The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I shall have something to add to what was stated yesterday. I am reminding you of something which most of you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death the physical body remains behind within the earth-forces, the etheric body dissolves within the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his continuing life, his existence, throughout the realms which lie between death and a new birth. I said that we can follow up the formative forces within the human being himself which project from one life into the other.

We know that man is in essence a threefold being, with three independent members; I mean, in regard to the formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the system of the nerves and senses, which naturally is spread over the whole body, but is located primarily in the head; we have the rhythmic system, including the rhythm of the breath, circulation, and other rhythms; then we have the metabolic and limb organization, which we consider as one because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with his metabolism.

You know that each human being has a differently, an individually shaped head. If we consider the forces which shape the human head—of course you must not think of the physical substances, but of the formative forces, of that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its entire character, its phrenological expression—if we consider these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic and limb system belonging to the previous incarnation which have now become form. Thus we have in the head the transformation of the earlier metabolic organism, and if we consider what we possess as a metabolic and limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping the head for our next incarnation. Therefore, if we understand the building of the human form we can, as it were, look back, through a corresponding development of the idea of metamorphosis, from the human head of today to the metabolic system of the previous incarnation; and we can look from the present metabolic system forward to the head formation of the next incarnation. [See: Guenther Wachsmuth, Reincarnation as a Phenomenon of Metamorphosis, Anthroposophie Press, New York, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London.]

This conception, which in our spiritual science and in the spiritual science of all ages plays a certain role, these truths concerning repeated earth lives remain by no means without substantiation, for whoever understands the human organism can read them directly from it. But the present trend of natural science is as far removed as possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation which would be necessary in this case. Of course one cannot escape, through the study of anatomy and physiology alone, the foolish conclusion that the liver and lungs may be investigated by the same method. One lays the liver beside the lungs upon the dissecting table and regards them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. In such a way one can obtain no knowledge of these things, and two organic systems which are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be studied by an external comparison of their cellular configuration, as they must be according to present ideas.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent details, methods must be employed through which a conception of these things may be gained. If the methods which I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment are sufficiently developed, then the human power of cognition is greatly strengthened. I am repeating here certain statements that I have already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum building: Our ordinary cognition is strengthened, through which we look out with our senses at our environment, and through which we also examine our inner life, where we meet primarily our thinking, feeling, and willing. And if we broaden our knowledge to the degree possible through these exercises which have been often described, then our view of the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a first result we realize the absolute folly of speaking of atoms in the manner of present world-conceptions. What is behind sense perception, behind its qualities, behind yellow and red, behind C sharp, g, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual essentiality. The outer world becomes ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition, so that we really cease to take seriously all those constructions derived from chemical or other ideas. All atomism is thoroughly driven from our minds when we broaden our knowledge of the outer world. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.

If, on the other hand, through such an enlarged vision we look more deeply into our inner life there arises—not that confused mysticism which forms a justifiable transition, pointed out and explained yesterday—but there arises instead, when inner cognition is developed, a psychic knowledge of the organs. We learn really to recognize our inner organization. While our outer perception is more and more spiritualized, our inner perception is, first of all, more and more materialized. Working in this inner direction, not the nebulous mystic but the real spiritual researcher will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism. We attain to the spiritual world in no other manner than by this detour through the observation of our own inner materiality. Unless we learn to know lungs, liver, and so forth, we do not gain on this detour through our inner being any kind of spiritual enthusiasm which, freed of the confusion of mysticism, works towards a concrete knowledge of the inner organs.

