The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There is so unendlessly much one could relate about the connection between the hygienic-therapeutic and eurythmy. Today we want to take into consideration that part of the physiological which we discover in the proximity of the spiritual when we contemplate a eurythmic exercise. Of course, all that which can he observed in this connection in artistic eurythmy will be encountered in an intensified form when one makes the transition from artistic eurythmy to the fortified eurythmy we have become acquainted with in these days. Nevertheless, the essence of that which concerns us can already be discovered purely artistically in a performance of eurythmy and the physiology corresponding to it then sought out. Let us try this by carrying out the following.

Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will be so good and perform the poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” alternately in vowels and in consonants, while you (Frau Dr. Steiner) recite it.

Now let us make clear to ourselves what is taking place here, proceeding however very exactly. What is happening? A poem is recited. The person who does the eurythmy listens—he is the one who comes for us into consideration physiologically. That is the first matter of importance. He doesn't speak himself, he listens. That is essential. He listens to something which is in essence the meaningful word, a meaningful association of words. He listens to something in which the activity of thought and of mental representation are alive. What he perceives outwardly is the activity of mental representation clothed in an association of sounds. That is something which man in his waking, daytime existence often does, is it not? But what actually takes place when he does it? If you consider the process from a psychologic-physiologic point of view you will easily discover that a light, partial sleep overtakes the listener. The “I” and the astral body glide over what they are taking in, they live into it. In listening man steps out of himself slightly. He is overcome by a condition which is similar and then again dissimilar to sleep. It is similar to sleep in that the “I” and astral body are slightly disengaged, dissimilar in that they remain receptive, perceptive and self-aware. Thus the process is extraordinarily similar to imagination. It is a subtle, conscious imagining that is still strongly suppressed in the subconscious. Such is the process at hand.

To every such process is a reaction within the human being himself; we take this into account as well. Let us look at what takes place in the person who is not reciting. What does he do when he listens? He brings his etheric body into motion. The etheric body reacts. in fact the etheric body takes up those movements which it carries out—only much more weakly—when the person is asleep and has left his etheric body behind in the physical body. When the human being is asleep the etheric body is considerably more active than when he is awake. During this dampened sleep taking place in the listener the movements of the etheric body are awakened to a greater degree. These movements of the etheric body can be observed. Thus in the listener one has a person demonstrating in a heightened manner the movements which the human being carries out otherwise in a a weakened form in sleep. Thus you can study in the listener, who promptly performs them for you, ether movements of the human being in sleep. It isn't at all necessary to study the person while asleep; one can study the etheric movements of the human being when listening and has in fact here the heightened movements of the etheric body in sleep. One studies these movements and has them carried out by the physical body. That is to say one allows the physical body to glide into all those etheric movements which one has studied in the manner just described. Thus in eurythmy one does what the human being carries out with his etheric body constantly while listening. You can see what is actually taking place.

Now that we have observed what actually occurs, its effect will become apparent as well. The result is that by means of the physical movement one carries over into consciousness what otherwise occurs unconsciously. One stimulates the astral body and the ego by means of this detour through the physical body and strengthens them. But what happens as a result of this? When the astral body and the ego are strengthened in this manner their activity becomes similar to the activity in the child and still growing person as it occurs naturally. You are calling upon the forces of growth in the human being. You are working directly into the person's forces of growth. If the person is still a child and shows signs of being retarded in his growth, you can stimulate his growth in this way. If the person is no longer a child, and the forces of growth have already diminished, or if the person is actually in the second half of his life, one calls upon the youthful forces, the rejuvenating forces in him which, however, cannot contribute to his growth since the human organism is, of course, fully developed. We can expedite a child in his growth or combat his abnormal growth by having him do eurythmy. In the case of the fully-grown person the inner organism presents too great a resistance to the outer organism for us to be able to make him grow. Nevertheless, we can still introduce these forces of growth. The result is that they crash against the resistance of organism and metamorphose; that means that they activate in their metamorphosed state the plastic force of the inner organs. They stimulate the plastic force of the inner organs and these inner organs learn to breathe better and to better digest. They are encouraged to fulfil the necessary activity of the human organism in its entirety.

When artistic eurythmy is performed one should not think of it in the first instance as curative eurythmy; nevertheless, in the moment a person begins to be abnormal in any way it will have a curative effect. We have already seen the examples where when the usual eurythmy is reinforced, the reaction which follows is naturally also strengthened and we can form a mental picture of how this eurythmy affects the plastic qualities of the organization.

You can understand that the habitual practise of eurythmy activates the plasticity of the organs, their plastic force, and that as a result the human being becomes internally a better breather, a better person, if I may express myself so, in respect to his inwardly oriented digestion. He becomes a person who has his whole organism more within his own discretion. He becomes an inwardly more agile person. And to become a true artist is nothing other than to make the inner man more flexible, plastic, agile. That can be seen when one sculpts, for example. One cannot sculpt properly if in experience one cannot transpose oneself for example into the figure that one is developing plastically, if one cannot bring to life in oneself the forces that are building the figure, that express themselves in the figure. If, however, one sees the human organism itself as an implement and carries out what corresponds within, then what is the case in outward artistry is in a higher degree the case here as well for at this point one can do nothing other than to call forth internally what corresponds to the outward movement.

If you would be so good we will do the poem again now, this time with only the vowels. So that the emphasis is on the vowels alone. (Miss Wolfram and Frau. Dr. Steiner)

What I have just said about the physiology of eurythmy is specialized here. When only the vowels are carried out then that which I have characterized does not come to expression in its entirety. What I characterized is correct when someone speaks and the movements for consonants and vowels are made alternately. For what we have just done is that which I said not entirely correct: it will have to be specialized. Here very specific, differentiated movements have been performed all of which prove to be movements within the etheric body having primarily to do with what lies in the rhythmic system. Thus we must fasten our attention on that system which—as an etheric system—participates especially when vowels are spoken. When a person listens to vowels—which occurs of course in so specialized a manner only in eurythmy and to which for this reason attention must be drawn as it is here especially important therapeutically—when one recites a simple sequence of vowels for this person, or when one has him carry out such movements, in which case he would be listening to the movements which are the forms of expression for the vowel element while doing eurythmy—then, in the normal person listening to vowels those movements of the the etheric body corresponding to the rhythmic system become active in the way described earlier. And now you have the person doing eurythmy carry out in turn those movements through which he glides with his physical body into the movements which are otherwise manifest in the etheric body when vowels are heard. That is how the matter is specialized. In this way in particular those organs which belong to the rhythmic system are stimulated to respiration and inward digestion. These organs are strengthened; in them the appeal goes out to the forces of growth in the growing child or to the plastic forces which have their resistance within the organization of the fully grown adult.

This will serve as an introduction to the physiology of the vowels in eurythmy. Thus in applying to therapeutic ends everything derived from the vowel-element in eurythmy you will be able to affect the rhythmic organs in particular.

Now perhaps Mrs. Baumann will do the same poem once again consonantally. A mere glance will testify to the radical difference between the consonants and the vowels as they are carried out eurythmically. The difference is indeed thoroughly radical. If we wish to study what we have just seen we will have to make clear to ourselves how the matter would lie if in ordinary listening we were to hear only the consonants. For civilized man that is seldom so, but among less civilized peoples it is sometimes the case that they must listen to much of a consonantal nature. The consonantal world in speech is appreciably richer among less civilized peoples, and the transition from one consonant to another is stronger and unilluminated by a vowel lying between. You will find it possible to observe this up to and even within Europe. just look at words written in the Czech language and you will see just what combinations of consonants are present. To be sure when the words are spoken the vowel element sounds within these combinations of consonants, but it permeates them only as a continuous, hardly differentiated undercurrent. And if you listen to Czech you will say to yourself: to listen to this consonantal element is entirely different from listening to a language that is thoroughly permeated by vowels. Thus one has to do with quite another process here which can be characterized best in the following manner.

As an ordinary listening process this process calls forth strongly those movements of the etheric body which are otherwise actually carried out in the case of physical movements. They are retained and so, while listening to consonants, the human being lives in a certain tension. Unconsciously he would like to be imitating outwardly, physically, when he listens to consonants, but he holds back. The situation is alive with tension: a state of pacification prevails, but an artificially induced pacification, called forth by the power of one's own ego in opposition to those movements which demand to be carried out. Volition dammed up within itself is manifest when consonants are heard. Therefore you will find that listening to consonants is inwardly exceptionally invigorating. If one has an eye for it one can study how peoples such as the Czechs comport themselves inwardly—how, the human being deports himself in his interior in relation to these tensions, these aggressive forces once one knows that they are built up out of the consonantal element of the language. It is a continual curbing of what unceasingly strives to become physical movement.

Once again it is for the human being a stepping-out, a going over into the condition of sleep, and this going out, this transition into sleep is extraordinarily interesting. Consider the human being schematically: head, rhythmic system, limb-metabolic system. In listening to consonants it is primarily the limb-metabolic system that is engaged. The person wants to move his limbs, wants to break into movement, but the movement is converted into tension. He passes as it were into a state of sleep which actually does not take place in other respects, for the ego and the astral body—which go out in ordinary sleep—remain within the organism. One even tries to bring about a sort of artificial sleep for the limb-metabolic system in this case. But when one falls asleep in the limb-metabolic system to a degree, a strong reaction makes itself evident. This reaction consists of dreaming. However, at the moment one's consciousness is not so organized that one can dream. Dreams come into being that play about the human being. (orange). They affect the outer astrality and the outer ether. People who listen to consonants reinforce the aura in their proximity. This expresses itself in turn in its polarity: what remains here in the subconscious as polar content plays about the head as a volition-feeling factor and penetrates into the organism of the head. (violet). Therefore you may notice an intensification of wilfulness and caprice in people who are accustomed to living in the consonantal element. Dreams transformed into will play through the organism of the head.

What are dreams transformed into will from a physiological point of view? If one examines the etheric-physical correlative, it is essentially what is plastically at work in the organization of the head. The plastic effect on the organization of the head is pre-eminent and in this manner it will be possible to activate to a degree the organization of a head which is retarded. If one has to do with a feeble-minded person, or with someone where it can be demonstrated physically that his head organism is not in order, one should let him do consonants in eurythmy.

Then one engages oneself with those forces which otherwise work as dream-like will in the entire remaining limb-metabolic system, which stimulate there the organization and preserve its activity. One makes the heads of imbeciles and those who are otherwise retarded in their head-organization more active. Thus one can employ this sort of eurythmy to arouse curative forces for the organization of the head, particularly when one carries it out in the intensified form, with the strengthened form of the consonants of which we have heard in the last few days. It is natural that when one wishes to consider the physiology of eurythmy one should keep the active moving human being in view. In ordinary physiology one actually does not pursue physiology at all: even when an experiment is conducted on the living one proceeds from the mechanical; or one starts with the corpse and draws conclusions about physiology in actuality. One then arrives at something which one has inferred. If one wishes to attain to a physiology of these processes, what one otherwise infers must be read from inner activity of man. And it will be seen how this sort of study will quicken the whole of physiology. Consider alone the following: what is the process of digestion as observed in the living human being? It is metabolic activity which thrusts itself into the rhythmic activity, which unfolds in the direction of the rhythmic. Digestive activity is metabolic activity which is caught up to a degree by the rhythm of the circulatory organs. A continuing process, which is a combination of the metabolic activity and rhythmic activity (completed by the German editor) is taking place here. When the rhythm pulses up against it, what is metabolic activity in the lymph is caught up into the rhythm of the organs of circulation and pulled along with it. The more chaotic activity—the chaos astir in the movement of the lymph—is taken over into the rhythm of the circulatory system. Physically human volition lives there where the chaos of the lymph goes over into the regular rhythmic functioning of the circulatory system. One must distinguish this activity of will, which consists in the continual transition taking place between the chaotic vigour in the lymph and the rhythmically regular, harmonising activity present in the circulatory being, from the outer activity into which it however pours. It is, nevertheless, in this way that the inner world of man lying within the skin brings itself into harmony with the outer being of man. Through the subordination of his personal being man encorporates himself into the being of the outer world. Therefore, when one influences this activity through eurythmy—as we have seen with the consonants—one counters in fact the human being's tendency to become self-willed, to become egoistic, and his tendency to become organically egoistic as well. What does it actually mean when man becomes egoistic? Organically expressed it means that the force of plasticity in the organs is diminished and the rigidifying, crystallizing tendency takes the upper hand. The organs no longer want to be modellers, they want to become more crystalline. By means of consonantal eurythmy this tendency can be counteracted.

Here you have an insight deep into the human organism. Egoists are always people whose organs threaten to take on a proper wedge form. They want to become wedges, to become crystalline, where as in the case of people who are pathologically self-less, these organs expand. They have no crystallizing agency; they have plastic forces and become round. That is also a pathological condition. It is always the swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other to which one must pay heed.

Consider what spiritual activity is: when man thinks and from out of his thinking feels—that is designated spiritual activity in normal life. It is carried out by the most physical part of the head organism and is for precisely this reason the sublimating spiritual activity, the individualizing on the one side, the abstractly felt on the other. When the human being carries out this activity, what happens then? He draws out of his organism the force that enables him to encorporate him-self into the outer world. He draws out of himself the force that, pathologically, entices him to expand. He makes a crystallizer of himself when he is spiritually active. Certain peoples, the more northern peoples in particular, have developed a strong instinctive consciousness of these matters. Today they have as yet no inclination to introduce eurythmy in accordance with this instinctive consciousness. They employ instead what is more outwardly physiologic, Swedish gymnastics and so on. Nevertheless they make decided use of the characteristic alternating effect, by alternating the activity which the children must carry out in scientific study in school—when they must think and so on—with what diverts them to movement. They expect every teacher to be a gymnastic teacher as well and require on the other hand that the gymnastic instructor stands at the spiritual level of the child. Such things should be taken into consideration in an advanced civilization. However if I may make a statement that may appear to be a bit nasty, but is really meant only to enlighten, one must have time if one wishes to take these matters into account instinctively. Such things must be carried out by those peoples who take less part in the process of civilization, who live a life apart, more for themselves, and who are thus able to gradually develop instinctively that which has to do with the rhythm of spiritual and physical activity. The Swedes and the Norwegians who lead a more isolated existence, for example, can put such ideas into practice instinctively particularly well. For others the practice of such matters must be more conscious since these peoples are more engaged in the world processes in general—people, for example, who must concern themselves—as was of late very much the case—with making war and so on. These peoples must see these matters much more consciously. And those nations that stand in the centre of the world's movement, who must take part in its affairs while the world turns around them so to speak, they will soon see what they will get themselves into if they do not turn to these things consciously, how they will gradually degenerate. That is something which Switzerland in particular should take to heart.

These things can be observed to play a part in the state of the world as a whole. The general conditions prevailing in the world are, of course, the result of human activity and even today they proceed more from unconscious human activity than from conscious activity. We are given the task, however, to gradually transmute the unconscious activity of man into conscious activity.

How does this spiritual activity work in man? It awakens the crystallizing forces. In people with weak egos it strengthens the “I”, it makes the ego more egoistic. In people who effuse organically because they are not sufficiently egoistic we will find it necessary to activate the forces of egoism not for the benefit of the soul, but for the body. We could stimulate them by outward means as well; it would be natural to advise people who effuse organically to consume substances containing sugar. However, they sometimes have an antipathy towards them—a fact which gives expression to the true state of affairs.

However, that is something of much less interest to us at the moment. What interests us just now is that through the vowel element in eurythmy one has the possibility of working most effectively in this direction; one can bring the human being organically to himself through the vowels. One can awaken the forces which bring him to himself organically. For certain people that will be most necessary, among them the sleepy headed people. One will find that the alternation between the two, between the vowels and the consonants in eurythmy, will work favourably as well as it enduces a living rhythm in the human being such as should exist between opening oneself to the world and retracting into oneself. That will be called forth by alternating consonantal and vowel elements in eurythmy.

It is, of course, particularly important, when one intends to apply eurythmy for therapeutic purposes, to make one's own what I would like to call this physiologic-psychologic perception of what actually takes place. One should understand that the person who does consonantal eurythmy tends to call forth around himself a sort of aura which works back on him and brings him out of an egoless mingling with the world; in the case of the person who does vowels in eurythmy, his aura is drawn together, densified in itself, which is, of course, always the case with spiritual activity as well, and that the inner organs are thus stimulated to bring the person to himself.

Pedagogically considered, alternating between the lessons one would place more in the morning hours where more mental work would be done and the lessons in which there would be more movement and where a great deal of eurythmy would be done calls forth rhythmic activity in the growing child that has an extraordinarily beneficial effect; all the detriments that are of necessity incurred through an improportionate mental exertion are balanced out again by doing eurythmy. For this reason eurythmy has an especially beneficial function within the curriculum as a whole.

That which I have to say about eurythmy particularly to the physicians I will convey in the course of my lectures to them. Thus we conclude our consideration of eurythmy as such here. Tomorrow there will be two consecutive medical lectures where the eurythmists are not present.

Held before physicians

In respect to particulars you will find it necessary to elucidate what I have to tell you today about eurythmy through your knowledge of physiology and so on. How that can he done will reveal itself to you as if of its own accord, if I may say so. When we look into a spiritual-corporeal process such as that which takes place in eurythmy, we may do no less than to indicate the deeper spiritual-physical connections as well. Thus I would like to draw your attention to the following.

First we must contemplate that extra-human world process which one usually traces only in its details and not in regard to what is actually inwardly active. Just consider what earth formation is, in reality: a formative tendency works from the planetary sphere inward. And furthermore, from what lies without the planetary sphere a formative working into the earth takes place: continuous, radiant cosmic forces revealing themselves in the individual potentialities (“Kraftentitäten”, entities of force) radiating towards the earth.

In this connection we may conceive of these cosmic powers as working centripetally and building up that which is on and in the Earth from without—although they encompass all that I have said about such rays previously as well. The fact is that the metals of the Earth as a whole, for example, are not in essence formed out of some force or another within the Earth, but are actually set into the Earth from the Cosmos. Now these forces that work through the ether can be called formative forces, formative forces working in from outside and not from the planets, for in that case they would work towards the centre; the planets are there for the specific purpose of modifying them, that is, the planetary sphere. Please take note of them in precisely this context: the formative forces. In opposition to them stand those forces in the human being and in the earth which take up those formative forces and make them fast, which assemble them around a point so that the earth can come into being. Those forces which make secure we may thus call the consolidating forces (“Kräfte des Befestigens”) (please see the following diagram, and the one shown on page 81.)

In the human being they are present as the forces that build up the organs plastically, whereas the other forces, the formative forces, have more to do with propelling the organs out of the spiritual-etheric world into the physical world. That is a process which becomes so tangible in the contrast between the propulsive powers of magnesium and the rounding-off forces of fluorine. It is a process active every-where: in the teeth from below upwards and rounding-off at the top, but from front to back as well and from the back forwards, from above to below, rounding-off at the bottom. This process will become directly tangible if you picture to yourself that, in association with the tendency to push something spherical forwards, from without inwards, some-thing is formed which is opposed by a process of spherical formation from below upwards (red, in the following illustration).

Between these two processes is that which mediates: processes of secretion and on the other hand, the absorption of what the other has secreted and so on, that which can be called processes of secretion in the widest sense; then in the final analysis absorption is dependent upon a secretion inwards which is in turn re-absorbed. In between lies thus what can be best called secretory processes.

Such a secretory process becomes tangible when you picture to yourself that on the one side lies what continually wants to secrete carbon (orange, in the illustration) and that which takes it up through respiration from the fore in the formation of carbon dioxide (white).

Behind this such a process of secretion is taking place. When you descend further into the metabolic-limb system, you have a proper process of consolidation. However, this process is present in the other direction as well. You will be able to follow it most tangibly by studying the eye, which is built inwards from without, as embryology demonstrates, but is consolidated from within. The formation is internalized. That is the manner in which the eye develops. It is internalized (see the following drawing: orange).

Thus, as we progress to that which is of soul-spiritual nature in man, to the organs of the soul-spiritual, to the sense-organs, we find that the process of consolidation has become spiritualized, truly ensouled and spiritualized in perception; that is, more or less, the descending process which leads to the formation of. the organs (please refer to the first illustration and to the chart which follows).

Thus we find at the lowermost end the process of sensory perception, objective perception. If this development continues, if it goes further in this direction, then the process of perception encounters the consolidating forces; should it become conscious in this encounter, it will become imagination. If imagination develops further and becomes conscious in encountering the process of secretion, it becomes inspiration. And when inspiration develops further in the direction of the formative forces, collides with them consciously and thus sees through these forces, it becomes intuition. Thus Dne can develop this progression in the life of the soul stage by stage from objective sensory perception to imagination, to inspiration and to intuition.

 Formative forces Intuition Secretory processes Inspiration Consolidation Imagination Perception 

This process which unfolds in the soul is based, however, on the process of coming-into-being. It is in fact, as you can see here, only the inverse of this genesis. One steps out to encounter what has already come into existence, rising into this becoming in the opposite direction. Formation takes place in the descending direction. The human being ascends in the opposite direction; he advances to meet what is coming into being. Thus, what one develops as powers of perception and cognition in imagination, inspiration and intuition always has its counter-activity in the creative powers which express themselves in the formative forces, in the processes of secretion and consolidation.

From all of this you will gather that what is active in the human organism in the opposite direction, in its coming into being, is that into which one ascends when rising in knowledge. You will perceive that in reality what we attain in imagination are the same powers which, without our being conscious of them, reveal themselves in the phenomena of growth, in the plastic phenomena of growth. If we ascend to inspiration, we come upon the forces which inspire man from without inwards in his breathing, which shape him through and through as he breathes, which shape themselves into the plastic forces as they work these forces through, to a degree. And if we ascend to intuition, we rise in reality to the primal mover (“Agens”) who enters into our plastic forms from the world without as substantial being.

You see, in this way we grasp the human being as he takes shape out of the Cosmos. If we now apply the knowledge which we have gained in one way or another through anatomy or physiology and illuminate it with what is given us here, then we begin to understand the organs and their functions. This is an indication of how to understand the organs and their functions. Thus what is always at work plastically in the human being, what permeates and shapes him, lives on the other hand in the movements for the consonants, the unconscious imaginative forces which call forth a permeation of the organism, as I said yesterday. Yesterday's lecture should be of help. Here you can perceive how consonantal eurythmy takes hold of deficient formative powers, deficient plastic forces in the human being and transforms them into something truly sculptural.¹

Let us assume we have a child before us and we see that he is insufficiently formed, that his growth is rampant. What does it mean, when we say that something of a plastic nature is growing uncontrolledly? It means that the plastic is working centrifugally, thus making the head large, and, in doing so, is no longer permitting the head to be permeated in the proper manner with imaginative forces. These must be supplied. Therefore one will let the child do consonantal eurythmy.

Here we have a question about “a two-year-old boy with a large head, who is nevertheless not hydrocephalic and is otherwise apparently healthy.”

Here you have the effective antidote, in properly applied consonantal eurythmy. Here we have arrived at the point at which a thorough observation of the morphology, of the more profound morphological facts, can provide a direct indication for the eurythmic treatment.

