plant uses to grow upward, a force coming forth from its roots (you see, it has to apply a force in order to grow upwards) with this force the human being is carried into the second sphere that I described. When it comes to those experiences I have described for you—when we are beset by a certain anxiety and say: I am a figure of mists in the universal cosmic fog, I must rest in the bosom of God—when we consider these experiences with respect to conditions on the earth, then, again, the soul can say to itself: I rest in all of that which lays like a cosmic blessing over a field of grain when it blossoms, which lays over a meadow when it blossoms. Everything that sinks down to the plants lives and expresses itself in the spiraling lines of force, is, fundamentally speaking, the bosom of God, the bosom of God enlivened and active within itself. Therein the human being feels embedded in every period of sleep.

The moon leads us back again to our animal nature while the forces of plants constantly strive to carry us further out into the universe. In this way we are connected with the cosmos. In this way the cosmos works between our falling asleep and our waking. And the heart-eye, sun-eye, and human eye go through the night feeling things in a way similar to the way, say, that we experience any kind of relationship to another human being. But we are not told this, neither do we think this out by ourselves, but rather the plants tell us this, the plants, which give us a ladder to climb up into the planetary world where we are then forced out into the world of the zodiac.

One could have an experience like this: I have a relationship to a particular person; the lilies tell me, the roses tell me, because the forces of the roses, the forces of the lilies, the forces of the tulips have driven me precisely to this place. The entire earth becomes a kind of “book of life” that enlightens us about the human world, the world in which we live, the world of human souls.

The people of various ages and epochs have had these experiences in different ways. If you look toward old India you will see that those wanting to discover something through the sleeping state, through a relationship with the world of the stars, wanted information only from those fixed stars and constellations that happened to be above the earth at any given time. They never wanted connections to the constellations below, the constellations whose forces had to go through the earth. Just take a look at the Buddha posture or at the posture of any sage whatsoever from the Orient, who strives for spiritual wisdom through exercises! Look at how he crosses his legs one over the other and sits on them. He assumes this posture because he wants only his upper body and what is connected to the stars above to become active within. He does not want what also works through him through the sun-eye, what works through the limb system, to become active within. He wants the forces of the limb system more or less excluded. Therefore, you can see, in the position of every Oriental striving for wisdom, how he wants to develop a relationship only to what is above the earth. He wants only to develop those connections leading to knowledge in the soul realm.

The world would have remained incomplete if this had remained the only kind of search for knowledge, if, in order to acquire knowledge, humankind had been restricted to the Buddha posture alone. Already, during the age of the Greeks, a human being had to enter into a relationship with the forces encountered when he develops in the direction of those constellations that, at any given time, are below the earth. This tendency is hinted at in a wonderfully intimate way in Greek tales. You are always told of a kind of initiation in Greek tales. When it is said that certain heroes in Greece have descended into the underworld, that they have experienced initiation, this means that they have become acquainted with those forces that work through the earth. They have come to know the chthonic powers.

Every age has its special task. In order to teach other people, the Oriental initiate learned primarily about what was to be found before birth, before conception actually, that is, what lay in the soul-spiritual realms human beings live through before descending into the earthly world. What approaches us in such a magnificent way in Oriental writings and in the Oriental worldview comes to us because people back then could look into the life human beings led before they descended to the earth.

In Greece people began to know the forces that depended upon the earth itself: Uranus and Gaia. Gaia, the earth, stands at the beginning of Greek cosmology. The Greek always sought to find out about, to know, the mysteries of the earth itself, mysteries that were, of course, also cosmic mysteries that worked through the earth. The Greeks wanted to know about the mysteries of the underworld. In this way the Greeks developed a proper cosmology.

Consider how little knowledge of history (as we call it) the Greeks had. Yet the Oriental never had any at all. The Greeks were far more interested in what was going on when the earth was being formed in the cosmos and then later when the inner powers of the earth, the Titanic forces, fought against other powers. The Greeks pointed to these gigantic, powerful spiritual forces that form the foundation for earthly conditions and in which humanity is so entangled. It is incumbent upon us in the new age to understand history and be able to point out that humanity has come out of an old, dreamlike clairvoyant condition, that we have now arrived at an intellectually colored consciousness that is merely tinged with the mythical. We must now work our way out of this consciousness and once again into a seeing into the spiritual world.

This present epoch marks the transition to a conscious experience of the spiritual world that can only be achieved with effort. For this purpose we must, above all, look at history. We have, therefore, in our anthroposophical movement, again and again reviewed the various historical epochs from our time all the way back to the time when human beings still received knowledge from higher, supra-earthly beings. We have followed the historical development of humanity.

The external knowledge of our time views this historical development of man in a completely abstract way. What abstract lines are drawn when people today develop knowledge of history! Ancient peoples followed a history still clothed in mythos, a history that included nature and its events. We can no longer do that. But people have not yet acquired a faculty that would lead them to ask: What was it like when the first human beings received wisdom from higher beings? And what was it like as that wisdom gradually faded away? What was it like when a God himself descended in order to incarnate in a human body through the mystery of Golgotha, in order to fulfill a grand, cosmic mission with the earth, so that the earth could receive its meaning?

The whole of nineteenth and twentieth century theology suffers from the inability to understand the spiritual significance of Christ. You see, modern initiation science must bring this understanding. There must be a modern science of initiation that can penetrate once again into the spiritual world, that can speak once again about birth and death, about life between birth and death and life between death and a new birth, and about the life of the human soul in sleep just as we here today have spoken to one another. Once again it must be possible for man to know about this spiritual, other side of existence. All of humankind's progress in the future will be possible only if human beings also become acquainted with this other side of existence.

Once people turned to the upper worlds alone for their knowledge. This can easily be observed in the posture of the Buddha. Later people came to their cosmology by reading it out of the development of the earth; they were initiated in the Greek chthonic mysteries, as passages in the Greek myths recount again and again. Now that the secrets of heaven and the secrets of earth have been studied in the old science of initiation we need a modern science of initiation that can move back and forth between heaven and earth, that can ask heaven when it wants to know something about earth and that can ask the earth when it wants to know something about heaven.

If I may say so in all modesty, this is how the questions are posed and given preliminary answers in my book An Outline of Occult Science.³⁴ The attempt is made there to describe what the modern human being needs, just as the ancient Orientals needed the mysteries of heaven and the Greeks needed the mysteries of the earth. In our present age we should observe how things stand with this modern initiation and its relationship to modern man.

To characterize briefly the tasks that form the foundation of modern initiation I will say something now that I was already able to say to a few of you in Oxford during these days of my visit to England. Namely, I would like to begin by pointing out that while it was important for the most ancient initiates to look up into the spiritual world from which man descended when he clothed himself with an earthly body, and while for later initiates such things as I characterized by pointing to Greek portrayals of a descent into the underworld were important, it is the obligation of modern initiation, as I have already said, to seek as knowledge the rhythmical relationship of heaven and earth.