At all events, we gain a more exact knowledge of the configuration of the soul. To begin with, we learn to give up the preconceived idea that our psychic constitution is merely an adjunct of the sensory and nervous system. Only the world of representations is correlated to the nervous system, the world of feeling not at all. The world of feeling is connected directly with the rhythmic organization; and the world of will is adjusted to the metabolic and limb system. If I will something, a corresponding activity is induced in my metabolic and limb system, the nervous system being there only in order that concepts may be formed in regard to what takes place in the will. There are no nerves of will, as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and nerves of will is absurd. The nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will exist for no other purpose than the inner observation of the processes of will. They too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly we come at last to consider the human organism in its entirety. Take the lung organism, the liver organism, and so forth. Looking at them within, you reach a point when you survey, as it were, the surface of the several organs, naturally by means of spiritual sight. What exactly is this surface of the organs? It is nothing less than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. Our perceptions, and also what we elaborate in thought are reflected upon the surface of all our inner organs; and this reflection makes known our recollections, our memory during life. Thus, after we have perceived and digested something in thought, it is mirrored upon the surface of our heart, liver, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our memories. And with a not very extensive training you may notice how certain thoughts shine back in memory from the whole organism. Very different organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering, let us say, very abstract conceptions, then the lung surface participates strongly. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts which have a nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is concerned. Thus we can describe very well, and in detail, how the various organs take part in this reflection which makes its appearance as recollection, as the power of memory.

When we concentrate upon the whole soul nature we must not say: In the nervous system alone we have the organic correlate of the soul life, for the entire human organism is the correlated organization for the life of the soul.

In this connection much knowledge, once present as instinct, has simply been lost sight of. It still exists in certain words, but people no longer realize how wisdom is preserved in words. For example, if anyone in the time of the ancient Greeks had a tendency to depression when forming his recollections, they called it hypochondria, meaning a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen where, as a result of this rigidity, reflection was brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of depression. The entire organism is involved in these things. That is something which must be kept in our minds.

When speaking of the power of memory, I drew attention to the surface of the organs. In a certain sense everything experienced strikes the surfaces, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. But something enters the organism at the same time. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular. They have an inner secretion, which during life is changed into force. But not everything is thus transformed into organic metabolism, etc. Certain organs take up instead something which becomes latent within them, and constitutes an inner force; for example, all thoughts connected mainly with our perception of the outer world through which we form images of outer objects. The forces developed in these thoughts are, in a certain manner, stored up within the lungs.

You know that the inside of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, the movement of the limbs, and these forces are so transmuted that during the life between birth and death our lungs are somewhat of a reservoir of forces which are continually influenced by the metabolic-and-limb system. We find that at the time of death such forces have been stored up. The physical matter naturally falls away, but these forces are not wasted. They accompany us through death, and throughout the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a new incarnation these forces which were in the lungs form our head outwardly, stamp upon it its physiognomy. That which the phrenologist, the craniologist study in the outer form of the skull would be found forecast within the lungs during the previous incarnation.

You see how definitely, from life to life, the transmutation of forces may be followed up. When this is done reincarnation will no longer be an abstract truth alone, but will be studied concretely, as one can study physical things. And spiritual science becomes valuable only when in this way we penetrate into concrete facts. If we speak only in generalities of repeated earth lives, and so forth, then these are mere words. They have meaning only if we can enter upon the single concrete facts.

If that which has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way it is squeezed out, as I said yesterday, much in the same way as a sponge is squeezed out, and then, from that which should form the head only in the next incarnation, there arise mainly abnormal phenomena which are usually called coercive thoughts, or described by some other term as illusions. It is an interesting chapter of a higher physiology to study in lung cases the strange notions which arise in the patient in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just explained to you, with the abnormal pressing out of thoughts.

You will see undoubtedly that the thoughts which are pressed out under these conditions are coercive because they already contain the formative forces. The thoughts which we ought normally to have in consciousness should be pictures only, they must not contain a formative force, and should not coerce us. Throughout the long period between death and rebirth these thoughts do coerce us; then they are causative, formative. During earth life they must not overwhelm us; they should use their power only during the transition from one life to another. This is the point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the manner I have just explained in regard to the lungs, you will discover that there are concentrated in the same way within the liver all the forces which in the next incarnation determine the inner disposition of the brain. Again by a detour through the metabolic organism of the present life, the forces of the liver pass over, this time not into the shape of the head, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present one, in order that thus, upon the detour through the metabolism there may arise within the liver definite powers. But if these are ejected during the present incarnation they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You see now concretely what I pointed out yesterday more theoretically: that these things arise, having been squeezed out of the organs, then force their way into consciousness. Out of the general hallucinatory life, which should extend from the end of one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and, in this way, make their abnormal appearance.