Another: “a twelve and three-quarter-year-old boy whose growth in height is distinctly retarded, with no organic findings other than worms; intelligent but intellectually quickly tired.” A most interesting complex of symptoms, all of which indicate that the imaginative forces are insufficent, that the plastic forces in the organs are running rampant because of a lack of inner fictile forces, of plastic soul forces. These plastic forces of the soul are those which destroy parasites. It is no wonder that when these forces are insufficient the child has worms. Thus one should have him do consonantal eurythmy; therein lies the antidote. These associations will provide you with concrete indications of where you can employ eurythmy. Although the phenomena are somewhat camouflaged here, eurythmy will have an extraordinarily positive effect even in such cases, particularly if one complements it medicinally.

Here I have an interesting question that has been presented to me. Naturally I must answer the questions in principle. If complications of any sort should appear, they can later be taken into special consideration as the case demands. However, although it may be necessary to combine something else along with it, the matter has nevertheless been thoroughly dealt with from the side characterized.

“I have as a patient a five-year-old child who lost a great deal of blood as the result of a bullet wound suffered in the outbreaks of violence; two years ago a deformation of the joints set in. These are things which could lead to anaemia and similar conditions in adults. How could one help this child therapeutically?”

Here you have a deformation of the joints. That is an outwardly-working tendency of plastic forces that are unable to remain within. Thus these forces ray outwards, leaving the human being instead of working within him as they should. They will be reflected in the most effective manner precisely through the practice of consonantal eurythmy. In doing consonantal eurythmy you will call forth the objectively effective imaginations which offset the deformations. As the manner in which the question is placed quite correctly indicates, people in the future will in general tend to deform in the most manifold ways, because they will no longer be able to build up the normalizing human form out of the involuntarily active forces. Man will become free; he will gradually become free even in respect to the building up of his own form. However, he must then be able to do something with this freedom. Ile must go on to engender imaginations which continuously counter the deformation.

Now as to the other; you see that we are here concerned with a dearth of objective imagination. We could have to do with a deficiency of objective inspiration as well, which would express itself in a deformation of the rhythmic system, if I may call it that. In the case of a deformation of the rhythmic system, the objective inspiration which goes inwards does not encounter the circulatory rhythm in the proper manner. One can work towards a normalization of the situation by practising vowels in eurythmy. In eurythmy the vowels affect internal irregularities which are precisely not accompanied by morphological changes, even as consonantal eurythmy affects deformations and the tendency to deformation.

As I said earlier, it may nevertheless be necessary to render aid when something appears in particularly radical form, as in the case of the deformations of the joints that we just discussed. There it would he necessary to come to the assistance of the consonantal eurythmic process therapeutically. This consonantal process works by stimulating through its imagination the inner breathing of the organs orientated from without inwards and lying on the far side, of the intestinal wall: the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, and so on. When a person does consonantal eurythmy, it is a fact that particularly the back of the head, the lungs, the liver and the kidneys begin to sparkle and flash; something is really there that indicates the reaction of the spirit and soul to what is _lone outside in the consonants. Man becomes a shining being in these organs, and the movements that are carried out are in continuous opposition to the luminous movements within. In particular, there appears an entire luminous reproduction of the excretory process of the kidneys, through certain consonantal movements. One has a picture of the excretory process of the kidneys in this luminous process which comes about as the result of consonantal eurythmy. And that works over into the unconscious imagination. The whole process in which this part begins to shine is the same process that I described as being especially under the influence of copper. It is the same process. Here one must draw the attention of the physicians to the fact that there are people with particular forms of illness. These forms of illness were brought to my attention again yesterday when I was shown some painted pictures that were very much admired in some quarters at least, and was asked whether they were particularly occult. In a certain sense, of course, they are occult, but it is extraordinarily difficult to speak to people about these things, for they are an objectively-fixed kidney-efflorescence; they are the objectively-fixed process of the excretion of urine. When in the case of persons predisposed to this illness the process of urinary excretion becomes an abnormal, luminous process, that is, when the process of excretion falters—a purely metabolic illness—the kidneys then begin to shine. When this inwardly directed clairvoyance then sets in, people begin to draw wildly. What they produce will be aesthetic, in an outer formal manner beautiful in every case. The colours applied will be beautiful. But, of course, people are not content when one says to them, “Yes, there you have painted something very beautiful; it is in fact your obstructed excretion of urine.” I can assure you that the obstructed urinary process and suppressed sexual desires—which lead as well in a certain manner to metabolic irregularities—are often presented by people of particularly mystical nature as mystically profound drawings and paintings. In much of what makes its appearance in the world in this manner one should recognize the symptoms of pathological abnormalities in the human being that are just bearable still.

As you see, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not mysticism as mysticism is commonly understood, since it fosters no illusions about matters such as we have just characterized. Quite the contrary: it investigates just such matters. People take exception to one for doing so, however. They resent my having gone so far in a public lecture as to indicate that the lovely poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg, for example, or of Saint Theresa, are the inspirational reflexes of processes arising from repressed sexuality. Here, of course, the things are not drawn or painted, but poetically expressed. Naturally it is not pleasant for people to hear Mechthild von Magdeburg or Saint Theresa described as personalities with a strong sexuality which they restrained precisely because it was too strong for them, that certain metabolic-circulatory processes resulted from this retension, and that the reactions to this in turn appeared in such a form that they were fixed in very beautiful poetry. Indeed, this phenomenon leads extraordinarily deep into the mysteries of existence, when considered in a higher light. However, one must be able to rise to such an interpretation. And, therefore, one must have at least a notion of these peculiar processes which light up as inward processes when eurythmy is done outwardly. And in the moment when what is concealed within the poetry becomes eurythmy, as I showed you yesterday—when a beautiful poem is read and the eurythmy corresponding to it is done as we saw yesterday in vowels or consonants—then the one thing crosses the other; then an inward silent speaking joins what is carried out outwardly in movements in the person doing eurythmy as well. And when this process does not exude in sultry poetry but takes instead the course of accompanying beautiful poetry as eurythmy, then that which takes place in the human being does not become a recording of mysticism, but a definite process of healing for the human being. Thus one can say that when one lets the patients do eurythmy in such a manner that one continually brings to his attention: listen carefully, bring intensely into consciousness the sound that you hear, the relationships of the sentence you hear, to which you are doing eurythmy; then one will initiate his ascent to the outward formative forces, to the objectively intuiting powers. When one wants to affect all that has remained in the human being from what no longer took place between birth and death, but what materialism calls inheritance—the greater part of which, however, is carried over from the pre-existent spiritual soul-life—if one wants to affect what can be called congenital defects and so on, then one will do well to work—particularly during the course of youth—again and again through eurythmy by challenging the person doing it: make very clear to yourself what you hear outwardly! By this method one can drive out all the tendencies to fix inwardly what would like to arise and take form in something like mystical poetry or mystical drawing. Precisely that will be connected to the beautiful outer poem. It is the reverse process. A true mystic knows that that of an abnormal nature which is reflected by the human being as beauty always has a questionable side. By contrast, one cannot claim that, when what is beautiful in the outer world is experienced inwardly, it appears as a particularly magnificent and beautiful picture: on the contrary, it becomes schematic and thereby abstract; abstract as if it were sketched; abstract, as a drawing is abstract. That is precisely what is healthy, however, and what is desired. The beautiful historic process would not have taken place, but if for example Mechthild von Magdeburg had been instigated to do eurythmy to good poetry, her entire mystic fate would have been spared her. Naturally one can say here that a point has been reached where in a certain sense good and evil cease to exist; one enters into the amoral sphere of Nietzche, beyond good and evil. Of course, one cannot be so philistine as to claim that all the Mechthilds von Magdeburg should be eradicated. On the other hand you may be certain that from the super-sensible worlds care will be taken that the corresponding connections with these super-sensible worlds nevertheless remain, when man attempts to prevent this tendency from undue proliferation.

Although it is quite late, I would still like to go into a few matters in order to perhaps bring some clarification. I would like to start with the following question:

“Couldn't the therapeutic eurythmy exercises be reinforced by rational breathing exercises? It needn't necessarily be Hatha-Yoga.”

To this I would like to make the following remark. In our times, and within the direction that the continually progressing human nature has taken, rational breathing exercises, as a reinforcement of the eurythmic exercises, can in fact only be treated in the following manner. It will be observed that a tendency towards a modification in the rhythm of respiration arises of its own accord under the influence of the vowels in eurythmy. One will notice this quite clearly. Here one finds oneself in the uncomfortable situation that one should avoid stereotyping, avoid saying the one thing or another in general, but should first observe what is to be done. One should concern oneself in each individual case with the breathing of the person in whose healing one is attempting to be of assistance by means of eurythmic vowel exercises (in accordance with the diagnosis given, whatever it may be); one should observe the modification of the breathing and subsequently make the patient aware that he can consciously pursue this tendency himself. We are no longer human beings like the ancient orientals, who would go the reverse route and influence the entire human being by way of a prescribed method of breathing. This is something which today leads of necessity, in every case, to inner shocks, no matter how it is prescribed; it should really be avoided. We just have to learn to notice what kind of effect eurythmy itself, especially vocalic eurythmy, has on the breathing process. And then we can consciously continue the tendency which arises eurythmically, in the individual case. You will certainly observe that this respiratory process will be carried on individually, continued in varying manners in different people.

My esteemed friends, those are more or less the things that it is possible to answer at the moment. We have no real possibility of dealing with a number of matters that have got bogged down due to the shortness of time. In closing, my dear friends. I want to warn you that you must be prepared that your medical colleagues in the world will wage their wars no less intensely when they become aware of your bringing something of our sort to bear, and that you will have need of the penetrating power of conviction to weaken what will confront you. In no case, of course, may what you are confronted with lead you to neglect these matters; we may permit ourselves no illusions about those antagonistic forces we arouse.

At the end of this course I would as well like to state that, in order to make the movement possible, as it should now be inaugurated in the medical field, I will adhere everywhere to the policy of not involving myself directly with the patients in the therapeutic process, but will discuss and consult only with the physicians themselves. Thus you will always be in the position to refute any allegations that I myself interfere in any way in an unjustified manner in the therapy. I have already mentioned this at the end of the last course. This has been made extraordinarily difficult for me even from the anthroposophical side—this cannot he passed over in silence—as people naturally make all possible demands in this direction. It is also definitely the case that among anthroposophists the tendency exists, not only not to rise above egoism, but sometimes to become even more egoistic than normal people are. Then, when the occasion arises it is often a matter of complete indifference to the person, what the welfare of the movement may entail; that the welfare of the movement is dependent in each individual instance upon a rejection of the practice of what the world outside terms quackery; that a healing process should take place in the whole of medicine and should not be disturbed by the demands arising from an individual's personal aspirations. People will make it difficult, but it must be carried through in this direction, since we will only be able to succeed in this area when we can stand up to the outer world—as we are otherwise able to, in the anthroposophical movement, insofar as matters are conducted with understanding and not bowdlerized by people without understanding. Simply by virtue of knowing what is going on in the anthroposophical movement we must be in the position to say: what is being said there is certainly a lie, it is beyond doubt an invention. We must simply always be in the position to say that, in certain cases. And we come to be able to say that, when we are all inwardly initiated in the contents of matters such as those to which I have drawn attention here: that I myself do not intervene in the therapeutic process, but that within the anthroposophical movement the doctors are responsible for the therapy of the patients.

Having said what was necessary, I want to add nothing more than the wish that the stimuli—which, in this course in particular, have often remained mere indications—may work on in you and become active in the appropriate manner for the welfare of humanity. Hopefully we will have the opportunity to carry on in some manner what we have already twice begun; in any case we will make an effort to carry on with it. With this wish, my dear friends, I will close these contemplations, in the hope that our deeds in these directions may be in accord with our wishes. It was very satisfying to see you here. It will be a satisfying feeling to think back on these days here, which it was your desire to spend together towards the enrichment of medical science. The thoughts that hold us together will accompany you, my dear friends, on the paths that you will wander, to transform into deeds what we attempted to activate, to begin with here, as thoughts.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner uses in every case here the word “plastic”.

Held before physicians

The wish has been expressed for me to expound somewhat further upon curative eurythmy. Basically, the empiric material related to curative eurythmy was developed and presented in the last course for physicians in Dornach, and it is hardly necessary to go beyond what was given at that time. Used in the proper manner, it will be of far-reaching importance. Today I would like to speak to you about the whole purpose and meaning of curative eurythmy.

Curative eurythmy took shape out of something purely artistic, out of what was first developed as an artistic impulse; and in certain connections a basis for the correct understanding of curative eurythmy must be taken from artistic eurythmy. Now perhaps I will be most clearly understood if at first I attempt to indicate the difference between artistic and curative eurythmy. Eurythmy in general is based on the possibility of transforming in a certain direction what takes place in the human organism in speech. For this reason eurythmy is, artistically, really a sort of visible speech. We must recognize that two components work together in human speech. One component originates through a particular use of the formative apparatus—of which I may speak on the basis of the preceding lectures—from a layer of the nervous system which lies further inward. What is related to the mental image plays in here. Esentially the apparatus of mental representation in the speech apparatus extends itself, to be sure in a somewhat complicated way, even into the construction of the nervous system, and it is exactly this which then produces in the further radiation one of the components at work in speech. The other component comes up out of the human being's metabolism. In a way we have a meeting of two dynamic systems, one coming out of the human metabolism and another arising from the nerve-sensory system. The two encounter each other in such a way that the metabolic system is transformed first into the circulatory processes; and that which has to do with mental representation, coming from the nerve-sensory system is metamorphosed into the respiratory system. In the respiratory and circulatory systems these two dynamic systems converge, and, since the whole is carried over into the air by means of the speech-system, it is possible for the human astral organism to stream into what is created there as movement of air. If we consider the outermost periphery of the human organism, we see that speech comes into being through an embodiment on the one hand of what has to do with mental picturing and on the other, of the metabolic nature which, when expressed in terms of the soul, is actually the will-nature. Thus we have what finds its expression in the soul as will, and bodily its expression in the metabolic system, that is, to the extent in which the nervous system has a part in the will (which it in fact has, insofar as metabolism takes place—not as nervesensory activity—in the nervous system). Thus, what is of a volitional nature and finds its bodily expression in the metabolic system, and that which is of the nature of mental representation which finds its expression in what I would like to call a section or stratum of the nerve-sensory system, conjoin to form what results. They then find physical expression in what manifests as ordinary speech or singing. In the case of song it is something different but nonetheless similar. In eurythmy one blocks out what is of the nature of mental representation to the greatest possible degree and brings volition into force. In this way ordinary speech is metamorphosed into movements of the entire human organism: one strengthens one component, the will or the metabolism, one weakens the mental representation or the nerve-sensory, and one has as a result eurythmy. In this way one is really in the position to create correlatives in human movement for the individual sounds, whether they be vowels or consonants. Just as a certain formation and movement of air can correspond to an A or an L, so can an outwardly visible form in movement correspond to an A or an L. Here we have a movement, or movement structure, as I would like to call it, derived from the human organism through sensible-super-sensible vision; which proceeds from the human organism with the same lawfulness as speech in sounds and which, although more volitionally-oriented, is only a metamorphosis of this speech. One can compose the entire alphabet in this speech; one can bring everything linguistic to expression through this eurythmy. When artistic eurythmy is performed, the attention of the human being and all the processes in the human physical, etheric and astral organisms which mediate this alertfulness, are directed to the corresponding sound, to the formation of the word or the artistic formation of the sentence, to the metric form, the poetic form and so on. When active in artistic eurythmy, one is completely absorbed in the possibilities of artistic formation and portrayal of the elements of speech. The human being surrenders to the outer world when he is artistically active in eurythmy, since in eurythmy one naturally follows the structure (“Gestaltung”) that is also common to speech. And since one does not stop at an A or an L in the middle of a word, but carries on further, in artistic eurythmy we have to do with something that may quite possibly take place in the normally functioning human organism. Ordinary artistic eurythmy has no other physiological consequences for the human organism other than that this artistic eurythmy calls forth in an energetic manner an inner harmony in the human functions, insofar as these functions form a totality in the human organism.

Thus one can say that when one refrains in the right manner from exaggeration in eurythmic artistic activity, it is conducive to health. But just as everything conducive to health can also make one sick if exaggerated, the artistic practice of eurythmy can be overdone. Professor Benedikt, the famous criminal psychologist, emphasized repeatedly—because he could not endure the anti-alcohol movement—that more people die from water than from alcohol. Even the statistics must concede this: over-indulgence in water leads to numerous sorts of illness. Eurythmy, in general, as long as it remains within the appropriate limits, can only be conducive to health; a certain artistic feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction will arise in any case.

That which lives in the devotion to the sound-, word- and sentence-formation in artistic eurythmy is reflected inwards in curative eurythmy. It is reflected inwards simply through the fact that in curative eurythmy the sound A, for example, must be repeated a number of times in succession. By this means, something entirely different is achieved than when I pass over from the sound A to an I or something else in an artistic presentation. Now it will be a question of gaining insight into the actual therapeutic process which can take place through eurythmy. I cannot avoid expressing concern about something which lies close at hand here: amateurs and dilettants appropriate such things very easily. From the beginning I have emphasized that curative eurythmy should be practised by the doctor himself or herself, or at the very least should only be practised in the most intimate collaboration with a doctor. The attitude which spiritual science takes in relation to such offshoots will be taken as indicative of spiritual science's position in regard to medicine as a whole.

Spiritual science does not operate in the field of medicine in such a manner as I once encountered twenty years ago. People who called themselves nature-therapy doctors were present at an anthroposophical convention and presented me with a treatise in which it was repeatedly stated in a variety of ways: all healing is based upon bringing into harmony what is inharmonious in the organism. This sentence was repeated for six pages in the most manifold variations: one should harmonize the disharmonious. There is nothing at all that one can object to in this sentence, it is only that one must be able to do it in a specific manner in a particular case. That is where it becomes unpleasant for people who hold an opinion such as was expressed in their final sentence: everything which has been said above proves that one can leave the unbelievably complicated medicine behind and restrict oneself to harmonizing the disharmonious. That would be, in their own words, “intoxicatingly simple.” Something so intoxicatingly simple I can't offer you. Medicine cannot be driven into intoxicating simplicity by spiritual science, but rather to greater complexity, as you will have gathered by now from various instances. Through spiritual science you will not have less to learn, but more, but there is a snag attached to learning less anyway, because through learning more everything will become clearer and more ordered and the learning thereby more interesting. Whoever had the idea that healing would be made easier through spiritual science will already have been convinced by the expositions that I have made here that this is not the case.

And so it is with curative eurythmy. It is definitely the case that curative eurythmy should not be applied without a thorough diagnosis and that it should only be practised in agreement with professional medical science, for the reason that one has to do here with the application of an exceedingly intimate knowledge of the human organism.

Because of the fact that in normal speech the metabolic activity and the plastic activity of the nerve-sensory system collide with one another, the result of this collision, is unloaded in the movement of the air (This is something which takes place in relative isolation from the human organism so that as a result speech is released from the organism.) all of what is shaped through curative eurythmy is thrown back into the organism, and one has thus to do with the following. Imagine that you place an A-movement together with an L-movement. First of all you have the movements repeated, so that the whole affair is not discharged outside, but rather that the repetition pours into the inner processes of the human organism. By allowing the vowel and consonantal elements, let us say in the A-movement and the L-movement, to work together, you will always induce a functioning in the human organism that implies a mutual activity of the metabolic-man and the nerve-sensory-man. To be sure, the activity of the nerve-sensory system is in any case weakened in eurythmy, but the two components, the dampened nerve-sensory activity and the heightened metabolic activity brought about by the eurythmic movement, work together in this exceptional proportion nevertheless. One has simply, a driving of the metabolic-man against the nerve-sensory-man, when one does the L-movement repeatedly, and when the L-movement is associated with an A-form. Thus one can say: the entire functioning of the human organism is carried along with the instigation of the forms and movements necessary. When, for example, you let someone carry out a consonantal movement, it works, to begin with, in such a way that it in essence unloads its whole power, its inner dynamic, on the process of inhalation; the whole procedure of inhalation actually lies in your control. According to the consonants you induce, you have the entire process of in-breathing in your hands. You strengthen the process of inhalation through each consonantal activity.

You perhaps know, from what has already been told about curative eurythmy, that movements of artistic eurythmy are somewhat modified for curative eurythmy. One can say that when an A- or an L-movement is carried out, it is always associated with a strengthening or weakening of the thrust initiated by inhalation. You must take inhalation into consideration here in its entirety. In examining the in-breath, we must to begin with follow its path into the middle part of the human organism, and then, however, through the medial canal, vertebral (“Rückenmarkscanal”) canal into the brain. The activity of the brain is in essence the harmonising of the breathing activity, in its refinement within the brain, with the nerve-sensory activity. There is no activity of the brain which may be considered alone; every such activity results from the nerve-sensory activity and the breathing activity. All the activities of the brain must be studied in such a way that respiration is taken into consideration. By inducing certain consonants, various consonants, you can, by way of the breath, influence the plastic activity of man, the sculptural activity, in the most striking manner. In the case of a child who is getting his second teeth, for example, you have only to know from a certain artistic grasp of the human organism how the upper teeth will be built up out of plastic activity which works from above downwards. In the case of the upper teeth, the plastic activity that forms them is active from the front backwards. How will the lower teeth be formed? In the teeth of the lower jaw the plastic activity works from the back to the front. If I were to express schematically the activity going on in teething, it would be as follows: the upper teeth are built up from front to back; thus, the back surfaces are shaped and the front surfaces are deposited. The lower teeth are built up from back to front. This is the manner in which the forces work together.

If you notice that a child is having difficulties in teething, you can assist the process in the maxilla, for example, simply by having the child do the movement for A. You can support the same process in the lower jaw with the O-movement. You can in fact gain control over the fictile powers through specific instigation. In order to give this plastic activity nourishment, so to speak, you must direct your attention principally to supporting the thrust that accompanies the inhalation; you must add to the plastic activity accomplished in this way by the A- and O-movements what you observe resulting from the entire human constitution. Let us say we have a person with weak peristalsis, who is somewhat inclined to constipation. In the period of life in which teething takes place, the intestinal activity is related to the building up of the teeth, and one must focus one's attention there, where irregularities in teething have their origin. If you wish to come to the assistance of the thrust of breath which travels through the vertebral canal into the brain and expedites from there the formative forces, which one has in one's power through the movements for vowels, you will be able to do this, if you have precisely such a case before you by having the child carry out the movmeent for L. If you simply study curative eurythmy, the way in which you should apply it will become clear to you through the diagnosis. Without a diagnosis it should not be practised, because in certain circumstances one can do entirely the wrong thing. However, it is indeed a fact that one must awaken in oneself a feeling for the artistic in the dynamics of the human being as a whole. One must develop an intuitive glance for the artistic. Let us assume that the child is observed to have certain difficulties at the time it begins to teethe; it has certain disorders which shouldn't be present. One discovers that the intestinal movement is irregular and insufficient. With the L-movement one is properly prepared. After one has done the L-movement for a time, one comes to the assistance of what one has conducted to the formative centre with the movement for A or O. The vowel movements affect the exhalation and begin to work already in the brain. The stream of breath works in the brain. Everything associated with inhalation, in its most extensive, inclusive sense, expresses itself in the consonantal element. That can be reinforced and promoted through consonantal eurythmy. Everything having to do with exhalation can be rein-forced by doing the vowels in eurythmy. When you do the vowels in eurythmy, the plastic element works directly together with the radiating element. You must judge, by how much strength must be applied, how many times the sound must be repeated. Let us say, for example, we have to do with a kidney disturbance of one sort or another. You may say to yourself that the kidney disturbance is in one stage or another, let us say in the beginning stage. The moment that I have certain movements performed—S-movements, for example¹—I will have a beneficial effect on the kidney disturbance in its early stages. If the kidney distrubance has been present a considerable length of time, and the insufficient function has led already to deformation, I must then first prepare the ground with consonantal eurythmy and follow with the vowels; in order to work on formation through the vowels as opposed to the deformation which has already taken place. In short, one must approach the matter as untheoretically as possible; one must discover, solely out of knowledge of the human organism in its healthy and diseased states, what was given in the rules I set out in Dornach that have been passed on to you.