This can only be achieved if we consider the following. Certainly, we must know heaven, and certainly we must know the earth. But then we must also look at the human being, in whom, among all the beings around us, heaven and earth work together to create a unity. We must look at—that means with our sun-eye, with our heart-eye, with the entire human eye—we must look at the human being. The human being! For humanity contains infinitely more secrets than the worlds that we can perceive with our external organs of perception, that we can explain with an intellect bound to the senses. The task of present-day initiation knowledge is to come to know the human being spiritually. I would like to say that initiation science wants to come to know everything for this reason: in order to understand the human being through knowledge of the whole world, through knowledge of the whole cosmos.

Now compare the situation of the present-day initiate with the situation of the ancient initiate. Because of all the abilities that existed in the soul of ancient humanity the initiate then could awaken memories of the time before the descent into an earthly body. For this reason initiation for the ancient was an awakening of cosmic memories. Then, for the Greeks, initiation meant looking into nature. Modern initiates are concerned to know the human being directly as a spiritual being. Now we must acquire the ability to set ourselves free from the grasp of earth, from the ties connecting us with the world. I would like to repeat an example that I have just recently mentioned.

Achieving a relationship to the souls who have passed through the gate of death, who have left the earth, either recently or long ago, is one of the most difficult tasks of initiation knowledge. However, it is possible to achieve such a relationship by awakening forces that lie deeper in the soul. Here we must understand clearly, however, that we have to accustom ourselves, through exercises, to the language we must speak with the dead. This language is, I would like to say, in a certain sense, a child of human language. But we would go completely astray if we thought that this human language here could help us to cultivate communication with the dead. The first thing we become aware of is that the dead are only able to understand for a short time what lives as nouns in the language of earth. What is expressed as a thing, a closed off thing, the characterization of a noun, is no longer present in the language of the dead. In the language of the dead everything is related to activity and movement. For this reason we find that some time after the human being has passed through the gate of death, he has a real feeling only for verbs. In order to communicate with the dead we must sometimes direct a question to them by formulating it in such a way that it is understandable to them. Then, if we know how to pay attention, the answer comes after a while. Usually several nights must pass before the deceased person can give us an answer to our questions. But we must first find our way into the language of the deceased; finally the language appears for us, the language the dead actually have, the language the deceased has had to live into after death, distancing himself from the earth with his entire soul life. We find our way into a language that is not at all formed according to earthly conditions, but is rather a language arising from feelings, from the heart. It is a kind of language of the heart. Here, language is formed in the way vowels or feeling sounds are formed in human language. For example, when we are amazed we say “Ah!” or when we want to lead ourselves back to ourselves we speak the “ee” sound. Only in such instances do the sounds and sound combinations receive their due, their real meaning. And beginning with such instances language becomes something that no longer sounds bound up to the speech organ. It is transformed into what I have just described, a language of the heart. When we have learned this transformed language, the forces that rise from the flowers give us information about humankind and we ourselves begin to speak with what comes from the flowers. When we enter into the tulip blossom with our soul forces we express, in the Imagination of the tulip, what is expressed here on the earth in the formation of words. We grow again into the spiritual aspect of everything.

From the example of language, just characterized, you see that the human being grows into entirely different conditions of existence when he has gone through the gate of death. You see, we really know very little about a human being if we only know his or her external side; the modern science of initiation must know the other side. This begins with language. Even the human body, as it is described if you read the relevant literature, becomes something else for us. The body becomes a world in itself when we grow into the science of initiation.

While the initiate in ancient times reawakened an ability in people that had been lost, while he brought to memory what they had experienced before descending to the earth, the initiate of the present age must do something entirely new, something that represents progress in the human being, that will still have significance for us when humanity itself will one day have left the earth, indeed, when the earth is no longer even present in the cosmos. This is the task of modern initiation science. Out of this strength modern initiation science must speak.

As you know, from time to time the science of initiation enters into the spiritual development of the earth. This has happened again and again. The initiation science we need actually sees only a beginning in the assumptions of contemporary science. This initiation science will be increasingly contested. You will need strength to get through all that stands against modern initiation. Before modern initiation, which is a conversation with super-sensible powers, actually first received its proper power in the last third of the nineteenth century, the adversarial powers were already at work to bring about a condition of human culture and civilization, in many ways an unconscious condition, which actually amounts to a complete extermination of modern initiation.

Just consider how popular it has become to respond to everything that appears in the world as knowledge with the words: This is my point of view. People say “This is my point of view” without having gone through any kind of development. Everyone is supposed to make his own point of view count from the location where he just happens to be standing at the moment when he speaks. And people are offended, even angry, when a higher knowledge is mentioned, a knowledge that can only be acquired through the work of self-development.

When the possibility of achieving a modern initiation appeared, primarily in the last third of the nineteenth century, adversary powers were already at work. Above all they wanted to bring about a great leveling of people, also in the spiritual realm. There are many people I could mention through whom these enemies of modern initiation have worked.

My dear friends, you must believe that the words I must speak out of the spirit of this initiation science must also sound the way they do from the point of view of ordinary conditions here on the earth. If I attempt to make clear to you how the sounds of human language become different when language is to be used in the presence of the beings of the spiritual world, then you will not misunderstand me when I say: I myself will never misunderstand the great significance, spoken from the merely earthly point of view, of someone like Rousseau; and if I speak from the merely earthly standpoint I will set out with all élan to praise and speak well of Rousseau, just as others speak of him.³⁵ But if I should rise to an attempt to clothe in earthly words what initiation knowledge says concerning Rousseau I would have to say that with his equalization, with his spiritual leveling, Rousseau represents the supreme babbler of modern civilization.

This is something that humanity cannot readily assimilate, that someone like Rousseau can be called a great spirit, a great personality, from the earthly point of view but—if we really want to get to know this person through the modern science of initiation (where we must know heaven and earth and describe the rhythm between them from both sides)—must be called the supreme babbler from the point of view of initiation. Only the harmony of what resounds from the one side and from the other side leads to a true knowledge of the human being. For this true knowledge of the human being must be built upon the same wisdom the old initiates build upon: Ex deo nascimur. All remembering must by built upon what comes to meet us when we look out into the world where, as I have today described the process, we have unconsciously allowed Christ to become our leader. But we must bring him into our consciousness more and more. Then we can recognize what belongs to death in the world as standing under the leadership of Christ. Then we can recognize that we live into the dead world with Christ: In Christo morimur.