If you study in the same manner all that is connected with the kidneys and excretory system you will discover that they concentrate within themselves the forces which, in the following incarnation, influence the head organization preferably in the field of affective emotions. The kidneys, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by a detour through the head organization.

If these forces are squeezed out during the present incarnation they display all the nervous symptoms connected with over-excitement of the human being, inner excitement specifically, hypochondriacal symptoms, depression, in short all the conditions connected particularly with this aspect of the metabolism.

In reality everything remembered with a strong ingredient of feeling or passion is also connected with what is reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections we find them to be more often memory ideas, the memories proper. If we turn to the kidney system we see what sort of lasting habits we have in this incarnation; and within the kidney system are being prepared already the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which, by a detour through the head organization, are intended for our next incarnation.

Let us study the heart with the same idea. For spiritual-scientific research, the heart is an extraordinarily interesting organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart rather lightly. It looks upon the heart as a pump which pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd can be believed, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood. The blood is set in motion by the full agility of the astral body and ego, and the heart's movement is only the reflex of these activities. The movement of the blood is autonomous, and the heart only brings to expression the movement caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that manifests the movement of the blood, the heart itself having no activity in relation to this blood movement. The present natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to Stockholm I explained this to a scientist, a medical man, and he was furious about the idea that the heart should not be regarded as a pump, that the blood comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply inserted in the general blood movement, participates with its beat, and so on.

Well, something is reflected from the surface of the heart which is not a matter of memory or of habit. The life processes become spiritualized when they reach the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. That is to be taken simply, entirely as the physical aspect. The pangs of conscience which radiate into our consciousness are that ingredient in our experiences which is reflected from the heart. Spiritual cognition of the heart teaches us this.

But if we look into its interior we see gathered there forces which again stem from the entire metabolic and limb organism, and because everything connected with the heart forces is spiritualized that is also spiritualized within it which has to do with our outer life and deeds. And however strange and paradoxical it may sound to anyone clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that what is thus prepared within the heart are the karmic propensities, the tendencies of our karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the limb and metabolic system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.

You see, if we learn to know this organization we learn to differentiate and recognize its connection with the complete life extending beyond birth and death. We look then into the whole structure of the human being. We cannot speak of the head in relation to metamorphoses, for the head is simply cast off, its forces having completed their activity in the present incarnation. That which, however, exists in these four main systems, in lung, kidney, liver, and heart, after making a detour through the metabolic and limb system, passes over forming our head with all its predispositions and tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of our body the forces which will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means a mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a retort which modern physiology describes. You need only to take a step in walking and a certain metabolic effect is produced. The metabolism then taking place is not simply the chemical process which may be examined by means of physiology and chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a nuance of morality. And this moral nuance is in fact stored up in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the human being in his entirety means to find in him the forces which reach over beyond earth life. Our head itself is a sphere, and this form is modified only because the rest of the organism is attached to it. Our head is formed out of the cosmos. When we go through death we must, with the spiritual and soul organization which remains to us, adapt ourselves to the whole cosmos. The whole cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle of the period between two incarnations—I have called it in one of my Mystery Dramas the Midnight of Existence—up to this time, if I may so express myself, we continue to spread out into our environment and what thus goes out from us into the surrounding world gives the astral and etheric configuration for the next incarnation.

All this, coming in essence from the cosmos, is determined by the mother. Through the father and impregnation comes that which is formed in the physical body and in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Being, passes over into an entirely different world. It goes over into the world from which it can then follow the path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely important process. The period up to the Midnight Hour and the period from the Midnight Hour on—both between death and rebirth—are really very different from each other. In my Vienna lecture cycle in 1914 I pictured these experiences in their inner aspect.¹ If we look at them more from the outside, we must say: The ego is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares within the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly through the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence on up to the next birth, the ego passes over into what the old Mysteries called the netherworld; and on the detour through this netherworld it passes through impregnation. There the two poles of humanity meet as it were, through mother and father, from the upper world and from the netherworld.