Now if, for example, it should be a case of suppressed heart-lung function which in turn affects the kidneys, one will make progress in the beginning stages with the movement for B or P. From this you will see that one has the entire functioning within one's grasp here, and that everything depends upon one's understanding that a sort of centrifugal dynamic is present in each separate human organ which is rounded-off plastically by another dynamic working from without inwards—a dynamic which is not exactly centripetal, but which could be designated as a similar-to-centripetal dynamic that works into every human organ. One will only be able to pursue the study of physiology properly when one is able to contemplate each separate human organ in its polarity. These polarities lie within, a centrifugal and a centripetal, in each human organ. For everything that is of a sculptural nature, the distribution and differentiation of the relative warmth and the organization of the air-conditions play a great role. For everything which is centrifugal, radiating, a great role is played by what in the human organism comes from the dynamic of the substances of the world themselves and what is developed in surmounting the vitality proper to external nature (“der äusseren Wesenheit”) in the human organism. These two dynamics must be regulated reciprocally, and one can hope that curative eurythmists come forth who will cultivate a fine feeling for what can be achieved in different instances. Precisely here will extraordinarily much depend upon the artistic disposition of the soul.

Now when you take into consideration that the whole system of curative eurythmy can be reinforced by actual therapeutic methods, you find you have two factors which work together. One can say to oneself, such and such affects the heart in particular in this or that way; one can reinforce that effect with a curative eurythmy exercise: then one thing will promote the other in a complementary manner. That is something which opens up truly great vistas, which can have an extraordinarily great future. Just think of the effect of massage, in some instances. I do not want to say anything against it or to criticise it; I acknowledge its importance. Yet this outward scratching about on the human being is inconsequential in comparison to the massage that you apply when you induce entire systems of organs which work together to move inwardly in a different manner, through the elements of curative eurythmy. That is the most inward kneading of the whole organism, linked with effects in the etheric, the astral, the ego organisms. Thus it is possible to say that what one recognizes as correct in massage is, in an unendingly powerful way, made inward through curative eurythmy. One will in fact first gain an insight into the curative effects of gymnastics as well when one examines the resemblance between gymnastic exercises and eurythmic exercises. What is therapeutic in gymnastics is only of secondary importance to what is of significance in curative eurythmy. As I said at that time in Domach, if one has the E-movement carried out in a rhythmic sequence in the manner that was then demonstrated, one does a great deal to help weak-looking children—children who only feebly carry through their bodily functions—to become healthier and to begin to become stronger, as one would wish to see them. It is, however, necessary that one takes the whole human being into consideration in such matters. Again and again it happens that the entire human being is taken too little into consideration. I know that that is a triviality, for you will say: “We know that, of course.” Indeed, but again and again in practice it is not taken into consideration. How often one hears: this person has an irregularly functioning heart, something must be done for it. Yes, but if one were to take the total human being into consideration one would have to say: thank God that he has such a heart; his organism couldn't tolerate a normal one. Similarly, for example, under certain circumstances one would have to say of a person who had broken his nose, that he had suffered a favourable stroke of fate: if he breathed in air through completely developed channels, he would have too much air for his organism to process. What has its foundations in the organism as a whole must everywhere be taken into consideration.

When the movements for “I” are carried out in a certain manner, they tend to harmonize the association of the right and the left sides of the human organism. With “I” one can be of help in all asymmetries that appear in the human organism.. Through the cautious use of “I”-movements one can have excellent results with curative eurythmy, even in the case of squinting. With squinting I would only advise that one does not proceed as one would with a person who walks asymmetrically, for example, or who can use the right and left arms too asymmetrically. For squinting I would apply the usual I-movements but would carry them out only with the index finger, and in this way I would have them repeated as often as possible during the day. When the person is still growing this can bring good results, especially if the “I” is carried out with the big toe as well. The best results will be achieved, however, when one can bring the patient to do it with the little toe as well. On the asymmetries affecting the sight these eurythmic exercises performed at the periphery will have a most beneficial effect. On the other hand, when it is a question of evening-out an indexterity in the manner in which a person walks, it could even bring good results to have him do the reverse: that is, to carry out the I-movement with the line of vision, as when sighting. Provided, of course, it does him no harm. In fact, one can really establish a sort of law: everything which is abnormal in the lower human being tends to be normalized by what is created as a compensation in the upper man, and vice versa.

When you find insecurities in standing, which may, of course, arise in the most varied manners, the forms of “U” will be of especial importance. However, you must see that the U-form is brought to completion so that the limbs concerned are really contiguous. This being in direct contact with one another, so that one limb feels the other, is of particular importance. Only then is the U-form complete. In artistic eurythmy it is only necessary to indicate that this is so; in curative eurythmy, however, it must be carried out: one limb is brought up against the other so that one stands as when “at attention”—with the legs pressed against one another. That is an extraordinarily curative exercise for people who are affected with a compulsive twitching in the head. When it is fitting to treat corpulent children by means of curative eurythmy, the O-forms serve the purpose well. All these forms, however, if they are intended to bring results as curative eurythmy, must be combined with a distinct perception of the muscle system involved. If you simply make the O-form as many eurythmists do, it will suffice as an outward indication. It will not have a curative effect, however, unless in the process of doing the exercise you feel the muscles throughout the arm. The slack swinging form has no effect; the sensation of the whole muscle system in its details, however, will bring the respective curative eurythmic result. It is particularly important to take heed that the curative eurythmic exercise is strengthened by ex-tending it into the consciousness. When you do the O-movement as I just did it, it is associated with a strong projection into the consciousness. Tell the obese person whom you treat with the O-form: “think of your obesity, of your own girth, when doing the ‘O’!” In this way the consciousness centres on exactly that which is to be remedied. You thereby rein-force in its innermost nature what is intended, namely, that the element of consciousness is not in the least to be underestimated in healing.

In this connection I have reason to believe that when these things become known, a battle with the orthopedists will take place. Despite the fact that they are experiencing a great deal of success in their field at the present time, they are quite intent on treating the human being as a sort of mechanism. In the case of appliances used therapeutically in such a way that the person in question should continually feel them, that they enter his awareness, this consciousness is an excellent curative factor. Let us say, for example, that I find it would be advantageous for someone to straighten his shoulders; and I give him bandages which bring to his awareness that the shoulders should be held hack—in other words, so that the treatment isn't carried out unconsciously. It is exactly the same in curative eurythmy: these matters are brought to consciousness, in order that, as I have already said, this concentration vitally reinforce the curative eurythmic element itself.

Let us go on to something of particular importance which I want to tell you. Everything that is an E-form has a regulatory effect where the astral organism affects the etheric organism either too strongly or too weakly. Thus in all those cases where one determines that either an exaggerated or an insufficient activity of the astral organism is present, one will under circumstances be able to achieve a great deal with the E-forms, with the repetition of the E-forms. E-forms could have a curative effect upon both complexes of symptoms which I described in the previous hour. What I have just said is particularly true when the astral organism is under the influence of the etheric, when it is too weak, when it permits itself to be influenced by the etheric, which itself is too strong as the result of an irregularity in the astral organism of the head. The opposite condition in which the etheric is too strongly affected by the astral may also arise. That would be the case when the astral comes very forcefully to expression in the intestine: when one gets diarrhoea on every occasion when one is a bit afraid. The U-forms will have an especially advantageous effect here.

Yesterday a question arose which I would like to discuss briefly here, in closing: can one allow persons who are pregnant or who have gynaecological complaints to do certain eurythmic movements? Just examine what was given as a rule in Dornach. You should be able to adhere to it even though in the case of pregnant women and gynaecological patients you must make certain that the abdomen is left in peace. It must be left undisturbed. It must not be irritated by curative eurythmic exercises. Although the abdomen itself is left in peace, exercises may nevertheless definitely be done with the arms while sitting, or while lying down, with the head; and while that which must have quiet is in complete repose. You will still find enough in the indications given to be able to take measures through curative eurythmy. Naturally when the person cannot move at all, eurythmy would he quite the most beneficial for him, as in the case of paralytic symptoms; but under the circumstances the person cannot carry them out. They would definitely be the most wholesome. Such paralytic symptoms are of course in essence an abnormal functioning of the astral body, which does not engage itself in the etheric and physical organisation. Here one will be able to achieve a great deal with E-movements. An E-movement that is very beneficial for disturbances of the abdomen is the carefully performed, not exaggerated, artificial crossing of the eyes. It is in fact true that the somewhat decadent yogis who do certain exercises in which they focus their eyes on the tip of the nose, really intend to evoke the most harmonic activity of the abdomen possible, since they know the significance of abdominal activity for what such people call spiritual activity. Thus one can say: matters are such that one can simply replace, with a lighter eurythmy of the arms, the fingers, or even the eyes when it is necessary, certain things that a person with a healthy abdomen would do with jumps. A pregnant woman should never be induced to do curative eurythmy exercises with jumps. That, of course, won't do.

As you see, it was not intended to produce a panacea that could be learnt in half a day. Curative eurythmy too must be acquired through earnest labour, and it is necessary in fact that it is acquired through practice. For practically every time you put the curative eurythmy exercises into practice, with the help of your curative exercises, you will be able to make better use of them. It is indeed so: through practice one will make exceptionally good progress, most particularly in curative eurythmy.

Now it was my intention to present you with this more theoretical discussion of curative eurythmy, because everything else having to do with it, to the extent curative eurythmy exists today, was given earlier in Dornach and will be handed on by our physician friends and thus be available to you; and because I wanted to give you the possibility of understanding the whole physiological and therapeutic meaning of eurythmy. Of course, on the other hand, one must not overestimate something like curative eurythmy. In many cases it will be an extraordinarily important resource, but one should not overestimate it. One must make clear to oneself that really nothing can be achieved with intoxicating simplicity; one can no more heal a broken leg or broken arm through curative exercises alone, than one can heal a carcinoma through the intoxicating simplicity of harmonizing the disharmonious. One must be entirely clear that it is not an increase in dilettantism and medical amateurism which is to be found on the path of spiritual science, but rather a definite enrichment of professional medical ability. Excuse me for emphasizing it so often; in order to prevent misunderstandings, however, I particularly want to stress again that the methods are not brought forward in amateurish opposition to official medicine, as is often the case in fanatical movements. They take into account the state of medical science at present, and desire only to lead it along the path along which it must be led, for the simple reason that it is not true that the human being is only that which the physiology and anatomy of today maintain he is. He is that, to be sure, but he is something more as well: he must be recognized from the aspect of his soul and spirit. Then those peculiar mental pictures that constantly show up nowadays, in which the brain for example is seen as a sort of central telegraphic apparatus to which the so-called sensory nerves run, and from which the motor nerves lead, will disappear. The whole matter has no relation to reality, as will have become clear to you through today's lecture. In the nerve-sensory system one has rather to do with a sort of modelling dynamic, from which something is wrung which then accommodates itself to the activity of the soul. There is a great deal to be done in order to give back to a healthy physiology what has been taken from it through the correlations incorrectly established between the physical organism and the functions of the soul. Something physical is indeed present for every function of the soul during the course of man's life on earth, but, on the other hand, nothing is used for the soul which has not a much greater importance for the bodily organization in its reciprocal action with the other organs. Nothing which is used for the soul is used merely as an organ of the soul. Our entire soul and spiritual make-up is wrested from the bodily nature, is taken out of the bodily. We may not permit ourselves to indicate certain organs as belonging to the soul. We could only say that the soul-functions are such that they are disengaged from the organic functions and are particularly adapted to the activity of the soul. Only when we become earnest about what is at work in the human organism, when we no longer proceed in so outward a fashion, that we picture the whole nervous system as an insertion serving the life of the soul can we hope to perceive the human organization as it is. Only when the human organism is so perceived can it provide the basis for a physiology and therapy which work in the Iight, not grope in the dark. I make this last remark to you, so that you yourselves do not leave here under a misunderstanding, and to enable you to counter misunderstandings which arise again and again.

Our carcinoma medication, for example, has been criticized with the “intoxicating simplicity” that arises from having no idea whatever about the knowledge through which one has arrived at the medication. People have constructed instead some simple analogy or another and believe that in disposing of the analogy, one can have done with the matter itself. A proviso for the development and growth of the spiritual-scientific side of medicine is that one confront the misunderstandings at least to a degree. People will soon notice that when they cannot spread misunderstandings, they will have very little at all to say, for the principal concern of the opponents is the broadcasting of misconceptions about the whole of Anthroposophy. Count how many adversaries have something other than misconceptions to relate. I must say that I often read antagonistic articles or essays and could connect them with something else entirely, were my name not present. It has no relation to what is nurtured here; it deals with something entirely different. Sometimes I am very much surprised and would like to go and search out where that which is being refuted has been expounded; in any case not here. In medicine the same thing is done as in theology; there one encounters it as well. One can, for example, say to a theologian at the pinnacle of science: we have the same to say about the Christ as you, only somewhat more. He is, however, not content when one says what he himself says, and then something in addition. He maintains one should not add anything to it. He does not criticize what is contrary to his assertions, he criticizes what he says nothing at all about. He criticizes what is said, simply because one speaks about something he knows nothing about. He considers it a mistake to know something about what he knows nothing about. Medicine must not fall into this error. We must observe accurately, and, rather than contradicting, we must add a great deal, out of an extremely well-founded knowledge of the healthy and diseased human being.

References to books related to passages in the text

Page 2 “... metamorphic variation ... Goetheanistic contemplation ...” see: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Kurschner's “Deutsche National-Literature”, Vol. 1, Troxler-Verlag Bern 1949

Page 65 The lecture which appears here as number seven (April 18, 1921) was given in connection with the so-called second course for physicians and is printed in the book Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie, Dornach 1963, as well. Rudolf Steiner refers to this lecture at the end of the foregoing with the words: “After a short pause we will proceed with greater reference to eurythmy.”

Page 79 The eighth lecture was given in connection with the “Medical Week” held in Stuttgart from the 26th to the 28th of October 1922 (see Physiologisch-Therapeutisches auf Grundlage der Geisteswissenschaft, Dornach 1965.) This lecture is printed only here.

Page 92 “E-forms could have a curative effect upon both complexes of symptoms which I described in the previous hour.” See the fourth lecture in the series: Anthroposophische Grundlagen für die Arzneikunst, in Physiologisch-Therapeutisches auf Grundlage der Geisteswissenschaft. Dornach 1965, page 140

• 1. In another transcript A appears here rather than S.—German editor.

The present edition of this course—which Rudolf Steiner gave in 1921 in order to bring to realization the hygienic-therapeutic side of eurythmy, which, as he explained in his introductory words to eurythmy performances, was given this name to distinguish it from artistic and pedagogical eurythmy—is the first edition to appear in print and be available to a wider public. Since those days curative eurythmy has become much used on a worldwide scale as a therapy in connection with medicine, and it takes its place alongside other recognized therapies in the same way as, according to Rudolf Steiner, artistic eurythmy does among the other arts.

In the main there are two things to be said about this edition. Firstly,—and Rudolf Steiner said this very strongly—curative eurythmy must only be given when a doctor prescribes it and is in charge of it. Secondly, a proper training in eurythmy is required as a preliminary to learning curative eurythmy for use as a therapy. Rudolf Steiner said that at least two years should be spent on a thorough study of eurythmy. The normal eurythmy training takes four years at present. As this course is now available to everyone, it should be said that it is quite impossible to study curative eurythmy on one's own with the help of this book. Collaboration with a doctor and the study of eurythmy are both inescapable. Rudolf Steiner puts it in the following way in the “Course for Curative Education” (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981)

“When you bring curative eurythmy into curative education you are bringing the whole of eurythmy into it. So you should be aware that you must acquire a living connection with it, and this should be such that anyone who does curative eurythmy ought to a certain point to have learnt basic eurythmy. Curative eurythmy ought to be based on a general knowledge of speech and tone eurythmy, even if artistic perfection has not been attained. Then, above all, people must be filled with the conviction that they must work with others, and therefore, when curative eurythmy is going to be put into practice the therapist must get the support of a doctor. When curative eurythmy was given to the world it was stipulated that it should not be put into practice without the collaboration of a doctor. All this points to how inter-connected in a living way, things have to be when they come out of Anthroposophy.”

The present lectures—with the exception of the one given on April 18,—were made available in manuscript form by Frau Marie Steiner in 1930. They were edited by Elisabeth Baumann, who had taken part in the course. Rudolf Steiner's executors produced a new edition in 1952 edited by I. de Jaager. The lecture to doctors given on October 28, 1922 was included in this edition. Both these editors made important comments on the course and summaries of these will follow.

For the present edition the notes were examined and the whole text checked against the available shorthand reports. Some additions and corrections could consequently be made. Some parts that had been revised now follow the shorthand notes more closely.

Where the story of eurythmy is concerned a detailed account is given in the volume of Rudolf Steiner's complete works “Die Entstehung and Entwickelung der Eurythmie” (the origins and development of eurythmy).

The following words are taken from Frau Baumann's introduction: “Children of all ages grasped and carried out the movements of eurythmy so naturally that we experienced every day of our lives that the visible language of eurythmy movement is a language that is in genuine harmony with the laws and requirements of both man's spiritual-soul nature and his bodily nature. We also experienced daily that hindrances the children had, whether in the realm of the will or in the realm of thought—the thinking activity—could be loosened up or actually overcome by eurythmy. At the Waldorf School we had to deal with children, almost from the very beginning, who had hindrances of this sort. Sometimes these difficulties were only slightly in evidence, sometimes the children were so overwhelmed by them, that they could not keep up with the lessons of their class, and a special remedial class was started where they could be given what Rudolf Steiner prescribed for their care.

Experience showed that for children of this sort eurythmy more than anything else could get across to them and they could take immediate hold of it. Therefore we asked ourselves whether it would be possible to find exercises that would help the spiritual part that was having such difficulty in incarnating because it met with such strong bodily resistance—exercises that would give the physical sheath a better form, movement exercises which would help the etheric formative forces to penetrate better and give their support to the creative upbuilding forces of the organism.

Out of our close connection with so-called difficult cases, with retarded children, with those in need of special care, we acquired the most intense desire to discover and take hold of the hygienic, curative element of eurythmy. From many conversations with Erna van Deventer-Wolfram, who was actively engaged in eurythmy in various parts of Germany, it transpired that through the work she was doing she, too, had been powerfully drawn to this curative aspect of eurythmy. After due reflection we decided to ask Dr. Steiner for instructions on curative eurythmy. Rudolf Steiner agreed with alacrity and promised to think about it. It was not long before Frau van Deventer and I were requested to go to Dornach in April where he wanted to give lectures on curative eurythmy alongside the doctors' course he was going to give at the Goetheanurn.

And so during the clays of April 12 to 17, 1921, Rudolf Steiner presented the gift of the third element of eurythmy, and the doctors and eurythmists who were present experienced a whole new world of possibilities for therapy opening up before them, which, in its variety and effectiveness and the way in which Rudolf Steiner presented it, is bound to have made an unforgettable impression on them. Instead of the few instructions and indications we had asked for we were given a complete and detailed method of eurythmy therapy in which we could directly experience that even today the creative and curative power of the Word, with its capacity to take hold of the movement potential in the human body, is still at work. It often happened that it was not easy to find our way into it, for even those of us who had been familiar with the eurythmic art of movement for many years found that the exercises Rudolf Steiner either performed himself or asked Frau van Deventer-Wolfram and myself to perform were utterly new and surprising. It was especially difficult for the doctors present, as only a minority had had anything to do with eurythmy up till then. Two eurythmy courses were organized where we discussed and practised basic eurythmy with the doctors, and also the exercises that had been given by Dr. Steiner in the curative eurythmy lecture that day.

Regular work at curative eurythmy now started up in various places. In the clinics in Arlesheim and Stuttgart and also at the Waldorf School, Rudolf Steiner gave several more indications for the use of curative eurythmy in special cases, he himself varied one or another exercise, and he gave certain sound sequences that were to be practised with individual patients under his special observation. These indications offer doctors and curative eurythmists a rich opportunity to learn more about a methodical approach, adapting of exercises to the individual needs of patients, and the scrupulous observation required for this.

The real basis of all curative eurythmy work is given in this course, as is clearly stated in Rudolf Steiner's own words. In October 1922, on the occasion of a medical week in Stuttgart he was again asked to speak about curative eurythmy, this time by doctors. That lecture is included here with the 1921 course. Right at the beginning Rudolf Steiner says ”I have been requested to say something more about this curative eurythmy of ours. Fundamentally speaking I presented the empirical material for this curative eurythmy at the last doctors' course in Dornach (see “The Spiritual Scientific Aspect of Therapy”), and it is hardly necessary to go further than that. For if it is put to proper use it can have far-reaching significance.”

From Frau I. de Jaager's epilogue (1952 edition):

“It will soon be evident to the reader that unless you make a thorough study of Anthroposophy you will not get very far with this curative eurythmy course. Curative eurythmy arises out of Anthroposophy just the same as artistic eurythmy does. A living grasp of Man and the world is a necessary basis for its use. Only on this assumption will it avoid becoming a system or something that is grasped and applied in an abstract, intellectual way; a danger that is ever present in our times. Curative eurythmy also requires an extensive knowledge of artistic eurythmy. Imaginative forces, the coming into motion of the whole being of man, are prerequisites for the application of this therapy, where it is essential to have an artistic understanding of the patient. All the delicate and minute nuances we need in order to help a sick child or adult come to us out of artistic eurythmy. You will continually find new inspiration there.

I would like to stress that a young person should not devote herself exclusively to curative eurythmy. Up to the age of 28 a person should be able to give her imagination and creative forces free rein. The more this can happen the better she will be able to develop devotion, patience and empathy when doing eurythmy later on. It is essential to devote oneself wholly to the patient and carry him with artistic warmth of heart.

As Rudolf Steiner often mentions in the course, curative eurythmy should never be used without a doctor's thorough diagnosis. The greater the collaboration with the patient's doctor the more effective the curative eurythmy will be.”