Finally, because we are submerged in the grave of the earth and its life we experience with Christ the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The modern initiate must strive above all for this Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. If you consider this counsel and compare it with the modern attitude coming from science you will recognize that there will still be immense opposition, perhaps of a kind you cannot even imagine today, which will take the form of external actions and deeds that, above all, will have a tendency to make initiation science entirely impossible. What I would like to leave in your hearts, in your souls, when I speak in such an intimate circle of friends, is this: Through the descriptions given by modern initiation science, I would like to awaken strength so that a few people are actually present in the world who can find the proper place between what wants to come into the earthly world from spiritual worlds and what, from the direction of the earthly world, wants it to be impossible for spirituality to penetrate into the life of earth. This is what I have wanted to draw attention to, in such an intimate circle of friends. An opportunity had already been given to speak in a more external lecture, such as, to my great satisfaction, we were able to have in Oxford. Since the opportunity was given to describe the external side, so the esoteric side must also be handled in this smaller circle, it must also be described. I believe it would be good if you could get beyond the fact that there is much that sounds paradoxical when I speak out of spiritual worlds. It has to sound paradoxical because the language of spiritual worlds is so different from any earthly language. What should actually be expressed differently can only be brought into earthly language with a great exertion of force. Therefore, it should be understandable if some things are shocking when they appear unmediated as a simple description of spiritual worlds.

My dear friends, in addition to characterizing the fundamental intention that was behind today's lecture, I also want to express my deep satisfaction that I have been able to be here and speak to you in London. It is always gratifying. As I have already said, we are seldom together here. May what we can found in our hearts, in our souls, through such rare gatherings bring about a togetherness that should always be present among those who call themselves anthroposophists—a togetherness of hearts and souls extending over the whole world. Today's lecture has been given with this goal in mind, that we use such brief times together as an inspiration for the greater togetherness that unites all our hearts and all our souls. And to document, as it were, this intention I would like to add the following words. Speaking out of this frame of mind I would like to say: Let us remain together, my dear friends, even as we leave now to go in such widely separate directions.

• 33. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 34. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline Of Occult Science, vol. 13 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 35. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), French philosopher. Influential in shaping Romanticism. Contending that people are good by nature and corrupted by civilization, Rousseau advocated a social contract to uphold the sovereignty of the people as a whole.

With his ordinary consciousness man knows only a fragment of all that is bound up with his existence. Looking out into the world with our ordinary consciousness we get pictures and images of the outer world through our senses. And when we proceed to think about what the senses have thus given us, when we form thoughts about what we have perceived, memory-pictures of these thoughts remain. Our life of soul is such that we perceive and live with the outer world and bear within us memory-pictures of what is past.

The process of memory, however, is not rightly understood by the ordinary consciousness of man. He thinks that he has known and perceived certain things in the outer world, that pictures have remained somewhere in the background of his being and that he can call them up again in his soul as memory-pictures. But the process is by no means so simple. Consider for a moment what goes on in man, step by step. You are certainly familiar with the ‘after-images’ that arise from what is perceived by the senses, by the eye, for example. As a rule we do not stop to think about them, but they are aptly described by Goethe in his Theory of Colours. He speaks of them as ‘vanishing after-images.’ We look intently at some object and then close the eyes. Different images or pictures linger for a while on the retina and then die away like an echo. In ordinary life we pay little heed to these images because we set up a more forceful activity than that of mere perception. We begin to think. If our thought-activity is weak when some object in the outer world is perceived, an after-image remains on the retina. But if we really think, we take the outer stimulus further inwards, as it were, and a thought-image lingers on as a kind of echo.

A thought-image is stronger and its ‘echoing’ more intense than that of an after-image produced by one of the senses, but it is really only a higher development of the same process. And yet these after-images of thought would also fade away, just as an after-image fades away from the eye, if they came into being merely as thought ¬pictures – which, however, they do not. Man has a head, but as well as this the rest of his organism, which is of quite a different nature. The head is pre-eminently an after-image of what happens before the human being descends from the spiritual to the physical world through birth, or rather, through conception. The head is much more physical than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is less developed, so far as the Physical is concerned, than the head. Let me put it thus: In the human head the Spiritual is present only as an image; in the rest of the organism the Spiritual works strongly as spirit. The head is intensely physical; it contains little of the spirit as being spirit. The physical substance of which the rest of the organism is composed is not a faithful after-image of what the human being was before his descent to birth. The Physical is more highly developed in the head of man, the Spiritual in the other parts of his organism.

Now our thoughts would fade away just as visual after-images fade away, if they were not taken over and worked upon by our spiritual organism. But the spiritual organism could not do much with these images if something else as well were not taking place. For something else is taking place while we are perceiving these images of which we then make the fleeting thoughts that really only reside in our head. Through the eye we receive the pictures which we then work up into thoughts. We receive these visual images from the physical and etheric universe. But at the same time, in addition to the pictures, we absorb into us the Spiritual from the remain¬ing universe. We do not only bear the spirit within us, but the spirit of the remaining universe is constantly pouring into us. We may therefore say that with the eye we perceive something or other in the physical and etheric universe and it remains within us as an image. But behind this an absolutely real spiritual process is working, although we are unconscious of it. In the act of memory, this is what happens: We look inwards and become aware of the spiritual process which worked in our inner being during the act of perception.

I will make this clearer by a concrete example. We look at some object in the outer world – a machine, perhaps. We then have the image of the machine. As Goethe described it, an after-image lingers for a short time and then ‘echoes’ away. The thought of the machine arises and this thought remains a little longer, although it too would ultimately fade away if something else were not taking place. The fact is that the machine sends something else into our spiritual organism – (nothing very beautiful when the object is a machine, far more beautiful if the object is a plant, for instance). And now – perhaps after the lapse of a month – we look inwards and a memory arises because, although we were entirely unconscious of it, something else passed into us together with the perception of the object which stimulated the thought. This thought has not been wandering around somewhere in the depths of our being. A spiritual process has been at work and later on we become aware of it. Memory is observation, later observation of the spiritual process which ran parallel with the act of physical perception.

In his onward-flowing stream of existence man is contained within the ocean of the spiritual world. During the period between death and a new birth his existence continues within this spiritual world. But there are times when with his head he comes forth from the spiritual world. In other words, with a part of his being he leaves the spiritual world like a fish that tosses itself above the water. This is earthly life. Then he plunges once more back into the ocean of spirit and later on again returns to an earthly life. Man never leaves this ocean of spiritual existence with the whole of his being but only with his head. The lower part of him remains always in the spiritual world, although in his ordinary conscious¬ness he has no knowledge of what is really going on. Spiritual insight, then, tells us the following: Between death and a new birth man lives in the spiritual world. At birth he peeps out with his head, as it were, into a physical existence, but the greater part of his being remains in the spiritual world, even between birth and death. And it is well that this is so, for otherwise we should have no memories. Memories are only possible because the spiritual world is working in us. An act of memory is a spiritual process appertaining to an objective and not merely to a subjective world.

In his ordinary consciousness man does not regard memory as being a real process, but here he is in error. It is as though he were looking at a castle on a mountain just in front of him and seeing it actually there, believes in its reality. Then he moves away a certain distance, sees the castle in greater perspective, and says to himself: Now I have nothing but a picture, there is no longer any reality. And so it is in ordinary life. In the stream of time we imagine that we get further and further away from reality. But the reality of the castle in space does not change because our picture of it changes, any more than does the reality of that which has given rise to our memory-picture. It remains, just as the castle remains. Our explanation of memory is erroneous because we cannot rightly estimate the perspective of time. Consciousness which flows with the stream of time is able to open up a vista of the past in perspective. The past does not disappear; it remains. But our pictures of it arise in the Perspective of time.

Man’s relation to the more spiritual processes in his being between birth and death has undergone a fundamental change in the course of earthly existence. If we were to regard man as a being consisting merely of physical body and etheric body, this would be only the part of him which remains lying there in bed when he is asleep at night. By day, the astral body and Ego come down into the physical and etheric bodies. The Ego of those men who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha – and in earlier incarnations we ourselves were they – began to fade in a certain sense as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near. After the Mystery of Golgotha there was something different about the process of waking. The astral body always comes right down into the etheric body and in earlier times the Ego penetrated far down into the etheric body. In our modern age it is not so.

In our age the Ego only comes down into the head-region of the etheric body. In men of olden times the Ego came right down and penetrated into the lower parts of the etheric body as well. Today it only comes down into the head. The outcome of this is man’s faculty of intellectual thinking. If the Ego were at any moment to descend lower, instinctive pictures would arise within us. The Ego of modern man is quite definitely outside his physical body. Indeed his intellectual nature is due to the fact that the Ego no longer comes down into the whole of his etheric body. If such were the case he would have instinctive clairvoyance. But instead of this, modern man has a clear-cut vision of the outer world, albeit he perceives it only with his head. In ancient times man saw and perceived with his whole being – nowadays only with his head. And between birth and death the head is the most physical part of his being. That is why in the age of intellectualism man knows only what he perceives with his physical head and the thoughts he can unfold within his etheric head. Even the process of memory eludes his consciousness and, as I said, is interpreted falsely.

In days of old, man saw the physical world and behind it a world of spirit. Objects in the physical world were less clear-cut, far more shadowy than they are to the sight of modern man. Behind the physical world, divine-spiritual beings of a lower and also of a higher order were perceived. To state that ancient descriptions of the Gods in Nature are nothing but the weavings of phantasy is just as childish as to say that a man merely imagines something he has actually seen in waking life. It was no mere phantasy on the part of man in olden days when he spoke of spiritual beings behind the world of sense. He actually saw these beings and against this background of the spiritual world, objects in the physical world were much less clearly defined. Thus the man of antiquity had a very different picture of the world. When he awoke from sleep his Ego penetrated more deeply into his etheric body and divine-spiritual beings were revealed to him.

He gazed into those spiritual worlds which had been the forerunners of his own world. The Gods revealed their destinies to him and he was able to say: ‘I know from whence I come, I know the divine world with which I am connected.’ This was because he had the starting-point of his perspective within him. He made his etheric body an organ to perceive the world of the Gods. Modern man cannot do so. He has no other starting-point for his perspective than in his head and the head is outside the most spiritual part of the etheric body. The etheric counterpart of the head is somewhat chaotic, not so highly organised as the other parts of the etheric body, and that is why modern man has a more defined vision of the physical world, although he no longer sees the Gods behind it. But the present epoch is one of preparation for what lies in the future. Man is gradually progressing to the stage where the centre of his perspective will be outside his physical being. Nowadays, when he is really only living in his head, he can have nothing but abstract thoughts about the world. It may seem rather extreme to say that man lives in his head, for the head can only make him aware of earthly, physical existence. But it is none the less a fact that as he ‘goes out of his head’ he will begin to know what he is as a human being. When he lived in his whole being he had knowledge of the destinies of the Gods. As he gradually passes out of himself he can have knowledge of his own destiny in the cosmos. He can look back into his own being. If men would only make more strenuous efforts in this direction, the head would not hinder them so much from seeing their own destinies. The obstacle in the way of this is that everyone is so intent upon living only in the head. It is simply an unwillingness to look beyond what the head produces that makes people loath to admit that the wisdom which Anthroposophy has to offer in regard to the being of man is something that can be understood by ordinary, healthy intelligence.

And so man is on the way to a knowledge of his own being, because he will gradually begin to focus his perspective from a point that lies, not inside, but outside himself. It is the destiny of man to pass out of his etheric body and so, finally, to attain to knowledge of himself as a human being. But obviously there is a certain danger here. It is possible for man to lose connection with his etheric body. This danger was mitigated by the Mystery of Golgotha. Whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha man was able to look out and see the destinies of the Gods, after that Event it became possible for him to see his own world-destiny. In the course of his evolution, man’s tendency is more and more to ‘go out of himself ‘ in the sense described above. But if, as he does so, he understands the words of Paul: “Not I but Christ in me” in their true meaning, his connection with the Christ will bring him back again into the realm of the human. His link with the Christ sets up a counter¬balance to the process which gradually takes him ‘out of himself.’ This experience must deepen and intensify. In the course of world-destiny the outer Gods passed into twilight, but just because of this it was possible for a God to work out His destiny on the Earth itself and thus be wholly united with mankind.

Think, then, of the man of olden times. He looked around him, perceived the Gods who arose before him in pictures, and he then embodied these pictures in his myths. Today, man’s vision of the Gods has faded. He sees only the physical world around him. But as a compensation he can now be united in his inner life with the destiny of a God, with the death and resurrection of a God. Looking out with their clairvoyant faculties in days of yore, men saw the destinies of Gods in fleeting pictures upon which they then based their myths. The difference in the myths is due to the fact that experience of the spiritual world varied according to men’s capabilities of beholding it. Perceived by this instinctive clairvoyance the world of the Gods was dim and shadowy – hence the diversity in the myths of the various peoples. It was a real world that was seen but it arose in a kind of dream-consciousness. The figures of the Gods were sometimes more and sometimes less distinct, but never distinct enough to guarantee absolute uniformity in the different myths.

And then it happened that a God worked out His destiny on the Earth itself. The destinies of the other Gods were more remote from man in his earthly life. He saw them in perspective and for that reason less distinctly. The Christ-Event is quite near to men—too near, indeed, to be seen aright. The old Gods arose before men’s vision in the perspective of distance and for this reason somewhat indistinctly. If it had been otherwise, the myths would have been all alike. The Mystery of Golgotha is too near to man, too intimately part of him. He must first find the perspective in which to behold the destiny of a God on Earth and therewith the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who lived in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place could behold with spiritual vision and so understand the Christ. They could readily understand Him for they had seen the world of the Gods. So now they knew: Christ has gone forth from the world of the Gods. He has come to this Earth for His further destiny beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha. As a matter of fact they no longer saw the Mystery of Golgotha itself in clear outline but until this moment they could see the Christ Himself quite well. Therefore they had very much to say of the Christ as a God. They only began to discuss what had become of this God at the moment when he came down into a human being at the Baptism of John in Jordan. Hence in the earliest time of Christianity we have a strongly developed Christology but no ‘Jesuology’.

It was because the whole world of the Gods was no longer within man’s ken that Christology afterwards became transformed into mere Jesuology—which grew stronger and stronger until the nineteenth century, when Christ was no longer understood even with the intellect and modern Theology was very proud of understanding Jesus in the most human way and letting the Christ go altogether.