The basis for the text: The course was taken down in short-hand by the professional shorthand writer Helene Finckh (1883–1963) and then written out in longhand. The Stuttgart lecture of October 28, 1922, which is included as the eighth lecture, was probably taken down by participants. There is no shorthand report.

For the first edition (manuscript of lectures 1–6) the material was arranged by the curative eurythmist Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus.

For the second edition (manuscript of lectures 1–6, with the addition of lecture 7) the first publication was revised by Isabella de Jaager.

For the third edition (first edition in the complete works) the publisher, Dr. Hans W. Zbinden, used Helene Finckh's original shorthand notes as a reference.

The present (fourth) edition is an unaltered impression of the third edition, the only additions being the summary of the contents and the subject index.

Concerning lectures 7 and 8:

The lecture of April 18, 1921, which was included as the seventh lecture of this course, was given in connection with the so-called second doctors' course and is contained in the volume “The Spiritual Scientific Aspect of Therapy”. In that context Rudolf Steiner refers to this lecture by saying “After a short pause we shall continue by going more in the direction of eurythmy.”

The lecture given in Stuttgart on October 28, 1922, and which has been included in this course as the eighth lecture, was given in connection with the “Medical Week” held in Stuttgart from October 26–28, 1922, (see “Anthroposophical Approach to Medicine”). The lecture has been published in the present volume only, however.

How the course came about and the ladies to whom the abbreviations “Frau B. and Frl. W.” refer:

Frau B. is Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus (1895–1947) who actively participated in the development of eurythmy as from the summer of 1913. Later on she was the first eurythmy teacher at the Independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart, and she was an active member of the curative eurythmy course.

Frl. W. is Erna van Deventer, née Wolfram (1894–1976), one of the first eurythmists, and, together with Elisabeth Baumann, an active member of the curative eurythmy course. In a memorial essay of the year 1961 in the periodical “Blätter für Anthroposophie” she makes the following reference to it:

“I have two rather faded pieces of paper in front of me; one is a small drawing of the curve of Cassini and the other is a postcard dated February 1921 from Dr. Roman Boos¹ in Dornach. Two modest pieces of paper, and yet they are almost the only visible testimonies of the events that led up to the curative eurythmy course that Dr. Steiner gave in Dornach in the Spring of 1921 alongside the second doctors' course.

If I want to go back in memory to the time when Dr. Steiner gave the first therapeutic eurythmy exercises I have to go much further back than 1921. As early as 1915 and even earlier Dr. Steiner gave me, and probably other eurythmy teachers too, in answer to our questions, various eurythmy exercises for speaking, and hints for using in special cases we had encountered in towns all over Germany. The expression curative eurythmy did not even exist then, and Dr. Steiner called these exercises “therapeutic” eurythmy and said that these arose out of the Greek Mysteries. This remark will perhaps show how earnest Dr. Steiner was even at that time about healing by means of eurythmy movements, and it will also show how deeply it was impressed upon the consciousness of us still very young teachers that “healing” is connected with “holy”, and that our movements in this therapeutic eurythmy would really have to be carried by “the will to heal” if we wanted to achieve any success with this therapy. (Dr. Steiner did not coin the expression “the will to heal” until later; it was actually on the occasion of our asking him for advice, in 1923–24, whereupon he entered into our problems and gave the course for young medical students.)

Anyone who worked with Dr. Steiner in any way will remember that everything he gave was in answer to a question, a wish, or sometimes even a vague aspiration that came his way. It was the same with curative eurythmy. For instance two children with speech defects were brought to him, and he gave what we would later on have called “curative eurythmy exercises”. In 1919 I met a child with curvature of the spine. Dr. Steiner entered into my questions very thoroughly and gave me the help I warned. I could give lots more examples like this. Yet at the same time I myself was also learning, in the course of giving lessons, to observe people, and I learnt to unite the various phenomena I observed in a person, and to become aware of how many people actually in the numerous eurythmy courses round about were in need of help.

... During those years I often met Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus, who was also one of the first eurythmists, and a deep love for the work we shared united us for many years. In 1919, after the end of the First World War, we encountered one another again when the Waldorf School was being founded. So we began to exchange our experiences, she being a teacher at the Waldorf School where she worked with Dr. Schubert's remedial class, and I being a eurythmist who in the course of the year gave eurythmy courses in almost all the big towns in Germany, and I had the privilege when I was in Stuttgart of standing in for Frau Baumann at the Waldorf School when she was ill. We each had much joy in the other, because we were aware of our common bond. We were both searching for the same thing, and what were we looking for? The healing element in or behind eurythmy!

This was one of the threads of destiny that hound us together. The other one was my engagement and marriage to H.A.R. van Deventer, who was himself a doctor, and who approached eurythmy from a background of medicine with the same enthusiasm that we approached medicine from a background of eurythmy. And what gave rise to it? The natural science course in Stuttgart at Christmas 1920/21.

Frau Baumann and I went to this course—more as visitors really—since we could not understand a lot of what Dr. Steiner was saying, and as eurythmists we hardly even belonged to that enlightened gathering of students and scholars! But—even if we did not understand it all with our intellect—our enthusiasm for the astronomical drawings made up for it. And one day Dr. Steiner drew something on the blackboard that made us fall on top of one another and nearly jump into the air, and that was the curve of Cassini.

This was the external occurrence that we needed to make us aware that the paths of the stars and the flow of forces within us, both sprang from the same source! For this curve of Cassini that Dr. Steiner was now describing in connection with natural science and astronomy, why, we eurythmists knew it too! As early as 1915, in the White Room of the old Goetheanum, Dr. Steiner had given four to six eurythmy teachers a series of lessons, and on this occasion he taught us “children's forms, good for children and young people from the age of three to eighty, to stop their thoughts scattering”. Those were his words, and one of these forms was the curve of Cassini, to the words “We will seek one another, we feel near one another, we know one another well”.

In 1915 we young people did not have the least idea why he gave this form as a pedagogical exercise, in fact we hardly knew the “Why” of any of the eurythmy teaching material—and to be honest do we know it that much better today? And yet it should be our task to pass not only the exercises but also the “Why” on to our successors. The only way to do this seems to be that in the eurythmy of the future we must separate truth from error, and the source of eurythmy from a watering down of it.

This experience of “recognizing” such an apparently insignificant form was what drew me to Elisabeth Baumann and what caused her and my husband to sit together for hours discussing the problem “If this form which Dr. Steiner was illustrating in the natural science course is so important for both macrocosmic man and microcosmic man, then does not everything given us in eurythmy come from the same source, and should it not be applicable for healing?” For just as with the curve of Cassini, we had also over the years learnt about the cosmic and the human healing effect of vowels, for instance AUM. Our experience of the curve of Cassini was really only the corner-stone of the building of our surmises and experiences in the realm of eurythmy!

But how was it to be done? How were we to acquire a knowledge of “therapeutic eurythmy”? What we knew up till then—Elisabeth Baumann and I—were only small building stones that Dr. Steiner had given us on occasion. Through the fact that my husband supported us in our ideas, as a doctor—he had done quite a lot of eurythmy himself and could understand and support our endeavours from both the medical and the eurythmic side—this gave us courage to ask Dr. Steiner whilst he was still in Stuttgart whether he would like to teach us a kind of therapeutic eurythmy in a systematic way just like he had taught us ordinary eurythmy. Dr. Steiner was very kind, looked at us somewhat astonished at our bold plans, and said he would discuss the matter further with my husband in Holland, and then we would hear.

And thus it happened. Dr. Steiner was in Holland at the beginning of 1921, and as my husband had a strong connection with our work through his medical studies, he had a good deal of opportunity to talk with Dr. Steiner. Frau Baumann was in Stuttgart at the time and I was in Breslau, but we had both set down our wishes very clearly in writing and sent them to my husband (He was still my fiance then). At any rate I)r. Steiner asked him one day in Holland “Do you actually have some eurythmists who would really put their backs into therapeutic eurythmy?”—to which my husband replied “Yes indeed, two at present, Frau Baumann and my future wife”. “Then we can start with it” said Dr. Steiner, and instructed my husband to do the necessary organizing.

This brings me back to the beginning, for the little drawing was the “curve of Cassini” which came from an evening's discussion with Dr. Steiner, and the faded postcard from Roman Boos was his announcement from Domach to say that the “Curative Eurythmy Course” (Dr. Steiner had now coined the name) was due to take place in Dornach at the beginning of April, along with the second doctor's course, that was also due to be given then.

In an article for the periodical “Beiträge zu einer Erweiterung der lleilkunst nach Geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen” (1971, volume 4) headed “Curative Eurythmy: 1921–71. Its Origins, Development and Task” she describes the following:

During the second doctors' course, from April 12 to 17, 1921, Dr. Steiner gave the curative eurythmy course in six lectures, for doctors, and also for eurythmists who had been training for more than two years. Not one of us could imagine what the course would be like! Dr. Steiner stood on the platform, and Frau Baumann and 1, sitting on two chairs in front of it, felt very uncomfortable, for we had instigated the situation, and in the meantime, from February till April, we had heard no word from Dr. Steiner as to how he would establish this new branch of medical science with the likes of us, who had not the slightest preparatory training in the realm of medicine!

We certainly did not have the necessary knowledge for curative eurythmy work—would it not have been much more practical and sensible for Dr. Steiner to have chosen a small group of doctors for this work? Or did Frau Baumann and I, being eurythmists, really bring something with us out of our past that seemed important to him? In the instructions he gave me shortly after the course, about the training necessary for curative eurythmy, I had my answer.

He answered our question by saying “The prerequisite for the curative eurythmy profession is that you first of all know the whole foundation of artistic eurythmy, in theory and practice. You must he capable of performing a dramatic poem on the stage, for example “der Zauberlehrling” (sorcerer's apprentice) by Goethe, and carry out all the eurythmic indications for word meaning and sentence construction, with all the forms and postures you have learnt. Not until you have mastered all the aspects of artistic eurythmy are you ready to change over to curative eurythmy. He made it clear to us that we would first of all have to master all the possibilities of artistic eurythmy, be able to find them in the cosmos as the forces of the planets and the fixed stars, then in their reflection in human speech and music, then through movements of the human body itself, and in this way we would get to know the human being, that is, ourselves, as beings who reflect macrocosm and microcosm in our own body. Not until we had grasped our situation and task would we be able to advance from the periphery of eurythmy to the centre of the healing aspect of eurythmy. Yet “first of all you must know the periphery, and then you can move on to the centre of man!” What a perspective for us, who had already been actively engaged in artistic and pedagogical eurythmy for eight years, though more in a practical way, and by learning from doing it rather than filling it with our consciousness. The vowels, consonants, parts of speech, rhymes—how much more significant they now appeared to be!

...What a eurythmist should know was also clearly defined by Dr. Steiner telling me what and how I would have to learn from my husband's textbooks, the “Spalteholz”² and the textbook by Professor Broesicke³ of Breslau.

Dr. Steiner told us this shortly after the curative eurythmy course, so that it was with a deep feeling of responsibility that we took our departure from Dornach.

• 1. Head of the Dornach administration at that time.
• 2. Prof. W. Spatcholz of the University of Leipzig, February 1914
• 3. Prof. Dr. Gustav Broesicke, Breslau 1920

There are many difficulties involved in translating the curative eurythmy course. In order to remain as close to Rudolf Steiner's meaning as possible, it was agreed to make as literal a translation as was necessary. It was therefore clear from the beginning that the text could not read like an English composition. In the German, one has of course to do with the spoken word, which is less clearly formulated than a written text. Furthermore, in this course Steiner develops concepts which are being formulated for the first time. His difficulty in finding the means to convey these ideas adequately is evident to begin with in the analogies he brings, which are in themselves complicated, and, what is here more important, in the way he bends and reshapes the German language to follow the contours of the thoughts. His intent is often more evident in the sound of the words and their sequence rather than in their meaning, as was justified in speaking to eurythmists. No attempt has been made to spare the English reader the work of following Steiner by translating intellectually what we understand his meaning to be. Sentences which are difficult to understand will on comparison generally be found to be equally difficult in German. Where an uncertainty arose in the German text it has been left as such in the English.

It is important to attempt to follow the invisible being of this course which is expressed only in its barest substance by the text. Repeated readings of the lectures will reveal an inner plan which is not at first apparent. The course outlines the inner structure of curative eurythmy and thus in its own way that of the human being.

The German pronunciation of the alphabet has been retained throughout as it is assumed that all practitioners of curative eurythmy will already be familiar with this usage.

Dortmund, West Germany
December 1982

Kristina Kroh

My dear Friends,

We have, as you know, quite a number of children whose development has been arrested and whom we have now to educate—or again, to heal, in so far as this is possible. There are several of these children here in the Clinic at Arlesheim, and you have a number also at Lauenstein.¹ We shall in these lectures try to deal with our subject in such a way that wherever possible our study leads straight on to the practical application. Then, when Frau Dr. Wegman puts some of the children at our disposal for demonstration—for this is permissible among ourselves—we shall be able also to discuss certain cases with the child immediately in front of us. To begin with, however, I want to speak more in general about the nature of such children.

It is obvious, in the first place, that a thorough knowledge of education for healthy children should already be possessed by one who wants to educate incompletely developed children. For the very things we notice in incompletely developed children, in children who are suffering from some illness or abnormality, can also be discerned in the so-called normal life of soul; only, they show themselves there less plainly, and in order to recognize them we must be able to practise a more intimate and close observation. In some corner of the life of soul of every human being lurks a quality, or tendency, that would commonly be called abnormal. It may be no more than a slight tendency to flights of thought, or an incapacity to place the words at the right intervals in speaking, so that either the words fall over each other or else the listener could go for a walk between them.

Irregularities of this kind—and they are to be found also in the life of will and of feeling—can be noticed, at all events to some slight degree, in the majority of human beings. We shall have something to say about them later on, because for anyone who sets out to deal, educationally or medically, with serious irregularities, these slighter ones will be of importance as symptoms. And one must, you know, be able to make one's own careful study of symptoms, in the sense in which the doctor speaks of symptoms by which he recognises illnesses. He speaks indeed also of the complex of symptoms which enables him to take a survey of the disease-process; but he never confuses the complex of symptoms with what is really the essential nature and content of the disease itself. Similarly, in the case of an incompletely developed child, we must regard what can be observed in his life of soul simply as symptoms.

Psychography, as it is called—descriptive psychology—is really nothing but symptomatology, the study and knowledge of symptoms. When psychiatry today limits itself to describing abnormal phenomena of thinking, feeling and willing, this means no more than that it has made progress in accurate description of complexes of symptoms; and as long as it cannot get beyond this point, it is quite incapable of penetrating to the essential nature of the illness. It is, however, most important that we should be able to do this, to perceive what the “being ill” really means. And in this connection I want to ask your attention to the following. You will find it helpful. Try to grasp it and hold it clearly before your minds.

Suppose we have here² the physical body of the human being, as it confronts us while the little child is growing. Then we have the life of soul, rising up, as it were coming forth from this physical body. This life of soul, which can show itself in varied expressions and manifestations, may be normal or it may be abnormal. But now the only possible grounds we can have for speaking of the normality or abnormality of the child's life of soul, or indeed of the life of soul of any human being, is that we have in mind something that is normal in the sense of being average. There is no other criterion than the one that is customary among people who abide by ordinary conventions; such people have their ideas of what is to be considered reasonable or clever, and then everything that is not an expression of a “normal” life of soul (as they understand it) is for them an abnormality. At present there is really no other criterion. That is why the conclusions people come to are so very confused. When they have in this way ascertained the existence of “abnormality”, they begin to do—heaven knows what!—believing they are thereby helping to get rid of the abnormality, while all the time they are driving out a fragment of genius! We shall get nowhere at all by applying this kind of criterion, and the first thing the doctor and teacher have to do is to reject it and get beyond the stage of making pronouncements as to what is clever or reasonable, in accordance with the habits of thought that prevail today. Particularly in this domain we must refrain from jumping to conclusions, and simply look at things as they are. What have we actually before us in the human being?

Let us look right away from this life of soul, which emerges only by degrees and in which a part is often played by teachers—concerning whom perhaps the less said the better!—let us look away from this life of soul, and then we find, behind the bodily nature, another life of soul, a spirit soul, which makes its descent, between the time of conception and birth, from the spiritual worlds. For the first-mentioned life of soul is not that in man which descends from spiritual worlds. The life of soul which descends from the spiritual worlds is something quite different, and is not, in the ordinary way, perceptible to earthly consciousness. This whole life of soul that comes down from the spiritual worlds takes possession of the body which is being built up from the sequence of generations in accordance with heredity. And if this soul-life is of such a kind that it tends, when it lays hold of the liver-substance, to form a diseased liver, or if it finds in the physical and the etheric body some inherited tendency to disease, which gives rise to a feeling of illness, then disease will make its appearance. Similarly, any other organ or nexus of organs may be faultily inserted into what comes down from the world of soul-and-spirit. When the connection has been made, when the union has come about between what comes down and what is inherited, when this entity of soul-and-body has been formed, then there arises—but even then no more than as a reflection in a mirror—that which we know ordinarily as our life of soul, as it manifests in thinking, feeling and willing. This soul life that manifests in thinking, feeling and willing is, however, as we said, no more than a reflection, it is really just like a reflection in a mirror. It is all obliterated when we fall asleep. The really permanent soul-life is behind; it makes its descent and passes through repeated earth-lives. And if we ask where it is in man, the answer is: It has its seat in the organisation of the body. How is this to be understood?

Let us think first of the human being in his three systems: nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism-limb system. You will understand me when I say that the nerves-and-senses system is localised principally in the head; we can therefore speak—although, of course, diagrammatically only—of the head system when we are referring to the nerves-and-senses system. This is more literally correct in the case of the very young child, where the upbuilding function of the nerves-and-senses system proceeds from the head and works thence into the whole organism. The nerves-and-senses system, then, is localised in the head. It is a synthetic system. What do I mean by that? It brings together all the activities of the organism. In the head is contained, in a sense, the whole human being. When we speak of hepatic activity—and we ought really to speak always of the activity of the liver, for what we see as liver is nothing but a liver process that has become fixed—this liver activity is, naturally, entirely in the lower body; but for each such nexus of functions there is a corresponding activity in the head. Here, shall we say, is the liver activity. And there is a correspondence to this liver activity in a particular activity in the human head or brain. Here in the lower body, the liver is relatively separated from the other organs, from kidneys, stomach and so on. But in the brain everything flows together, the hepatic activity flows together with the other activities; so that the head is the great synthesizer of everything that is going on in the organism. And the effect of all this synthesized activity is to set up a destructive process, a process of breaking down. Substance falls away.

Whilst we have thus in the head a synthesizing process, in the whole of the rest of the organism, and especially in the metabolism-and-limbs system, we have an analysing process; here, in contrast to the head, everything is kept separate. Whereas in the head, the renal activity takes place together with the intestinal activity, in the rest of the organism the several activities are held apart. In the head, however, everything flows together, it is all synthesized.

Now this flowing together—accompanied as it is by a continual falling away of substance, like rain—this synthetical activity of the head lies at the basis of all our thought activity. For what has to happen in order that man may be able to think? That which enters into man from out of the realm of soul and spirit, enabling him to come forth and be active in the world—this soul-and-spirit nature of his has to be endowed, in the region of the head, with the synthesizing function and so be capable of synthesizing in the right way the inherited substance; then this harmoniously synthesized hereditary substance can become a mirror. When, with the descent of soul and spirit, the synthesizing activity begins to take place in the head, the head becomes a mirror; the outer world is reflected in it, and this produces the thinking that we ordinarily observe. We must therefore distinguish between two functions or activities of thinking: there is first the one which takes its course behind the realm of the perceptible, and builds the brain—this one is the permanent element in human thinking; and then there is the thinking function that is not real in itself but only a reflection. This latter function is obliterated every time we fall asleep; it subsides as soon as we stop thinking.

Another part of what comes down from the realm of spirit and soul builds up the system of metabolism and limbs—analytically, building there organs which are separate one from another and have each their own clearly distinguishable outlines. If you set out to study the whole human body with its several clearly distinguishable outlines, then in this body you find liver, lungs, heart and so on. With all of these the metabolism-and-limbs system is connected. The rhythmic system we do not see; everything which is filled with physical substance belongs to the system of limbs and metabolism; even what we can see of the brain is metabolism. Now it is these single, analytically built-up organs that lie at the basis of the whole life of will in the human being, just as the synthesizing activity lies at the basis of thinking. Whatever we have in us in the way of organs is the foundation for our life of will.

And now let us think of a human being who has arrived at the stage of being “grown-up”. What has happened to him while he has been living his earthly life? He reached the age of seven and got his second teeth, he grew to be fourteen years old and attained puberty, finally he reached the age of twenty-one, when the consolidation of his soul-life took place. If we want to have any understanding at all of the development of the child, we must clearly distinguish between the body a human being has who has passed through the change of teeth, and the body of a very young child who has not yet experienced the change of teeth. As a matter of fact, what can be observed by comparing these two outstanding examples, is happening continuously. The body changes with each year that passes. We are perpetually thrusting something out from our body; a streaming outwards, a centrifugal impulse is at work all the time, pushing the body out. The consequence is that the body of man is completely renewed every seven or eight years. This renewal is, however, particularly significant about the time of the change of teeth, about the seventh year. For what reason?

The body which we have from birth till the change of teeth is, in a sense, nothing else than a model that we take over from our parents; it contains the forces of heredity, our forefathers have helped to build it. In the course of the first seven years we thrust off this body. And what have we then? A completely new body comes into being; the body that man has after the change of teeth is not built up by the forces of heredity, but entirely by the spirit-and-soul which has descended. The human being has his body of inherited substance until the change of teeth, and no longer; but while he is thrusting off this body, he builds up a new body, working from out of his own individuality. Thus only since the change of teeth have we had what we may call our own body. But the inherited body is used as a model; and according as the life of spirit-and-soul is strong or weak, will it either be in a position to proceed in a more individual direction when confronted with the inherited form, or be subject to the inherited form—in which case the soul will be compelled to shape the second body like the first, which was shaped by the parents. What is usually adduced in the theory of heredity is really nonsense. For it is assumed that the laws that underlie man's growth up to the change of teeth simply continue into later life; whereas the truth is, that the influence of heredity has to be reckoned with only until the change of teeth, and no further; the individuality then comes in and builds the second body.

We must therefore distinguish, when speaking of a child, between the body of heredity and the individual body which is its successor. The individual body—and this body alone can truthfully be called the personal body of the human being—develops by degrees. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the very strongest activity of which the individuality is capable goes forward. Either, the individuality conquers during this period the forces of heredity, and then it can be observed in the child that, after the change of teeth, he begins to work his way out of the forces of heredity—the fact will be clearly perceptible, and we teachers must take note of it—or, the individuality is completely subject to the forces of heredity, to what is contained in the model, with the result that the hereditary likeness to the parents simply continues beyond the seventh year. But it all depends, you see, upon the individuality, not upon the forces of heredity. Suppose I am an artist and you give me something to copy and I change it very considerably. Just as little as I can say that you are responsible for my picture, just so little can it be said that a person has acquired through heredity the body he bears from the seventh year onward. This truth we must master thoroughly, and then be able to know for ourselves in any particular case how strongly the individuality is working.