Precisely through spiritual knowledge the perspective must be found once more to recognise what is the most important of all—the Christ in Jesus. For otherwise we should no longer remain united with the human being at all. Increasingly we should only be looking at him from outside. But now, by recognising Christ in Jesus, through our union with the Christ we shall be able to partake once more with living sympathy in man and in humanity—precisely through our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus we may say: In going more and more out of himself, man is on the way by-and-by to transform all spiritual reality into mere abstract concepts and ideas. Mankind has already gone very far in this direction and such might be its impending fate already at this moment. Men would go farther and farther in their abstract, intellectual capacity and would develop within them a kind of faith whereby they would say to themselves: Yes, now we experience the Spiritual, but this Spiritual is a Fata Morgana. It has no weight. It consists of so many ideas.

Man must find the possibility once more to replenish these ideas with spiritual substance. This he will do inasmuch as he takes the Christ with him and experiences the Christ as he passes over into the intellectual life. Modern intelligence must grow together with the consciousness of Christ.

In olden times man spoke of the Fall into Sin. He spoke of this picture of the Fall as though with his own being he had belonged to a higher world and had fallen down into a lower, into a deeper world. Take it in a pictorial sense and it is quite true to the reality. We can in a very real sense speak of a Fall into Sin. But just as the man of olden times felt truly when he said to himself: ‘I am fallen from a spiritual height and have united myself with something lower’—so should man of modern time discover how his increasingly abstract thoughts are also bringing him into a kind of Fall. But this is another kind of Fall. It is a Fall that goes upwards. Man as it were falls upward, that is to say he ascends, but he ascends to his own detriment just as the man of olden times felt himself fall to his detriment. The man of old who still understood the Fall into Sin in the old sense could recognise in Christ Him Who had brought the human being into the right relation to this Sin, that is to say, into the possibility of a salvation. The man of old, when he developed the right consciousness, could recognise in Christ the Being Who had lifted him again out of the Fall. So should the man of modern time as he goes on into intellectualism see the Christ as the one who gives him weight so that he shall not spiritually fly away from the Earth or from the world in which he should be.

The man of old perceived the Christ Event paramountly in relation to the unfolding of the will which is, of course, connected with the Fall into Sin. So should the man of modern time learn to recognise the Christ in relation to thought—thought which must lose all reality if man were unable to give it weight. For only so will reality again be found in the life of thought.

Mankind indeed is going through an evolution. And as Paul might speak of the old Adam and of the new Adam, of the Christ, so too may the modern man in a certain sense. Only the modern man must realise it clearly. He must perceive that the man of old who still had the old consciousness within him, felt himself lifted up by the Christ. The man of the new age, on the other hand, should feel himself protected by the Christ from rushing forth into the spiritual emptiness of mere abstraction, mere intellectualism.

The modern man needs Christ to transform within him this sin of going out into the void, to make it good again. Thought becomes good by uniting itself once more with the true reality, that is, the spiritual reality. Therefore, for a man who can see through the secrets of the universe there is the fullest possibility to place the Christ into the very centre even of the most modern evolution of human consciousness.

And now go back to the image with which we began. I began by speaking of the faculty of memory in man. We human beings live on and on in the spiritual world. We only lift ourselves out of the spiritual world inasmuch as with our heads we peer forth into the physical. But we never emerge from the spiritual world altogether. We only emerge with our head. So much do we remain in the spiritual world that even our memory processes are constantly taking place within it. Our world of memories remains beneath, in the ocean of the spiritual world.

Now so long as we are between birth and death and are not strong enough in our Ego to perceive all that is going on down there even with our memories—so long are we quite unaware of how it is with us as humanity in modern time. But when we die, then it becomes a very serious matter, this spiritual world from out of which we lift ourselves in physical existence, like a fish that gasps at air. Then we no longer look back on our life imagining that we perceive unreal memory-pictures, giving ourselves up to the illusion that the perspective of time kills the reality. For that is how man lives in relation to time when he gives himself up to his memory. He is like one who would consider what he perceives in the distance, in the perspective of space, as unreality, as a mere picture. He is like one who would say: ‘When I go far away from it, the castle there in the distance is so small, so tiny that it can have no reality, for surely no men could live in so tiny a castle. Therefore the castle can have no reality.’ Such, more or less, is the conclusion he draws in time. When he looks back in time he does not think his memory-pictures realities, for he leaves out of account the perspective of time. But this attitude ceases when all perspective ceases, that is to say when we are out of space and time. When we are dead it ceases. Then that which lives in the perspective of times emerges as a very strong reality.

Now it is possible that we had brought into our consciousness that which I call the consciousness of Christ. If we did so, then as we look back after our death we see that in life we united ourselves with reality, that we did not live in a mere abstract way. The perspective ceases and the reality is there. If in life we remained at the mere abstract experience, then too, of course, the reality is there. But we find that in earthly life we were building castles in the air. What we were building has no firmness in itself. With our intellectual knowledge and cognition we can indeed build, but our building is frail, it has no firmness. Therefore the modern man needs to be penetrated with the consciousness of Christ, to the end that by uniting himself with realities he may not build castles in the air but castles in the spirit. For earthly life, a castle in the air is something which in itself lies beneath the spirit. The castles in the air are always at their place, only for earthly life they are too thin and for the spiritual life too physically dense. Such human beings cannot free themselves from the dense physical, which in relation to the Spiritual, after all, has a far lesser reality. They remain earthbound. They get into no free relation to earthly life if in this life they build mere castles in the air through intellectualism.

So you see, precisely for intellectualism the Christ consciousness has a very real significance. And this significance is in the sense of a true doctrine of salvation—salvation from the building of castles in the air, salvation for our existence as it will be when we have passed through the gate of death.

For Anthroposophy these things are no articles of faith. They are clear knowledge which can be gained as clearly as mathematical knowledge can be gained by those who are able to manipulate the mathematical methods.

Mankind is reaching out to apprehend the Mystery of Golgotha once more with all the forces of the human soul; to understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilisation, but so as to unite with it all the forces of man's being. But this will only be possible if we are ready to approach the Mystery of Golgotha once more in the light of spiritual knowledge. Intellectualistic knowledge can never do justice to the full World-impulse of Christianity. For such knowledge only takes hold of the thinking life of man. So long as we have a Science whose only appeal is to our life of Thought, we must derive the sources of our Will (and these for Christianity are the most important) from our instinctive life, and cannot realise their true origin in spiritual Worlds.

Thus it will be indispensable to turn attention in our time once more to this the greatest question of mankind, inasmuch as the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth lies in the Mystery of Golgotha. I would fain express it in a parable, however strangely seeming. Imagine some Being descending from another planet to the Earth. Unable to become an earthly man, the Being would in all likelihood find the things on Earth quite unintelligible. Yet it is my deepest conviction, arising from a knowledge of the evolution of the Earth, that such a Being—even if he came from distant planets, Mars or Jupiter—would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper. For in this picture he would discover that a far deeper meaning lies hidden in the Earth,—in earthly evolution. Beginning from this deeper meaning which belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being from a distant world could then begin to understand all other things on Earth.