Between the seventh and fourteenth years every human being passes through a process of growth and development which expresses, as strongly as in his case is possible, the individuality he has brought down with him. In this period of his life the child is thus comparatively shut off from the external world; and we teachers have opportunity to watch during these years the wonderful unfolding of the forces of the individuality. But now, if this development were to continue after the fourteenth year, if the human being were to go on into later life with nothing further than this unfolding of individuality, he would become a person who was perpetually refusing and rejecting everything that approached him, a person utterly without interest in the world around him. That this does not happen is due to the fact that, during the aforesaid period, he is all the time building his third body, which manifests at puberty, and this third body is built up to accord with—to bear right relation to—the forces in the earthly environment. The relation of the sexes is not the whole thing; the exaggerated importance given to it is just a consequence of our materialistic turn of mind. In reality, all connections with the outer world which begin to make their appearance at puberty are fundamentally of the same nature. We should really speak, therefore, not of sexual, but of earthly maturity. And under earthly maturity we have to include the maturity of the senses, the maturity of the breathing—and another such sub-division will also be sexual maturity. This gives the true picture of the situation. The human being, then, reaches earthly maturity. He begins to take again into himself what is outside and foreign to him; he acquires the faculty of being sensitive and not indifferent to his environment. Before this time, he is not susceptible to the other sex, neither is he susceptible to his whole environment. Thus does the human being form and develop his third body, which is active in him until the beginning of the twenties.

What descended from the spiritual world reached a kind of end at the time of the change of teeth; but it has continued to work, right until the twentieth year. It has already taken form in the organs which are now there, and has given the human being individual maturity, and earthly maturity. Suppose that now some abnormality shows itself in the life of soul, which reflects—and is in conformity with—the structure of the organs, and is conditioned by the whole development of the human being. We shall then manifestly have an abnormality of soul, that has come about in this way. But if, after the human being has passed his twenty-first year, an abnormality appears in the liver or in some other organ, this organ is by then so much “on its own” and so detached, that the will—in its inner “soul” aspect—can keep itself independent of it. This is less and less possible the further one goes back into the years of childhood. But in a grown person the soul-life has become relatively independent; the organs already have a definite direction, and the oncoming of illness in an organ will not work so strongly upon the soul-life, and can therefore be treated simply as a disease in that organ. In the very young child, however, everything is still working together; a diseased organ still works into the life of soul—and very actively.

The diseases usually diagnosed by our modern pathology are the cruder illnesses; the subtler illnesses are not really accessible to histology. These lie in the fluids that permeate an organ, such as the liver, for instance; in the movement of the fluids—or even of the air—through that organ. The warmth permeating the organ is also of quite special significance for the life of soul. If therefore we are dealing with a child who shows evidence of a defect in the will, the first thing we must do is to ask ourselves: with what organ is the defect in the will connected? Is there some organ showing signs of degeneration or of illness, with which we can connect the defect in the will? That is the really important question.

A defect in the thinking is not of such tremendous importance. Most defects are really defects in the will; for even when you find a defect in the thinking, you must look carefully to see to what extent this defect in thinking is really a defect in will: When someone thinks too rapidly or too slowly, the thoughts themselves may be quite correct; the trouble is that the will which works in the dove-tailing of the thoughts into each other is faulty. We must be able to discover in all such cases how far the will is a factor. One can really only be sure that there is a defect in thinking when, independently of the will, deformations of thought, sense-delusions, make their appearance. These then arise quite unconsciously in the human being in the process of relating himself to the outer world. The mental picture itself becomes irregular, or we have something like “fixed ideas”, where the very fact that they are fixed ideas lifts them out of the sphere of the will. It is therefore most important we should take pains to discern whether in a particular case we have to do with a defect in the will or a defect in the thinking. Defects in thinking fall for the most part into the strictly medical domain. In the education of incompletely developed children, we have mainly to do with defects of the will.

And now look how the entire being of man plays into his development! You can appreciate this from the description we have been giving. Take the first seven years. There may be defects due to heredity. It is during this period that such defects come particularly into consideration. But now, a hereditary defect should not be regarded in the terribly mistaken way in which it is regarded by modern science; it does not fall to our lot by chance, but as a karmic necessity. Out of our own lack of knowledge—in the spiritual world, of course—we have chosen a defective body, one that is defective as the result of the generations. The existence of defective forces of heredity means that before conception there was a lack of knowledge of the human organisation. Before a human being comes down to Earth, he must have an exact knowledge of the human organism; otherwise he cannot enter into this organism in the right way during the first seven years, neither can he transform it rightly. The knowledge about the inner organisation of man which we acquire between death and a new birth is infinite in comparison with the scraps of knowledge that have been acquired by external observation and are to be found in the physiology or histology of today. (As for the latter, it really amounts to nothing at all!) The knowledge which we have between death and a new birth and which then sinks down into the body, and is forgotten because it sinks down, a knowledge that does not direct itself, with the help of the senses, to the outer world—this knowledge is immeasurably great; it is however impaired if, in an earlier life, we neglected to develop interest in our surroundings or were prevented from doing so.

Suppose one day a civilisation were to arise that confined human beings in rooms, keeping them there from morning till evening, so that they were debarred from taking any interest at all in the outer world. What would be the result? These human beings would of course by such a process be precluded from acquiring any knowledge of the outer world; and this would mean that when they passed afterwards through death and came into the spiritual world, they would be insufficiently equipped for getting to know the human organism in this spiritual world (where all is contained); with the result that when they descended again to Earth, they would come down with far less knowledge than one who had in his previous life acquired the faculty for looking out upon his surroundings with free, open perception.

There is another secret connected with this. You go through the world. You think perhaps, as you go through the world, that a single day is of little importance. And so it is for ordinary consciousness, but not for that which is building the unconscious within this ordinary consciousness. If for one single day, as you go through the world, you observe the world intently and carefully, then this gives you already the preliminary condition for knowledge of all that is contained in the body of man. For what is outer world in Earthly life is spiritual inner world in life beyond the Earth. And we shall have to speak further of the results that cannot but ensue from our present civilisation, and of how it comes about that children are born defective. Those human beings who live shut off from the world today will all of them at some time or other come down with a lack of knowledge of the human organism, and they will choose ancestors who would otherwise have remained barren. It will be precisely those parents who tend to beget sick or feeble bodies who will be chosen, while those who would be capable of producing good bodies will remain sterile. Yes, it is actually so: it depends upon the whole development of a particular epoch, how a generation, when it descends again to birth, will be formed and built.

When we look at a young child, we must see what it is in this child that has come from the previous earthly life. We must understand why he chooses organs that are diseased in consequence of the forces of heredity; and again, why he works himself into this body with an incompletely developed individuality. Think of the many possibilities that exist for a child, in this first period up to the change of teeth, owing to the fact that what has come down is not always quite able to cope with what it finds before it. There is the possibility, let us say, of the child having a good model that has been well developed in the liver; but because the individuality is incapable of understanding what is contained in the liver, the development of the same (upon the model provided) during the second life-period is incomplete, and we have, in consequence, a very significant defect of will. Precisely in a case where the development of the liver has not been complete in this second period, has not been in accordance with the good development of the model, we find a defect in the will. The child has will, but does not get to the point of carrying it out; the will remains in the thinking. As soon as ever the child has begun to do something, he immediately begins to will something else. The will gets “stuck”, it is transfixed. For you must know that the liver is not merely the organ modern physiology describes; it is pre-eminently the organ that gives the human being the courage to transform a deed which has been thought of into an accomplished deed.

Imagine a man who sees a tram about to start, and knows that he has to go to Basle, but at the last minute cannot get into the tram. There are people like this! Something holds him back, he does not reach the point of getting in. This kind of stoppage of the will may sometimes reveal itself in most curious ways. But wherever it occurs, there is invariably a subtle defect of the liver. The liver is the mediator which enables an idea that has been resolved upon, to be transformed into an action carried out by the limbs. In point of fact, every organ is there in the body for the purpose of acting as mediator for something to come about.

I was once told about a certain young man who had an illness of this kind. He would be waiting for a tram; but when the tram came, he would suddenly stop short and not get in. Nobody knew why, he did not know himself. He simply stood there, rooted to the spot. What was the cause of this condition? It was a very complicated affair. The young man's father was a philosopher. He had divided the faculties of the soul, in a rather singular manner, into ideas, judgments (or conclusions) and the forces of “sympathy” and “antipathy”. He did not reckon the will among the powers of the soul. The will was omitted in his enumeration—from sheer desire on his part, to be honest and not to put forward more than revealed itself clearly to his consciousness. He carried this to such a point that it became perfectly natural to him to have no mental concept of the will at all. Then, at a comparatively advanced age in life, he had a son. By perpetually ignoring the will he, the father, had implanted into the liver an inclination not to transform subjective intentions into deed. This came out in the son as an illness! And now you can see why the individuality of the son chose this man for his father. The individuality of the son had no understanding of how to cope with the inner organisation of the liver; so he chose a constitution in which he need not trouble himself about the liver, a constitution in which the liver was lacking in the very function he had himself failed to bring down. You have here a very striking instance of the need to look also into karma, if we want to understand the child.

This is what I wanted to say to begin with, and tomorrow at the same hour we will continue.

• 1. The first two anthroposophical homes for handicapped children.
• 2. A drawing was made.

My dear Friends,

It is, as you know, my dear friends, our intention to work things out here from their foundations, in order then to pass on afterwards to the practical side. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the ordinary, superficial life of soul has to be regarded as a complex of symptoms, and no more. It follows from this that, if we want to get at the real state of affairs that lies behind a so-called mental illness or mental weakness in some child, modern methods of approach are quite inadequate, for they can only describe how things are in this superficial soul-life, without being able to lead on to what lies deeper—that is to say, to the region where, as we saw yesterday, the real life of soul is working. We cannot here enter into the question of how mental illnesses in grown-up people should be dealt with (there are indeed always, as you know, problems of many kinds connected with that), but we do want, in this course, to make a thorough study of what it is possible to do with children.

Before going further into the subject, I would like to read you an article from this newspaper that gives a crude example of how misleading an observation of the superficial life of soul can be. (I use the word “superficial” in the sense of locality, not in a derogatory sense.) It is an example that will have special significance for you, in view of the tasks that you are undertaking.

A man of the name of Wulffen,¹ who was once Public Prosecutor, has made a study, from the standpoint of criminal psychology, of all kinds of mental abnormalities, and has written big books on the subject. How does he reach his conclusions? For he obviously does not take his start from professional medicine. In his capacity as Public Prosecutor he naturally became familiar with a wide field of abnormalities in the life of soul, and afterwards at a more mature age, he set out to acquire a somewhat miscellaneous knowledge of medicine. He then combined his experience in his profession with his subsequent reading, and evolved a theory which is nothing else than the inevitable outcome of the so-called “scientific” hypotheses of today. For either we take this modern scientific point of view seriously, in which case we are bound eventually to come to the conclusions arrived at by Wulffen, or we do not take it seriously, and then nothing remains but to take our start from Anthroposophy. An intermediate way can never be anything but a questionable compromise.

Wulffen recently gave a lecture in Zürich dealing with the subject of criminal psychology, in which he spoke about abnormality in the life of the soul. It is important that we should pay attention to what is said in such a lecture, for we are in fact in these days continually coming up against the very same kind of thing. If you set out to think about any knowledge you have gained from looking into some modern scientific book, or into any book that is based on the scientific way of thinking, you will find it full of the forms and modes of thought which this man Wulffen voices in a particularly radical way. And you really ought to know whither modern science must inevitably lead when it begins to investigate the field of abnormal soul-life. Before I read the press notice let me tell you that Wulffen himself is a much more able man, and much more correct in his statements, than the journalist who is reporting his lecture. The journalist can only make fun of it, which he is free to do, since he has still the public behind him—thanks be!—in his prejudice against psychiatry and criminal psychology. The tone in which the report is written need not therefore concern you; the journalist, as I said, is not a man of much ability and can do no more than ridicule the whole thing. He has, however, no idea that his jests are a hit at modern science rather than at Wulffen! For if the science upon which Wulffen takes his stand were honestly adhered to, its representatives in other fields of knowledge would have to speak in the very same way as he does. And now let us read this press notice—for it really does concern us. It is entitled: “Schiller according to the Psycho-Analysis of the Public Prosecutor”. It should rather be called: “Friedrich Schiller, according to the Psycho-Analysis of present-day Psychology or Psycho-pedagogy”.

Last Friday, 29th February, I924, the Public Prosecutor Dr. E. W. Wulffen, a man known and respected far outside his immediate profession, took severely to task the penniless Swabian, Fritz Schiller (at one time Professor of History in Jena and the author of several revolutionary writings) in a brilliantly constructed lecture on “Criminal Psychology and Friedrich Schiller”. He achieved among the large number of listeners belonging to the Zürich Lawyers' Union a success all the more lasting because, on account of death, the accused was unable to be present at the meeting; the utmost he could do was perhaps to point with an invisible hand to what he had written during his lifetime.

Wullfen's arguments were most effective. The proofs adduced were irrefutable. The lecturer had even confiscated—I mean, had read—Schiller's private correspondence. And, lo and behold, thanks to Dr. Wulffen's help, scales fell from the eyes of the audience. Our people's love for Schiller, youth's adoration for him, were laid bare in all their ugly roots. Schiller is popular, it seems, on account of his innate cruelty which makes wallowing in the gloomy splendor of the horrible come natural to him, and causes him to write ballads like “Die Kindesmörderin”, etc., which are evidence enough of a cruelty that is continually intensified by Schiller's struggle with his own sick body. And then his tragedies, which stimulate fear and compassion in the spectators why are they so effective on the stage? Because they appeal to latent criminal qualities in the public and enable the audience to enjoy a safe outlet for dangerous propensities ...

It is true that in spite of this overwhelming load of proof Wulffen concedes to Schiller certain redeeming features. There is his feeling for freedom, which, nursed by the suppression he laboured under in earlier years (associated, as it was in him, with an inferiority complex) suddenly flares up in “The Robbers”, and is then gradually purified and ennobled, until finally in “Wilhelm Tell” we have the glorification of a revolution that is founded on order. For the rest, Schiller's attitude to good and evil is seen to be the outcome of aesthetic points of view.

Thus are the arteries which feed Schiller's poetry quickly detected by Dr. Wulffen and defined; they are—cruelty and the urge for freedom. The struggle with these impulses, which Schiller lived out in his poetry—this it was, so we are assured, that led him along the path to perfection.²

So there was, then, in Schiller an “inferiority complex”—in his childhood. It is quite important to realise what the outcome would be if modern science were to enter the realm of pedagogy, and teachers were then to give lessons in the manner of this science—let us say, in a school where some young Schiller was among the pupils. You must envisage quite exactly what this would mean.

If you think of what was said yesterday, you will see that, just as we have to take, in other illnesses, the symptoms, that help us to find the right orientation, and then lead back from these to the real facts of the illness, so we must start in our present investigation from the manifestations of the life of soul, from thinking, feeling and willing, and trace our way back until we can “behold” the real condition of the patient. We saw that the origin, for example, of an abnormality of soul, which showed itself in the patient's being unable to pass from intention to deed, had to be sought in some subtle abnormality of the liver, and that the knowledge of this connection must form the starting point for our treatment, both educational and therapeutic.

And now, before we can pass on to consider the practical side in detail, we must look back once again at the life of soul of the child. We have seen how during the first seven years the body presents a model, and the individuality works out in accordance with this model the second body, which functions between the change of teeth and puberty. If the individuality is stronger than the inherited qualities, the child will overcome these—more or less—in the course of changing his teeth; his individuality will then be apparent in his whole life of soul, and will manifest also externally in his bodily nature. If, however, the individuality of the child is weak, it will be overcome by the inherited characteristics; it will give, as it were, such close attention to the model that a slavish copy of the same will be visible in the body. And then one can rightly speak of inherited characteristics. For between the change of teeth and puberty everything is as it results from the individuality; the reason why it can happen that inherited characteristics show themselves at all during this period, is because the individuality has been to that extent too weak to overcome them and follow its own line of direction in accordance with karma. What works in the individuality as the real impulse of karma shows itself overpowered in such a case by the inherited characteristics.

Now at this point we must observe—and it will also provide us with what I may describe as a symptomatology of more general application—we must observe how thinking is related in its development to the development of will, in the child. We saw yesterday that there is a certain sense in which we have to look upon thinking, feeling and willing as no more than symptoms. We saw that thinking, as it expresses itself in the superficial soul-life, has behind it a synthesizing activity which operates in the construction and organisation of the brain; and then we saw how behind expressions of will is an analytical activity which underlies the organs—underlies indeed our whole metabolism-and-limbs man, keeping the organs separate and distinct one from another.

To begin with, let us consider thinking, with the synthesizing activity of the brain, that underlies it. We must understand clearly what thoughts really are. Thoughts, as we know, enter the organism of the child, as it were, in snatches, bit by bit. Even the grown person has around him only in scattered fragments, so to speak, all that man is capable of thinking. One person will have a great wealth of thoughts, another will have less. But now, what are thoughts?

The modern view, which tends to degenerate into the conclusions you find in people like Wulffen, imagines that thoughts come into existence gradually in the human being, as he progresses in his development, and that when he succeeds in having thoughts that “answer” in the world, that fit in all right with the world, then these thoughts he has evolved, of course, out of himself. But if we investigate, with anthroposophical understanding, the being of man, we shall never succeed in discovering in him anything from which thoughts can arise. All investigations which set out to discover where thoughts could originate in man are, in the eyes of Spiritual Science, no more sensible than if someone who had a jug of milk given him every morning were to begin one day to ponder, in his cleverness, how the china of which the jug is made produces the milk. It might conceivably happen that he had never observed how the milk does get into the jug; but if he could start wondering how the milk manages to ooze out of the china, we should take him for a simpleton indeed. To assume such a possibility in regard to a milk jug is obviously to adopt a hypothesis which leads to an absurdity. And yet, in regard to thinking, science makes this very hypothesis; science is just as stupid, every bit as stupid as the fellow we have imagined. For when we set out to investigate with all the means afforded by Spiritual Science (and we have been speaking of these now for more than twenty years), we find nothing at all in the human organisation that could possibly produce thoughts. There is simply nothing there capable of doing it. Just as the milk must be poured into the jug in order to be in the jug, so for thought to be in man, they must come into him. And whence do they come—for the life we are considering, between birth and death? Where are thoughts? We can investigate the question of where milk comes from; we ought also to be able to discover where thoughts are. Where then shall we look for these thoughts.

We are surrounded by the physical world. But we have around us also the etheric world, from which, as you know, our own etheric body is taken, immediately before we descend to physical incarnation. The etheric body of man comes from the cosmic ether, which is all around us in every direction. Now it is this cosmic ether, my dear friends, that is the bearer of the thoughts. The cosmic ether, which is common to all, carries within it the thoughts; there they are within it, those living thoughts of which I have repeatedly spoken in our anthroposophical lectures, telling you how the human being participates in them in pre-earthly life before he comes down to Earth. There, in the cosmic ether, are contained all the living thoughts there are; and never are they received from the cosmic ether during the life between birth and death. No; the whole store of living thought that man holds within him, he receives at the moment when he comes down from the spiritual world—when, that is, he leaves his own living element, his own element of living thought, and descends and forms his ether body. Within this ether body, within that which is the building and organising force in man, are the living thoughts; there they are, there they still are.

If we have here the symptomatic life of soul—thinking, feeling and willing—and here behind, the real life of soul, then the thoughts constitute a part of this real life of soul: and these thoughts which we take from the universal cosmic ether build up in us, first of all, our brain, and then in the wider sense, our whole nerves-and-senses system. For it is the living thinking that forms our brain—forming it into an organ of demolition, an organ that deals with matter in a way we might describe somewhat as follows.

When we look out upon our environment, we have around us the world of earthly substance, in all its various processes and ways of working. These processes, which in Nature are living processes, are gradually broken down by the activity of the living thinking, so that here—in the brain—a continual demolition is going on; the processes—which are, as I said, Nature processes—are arrested. Thus, in the brain, a beginning is actually made in the direction of a stoppage of Nature processes; matter is continually being secreted and then falling away. The matter that has fallen away, the matter that has been excreted and become useless, is the nerves. And the nerves, arising in this way as a product of living thinking but with the life in them being perpetually killed all the time, become in consequence endowed with a faculty that resembles the faculty possessed by a mirror. They acquire the faculty of enabling the thoughts of the surrounding ether to be reflected in them; and this is the origin of subjective thinking, the superficial thinking which consists in reflected pictures, the thinking we carry within us between birth and death. Through the fact, therefore, that living thinking is active within us, we are enabled to hold up our nerves-and-senses system to the world like a mirror, and can then produce there pictures of the impressions that are living in the surrounding ether, and throw them back into our consciousness. This means that the thinking, and the forming of mental pictures, which belongs to the superficial life of soul is nothing else than the reflection of the thoughts that live in the cosmic ether.

When you compare yourself with your reflection in a mirror, you realise at once that you are something altogether different from that reflected picture. Similarly, you can compare thoughts with their reflections, and you will find that the latter are “dead” thinking, just as the picture of you in the mirror is dead, whilst you yourself, standing in front of it, are alive. There cannot ever be in the cosmic ether a distorted, an illogical or a deranged thought. Yet the thoughts that are contained in the ordinary, superficial life of soul are, as we have seen, reflections of the thoughts in the cosmic ether; how, then, does a deranged or senseless thought come about? How can it ever arise? The answer is, through the mirror not being in order. The whole process that originated in the structure of the brain has not succeeded in producing a perfect mirror. In order, therefore, to explain the presence of distorted thoughts, we have to go back to what takes place in the brain and the nerves-and-senses system, which the human being constructed for himself from the real living life of thought. It is most important to be clear from the outset that it is not the thoughts themselves that we can in any way assail; for the thought-content as such, the thoughts themselves, are in the cosmic ether in their full validity and truth.

We must make every endeavour to enable the pupil with whom we are dealing, who has been given into our charge, to find his right relation to this cosmic ether. We shall never do so unless we, as teachers, are permeated through and through with the feeling that the thoughts in all their rightness and in all the power of their livingness are contained in the cosmic ether, are present all the time in the cosmic ether. Without having ourselves this religious feeling towards the cosmos, we cannot possibly develop a right attitude towards the child. And the attitude, the whole relation that we bear to him, is what matters most of all. Let me explain why this is so.

What is it that is influencing the child, and what is it that is living in the child, when he gets distorted thoughts? And what is able then to work from the teacher upon the child? What can the teacher do? From all that I have said, you will be able to see that in such a child the etheric body has not been formed in the right way. When the human being is descending from pre-earthly existence, there are of course, at that moment, as always, only right and true thoughts in the cosmic ether; but these right thoughts have to be received by the being who is providing himself, clothing himself, with an ether body. And now let us go back to our milk jug. We cannot accuse the milk of having a wrong form or shape: it is obliged to take on the form that the jug can give it. If we have a sensible vessel, then our milk will be properly and sensibly “housed” in it. But suppose it occurred to an eccentric person to make a milk jug like an hour glass with the waist stopped up. [A drawing was made.] He pours in the milk and it cannot get down to the bottom. And yet, in reckoning up the cubic content of the jug, he reckons in all this part down below! I have given you an extreme case. All sorts of mistakes are, in fact, possible. One could, for example, make a jug that very easily tips over, and more often than not, the milk is spilt. The point is, of course, that the way in which the milk will be in the jug, will depend upon what the jug is like. And the way in which the ether body with all its livingness will be in the human being, will depend upon how the human being—as he arrives from pre-earthly existence, bringing with him his karma—is able to receive into himself the ether body. It is important to recognise this and have it in our consciousness.

It can actually happen that a human being, owing to his karma, arrives from pre-earthly existence with something that is not at all unlike this very inadequate milk jug. For his karma may not enable him, for instance, to permeate the metabolism-and-limbs system properly. This system will then be poorly provided with etheric body. The child will have in the region of the head a properly developed etheric body, and in the region of the abdomen and limbs, a poorly developed etheric body. In these parts he will lack the formative thoughts. It is actually most important for you to know that in very many cases of backward children we have to do with an imperfectly developed etheric body. And we teachers must ask ourselves the question: What is it that can influence the etheric body of a growing child?

Here we encounter a law, of the working of which we have abundant evidence throughout all education. It is as follows. Any one member of the being of man is influenced by the next higher member (from whatever quarter it approaches) and only under such influence can that member develop satisfactorily. Thus, whatever is to be effective for the development of the physical body must be living in the etheric body—in an etheric body. Whatever is to be effective for the development of an etheric body must be living in an astral body. Whatever is to be effective for the development of an astral body must be living in an ego; and an ego can be influenced only by what is living in a spirit-self. I could continue, and go beyond the spirit-self, but there we should be entering the field of esoteric instruction.

What does this mean in practice? If you find that the etheric body of a child is in some way weakened or deficient, you must form, you must modify, your own astral body in such a way that it can work upon the etheric body of the child, correcting and amending it. We could, in fact, make a diagram to demonstrate how this principle works in education:

The teacher's etheric body (and this should follow quite naturally as a result of his training) must be able to influence the physical body of the child, and the teacher's astral body the etheric body of the child. The ego of the teacher must be able to influence the astral body of the child. And now you will be rather taken aback, for we come next to the spirit-self of the teacher, and you will be thinking that surely the spirit-self is not yet developed. Nevertheless, such is the law. The spirit-self of the teacher must work upon the ego of the child. And I will show you how, not only in the ideal teacher, but often in the very worst possible teacher, the teacher's spirit-self—of which he is himself not yet in the least conscious—influences the child's ego. Education is indeed veiled in many mysteries.

What concerns us at the moment is that the weakened etheric body of the child must receive the influence of the teacher's health-giving astral body. How is the astral body of the educator to be “educated” for this purpose? Self-educated too, as it needs must be today! For Anthroposophy can at present do no more than give suggestion and stimulus; we cannot right away establish colleges and arrange courses for all the necessary branches of training. The astral body of the teacher must be of such a character and quality that he is able to have an instinctive understanding for whatever debilities there may be in the child's etheric body. Say, the child's etheric body is weak and deficient in the region of the liver. As a result, we shall notice that the child stops short at intention, he cannot get beyond it; it constantly happens that he has an impulse of will, but the impulse comes to a standstill before the actual deed. If the teacher can feel his way right into this situation (where the child's will ought to push through to deed), if he is able himself to feel the stoppage that the child feels, and able at the same time out of his own energy to evoke in his soul a deep compassion with the child's experience, then he will develop in his own astral body an understanding for the situation the child is in, and will gradually succeed in eliminating in himself all subjective reaction of feeling when faced with this phenomenon in the child. By ridding himself of every trace of subjective reaction, the teacher educates his own astral body.

Let us say, the child wants to walk, has the will to walk, but cannot. This can become a pathological condition, can become quite conspicuous; it may even happen that at last the child comes to be described as “incapable of learning to walk”. But we will suppose that the condition shows itself in only a slight degree. So long as the teacher meets the situation with any kind of bias, so long as it can arouse in him irritation or excitement—so long will he remain incapable of making any real progress with the child. Not until the point has been reached where such a phenomenon becomes an objective picture and can be taken with a certain calm and composure as an objective picture for which nothing but compassion is felt—not until then is the necessary mood of soul present in the astral body of the teacher. Once this has come about, the teacher is there by the side of the child in a true relation and will do all else that is needful more or less rightly. For you have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is, as teacher.

How may one set about acquiring this kind of understanding? By developing greater and greater interest in the mystery of the human organisation. All sense of its mystery—in fact, any real interest in the organisation of man—is completely lacking in present-day civilisation; consequently, one thing present-day civilisation does not know ...³

Suppose someone is suffering from severe mental disease. How is that regarded in our time? For obviously whatever is done in such a case has to be done within the civilisation of the present day; there is no alternative. This will mean that while we must do our best to come to an understanding of such illnesses, we cannot expect to be able at once in each single case to use methods and treatment that accord with the picture we have in our understanding. It is, on this account, very important that there shall be no fanatics among you. It will not do for you to set out on this work of Curative Education in a fanatical spirit, not knowing how to judge the scope and bearing of some truth, when it is a question of applying esoteric knowledge in practical life. For this reason the circles within which these truths are communicated cannot be too carefully restricted; for people of the present day have not the insight to see why, in very many cases, it is quite impossible to follow at once some particular guidance that has been given. We must know the truth, and then try to act wisely and sensibly, applying the guidance where it can be applied, as in the education of backward children, within the given limits. In dealing with adult mental patients you will not be able to apply the guidance in the same way; for something extraneous comes in there—namely, the law. And the moment you have to reckon with factors other than those that arise out of the nature of the case, the moment you have to do with hard and fast laws, the thing becomes unworkable. For what the law lays down is general; it cannot be individual in its application, it has to be general. So far as treatment of abnormal human beings is concerned, the law is a veritable poison. It is there in the world, however, and you have to reckon with it. The things of which we are speaking here cannot be applied fanatically; you have to let them percolate into life, in ways that are possible and practicable.

Let us suppose then that you have this person who is said to be suffering from grave mental illness. You can, as is generally done nowadays, describe the case psychographically—that is, describe the symptoms. According to the view of the case that is certain to be adopted in our present-day civilisation, the person does the maddest possible things. But people do not stop to consider what they may have before them in this mad person! As a matter of fact, it may quite well be that the person who is now passing his life in complete insanity has had in earlier ages a very significant incarnation, he may at one time have been a genius. But suppose this manifestation of genius came two incarnations ago and then, in the intermediate incarnation, the man was imprisoned when comparatively young, and had from that moment on no contact with the world. He passed then through the gate of death, and lived on further in the spiritual world. Then he appeared again on Earth—insane. Because what he took in during that incarnation remained completely outside the field of experience of the physical and the etheric body, he had not the opportunity of elaborating it, and therefore returns to incarnation in entire ignorance of the interior of the human body. He cannot get into the physical body and ether body, he remains outside them all the time; and so, being unable to make use of the physical body, he is, you see, insane. His manner of life is such that we shall not be able to see him as he really is, until we look right away from his physical and his etheric body and give our attention to his astral body and ego.

Let us now imagine, we have such a person before us in childhood. There will be a constant effort on the part of the child to come into the physical and into the etheric body, and then again, he will experience a resistance, he will be pushed back. It may very well be that owing to the predetermined conditions some of the organs are not in order. Imagine you have here physical body and etheric body.⁴ The astral body and ego want to come in. And they do come in, everywhere, but here they do not enter in a proper and orderly manner. They have to make a special effort. Every time, they want, let us say, to penetrate liver and stomach, the astral body and ego have to make an effort. And now this effort works itself out—regulates itself, as it were, in a curious way. A kind of rhythm is set up, an abnormal rhythm. At one moment the ego strengthens itself, then it become feeble again. So that we find in the child this alternation—first, a strong liver-stomach feeling, and then, before this has come to consciousness, a weakened liver-stomach feeling. The child oscillates continually between the two. And the consequence is, he has not, as it were, time to make use of his body in the so-called normal way. For he could make use of the body only if this rhythm were not present and astral body and ego were able to take possession of the several organs quietly.

How can we learn to recognise and understand such a condition? It will help us to do so, if we look at the whole process in somewhat the following way.

Imagine you have before you a clever man, an exceedingly clever man—but a man who is definitely not a watchmaker. It happens one day that he is in the predicament of having to mend his watch, which has stopped. Instead of mending it, he completely ruins it. That does not gainsay the fact that he is an exceedingly clever man. He fails, not from lack of cleverness, but because he has not sufficient mastery of the situation. Similarly genius may, under certain circumstances, fail and come to grief, when descending from pre-earthly to earthly existence. Only, in this case the failure is not so quickly finished with, but lasts for the whole of that earthly life.

There is a real call to us here to look with love upon the soul-and-spirit nature that descends from the spiritual world, to look with love upon it, even where it comes to expression in so-called insanity—yes, to look with love upon the very details of the insanity. And then we shall feel impelled to go beyond the symptomatology that can furnish a psychography of the case, and look rather at the karmic connections into which this insane human being comes. We shall have to observe his relation with the outer world, and note carefully the situations of life into which he comes, for these are incredibly interesting. And then, watching all this objectively, we shall find that insanity is really something that can arouse our deepest interest. We shall see in it a distorted image of the highest wisdom; it will be for us like the opening of a door from the direction of the spiritual world—though the spiritual world has then to come in through a rather twisted and contorted passage of entry! And as our interest in the whole process grows—without of course becoming sensational—the particular abnormalities will become deeply and inwardly interesting to us. Suppose an abnormality gets hold of the physical and the ether body and a rhythm such as I have described is set up: first, a powerful development of astral and ego activity, so that physical body and etheric body are taken hold of strongly; then, that is all reversed, and the activity of astral and ego becomes weak again. Suppose there is this rhythm, and we come to the point of being able to observe what happens, first in the moment when firm hold is taken of the physical and etheric bodies, and then again in the moment when this hold is weakened. If we are able also to enter into the experience the child goes through inwardly, entering into it with a great capacity of love, it can come about that, as time goes on, the rhythm is overcome, and that then as a result of it all, liver and stomach are gripped with quite unusual intensity—and behold, the child begins to do things that are a manifestation of genius! Otherwise the condition has to remain as it is until these things can be adjusted in the further life between death and a new birth. For it is indeed true, and we must be conscious of the fact: in educating backward children we are intervening in a process which in the normal course of development—were there no intervention, or were there misguided intervention—would find its fulfilment only when the child had passed through the gate of death and come to birth again in the next life. We are making, that is to say, a deep intervention in karma. Whenever we give treatment to a backward child, we are intervening in karma. And it goes without saying, we must intervene in karma in this way. For there is such a thing as right intervention. Certain prejudices in these matters need to be overcome. How necessary that is, let me demonstrate to you from another example.

In the Agricultural Course at Koberwitz,⁵ at which one or two of those here were also present, I indicated guiding lines for agriculture. An elderly farmer attended the course, who is also an old member of the Society. Throughout the whole of the course he could not rid himself of a feeling of misgiving; it kept coming out in the discussions. Again and again he would say: “But if we do that, we shall be using occult means for practical ends; won't that be steering too close to the sphere of ethics? Could not these truths be applied also in a wrong way?” He was never able to get rid of this scruple; he was always suspicious of black magic in the application. Needless to say, these things do become black magic when they are not handled as they ought to be handled. And it was for this reason that I said once on that occasion quite explicitly: “A high standard of morality is absolutely essential in dealing with these matters; therefore I assume at the outset that those who attend this course attend it on purely ethical grounds, desirous only to serve humanity and help agriculture. The Agricultural Experimental Circle has accordingly to be regarded also as an ethical circle, which definitely sets itself the task of seeing that the truths are applied in the right and proper way.” The Gods use magic, and the difference between white and black magic consists only in this: in white magic one intervenes in a moral, selfless way, and in black magic in an immoral, selfish way. There is no other difference. And so, in the nature of the case, since all talk about education of backward children is mere talk and leads to nothing, obviously this education can only be effective when it uses measures which are capable also of immoral application. And that brings us once again to the imperative need for a deep sense of responsibility.

If only one could count upon a more serious sense of responsibility, one could at this time do a great deal. I must, however, frankly admit that silence has to be maintained today about many things, just because conscientiousness is not sufficiently developed. When people hear that this can be done, and that can be done—they want to do it! An eagerness to be doing something—that they have. But that is not enough. As soon as it comes to the doing of a real deed, and no mere continuation of some old impulse, as soon as it is a question of bringing in new impulses from the spiritual world—and that is what is needed, new impulses from the spiritual world!—then it becomes imperative to demand a high standard of conscientiousness and responsibility. And there is only one way in which these can be awakened in us, namely, that we have knowledge of what is really involved. Thus, we must know that in the education of backward children it is a matter of deep intervention in karmic activities which would otherwise come to fulfilment between death and the next birth. It is actually so: what is done by us now, intervenes in the work of God which would otherwise be brought to fulfilment at a later time. If we are not satisfied for this to remain merely a piece of theoretical knowledge, if we are ready to let it work powerfully upon our minds and hearts, then we shall find ourselves continually faced with the alternative of doing what has to be done or of leaving it undone. Let us never forget that every step taken at the prompting of the spiritual world leads us into a situation where we have to look right and left, and make a new decision—and these decisions that are continually facing us have to be made with courage, with inner courage of life.

In ordinary life, man is protected from the necessity of this inner courage, for in ordinary life he can simply continue doing what he has been accustomed to do. He can jog on in conformity with the motives and standards that are so deeply rooted in him, taking for granted that these are correct, and feeling no necessity to adopt new ones. This answers quite well for the life that proceeds merely in the physical world. But when we come to working out of spiritual sources, we are inevitably confronted, daily and hourly, with decisions; in regard to each single action, we stand face to face with the possibility of either doing it or leaving it undone—or else maintaining an entirely neutral attitude. And the decisions require courage. This inner courage is the very first thing needed, if we want to accomplish anything in the domain of Curative Education. And it can be aroused in us if we hold continually before our minds the greatness of that which we have undertaken. We must be constantly thinking: “I am doing something which generally God does in the life between death and new birth.” The fact that you know this is of untold significance. Receive it as a meditation. To be able to think it, is most important. If we bring it before us every day in meditation—as one says a prayer every day—if we place it there before our soul day by day, it will endow our astral body with the character and tone that we need to give it if we are to deal in the right way with backward children.

It is really only possible for us to go on in these lectures and speak together of further things, if we are ready to acknowledge that we must in this way prepare ourselves for the task before us. Therefore, let us resolve to take what has been said as a necessary introduction, providing the groundwork for what follows; and let us ponder it with all earnestness. For in approaching tasks like those of which we are speaking here, it is indeed a matter of undergoing preparation of mind and heart.

• 1. Erich Wulffen, b. 1862, author and criminologist.
• 2. From Neue Züricher Zeitung, No. 342, 7th March, 1924.
• 3. A gap occurs here in the text.
• 4. A drawing was made.
• 5. A course held at the Estate of Count Carl Keyserlink near Breslau, 7th – 16th June, 1924.

We have been speaking of the connection between etheric body, physical body, astral body and ego organisation, and of different ways in which this connection may manifest in the so-called abnormal child. We explained yesterday how the etheric body can be abnormally formed as a result of its not being in right correspondence with the thought-system of the World Ether, and we went on to show how this can lead to irregularities in many different directions. If you can grasp this, then the conviction may also be brought home to you in the course of these lectures that while the mood of soul with which you approach your task as educators is the same for all, you will yet have to find the method of treatment for almost every single child individually. But you must first have some knowledge—and it is important to realise that the whole of modern psychiatry can have no true knowledge of so-called illnesses of the soul. When once we learn to recognise these illnesses for what they really are, then we can go on to consider methods of treatment in detail. It is, therefore, a matter of less importance for you to receive advice of particular measures to be adopted. What is of far greater importance is that you should come to see how in this domain too, sound pathological knowledge, sound diagnosis, lead of themselves into therapy.

Now, as you know, many cases of so-called mental disease are of such a nature that, for reasons which you will understand as you follow these lectures, they cannot be healed—or at any rate could be healed only under conditions extremely difficult to provide. And this would still be true if one were able to call in the help of Spiritual Science. For, in order to treat these illnesses, we would need, in the first place, to have our own sanatoria; and even then the healing of adult patients would still be attended with extraordinary difficulty. I am thinking here of illnesses of a particular kind, and especially of those cases that have important bearing on our work with children. On the other hand, you will come to see that help can most decidedly be given in such forms of illness in childhood, by a right educational treatment; and we shall find that in an illness which is one of the most difficult of all to treat in adults, namely epilepsy—if a patient is brought to us in early childhood and we are able to acquire a correct perception of how it stands with the illness, then there is good ground for anticipating very considerable improvement; indeed the illness may in some cases be got rid of altogether. When once we understand how to make the transition from what underlies the illness to what ought to be done, we shall find our way, in any particular case, to the right measures. But it is essential first of all to know what underlies the illness, to know how it has come about.

Modern psychiatry cannot help us here, for the reason that the men of our time have no notion that there is such a thing as a real ego organisation or a real astral body. The existence even of the etheric body is still widely denied—although science is in fact pressing forward today from the physical to recognition and knowledge of the organic and etheric. I will not stress names but when some people advance theories like those of Driesch¹ they show that they have no knowledge of the ether body because they are afraid of it. But the very thing that is of first importance for us to know, when we set out to understand these illnesses, simply cannot be known, if we know nothing of the astral body and of the ego organisation. For we have to proceed with our investigation in the following way.

Take, first, the connection between physical body and etheric body. This connection is maintained throughout life, from conception, from the embryonic state, right until death; for it continues also through all the periods of sleep. On the other hand, the connection of these two with astral body and ego organisation is broken every time we fall asleep. Now it is essential for us to have a correct picture of how it is with ego organisation and astral body in the waking state, when they are within the physical and etheric bodies. An accurate perception of the particular way in which astral body and ego are membered into the physical and etheric bodies is indispensable if we are to be able to think intelligently about those who are suffering from so-called mental disease. It is commonly believed even among Anthroposophists—not that Anthroposophy, which is very precise in its statements, gives occasion for such a belief, but because it is so easy to cling to old and accustomed habits of thought—it is, I say, commonly believed that when the human being wakes up, his astral body and ego organisation go straight over into his physical body and etheric body, combining with them in very much the same way as hydrogen and oxygen combine in water. It is not like that. Seen clairvoyantly, it is like this² If we have here the physical body, and here the etheric body, then, at the time of awaking, the astral body does certainly come in, the ego organisation also comes in; yes, they come in, and one can perceive how astral body and ego organisation, entering in, proceed to lay hold of the physical and the ether body. But this is not all. For here we meet with a fact of human life that is of great importance.

Take first the ego organisation. When, at the moment of awaking, the ego organisation returns, it does not lay hold merely of the etheric body and physical body; within these, it lays hold of the external world, of the forces of the external world. What does this mean? Imagine we have here the force of gravity. It works in this direction. When we are awake, we stand up in the direction of the force of gravity.³ Picture to yourself gravity simply as a force working in this direction—the direction of the forces of weight. Now there are two ways of looking at the matter. Let us be quite clear about these two ways. The first is as follows. The ego, we could say, lays hold of the physical body (for the moment, we will leave the etheric body out of the picture), and the physical body adapts itself to gravity. We place ourselves, do we not, into the forces of gravity when we walk; we have to find our equilibrium, and so on. This is one possible way of looking at what happens: on awaking we lay hold of the physical body with our ego, and the physical body being heavy, being subject to the gravity of the earth, we are now subject with our physical body to the gravity of the earth, we are connected—indirectly, through the physical body—with the physical force of gravity. Seen from this point of view, it is something like what happens when I take up a book: the weight of the book connects me indirectly with the force of gravity. That, then, is one possible picture of the situation. It is however false, it is incorrect. Let us now consider the other. Here we have to see what takes place, in the following way. The ego slips into the physical body, lays hold of the physical body—slips in so far that it makes the physical body light. Through the ego's gliding into it, the physical body loses its weight. And so when I, as an awake human being, stand upright, then for my consciousness—for my ego, for my ego organisation which has also its physical expression in the warmth organism—gravity is overcome. There is no question here of the ego entering into indirect connection with gravity. The ego, the I, enters into direct connection, places itself as ego right into gravity, shutting the physical body completely out of the process. And that is how the matter really stands. When you walk, you place yourself, with your ego organisation, right into the actual gravity of the earth; and you do not do this via the physical body, you yourself enter into direct connection with the earthly.

It is the same with the etheric body. The etheric body too is inserted into forces. Take one of these forces. I have often drawn attention to the fact that we human beings, as we go about on the earth, are subject to a strong force of buoyancy. We have a brain which weighs, on the average, 1,500 grammes. If the whole weight of the brain were to press on its base, the delicate blood vessels of the latter would be crushed at once. The brain does not do this, but swims in the cerebral fluid and becomes thereby subject to a force of buoyancy. It loses as much of its weight as the weight of the fluid displaced. The fluid displaced weighs about 20 grammes less than the brain itself; therefore, the brain presses on its base with a weight only of 20 grammes. So we have a heavy brain that is however not borne down with its weight, but has buoyancy. In this buoyancy we live. Our ether body lives in the buoyancy. But when we with our ego organisation slip into our ether body, then our ego is within the buoyancy, not merely indirectly, but directly. We are in the buoyancy with our ego. Our human organisation stands, in fact, in connection with all the forces of the earth, with the whole physical world, and not indirectly, but directly.

Let us follow this out in more detail. Our ego organisation is connected, firstly, with gravity—that is, with the element of “earth”. For there is no such thing as what the physicists call matter. In reality there are only forces and the forces—as, for example, gravity (there are other forces too, of course; magnetic and electric forces are all alike in this, that the ego organisation is in direct connection with each one of them and, in the normal human being, is so during the whole of waking life. All that we include under the term “earth” is, really, these forces. Then the ego organisation stands in direct connection also with all that is comprised under the term “water” and is in a state of equilibrium; and it is moreover directly connected also with all that is of the nature of “air”, with all that is gaseous. You know how in physics one has to learn, in addition to ordinary mechanics, a hydro-mechanics and also an aero-mechanics, the reason being that the processes of equilibrium (in water) and the meteorological processes in the air have each their own peculiar character. Finally, the ego organisation is directly connected with a part of the all-pervading “warmth” through which we are continually moving as long as we live in the physical world.

I draw a line through the word “warmth”, because it is with a part of it only that the ego is connected. We wake up, and place ourselves with our ego organisation—place ourselves as spirit—into the world of earthly forces. Our connection with these forces is in reality not a physically mediated, but a magical connection, a magical connection however which can take effect only within a particular space—namely, within the boundaries of our organism. When you have begun to understand that this connection is not a physical, but a magical connection, then you have taken a good step forward.