We men of to-day little know how far we have gone in intellectual abstraction. We can no longer feel our way into the souls of those who lived a little while before the Mystery of Golgotha. They were very different from the souls of men to-day. We are apt to imagine the past history of mankind far too similar to the events and movements of our day. In reality the souls of men have undergone a tremendous evolution. In the times before the Mystery of Golgotha all human beings—even those who were primitive, more or less uncultured in their souls,—perceived in themselves something of the essence of the soul, which might be thus described: They had a memory of the time the human soul lives through, before he descends into an earthly body. As we in ordinary life remember our experiences since the age of three or four or five, so had the human soul in ancient time a memory of pre-existence in the world of soul and spirit. In a deeper psychological sense, man was as if transparent to himself. He knew with certainty: I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to the Earth. Notably in still more ancient times, he even knew of certain details of the life of soul and spirit which had preceded his descent to Earth. He experienced himself in cosmic pictures. Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. Descending as a soul from yonder spiritual World, I entered the dwelling of a human body.” Never did the man of ancient time unite himself so closely with his human body as to lose this awareness of the real life of soul.

What was the real experience of the man of ancient time in this respect? It was such that he might have said: “I, before I descended to the Earth, was in a world where the Sun is no mere heavenly body spreading light around, but a dwelling-place of higher Hierarchies, of spiritual Beings. I lived in a world where the Sun not only pours forth light, but sends out radiant Wisdom into a space not physical but spiritual. I lived in that world where the stars are essences of Being—Beings who make felt their active will. From yonder world I descended.”

Now in this feeling two experiences were joined together for the man of ancient time: the experience of Nature, and the experience of Sin.

The old experience of Sin: the modern man has it no longer. Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature. For the ancients the duality was non-existent, of natural law upon the one hand, and moral on the other. All moral necessities were at the same time natural, likewise all natural [necessities] were moral. In those ancient times a man might say, “I had to descend out of the divinely spiritual World. Yet by my very entry into a human body—compared to the World from which I am descended—I am sick and ill.” Sickness and Sin: for the man of olden time these two ideas were interwoven. Here upon Earth man felt that he must find within himself the power to overcome his sickness. Increasingly the consciousness grew on the souls of olden time: We need an Education which is Healing. True Education is Medicine, is Therapy. Thus there appear upon the scene shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha such figures as the Therapeutæ, as the healers. Indeed in ancient Greece all spiritual life was somehow related to the healing of humanity. They felt that man had been more healthy in the beginning of Earth-evolution, and that he had evolved by degrees farther and farther from the Divine-spiritual Beings. “The sickness of humanity” was a widespread conception, forgotten as it is by modern History, in that ancient world in which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed.

It was by turning their gaze into the past that the men of those ancient times felt the reality of spiritual things. “I must look back beyond my birth, far into the past, if I would see the Spiritual. There is the Spirit; out of that Spirit I am born; that Spirit must I find again. But I have departed far from Him.”

Thus did man feel the Spirit from whom he had departed, as the Spirit of the Father God. The highest Initiate in the Mysteries was he who evolved in his heart and soul the forces whereby he could make manifest the Father in his own external human being. When the pupils crossed the threshold of the Mysteries and came into those sacred places which were institutions of Art and Science and of the sacred religious Rites at the same time, and when at length they stood before the highest Initiate, they saw in him the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher Initiates than the “Sun-Heroes.”

Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha the Father Principle held sway. Yet it was felt how man had departed ever more and more from the Father, to whom as we look up we say. Ex Deo nascimur. Mankind stood in need of healing, and the seers and initiates lived in expectation of the Healer, the Hælend the healing Saviour.¹ To us the conception of Christ as the Healer is no longer living. But we must find our way to it again, for only when we can feel His presence once more as the Cosmic Physician, shall we also realise His true place in the Universe.

Such was the deep-seated feeling in human souls before the Mystery of Golgotha, of their connection with the spiritual world of the Father. A strange saying coming down to us from ancient Greece—“Better to be a beggar upon Earth than a king in the realm of shades”—bears witness, how deeply humanity had learned to feel the estrangement of their being from the world of Spirit. Yet at the same time their souls were filled with a deep longing for that World.

But we must realise that if a man had gone on evolving with the old consciousness of the Father God alone and unimpaired, he could never have attained the full self-consciousness of the “ I ” and inner spiritual Freedom. Before he could attain true spiritual Freedom, something had to take place in man, which, in relation to his primæval state, appeared as sickness. All humanity was suffering as it were the sickness of Lazarus. But the sickness was not unto Death; it was unto liberation and redemption, unto a new knowledge of the Eternal within man.

Men had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit before birth. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. The physical environment was now the real thing. The souls of olden time, looking out through the body into their physical environment, had seen in all the stars the pictures of the world of spiritual Being which they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. In the light of the Sun they saw the radiant Wisdom which they had indwelt, which had been their very breath of life. In the Sun itself they beheld the choirs of Divine Hierarchies by whom they had been sent down to Earth. These things mankind had now forgotten, and as the Mystery of Golgotha approached—in the 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th centuries B.C.—they felt that it was so. If external History says nothing of these things, that is its failing. He who can follow History with spiritual insight will find it as I have said. He will see at the beginning of human evolution a wonderful consciousness of the Father God; he will see this consciousness gradually weakened and paralysed, till man at length should only see around him a world of Nature, void of spiritual Beings.

Much of these things remained unspoken in the unconscious depths of the soul. Strongest of all, in the unconscious depths, was a question unexpressed in words, but felt the more deeply by the human heart. Around us is the world of Nature, but where is the Spirit whose children we are? In the best of human souls, in the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., this question lived, unconscious and unformulated. It was a time of questioning, when mankind felt their estrangement from the Father God,—when human souls knew in their very depths: “It must be so indeed: Ex Deo nascimur. But do we know it still? Can we still know it?”

If we look still more deeply into the souls of those who lived in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, the following is what we find:—First there were the more primitive and simple souls who felt, deeply in their subconscious life, their present separation from the Father. They were the descendants of primæval humanity, which was by no means animal-like as modern Science conceives; for within the outer form, however like the animal, primæval man had borne a soul, in the ancient dream-clairvoyance of which he knew full well: “We have come down from the Divine-spiritual world, and have assumed a human body. Into this earthly world the Father God has led us. Out of Him we are born.” But not only so; the souls of primæval humanity knew that they had left behind them, in the spiritual worlds, That which was afterwards called and which we now call the Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian authors said that the most ancient souls of humanity had been true Christians, for they too had looked up to the Christ and worshipped Him. In the spiritual worlds in which they dwelt before their descent to Earth, Christ had been the centre of their vision—the Central Being to whom they had looked with the vision of the soul. It was this communion with Christ in the pre-earthly life which they afterwards remembered when on Earth.