Now let us pass on to the astral body. The astral body is also connected with certain forces that work upon us when we are awake, and here too the connection is direct—not indirect, not merely through the ether body. Among these forces we have again a part of the force of “warmth”. (You must remember, throughout, that the warmth element works in two directions; part of it reacts on the physical body, and part on the etheric body.) Then, the astral body is directly connected also with the forces of “light”. You must know however that what Spiritual Science speaks of as forces of light is not identical with what modern physics understands by the term. We do not want here to enter into a discussion of theories, but let me suggest the following. You look out upon the world around you, and perceive it all lit up. What enables you to do this? Something gives you the capacity to perceive the world illumined in this way, and it is something in the ether. Light is, in fact, an ether force. Modern science speaks of light as of something that is present where we see things illumined. Spiritual Science speaks of light in another way. It calls “light” that which underlies other sense-perceptions too; it speaks, for example, of the light of perceptions of sound. Present-day physics, when it speaks of perceptions of sound, is in reality speaking merely of their external correlate—namely, the vibration of the air. The movements in the air are but the medium of the real sound or tone, which is something etheric; the vibrating that goes on in the etheric brings about the vibration of the air. Light lives also in the perceptions of smell. In short, all perceptions have as their basis a light of a kind that is much more all-pervading than the light that is spoken of in the physics of the present day. I admit, people are liable to grow confused when we speak of light in this way. For, although it was so spoken of in ancient spiritual knowledge and even as late as the 12th and 13th centuries, all understanding of it was then lost and people began to use other names for it, which are still less intelligible! This is what makes all the alchemical books written after the 12th century so very difficult to follow. What is important for you, however, at the moment is to know that this is what we mean by “light”. Now the astral body is connected with this light; that is to say, it has direct relation—not indirect through the etheric body—with all that underlies sense-perception on the earth. This is a most interesting fact. Outside lives the light in the ether, but we have also the etheric within us. The light works upon our ether body. When we wake up, we not only come into connection with the light that is within us; but, turning aside as it were from the light that is within us, we member ourselves into the light that streams through the external world. It is the same with the external “chemical forces” that are at work in the world around us. Into these too we member ourselves, directly. And this is very important, for it means that, while he is awake, man is membered into a kind of cosmic chemistry. Modern science knows the chemistry of the lifeless, but has very little understanding of organic chemical processes; it has no knowledge at all of the chemistry that is a universal world-chemistry. And this cosmic chemistry it is, of which we become part and member when we awake from sleep. Similarly, we become part and member of the all-pervading cosmic life, the “life ether”—again, directly.

All that we have been describing—necessarily only in outline—has to be achieved, has to be brought to fulfilment, while the human being is gradually building up, first his second body, and then his third. He has to dive down into himself, and through very penetration of his own being, immerse himself at the same time in the earthly-cosmic forces, the earthly-cosmic active forces. Entering into himself, he must in so doing be able to lay hold of the world.

In one domain, and in one only, modern science has still a clear perception of how things really are. In its study of the organisation of the eye, physics proceeds in a way that one could only wish might be followed in many domains. The eye is regarded, as you know, in physics as a contrivance, a mechanism, an instrument that works in accordance with the laws of physics. In order to come to a clear comprehension of the eye, the physicist makes drawings of it, in which he demonstrates the refraction of light through a lens, the formation of the objective picture, and so forth—the very same kind of drawings as he would make for a mechanical instrument. What the physicist is unable to do is to pass on then to the way in which the element of soul enters into this mechanical instrument. The whole thing is exceedingly interesting. The physicists have before them this complete picture of the eye. But there they come to a standstill. What they would like to do is to find their way to the element of soul through the brain. Just look at all their queer somersaults in thought, all those interesting, but in fact nonsensical theories of psycho-physical parallelism or interaction! The truth is that the ego organisation and the astral body come straight into the physical eye itself, the eye that we can draw and describe; there, within the eye, the ego and astral body take immediate hold of the physical. Nevertheless, just in the case of the eye, the scientists do, as you see, come very near understanding the true state of affairs. They can, in fact, hardly help doing so, owing to the peculiar seclusion of the eye; for the eye lies almost outside the body, it is built in from without during embryonic development. And so, in the case of the eye, a certain measure of understanding is attained. But the fact is, what is thus seen to be true of the eye holds good for the whole human organism. The whole human organism has to be understood in the light of an inner physics, a spiritual physics, a physics that allows for the subtle, more fleeting light-forces to be added to the earthly forces. We must learn to recognise the presence within the human organisation of something which comes in reality from the environment, something of which the soul-and-spirit of man lays hold, directly, notwithstanding that it is purely physical, having been constructed in accordance with the laws of physics.

But now, how will it be when abnormal conditions are present? It can quite well happen that in the case of some organ (it cannot be the whole organism) the human being has no possibility of making direct connection, by means of this organ, with the external world. The organ stands in the way, as it were, making it impossible for the human being to find contact with the external world via that organ. What will be the result? Let us take, for example, the lung. The lung may be so placed in the human organism that when the human being wakes up, he is not able to make contact with the external world. Imagine he is asleep. While he is asleep something happens in his lung which has the effect that if he were now to wake up, he would come down into the lung but would not be able to get out again, to get through to the external world. His ego and astral body would be under necessity to press into the lung, to squeeze themselves into it; but they would not be able to come forth again. What the human being should be able to do, as you know, is to come down with his astral body and then come forth again into the world in all directions. The lung should be merely the way through. But in this case, the lung does not provide any free passage; it holds fast the ego and astral body—that is to say, it will do so if the human being wakes up. The unfortunate thing is that when such a condition is present, he always does wake up. For, owing to the special way that the chemical processes are at work in such a case, and infiltration of some substance in fine distribution enters into the lung; the lung organisation which is already in some way misplaced, gets filled with a fine substance that has special affinity for it. The lung is then irregular; consequently the human being wakes up. But how? He wakes up, without gaining consciousness. In order to gain consciousness he would have to come forth from the lung; for he can acquire consciousness only when he has succeeded in penetrating right through. If he has merely come in, he wakes up; if he succeeds in pressing his way through, he gains consciousness. In the case we are considering, he stops short, he remains in the organ; and sleep which is healthy unconsciousness, passes over into pathological unconsciousness. The human being wakes up, but remains unconscious.

You see, we have come in this way to an exact description, drawn from within, of the condition of the epileptic. Epilepsy is just the condition I have been describing—and especially so in the years of childhood. The epileptic is able to dive down with his ego organisation and astral body into the physical body and ether body—that, he can do; but he does not come forth into the physical world, he is held fast within. Let us consider then how it will be if the astral body enters into the lung, and is held fast there, cannot get out again. The astral body will remain pressed against the surface of the lung; astral body and ego organisation will be, so to speak, damned up, congested beneath the surface of the organ. This condition then manifests outwardly as a fit. That is what fits really are. Every time a fit occurs, an inner congestion is taking place at the surface of one or other organ. These congestions are to be found, above all, in the brain. But we know how the parts of the brain are related to the other parts of the body; a congestion in the brain may be due entirely to the fact that congestion is present in the liver, or in the lung, in which case the cerebral congestion is only a projection, a feebler copy of the congestion in the bodily organ. Whenever a fit occurs, this congestion of ego organisation and astral body within an organ can be observed. And so we have at last found our way to the true cause of epileptic fits. Everything else that can be said about them amounts to no more than a description of the external phenomena. You see now how impossible it is to come to a true knowledge of epilepsy unless we are able to go beyond physical body and etheric body and take into account also ego and astral body. Nothing of any real value can be said about fits if we do not know that at the surface of some organ, astral body and ego organisation are being terribly squeezed and crushed. They cannot get out, they try to make their way out, they push and are held back.

And now you will naturally ask: What am I to do when symptoms of epilepsy show themselves in a child—lapses of consciousness, associated with fits, or other phenomena of which we have still to speak? What can one do in an individual case? You must investigate the case out of your own instinctive insight, you must put it to the test. Find out, to begin with, whether the disturbances in consciousness are nearly related to the phenomena of ordinary giddiness. In many epileptics this is decidedly the case. Phenomena of giddiness show themselves; one notices in the child a disposition or tendency to giddiness. If we should find that the gaps in consciousness are only brief, but that there are on the other hand very marked symptoms of giddiness, we would be able to know with certainty where the trouble lies. For in such a case, the ego organisation and the astral body would be failing to enter into direct relation with the forces of balance. You must, therefore, proceed first of all to investigate whether this is so in the child with whom you are dealing—namely, that the ego organisation and astral body do not make right connection with the forces of balance.

If you find this to be the case, let the child do gymnastics or Eurythmy, but giving him always at the same time objects to hold, such as dumb-bells or the like. Especially during the period between change of teeth and puberty are such exercises for balance important. If you give the child two dumb-bells of exactly the same weight—you must have them weighed on a chemical balance—and let him do exercises with them, making Eurythmy movements, or other gymnastic movements, this will be one thing achieved. Then you can go on to something else. Let the child hold in his left hand a dumb-bell that is lighter than the one in his right hand, and again let him do exercises; then let him take in his right hand a dumb-bell that is lighter than the one in his left, and once more do exercises. Then tie some object—it need not be particularly heavy—to one of his legs, and let him walk about with it, so that he becomes conscious of the force that is pulling at his leg. When he walks in the ordinary way, he is not conscious of the force of gravity. It is, however, important for him to place himself, with his ego organisation, right into the force of gravity. When you attach something to his leg, he at once becomes conscious of gravity. You can then hang the weight on to the other leg. And now, to produce an activity that comes nearer to the mental or spiritual, let him feel movements that he makes with his arms; let him think himself into a stretching movement made with the left arm, and then again into a stretching movement with the right arm; finally, with both arms at once. Another way of helping him to become conscious of gravity is to get him to lift one leg while keeping the other still. To sum up, in cases where you perceive, from the attacks of giddiness, that the child does not enter properly into the earthly forces, you get him to make movements in which he is obliged to learn control of his external balance. Similarly, you will find methods of treatment that will help epileptic and epileptoid children to adapt themselves to the other forces.

So you see, there is certainly something you can do. Good results can often be achieved also in the case of epileptics in whom you perceive that their circulatory system is disturbed, and that the whole way in which the fluids are circulating is really the cause of the phenomena. If you notice that in connection with the attacks of epilepsy (which take the form of fits and perhaps also of giddiness), feelings of sickness or nausea are present, then you will know that you have to do with an incapacity to combine properly with the element of water. In such a case it will be good to bring the watery element as much as possible to the notice of the child, before he receives it into his organism. Try to prepare the child's food in such a way that he tastes it quite specially. Something could also be achieved by letting the child learn to swim. Learning to swim is very good for epileptics; only, we must understand what is involved and be intelligent and sensible in the use of such a treatment.

When cloudings of consciousness occur unaccompanied by any marked feeling of nausea, carefully regulated breathing exercises are not bad, in order to restore connection with the air. And to establish a right connection with warmth, we should accustom epileptic children—really all children, but particularly epileptics—to feel the warmth. It is, as a matter of fact, quite wrong to allow any child to go about half naked, with nothing on his legs, and is often the cause in later life—only, people do not know it—of irritation of the appendix and even appendicitis; for epileptic children it is a downright poison. Epileptic children should be clothed in such a way as to induce a tendency to sweating; sweating should be always mildly present in them in nascent state. They should, in fact, be a little too warmly clad. This is real therapy. All the talk we hear nowadays about “hardening”—to what does it lead in the end? People who have been thoroughly hardened as children, when they grow old, cannot even walk across a sunbeaten market square without tottering. A person has not been made hardy if he cannot walk safely over a sunbeaten pavement. Watch some old man taking off his hat while he is walking across an open square on a hot summer afternoon! You are afraid his knees will give way any minute. Such, as a rule, are the consequences of this modern hardening.

So far we have been considering mainly the things that in early childhood lead the ego organisation into the elements into which it needs to be led. Here however begins the sphere where the doctor must come in, and co-operate with the teacher. For we shall not get to the heart of the trouble, when epileptic phenomena are present, without employing remedies, nor should we shrink from doing so. As soon as the epileptic phenomena show signs that the astral body is involved—that is to say, that the higher elements, the ether elements, are holding up the astral body from penetrating to the external world—then naturally it is upon these higher elements in the human being that we must work. And it will be a question of finding the way to do this. But first of all we have of course to be able to recognise whether the astral body is involved or not. How can we know whether the astral body is involved?

Anyone who has observed many epileptic children, or many children with a tendency to epilepsy, will have noticed two conditions which differ very considerably from one another. There is, first, the condition where the child does not defy moral judgements; he adapts himself to the moral and ethical standards that one would desire to impart to every child. When we have to do with epileptic or epileptoid children who readily adapt themselves in this way to the moral order, then the indications that have already been given will perhaps suffice. But if we have to do with children who are not accessible to moral influence, who, for example, readily become violent during their attacks—for epileptic attacks may disguise themselves as outbursts of violence of which the child has afterwards no memory—if, in short, there seem to be moral defects, then it is important to intervene in early childhood with actual remedies. In these cases, we shall quite definitely try to fight the epilepsy with the remedies that are in general use for the purpose, or with remedies prescribed by us under certain conditions, remedies like sulphur or belladonna—thus entering here upon a systematic therapy. As to this more medical part of the treatment, we shall be speaking of it later. Today I want only to show you how the things we can perceive externally in the child may be a sign to us that we need to pass from the more educational treatment to the more medical. There will, in fact, be some epileptic children who are thoroughly well adapted to fit into the external world, and with whom we shall have on this account actually to avoid the use of external methods and exercises, and work primarily by means of internal therapy.

This brings us at the same time to the point where epileptic phenomena pass over quite naturally into other phenomena. You remember what I said yesterday, that thoughts cannot themselves really ever be false; and today I have been speaking more fully of the way in which the human being members the thoughts into his organism. For, a phenomenon like that of the astral body becoming congested in the lung is due to the fact that the thought of the lung has not been properly membered into the organism. All such phenomena are accordingly due to defects of thought! They are the result of our being unable, as we descend into our organism, to gain the control of it that we require to gain in order that we may be able to build it up a second time. But now, we bring with us also our will nature, that is distributed over the several organs; we bring it with us from our former earthly life. And whereas the thoughts cannot of themselves be false, but are always true and correct—that they appear distorted in us is due entirely to our own organism; and this, as we have seen, can go so far that organs framed by such thoughts are liable to be distorted in their structure—whereas the thoughts cannot be false, of the will we have on the contrary to say that when it comes from pre-earthly into earthly existence, it hardly can be right and true. It arrives in complete uncertainty and has to build itself up within the thought system. Of the thought system we can say with truth that never in all the world is it wrong; on the other hand, it is scarcely possible for the will system to be in any way right unless we ourselves take it in hand. We invariably bring into the world a faulty will system, consequently we never under any circumstances descend to earth to become physical human beings, bringing with us morality.

We have to acquire morality, little by little. The morality we had in our last incarnation we used up between death and new birth, when we were engaged in that wisdom filled building activity; we spent it all before we came to birth. Ethics and morality have to be acquired anew in each single earthly life. This has a very significant result, namely, that inasmuch as we come from pre-earthly existence without morality, we have to develop intelligence in our will. We enter with our will into our organs, and in our will we must develop intelligence for what is brought to us in the way of ethics and morality. We must develop a “sense” for it.

It is quite wonderful, how moral and ethical impulses pour into the child when he is learning to speak! For imitation reaches into the most intimate things of life, and it is exceedingly important that we be conscious of this; we must never forget it. If teachers and parents in the environment of the child are immoral, if their talk is immoral, then not what they do outwardly, but the immoral quality and import of what they say and are, will be imitated in the deep inner organisation of the child. Here too, you see, it is once more a question of the human being's entering into connection with the external world, but this time via the whole organism, not by way of the single organs. And if there is again congestion, it will arise from the fact that, whereas in the previous case we failed to come forth in every direction with our thoughts, this time we fail to come forth with our will. And the failure to press through with the will finds expression in moral defects. You see now what are the inner causes of moral defects. These occur, namely, when what enters in from pre-earthly existence and should find its way through to an ethical and moral relation to the world around us, gets stopped up or congested in the whole human organism. For we should be able to receive into us the ethical and moral principles of the world around us; but this we cannot do if there is this congestion, if we come to a standstill with our spirit and soul, remaining within the physical organisation, unable to push our way through.

We are here right in the sphere of the moral and ethical in human life; and we must be clear what that means. When you meet with the characteristic phenomena of epilepsy, then you will have to make your diagnosis from the symptoms I have indicated—attacks of giddiness, obliteration of consciousness, etc.—that is, you will make your diagnosis from transitory phenomena of this kind. If, however, you want to be able to recognise moral defects, you will have to think, not of passing temporary symptoms, but of permanent symptoms. The really serious disturbances—what can cause these to arise? Everything is conditioned, of course, by karma. We have accordingly to speak of two aspects of a human being. There is his physical and mental constitution that shows itself to us when we meet him; and then we have to discern within this the working of his karma.

Suppose the embryo lies in such a way in the organism of the mother that there is pressure at a certain point, and the brain, when it is formed, is narrow in comparison with the rest of the organisation. What can we observe as a result of this? If those influences from the brain which are of particular importance between the ages of seven and fourteen proceed from a brain that is too narrow, they become disturbed and congested, and a reflection of the pressure and congestion makes its appearance in the functioning of the spleen. And then in consequence of this kind of congestion the child will develop no feeling of any kind of moral principle or standard. Just as colours are simply not there for the man who is colour-blind, so the moral and ethical impulses contained in our words, when we speak in admonishment or reproof, are simply not there for such a child. He has been rendered morally blind. And we have then the task of dispelling this moral blindness.

We shall find, if we proceed carefully in our investigation, that external deformations can never fail to be for us most significant symptoms. Although there will always be a great deal to be said against the charlatan phrenology that is commonly practiced, a genuine phrenology really should be studied by anyone who wants to form his conclusions correctly about moral defects. For it is indeed most interesting to see how moral defects which are connected with karma are forces of such strength that they manifest themselves quite unmistakably in deformations of the physical organism. And whenever we find in a child this evidence of what may be described as karmically conditioned immorality, there is a special call for us to come in with our curative education. If we bring with us to our work the qualities of which we were speaking yesterday—inner courage, readiness to face decisions—then we shall be able to imbue the warnings and admonitions that we have to give with the requisite inner strength. For we need inner strength and power, in order to give our admonitions in the right way. That healing is possible is clear from the following example which I have often quoted. A German poet, who had already made his name, went once to a professional phrenologist. The latter was expecting to make all kinds of interesting discoveries, but all of a sudden, when he touched a certain place on the poet's head, he turned deathly pale and could not trust himself to speak. And as; a rule he would become quite talkative if he found anything of interest. The poet began to laugh and said: “I know what it is, you have found the tendency to thieving; and I did have it quite strongly.” The phrenologist had in fact discovered that the man could have become a kleptomaniac. He had however transformed his kleptomania into the art of writing poetry.

Matters of this kind have to be approached in the manner I explained yesterday. We must not be so ready as we usually are, to jump to conclusions. For it is, you see, like this. Man develops his human qualities mainly in two directions—towards the pole of thought and ideation and the forming of mental pictures, and towards the pole of will. Now as for the mental process, the thought process—that is ill if it is not a thief, and a persistent thief too! The brain-mental-organisation, the whole life of ideas, has to be a downright thief and apply no moral considerations whatever in connection with what it must and should receive. It must have the intention and habit of acquiring everything for itself. And it will even be found that there is a tendency to epilepsy or to some other illness, if the mental organisation does not snatch and grab at things in all directions. But this aptitude for thieving must not, for heaven's sake, slip down into the will organisation! The will has to be modest and restrained. It has to be sensitive, and have a feeling for “mine and thine”—a feeling which develops only gradually in contact with life in the outside world. The animals, who live more in the life of mental pictures than man does, would starve if they did not possess the habit of acquisitiveness, the impulse to get everything for themselves. These things need to be understood. But in man the propensity must not be allowed to find its way down into the will-organisation, it must remain in the finer, mental-picture-forming activity. If the astral infiltration of our brain (if I may so express it), which is, as we said, entirely justified in seeking to acquire everything for itself—if this astral infiltration makes its way down into the metabolism-and-limbs organisation or into the rhythmic system, then the urge to seize hold of everything for itself begins to manifest in the will. The urge may at first show itself in a comparatively harmless manner. You may notice a child beginning to take whatever he can lay hands on, gradually piling up for himself a little store or collection. Naturally one tries to check such a habit whenever it begins to show itself, and so it does not assume large proportions. We must accustom ourselves however to detect the tendency. As a rule of course the child does not achieve his end, because someone starts thrashing him. But we must be on the watch for this predisposition, we must take careful note of any inclination on the part of a child to collect things, to save up things for himself. And we must be sensitive for the point at which the tendency begins to be pathological; for if it goes beyond a certain limit, it becomes pathological.

People who follow the ordinary, conventional standards, have no judgement as to how far collecting may legitimately go—unless some particular occasion brings it home to them. One can be an exceptionally proper and correct person in every way, and collect postage-stamps; the collecting mania is here relatively harmless. If however a child begins, in imitation, to do the same kind of thing, you may take it as a sign that he has pushed down this quality of acquisitiveness into the sphere of the will. And then it is important that you should take particular care to see whether you have here to do with moral defects that are due to the working of karma. You should be able to discover for yourselves whether this is so, in the light of the connections I indicated yesterday. You will then have to approach the child with this understanding in your soul, and to proceed to educate him morally and ethically, doing it as effectively as you can, and with the utmost inner vitality—never in a dull or heavy manner! Working thus with inner vitality, you will make up stories in which the kind of thing the child does is carried to an absurdity. You will tell him a story about stealing, and you will go on doing this again and again. In this way you will actually intervene in the child's karma, you will be working right into his karma.

If we are really awake and “on the spot”, following with intense interest, in each individual case, to see just how the child does the things, then we shall be doing curative educational work of a kind that can remain in the sphere of the moral and ethical. Every kleptomaniac is exceedingly interesting. Qualities which are in their right place in the sphere of ideas have, you see, sunk down, in such a child, they have gone right into his toes, into his finger-tips. Naturally we must know this if we want to educate him. Under some circumstances it will even be good to introduce into the stories gestures that come natural to the kleptomaniac himself. We must transplant ourselves wholly into the particular case we are dealing with, and then invent legends or tales in which the things that are done by the child are shown to end in absurdity.

Think over all that I have been saying. Later on, we shall show you some kleptomaniacs. Think it over well, and you will see how, when such an understanding is present, the diagnosis itself can lead us straight on to the therapy.

• 1. Hans Driesch, 1869 – 1941, Zoologist and Philosopher—Neovitalist.
• 2. A drawing was made.
• 3. An arrow pointing upward was drawn.

I would like today to try as it were to round off our introductory studies, so that we may be able, from tomorrow onwards, to pass on to the practical consideration of particular cases; for it is indeed so, that a faithful study of the nature of so-called illnesses of the soul will of itself afford clues for the discovery of their right treatment.

The treatment of adult patients by our methods still presents difficulties. As I explained yesterday, the treatment would require certain conditions for the patients which, so long as things are in the world as they are today, cannot be realised within the work of our Society. For children, on the other hand, a very great deal can be achieved—by education.

It will already be clear to you, dear friends, that in illnesses of the soul we have to do with karmic connections which come to manifestation in the illness. This is, of course, true of other illnesses too, but it is true in a much deeper sense, and more specifically, of illnesses of the soul. We are therefore perfectly justified in asking the question—we do not formulate it in so many words, but it is bound to arise in the unconscious, and we must have a feeling for what lies behind it—the question, namely: how far can we expect to bring about an improvement? Any degree of improvement that we are able to bring about is so much gain for the patient. We must never take refuge in the thought that, owing to the patient's karma, things are bound to take their course in such and such a way. We can say this about the external events; that a person encounters on the path of destiny; but it is never possible to speak so in regard to the free flow within him of his thoughts and feelings and deeds. For here karma can take different roads; karma can even be turned aside, so that the fulfilment comes in some quite other way. Not that it ever fails to come, but karma can be fulfilled in many ways. I have frequently said, when people have raised the question of pre-natal education—meaning education in the embryonic time—that so long as the child does not yet breathe, it is the education and whole manner of life of the mother that is of importance. For the rest, we should not intervene in the work of God. In the embryonic period, it is entirely a matter of how things are with the mother.

We can now usefully carry further the study we began yesterday when we were considering the epileptic disorder—the study, that is, in regard to physical body, ether body, astral body and ego organisation. What conclusion did we come to as regards all those forms of illness in children, that are of an epileptic nature? We found that in these illnesses we have to do with a congestion of astral body and ego organisation in some organ. The surface of the organ does not allow the astral body and ego organisation to make their way out, and they become congested. They are, as it were, jammed in the organ. An astral and ego atmosphere of high pressure arises there. This causes fits. For what is really taking place, when a fit occurs?

Suppose you have an organ with its ether body within it. For each single organ there is a definite relationship that should obtain between physical body and ether body on the one hand and astral body and ego on the other hand. Now I assume of course that all of you are familiar with the fact that in inorganic external Nature, substances combine with one another in certain definite relationships. The descriptions of this that you find in the chemistry books are not correct; nevertheless there are these well-defined relationships. I purposely do not say relationships of weight, nor do I say atomic relationships for there we would come into the realm of theory; nevertheless it is a fact that hydrogen and oxygen, for example, combine in a certain definite relationship. If we have sulphuric acid (H₂S0₄), we have in it hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen in a particular relation to one another. If this relation were to change, then the combination might under certain circumstances give rise to an altogether different substance. We can, for example, if we have a certain relation of hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen that is different from the relation in sulphuric acid, obtain sulphurous acid (H₂S0₃)—obtain, that is to say, a different substance, although composed of the same three original substances.

In a similar way, physical body and ether body stand in a certain definite relation to astral body and ego in the so-called normal human being. (I say “so-called”, because the expression “normal human being” is a purely conventional one, founded on the belief that there is a fixed boundary dividing human beings into normal and abnormal.) This relationship is, within limits, a variable one. But if it exceeds a certain limit of variability—and this again can be individual for the particular human being—we have abnormality, a state of illness; in some organ astral body and ego organisation will be present, but in such a way that they cannot fill it in a right relationship. This will mean, that they are unable to come forth from it, they cannot get out. You will remember, we recognised yesterday the necessity for astral body and ego organisation to come forth again out of an organ, out of the physical body. When the astral body and ego are jammed and squeezed in this way in some organ, then there is too much astral body, too much ego in that organ; there is not the proper amount, there is a surplus—with the result that the organ cannot help feeling the astrality. If the organ has in it the right and proper amount, it does not perceive or feel the astrality, it does not sense the presence of astrality within it. But if there is in an organ an activity of astral body and ego organisation that does not belong there, then the organ is bound to feel it. If something is there in the organ that does not pass over into consciousness, if there is congestion, so that a great amount of astrality and ego organisation is present which does not go over into consciousness, then a fit takes place. The very description I have given you contains an indication of the accompanying phenomenon—namely, disturbance of consciousness. Disturbance of consciousness is bound to occur whenever this congestion happens in an organ that is in any way connected with consciousness.

When such congestion of astral body and ego organisation takes place in an organ that has not direct positive connection with consciousness—for there are organs that are not directly but inversely connected with consciousness, organs that in fact hinder or arrest consciousness—then we have, not loss of consciousness, but pain. Pain is heightened—not lessened—consciousness. A fit as such is not painful, as you know; that is simply a fact. Pain occurs when the congestion takes place, not in an organ that promotes consciousness, but in an organ that retards or arrests consciousness. Here the congestion will lead to enhanced consciousness—to pain. That is the real nature of pain.

We have now arrived at some understanding of all those forms of disorder which, occurring in childhood, lead to epileptic and related illnesses; we shall afterwards have to speak more specifically of these illnesses, but that we can do better when we have individual cases before us.

But now you will easily see that we may also have a quite different state of affairs. Instead of an organ whose surface holds back within the organ the ego organisation and the astral body, we could have an organ whose surface lets too much through, an organ that does not, as it were, keep back sufficient for its own use. Here the astrality, with which is associated also the ego organisation, is not dammed up, but tends, on the contrary, to overflow the organ. The surface becomes, as it were, porous for the astrality and the ego organisation; they “leak” out of the organ. With imaginative consciousness we do actually see rays streaming forth from the organ. In an organ that “leaks” in this way you will always find also the physical correlate of secretion; even where the secretion is not strikingly present, you will find that it can occur and can be detected. We shall have more to say about this later. When a human being is affected with this condition in childhood, the condition can be healed only if we are able to hold fast the astral body and ego organisation—bring them back, as it were, into the organ.

To what forms of illness, to what outwardly perceptible complexes of symptoms does such an inner condition lead? Here we come to a chapter in our study, where the phenomena that show themselves differ according as we are dealing with children or adults. For we come to illnesses that are bound to assume quite special forms for the period in human development between birth and puberty. We come, in effect, to the various kinds of hysteria. Now it is just in the realm where we are concerned with the forms of hysterical disorder, that the deplorable lack of clarity in modern science proclaims itself. Words are coined to name the various forms without any regard for reality. This shows itself at once in the first picture people begin to make of the matter; for in conformity with the modern way of looking at such things they are, of course, bound to bring this hysterical condition into connection somehow or other with the sexual life, and more so in the case of the woman than of the man; and then the forms of illness are named accordingly. The words by which the various forms are designated are of no importance. What is important for us is to make sure whether all the cases that are today reckoned under these names really deserve to be called hysteria, in the way the word is understood, or whether we do not rather need to have recourse to a much wider classification.

Now, as a matter of fact, the child who has not yet attained puberty cannot possibly have the form of disorder from which he is frequently said to suffer. He cannot have hysteria—if it is assumed that hysteria is associated with sex. The child can, however, certainly have in his earliest childhood what I have described as a protrusion of astral body and ego organisation beyond an organ. That he can have, but only that. We must turn a deaf ear to the various descriptions that have been given for the better comprehension of hysterical disorder. All these descriptions are made with reference to one ruling idea; and when an idea is set up in this way and all descriptions are made with reference to it, then these descriptions cannot but be false. Countless descriptions in psychiatry today are false just on this account. You cannot do things that way.

Let us see what it is we really have before us in a young child who is said to be suffering from hysteria. He has difficulty in making contact with the external world. I explained yesterday what this means. He has difficulty in taking hold rightly of the equilibrium that belongs to the fluid element, of the equilibrium that is associated with air, of the differentiations in warmth, in light, in chemical action, and in the universal cosmic life. But instead of grasping all these too weakly, as is the case with the epileptic, the child takes hold too strongly, he puts his astral body and Ego into his whole environment—into weight, into warmth; he seizes hold of all the elements more intensely than is really possible for a so-called normal person. And what is the result?

You have only to remind yourself how it is with you when you have grazed your skin at some spot. Suppose you then grasp hold of some object with the sore surface, where the skin has been rubbed away. You know how it hurts! The reason for your being so sensitive is that at that spot (where the surface is raw) you come up against the external world too vigorously with your inner astral body. Only in moderation are we able to contact the external world with our astral body (and ego organisation). The child who from the first brings his astral body right out—such a child will touch and take hold of things delicately, just as though he had been wounded. Nor shall we be surprised to find in him this hyper-sensitiveness, this hyper-sensitive response to the world around him. A human being in this condition is bound to feel his environment much more keenly, much more intensely; and he will moreover have within him a much more powerful reflection of his environment.

And now ideas will begin also to arise in the child which are painful in themselves. It comes about in the following way. The moment he begins to develop will in any direction, the child has to reach out into something in regard to which he is hyper-sensitive. And then as soon as the will begins to develop, a strange condition arises in the conscious part of him. He becomes super-conscious of the unfolding of the will; in other words, the unfolding of the will causes him pain. Pain is present in nascent state as soon as the will begins to appear, and the child tries to hold back the pain. This happens with great intensity. He makes restless, struggling movements, because he is trying to hold back the pain. Here, you see, I have given you descriptions of inner conditions which find their outlet in life in a clearly recognisable manner. A child wants to do something but feels a pain and cannot do it; instead of the soul-life flowing out into action, he has a terribly powerful inward experience before which he shudders—he shudders at himself. But now it may equally well be a question, not of an outward action, but of a concealed or disguised action in the sphere of thought—for the will lives also in the sphere of thought. When it is a question of an action in the life of thought, when it is ideas that should unfold, it may be that in certain forms of illness these ideas, at the moment they should develop, evoke fear, evoke anxiety and fear and are unable to arise in the mind. Every such idea which, at the moment when it should come to consciousness, evokes fear—every such idea simultaneously causes the life of feeling to develop below it; feelings surge up, and depression invariably sets in. Feelings which are not comprehended, not taken hold of by ideas, give rise to depression; only those feelings are not of a depressing nature, which, as soon as they arise, are immediately apprehended by the life of thought and ideation.

The condition that has been described as arising out of the nature of the case can be seen in the patient; it is there before us as a complex of symptoms. If we have learned to know an abnormality for what it really is, then we shall find that this true and essential nature of the abnormality shows itself to us quite plainly in the patient. And that is how it should be, when we take with us into the practical spheres of life perceptions that have been arrived at in Spiritual Science. When speaking to those who will have to intervene in illnesses of this kind with practical help, descriptions must leave the realm of the abstract entirely and enter right into the realm of living reality, so that the person who listens to the description can see it taking place in the patient before him. And in such a case as we are considering, you do actually see what is happening; in some organ, or nexus of organs, you perceive an outflowing of the astrality or ego organisation.

A phenomenon in a child, which brings the complex of symptoms to expression with somewhat rude plainness, is nocturnal enuresis. It happens quite naturally; but only in the light of what has been explained will you see the phenomenon of bed-wetting in a child in its right perspective. For it has its origin in the condition we have been describing. Whenever you have a case of bed-wetting, you can assume that the astral body is running out, is overflowing. As a matter of fact, secretions and excretions of every kind are always connected with the activity of the astral body and ego organisation. These must therefore be in order, if we want the secretions and excretions to be in order.

Now it is through the physical body that the ego organisation and astral body are connected with the four elements (as they are called), whilst in the etheric body, the ego organisation and astral body are connected more with the higher elements, with a part of the warmth, with the light, with the chemical ether and with the universal life-ether. If now we may borrow from the physical realm a word which can be most expressive when we extend its application to the spiritual (as was continually done in earlier times, when men had instinctive clairvoyance and made no such sharp distinction as we do between physical and spiritual), let us take the word “soreness” and speak of a child having soreness of soul. The child is sore in his soul, and this soreness of soul becomes a dominant idea in him, overriding everything else. If it cannot be made better by means of curative education, then, when the child attains puberty, either the feminine or the masculine form of this soreness will appear. The feminine form will have the character of hysteria, as it was called when there was still a true perception of it. The masculine form will have a different character. We shall be able to speak about that also; we shall find that it assumes quite other forms.

Whenever therefore you have a case where the conditions are the opposite of what are found in epileptic or epileptoid trouble, you will always have to give your attention to the excretions. And you will find you need to observe particularly how the child sweats. Whenever you want to bring something home to the child, to call up ideas in him, then watch carefully to see whether the inner soreness of soul, that is experienced at the origination of an idea, does not express itself in conditions of sweating. There is a certain difficulty here. In the ordinary way, one might imagine that when something like sweating had been stimulated by an inner condition of soul, the sweating would be noticeable immediately afterwards. It may be so in some circumstances but it is not necessarily so. For, the peculiar thing is that the inner anxiety or shrinking, the feeling of tenderness and soreness, does not work as does an outer feeling of soreness; but what arises as the result of it is first of all “digested” in the human being, and will sometimes take then the strangest paths in the interior of the human being, making its appearance not at all quickly but, curiously enough, only after some time, in the course of the next three to three and a half days.

Now, everything that is caused by expansion of astral body and ego organisation, is connected with what meets us in the normal expansion of astral body and ego organisation at death. When it is a question of congestion, the opposite condition from dying sets in. In epileptic phenomena there is the attempt to damn up life within the organism, to imitate, under abnormal circumstances, the process of creeping into the physical organism when the descent to earth takes place. But in the condition of which we are speaking now, we have to do with an imitation of what happens at death. After death the astral body and ego expand at the same time as life flows away; and it is with an imitation of this condition that we are here concerned. When once we are able to feel this, we come to acquire, little by little, something that is important in the observation of such cases. We acquire, namely, an organ of smell for what is present in the child; we smell this outflow. For it can really be smelled, and it belongs to the esoteric side of our work to acquire this perception and to experience how the aura of these children smells differently from the aura of normal children. There is actually something faintly corpse-like in the auric sweatings of these children. Such a fact can help to bring it home to you that we do indeed have here a kind of imitation of death; the accompanying phenomena of “dying” appear, in the sweatings that occur in consequence of this or that symptom. Such phenomena can make their appearance in the course of the next three days, approximating to the period during which the backward review after death takes place, when the astral body and ego organisation are expanding.

Working with this knowledge, you will have to accustom yourselves to imprint in your memory something you have noticed in the connections of mind or will of such a child, and then go on observing him for the next three or four days. This will enable you to discover whether you have before you the form of abnormal soul-life of which I have been speaking. And now we are at last rightly equipped for tackling the question: How am I to treat such a child?

The soul of the child lies open to my view in his every action. His soul flows into everything I see him doing around me. In such a case, where the soul of the child comes streaming towards you, you will realise that the education must more than ever depend upon what the teacher, on his part, is able to bring to the child in his own attitude of soul—in his whole mood, when he is dealing with something in his own surroundings, when he is himself doing something. Suppose you are a very nervy teacher, a person who is continually doing things in such a way as to give a shock to other people. This quality of character or temperament is much more widespread than one imagines; it is exceedingly frequent among teachers. If I may use a frivolous expression—are not most teachers today inclined to be “jumpy”? This state of nerves, where people are so easily put out or upset, simply cannot be avoided, so long as the training of teachers continues to be as it is today, where the student is overloaded with an enormous amount of undigested knowledge. Those who take teachers' training courses (we are concerned here with the training of teachers, so I say nothing about other courses of training!) ought never on any account to have to go in for an examination. The examination in front of them puts them into the frame of mind which leads to this nervy condition.

You will see at once in what a difficult position we are placed when we have to develop our work on the background of present-day conditions! We are at this moment faced with the question of organising the Lauenstein Home for backward children. In view of the government regulations, those who are to take charge would be well advised to take the examination. One of them, at any rate, will have to do so. And yet there is no sense in it; because it is, of course, only another opportunity of becoming nervy. This is a situation which we must face quite dispassionately—unless we want to go through the world blindfold! There is nothing to be done but to take the examination, and after it gradually get rid of the nervous tendencies. That is, however, what most people do not succeed in doing.

Anything in the environment that may cause even a slight shock to the child—if it originates in the unconscious, in the temperament, of the teacher—must be avoided. And do you know why? Because the teacher must also be capable of inducing shock, consciously and deliberately; shocks are often the very best remedy for these conditions! They take effect, however, only if they do not proceed from unconscious habit, but are given consciously and deliberately, the teacher watching intently all the time to observe the effect on the child.

Suppose you have observed this complex of symptoms in a child. You must take the child and get him to write, or read, or paint. Well, and what then? Having first tried to bring him to do as much as he with his particular constitution is capable of doing, then, at a certain point, try to bring the work into a quicker tempo. This will mean that the child is then obliged to let, not the feeling of soreness, but the anxiety connected with the soreness, retire, because you are there in front of him and he cannot help getting into a fresh state of anxiety on that account. The fact that the child is at this moment compelled to come into a new state of anxiety, compelled to enter into an experience that has been artificially promoted and is different from the previous one, brings it about that he strengthens within him, consolidates within him, the ego and astral that are trying to flow out. If you repeat such things systematically with a child, over and over again, a consolidation of ego and astral body will take place. But you must not grow tired! You must do the thing over and over again, preparing your whole teaching in such a way that, as it proceeds, at certain moments it suddenly takes a new turn.

For this, it is, of course, essential that you have the arranging of the teaching in your own hands. If, let us say, every three-quarters of an hour you are obliged to take a different subject, then all your plans will be frustrated. A form of teaching for abnormal children can be built up on the basis of what we have introduced in the Waldorf School—period lessons where, during the main teaching hours, one subject is continued for weeks at a time. For we have, as you know, no set curriculum for the early morning hours between 8 and l0 a.m.; the teacher can take what he chooses, what he sees to be right, in accordance with the principles on which he works. On this basis you can also work out what you must do for abnormal children. You will be able, for instance, to introduce such a method as I was describing, where you are continually changing the teaching, altering the tempo. By such means you will find you can work very strongly indeed upon glandular secretion, and therewith on the consolidation of the astral body in the child. But you will have to practise a certain resignation, for where this kind of treatment has been given and healing has begun, people will not notice that the children have begun to grow healthy. They will notice only that in a particular case there has been in their view no healing, since “becoming normal” is regarded by them as the right and natural thing to expect. What the world calls “becoming normal” is however not at all a thing to be so taken for granted.

So you see, whereas in cases of epileptic or epileptoid trouble it was a question (as I explained yesterday) of adopting rather methods that call for bodily activity, or else methods that work purely in the moral sphere, it is mainly didactic methods that will be needed for combating this other trouble of which I have been speaking today. To give these “shocks”—that is one thing you must do. And the other is as follows.

Observe carefully how the condition alternates between depression on the one hand, and on the other hand a kind of excitement or mania, outbursts of mirth and cheerfulness. What is the cause, when they occur in these forms of illness, of such alternation between states of depression and mania? Owing to the inward soreness, there is a perpetual longing not to let the will come to expression. If the will fails to unfold in the life of ideas, then conditions of depression arise. But when this has been happening for a long time and the child can no longer restrain himself but must give vent, there arises—because the inner soreness is repressed and the child can now flow right out, together with the astral outflow—an enhanced feeling of well-being. So we have in this way alternating conditions of sadness and hilarity, which, when they occur in a child who has also the other symptoms of sweating and bed-wetting, should be carefully watched. For this is where we must intervene as teachers.

Suppose we are faced with depression in the child. The first step will have been taken, the moment the child feels that we are strongly united with him inwardly, that we understand him. But because we are dealing here with a kind of hypertrophy of the life of thought and will, what the child needs is more than that we simply share his sorrow. If we are merely dejected and sorrowful with the child—that is no good to him! We can help him only if we are ourselves competent to cope with the depression we are experiencing with him, and able therefore to give him effective consolation, so that he feels comfort and relief.

A teacher who can understand these things will learn to find for himself the methods he can use. He will know, for example, that a constant idea in such children is that they think they ought to do something, and yet they cannot do it. It is a complicated idea, but one must be able to study it and understand it. They ought to do something and cannot do it; but they have to do it notwithstanding, and then it turns out differently from how they would have liked. Examine the soul-life of such children and try to get hold of the idea in their soul. One could express it in the following words: “I want to do it. I cannot do it. And yet I must do it ... And then it turns out differently from what it ought to be.”

In this complex of ideas the whole of the child's illness is really contained. The child detects in himself the peculiar constitution which consists in the out-flowing of astral body and ego organisation. It manifests as a kind of working outwards-into-the-world of the astral body—“I will do it.” But the child knows that then he comes immediately up against the external world and its reagents. Here is the soreness, here it hurts. The child is forced to perceive: “I cannot do it!” Then he knows that it has to be done, nevertheless. He feels: “I have to reach out with my astral body into the agents of the world. But I have no control over what I take in hand, I am so unskilful with my out-flowing astral body. The thing turns out different, because I am not in full control; the astral body flows out too strongly.”

It is precisely in such children that we can observe, in the most wonderful way, what the sub-consciousness, which reaches up into the life of feeling, is really doing. The sub-conscious is so terribly clever! It stamps into the clearest concepts what is going on in the inner constitution of the child, and in his relationship with others as well as with his environment. All this is, so to speak, disentangled in the child's sub-consciousness. But it does not rise up into consciousness. We have to go in search of it. We have to put forth all our efforts to discover these inner, unconscious complexes of ideas in the child. And now suppose the moment comes when such a complex shows itself to you. You notice it. As a matter of fact, it is there almost every time the child is about to begin something in the way of outer action or even also in the way of thought; it is nearly always there. If you intervene at this moment by gently helping in what the child has to do—doing it with him, feeling, as it were, every movement of his hand in your hand, then the child will have the feeling that the second stage is being corrected for him by what you are doing. Naturally the child is not helped at all if you simply do for him the things he has to do. You must intervene only fictitiously. Say, you get the child to paint. You do not paint yourself; but you sit down by him and move your paint brush, accompanying with your brush each movement he makes with his. The child will have the idea that you are gently guiding him, while thus, with love in your heart, you do with him what he has to do; the fact that you are there beside him in this way—he will feel it like a gentle caress in his soul. Even down to intimate details of this nature, we shall be able to find, if we practise a really careful observation, the right thing to do.

In everything Spiritual Science can give, you will always find that there is at last this summons to the individual human being; he must do his part. People are for ever wanting prescriptions: Do this in this way, do that in that way! But the fact is, anyone who sets out to educate abnormal children will never have finished learning. Each single child will be for him a new problem, a new riddle. And the only way he can succeed in finding what he must do in the individual case, is to let himself be guided by the being in the child. It is not easy, but it is the only real way to work. And this is the reason why it is of such paramount importance that, as teachers, we should take in hand our own self-education.

The best kind of self-education will be found to consist in following the symptoms of illness with interest, so that ever and anon we have the feeling: there is something quite wonderful about that symptom! Not that we should go about the world, proclaiming with a flourish of trumpets that it is the insane who are the really divine human beings. One must not do that—not in our time! We should however be fully awake to the fact that when an abnormal symptom makes its appearance, something is there which, seen spiritually, stands nearer to the Spiritual than the things that are done by man in his healthy organism. Only, this standing-nearer-to-the-Spiritual cannot become active in the healthy organism in the corresponding way. If we have once grasped this, then many intimate truths will reveal themselves to us.

It is, as you see, indeed the case that in every domain diagnosis and pathology lead—of themselves—to a real therapy, provided the diagnosis can succeed in penetrating to the essence of the trouble.