Then there were the regions of which Plato speaks so strangely, where pupils were initiated into the Mysteries—where the vision of super-sensible Worlds was awakened and the forces in the human being were liberated to gaze into the spiritual Worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the pupils of the initiates learned to know the Christ, with whom indeed all human beings lived before their descent to Earth. For by this time Christ was already a half-forgotten notion in the souls of men on Earth. But in the Mysteries the pupils learned to know Him once again in His full stature. Yet at the same time they knew Him as a Being who, if we may put it in these words, had lost His mission in the Worlds beyond the Earth. It was so in the Mysteries of the second and first centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, that as they looked up to the Being in super-sensible worlds who was afterwards called the Christ, they said: We still behold Him in the spiritual worlds, but His activity in those worlds grows ever less and less. For He was the Being who implanted in the souls of men what afterwards sprang forth within them as a memory of the time before their birth. The Christ-Being in the spiritual worlds had been the great Teacher of human souls, for what they would still bear in memory after their descent to Earth. Now that the souls of men on Earth were less and less able to kindle these memories to life, He who was afterwards called Christ appeared to the initiates as One who had lost His activity, His mission.

Thus as the initiates lived on, ever and increasingly there arose in them the consciousness: “This Being whom primæval humanity remembered in their earthly life—whom we can now behold, though with ever lessening activity, in spiritual worlds—He will seek a new sphere of His existence. He will come down to the Earth to re-awaken the super-sensible spirituality in man.” And they began to speak of the Being who was afterwards called Christ, as of Him who would in future time come down to Earth and take on a human body—as indeed He did, when the time was fulfilled, in Jesus of Nazareth. In the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha it was one of the main contents of their speech, to speak of Christ as the Coming One. And in the beautiful picture of the Wise Men of the East—the three Kings or Magi—we see the typical figures of initiates who had learned in their several places of Initiation that Christ would come to Earth when the time should be fulfilled, and the signs in the Heavens would proclaim His coming. Then must they seek Him out at His hidden place. Indeed, there resounds throughout the Gospels what is made manifest as a deeper secret, a deeper Mystery in human evolution, when we approach it once more with spiritual vision.

Meanwhile the simple and primitive among mankind felt as it were forlorn when they looked up to Worlds beyond the realms of sense. Deep in the subconscious they said to themselves, we have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of Nature around them, and there arose in their hearts the question of which I spoke above: “How shall we find the spiritual World again?” But in the Mysteries the initiates knew that the Being who afterwards was called Christ, would come down and would take on a human form. And they knew that what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre-earthly life, they would now experience on Earth by looking up to the Mystery on Golgotha.

Thus, not in an intellectual or theoretic way, but by the greatest fact that ever took place on Earth, answer was given to the question: How shall we come once more to the Supersensible—to the Spiritual that transcends the world of sense? The men of that time, who had a certain feeling for what was taking place, learned from those who knew, that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. He had come down to Earth. He was the God whom mankind had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving towards Freedom. He, whom man on Earth had forgotten, appeared again in a new form, so that man could see Him and behold Him, and future History could tell of Him as of an earthly Being. The God who had only been known in yonder spiritual World, had descended and walked in Palestine, and sanctified the Earth inasmuch as He Himself had dwelt in a human body.

For those who were the educated men according to the culture of that age, the question was. How did Christ enter into Jesus, what path did He take? In the earliest times of Christianity the question about Christ was indeed a purely spiritual one. Their problem was not the earthly biography of Jesus. It was the descent of Christ. They looked up into the higher Worlds and saw the descent of Christ to Earth. They asked themselves, How did the super-sensible Being become an earth Being?

And the simple men who surrounded Jesus Christ as His disciples were able to converse with Him as a spiritual Being even after His Death. Nay, what He was able to tell them after His Death is the most important of all. Only a few fragments have been preserved, but spiritual Science can re-discover what Christ said to those who were nearest to Him after His Death, when He appeared to them in His purely spiritual being.

Then it was that He spoke to them as the great Healer—the Therapeut, the Comforter—to whom the great Mystery was known, how human beings had once upon a time remembered Him, because they had been with Him in super-sensible spiritual worlds before their earthly life. Now He could say to His disciples upon Earth: In former times I gave you the faculty to remember your spiritual life, your pre-earthly existence in higher worlds. But now, if you receive Me into your hearts and souls, I give you power to go forward through the Gate of Death, conscious of immortality. And you will no longer merely recognise the Father—Ex Deo Nascimur—you will feel the Son as Him with whom you can die and yet remain alive: In Christo morimur.

Such was the purport—though not of course expressed in the words I am now speaking—such was the meaning of what He taught to those who were near Him after His bodily Death. In primæval ages men had not known Death. Since ever they came to consciousness on Earth, they had an inner knowledge of the soul within them; they were aware of that which cannot die. They saw men die, but to them this Death was a mere semblance among the outer facts around them. They felt it not as Death. Only in later years, as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, did men begin to feel the real fact of Death. For by degrees the soul within them had grown so closely united with the body that doubt could arise in their minds: How shall the soul live on when the body falls into decay? In olden times there could have been no such question, for men were aware of the living, independent soul.

But now there came the Christ Himself, and said: I will live with you on the Earth, that ye may have power to kindle your souls to life again, that ye may bear them, once more a living soul, through Death.

This was what St. Paul had not understood at first. But he understood it when the spiritual worlds were opened out before him and he received here upon Earth the living impressions of Christ Jesus. For this reason the Pauline Christianity is less and less valued in our time, for it requires us to recognise the Christ as One who comes from real worlds beyond the Earth, uniting with earthly man His cosmic power.

Thus in the course of human evolution, in the consciousness of man, the “Out of God—out of the Father God—we are born,” was supplemented by the word of life, of comfort and of strength, “In Christ we die”—that is to say, in Him we live.

In order to bring before our souls what came upon humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, I shall best describe the present evolution of mankind, and that which we must hope for the future, from the standpoint of the initiate of modern time. I have already sought to place before you the standpoint of the initiate of olden time, and of the initiate of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I will now try to describe that of the initiate of our own time. The initiate is one who does not approach life with external natural Science alone, but in whom those deeper forces of knowledge have been awakened which can be kindled from depths of the human soul by proper methods. Such methods are indicated in the spiritual literature,² and I have referred to them in my other course of lectures in this College.

When the modern initiate enters into the Sciences of our time (which are the glory and triumph of the age, and in the study of which so many people, possessed even of a certain higher consciousness, feel the greatest satisfaction) he finds himself in a tragic situation. For when he unites his soul with that form of Science which is valued above all by the world to-day, the initiate feels it as a slow process of Death. A sphere of existence higher than all earthly things has risen up before his soul. And yet, the more he imbues himself with that which all the world to-day calls Science, the more he feels his soul to die within him. For the modern initiate, the Sciences are indeed the grave of the soul. While he acquires knowledge about the world in the manner of modern Science, he feels himself bound up, even in life, with Death. Again and again he feels this Death deeply and intensely. Then he may well seek the reason why, whenever he acquires knowledge in the modern sense, he dies. Why is it, he asks himself, that he has a feeling comparable even to the presence of a corpse—the odour of decay—just when he rises to the highest points of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he is truly able to appreciate, though to him it is the premonition of Death.

From his knowledge of spiritual worlds he finds the answer, which I will try to convey to you this evening, my dear friends, in a picture.

Before we come down to Earth, we human beings live in a life of soul and spirit. Now of that life in full reality of soul and spirit, in yonder pre-earthly realms, here upon Earth we retain only our Thoughts—our concepts and ideas. These are in our soul: yet how are they there? Look at the human being as he stands before you in the life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with the living flesh and blood. We say, he is alive. Then he passes through the gate of death. Of the physical man, the corpse remains behind, and this is given over to the Earth—to the elements. We see the dead physical man; we have the dead corpse before us, all that is left of the man who was filled with living blood. Physically he is dead.

Now we look back, with the vision of Initiation, into our own souls. There we behold our thoughts—the thoughts we have in the present life between birth and death—the thoughts of modern Science, modern wisdom. And we recognise; These thoughts are the dead corpse of what we were before we descended to the Earth. As the dead body is to the human being in the fulness of his life, so are our thoughts (the thoughts which we respect above all things in this age, which bring us knowledge of external Nature)—so are our thoughts to what we were in soul and spirit before we came down to Earth.

This is what the modern initiate discovers, and it is a very real experience. He experiences in Thought, not his real life, but the dead corpse of the soul. I am stating a simple fact. It is not uttered out of any sentimental feeling: on the contrary, it comes before the soul in modern time with all intensity, just when the soul's knowledge is active and courageous. It is not what the sentimental mystic says to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his being.

He who passes to-day through the Portals of Initiation discovers in his soul the real nature of the thoughts of man. For the very reason that they are unalive, they can make way for living spiritual Freedom. These thoughts are in truth the only ground on which man's spiritual Freedom grows. Because they are dead—because they are not alive—they have no power to compel. Man can become a free Being in our time because he has to do, not with living thoughts, but with dead ones. He can take hold of the dead thoughts and use them towards Freedom. And yet, it is with all the tragedy of Worlds that we experience these thoughts as the dead corpse of the soul—of the soul that was, before it came down to Earth. For in the pre-earthly life all this, which is a corpse in man to-day, was alive and filled with movement. In spiritual Worlds it lived and moved among other human souls—those who had passed through the gate of death and were now dwelling in those Worlds, and those who had not yet descended to the Earth. It lived and moved among the Beings of the Divine Hierarchies above humanity, and in the sphere of the elemental beings that underlie all Nature. There, everything in the soul was alive, while here, the soul possesses Thought as its heritage from spiritual worlds, and Thought is dead.

Yet if as initiates of modern time we fill ourselves with Christ, who made manifest His life in the Mystery of Golgotha; if we take hold in its deepest, inmost sense, of the word of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me,—then will Christ lead us even through this Death. We penetrate into Nature with our thoughts, yet as we do so Christ goes with us in the Spirit. He sinks our thoughts into the grave of Nature. For Nature does indeed become a grave, inasmuch as our thoughts are dead. Yet if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ Himself, we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, the clouds, mountains and streams, then we experience in modern Initiation the resurrection of dead Thought as living Thought out of all Nature. With the dead Thought, we dive down into the crystal quartz, letting Christ be our companion, according to the word: Not I, but Christ in me. Then the dead Thought arises again as living Thought out of the crystal quartz, out of all Nature. As from the tomb of the mineral world, Thought is lifted up again as living Thought. Out of the mineral world the Spirit is resurrected. And as Christ leads us through the plant-world of Nature, here too, where otherwise only our dead thoughts would dwell, the living thoughts arise.

Truly we should feel that we are sick and ill as we go out into Nature, or gaze into the Universe of stars with the restricted calculating vision of the astronomer, thus sinking our dead thoughts into the world. We should feel that we are sick, and indeed it would be a sickness unto Death. But if we let Christ be our companion, if accompanied by Him we carry our dead thoughts into the world of the Sun, the Moon, the clouds, mountains and rivers, the minerals, plants and animals and the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of Nature it all becomes alive, and there arises from all creation, as from a tomb, the living, healing Spirit who awakens us from Death: the Holy Spirit. Accompanied by Christ, in all that we have hitherto experienced as Death we feel ourselves called to Life again. We feel the living and healing Spirit speaking to us out of all the creatures of this world.

These things must be regained in spiritual knowledge, in the new Science of Initiation. Then only shall we take hold of the Mystery of Golgotha as the true meaning of all Earth-existence. Then shall we know that in this age, when through the dead thoughts human freedom must be evolved, we need the Christ to lead us into a true Knowledge of Nature. For He not only placed His own destiny upon the Earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, but gave to the Earth the mighty liberation of Pentecost, in that He promised to mankind on Earth the living Spirit, which can arise through His help from all things on the Earth. Our Science remains dead—nay, our Science itself is Sin—until we are so awakened by the Christ that from all Nature, from all existence in the Cosmos, the living Spirit speaks to us again.

It is no formula devised by human cleverness: the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a reality deeply bound up with the whole evolution of the Cosmos, and it becomes for us a living, not a dead, dogmatic knowledge, when we bring to life within ourselves the Christ who as the Risen One is the Giver of the Holy Spirit.

Then do we understand how it is like an illness if man cannot see the Divine out of which he is born. Man must be secretly diseased to be an atheist, for, if he is healthy, his whole physical being will find as it were its summation in the spontaneous inner feeling which exclaims: Out of God I am born. And it is tragic destiny if in this earthly life he does not find the Christ who can lead him through the Death that stands at the end of life's way, and through the Death in Knowledge. But if we thus feel the In Christo morimur, then too we feel what is seeking to come near us through His guidance; we feel how the living Spirit arises again out of all things, even within this earthly life. We feel ourselves alive again even within this life on Earth, and we look through the gate of Death through which the Christ will lead us into yonder Life that lies beyond. We know now why Christ sent us the Holy Spirit, for if we let Christ be our guide we can unite ourselves to the Holy Spirit already in this life on Earth.

If we let Christ become our leader, we may surely say: We die in Christ, when we pass through the gate of Death. Our experience here on Earth, with our Science of the world of Nature, is indeed prophetic of the future. By the living Spirit, what would otherwise be a dead Science is resurrected. Thus we may also say, when the Death in Knowledge is replaced by that real Death which takes away our body:—Having understood the “Out of the Father we are born,” “In Christ we die,” we may say as we look forward through the gate of Death: “In the Holy Spirit we shall be reawakened.” Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

• 1. German Heiland, Anglo-Saxon Hælend, meaning Christ the Saviour
• 2. See especially “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment” (“The Way of Initiation”) by Rudolf Steiner.