What I am now saying was an intrinsic portion of the Egyptian Mysteries which came out of the old instinctive knowledge, at least so far as is known to me. The Egyptian Mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they then called the upper and the lower gods, the upper and the underworld of gods; and it may be said that in the act of impregnation a polar equilibrium of the upper and the underworld of gods is brought about. The ego between death and rebirth goes first through the upper and then through the lower world. In olden times there was not the strange nuance which many connect today with upper and netherworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper as the good and the netherworld as the bad. This nuance was not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities which had to participate in the general world creation. Humanity in the direct experience of the upper world, viewed it more as the world of light, the netherworld more as the world of gravity. Gravity and light were the two polarities when expressed exoterically, and thus you see that such things may be described concretely.

In regard to the other organs I have told you that the overflowing of organic forces may become hallucinatory life, especially that which is squeezed from the liver system. But if the heart squeezes out its contents it is really the collected forces, ejected and brought into consciousness, which call forth in the next incarnation that strange urge to live out one's karma. If we observe how karma works, it may be said that a figurative description from the human side might represent it as a kind of hunger and its assuagement.

That must be understood as follows: Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking case: A woman meets a man and begins to love him. As that is usually regarded, it is somewhat as though you were to cut out a small piece from the Sistine Madonna, for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy and gaze at it. You have a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that. You must trace it backwards. Before the woman met the man she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons why the woman went from one place to another. There is sense in it and, although it is naturally hidden in the subconscious, there is a connection throughout, and we can, by going back into childhood, follow the way. The woman in question—and this is directed at no one in particular—follows the path from the beginning which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being at birth hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is the result of such an indescript spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to it, as it were, by the whole self. The human being has forces within him which lead to later events, in spite of the freedom which nevertheless exists, but acts in a different field. Well, the forces which manifest in this way as hunger, leading to karmic satisfaction, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out prematurely and enter the consciousness during the present incarnation, they may create pictures which produce a stimulus, and then frenzy results.

Frenzy is nothing but the outburst in this incarnation of a karmic force intended for the subsequent incarnation. Think how differently we must accustom ourselves to look upon world events, having understood these connections. People put questions such as: Why did God create frenzy? Frenzy has plenty of good reasons for existence, but everything working in this world may appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, due in this case to Luciferic forces—everything premature in the world is brought about by Luciferic forces—this precipitate appearance of karmic forces intended for a later incarnation produces frenzy.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in later incarnations may really be studied in the abnormalities of the present life. You may easily imagine what an important difference exists between what remains in our heart throughout our entire incarnation, and the condition it will be in after it has gone through the long development between death and rebirth, to appear then in a new life in the outer behavior of a human being.

However, if you look into your own hearts you can see pretty clearly, though of course only in latency, not in a finished picture, what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general statement: what will take effect karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the receptacle in which the karma of subsequent incarnations is stored. These are the things which must be concretely regarded if we wish to practice genuine spiritual science.

You may imagine what enormous importance these things will attain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does present medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not recognize the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs! And it does not know that. It does not even discover a correct connection between excitement hallucinations and the kidney system, nor of the quiet hallucinations, those which simply appear and are present as I have just explained, and are, so to say, liver hallucinations. Hallucinations which appear as though crawling on a human being so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are the excitement hallucinations which have to do with the emotions and temperament. From such symptoms a much more exact diagnosis can be made than by the means in ordinary use today. And diagnoses based upon purely external evidence are very uncertain in comparison with what they would be were these things studied with the above-mentioned symptoms in mind.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as an inner organ or organic system, contain the compressed coercive thoughts with all that we receive and concentrate in that organ through perception of outer objects. The liver has an entirely different relation to the outer world. Because the lungs preserve the thought material they are quite differently shaped. They are more closely connected with the earth element. The liver, which conceals in particular the quietly appearing hallucinations, is connected with the element of water; and the kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, belongs to the element of air. One thinks naturally that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not with it alone. On the other hand, the kidney system—as an organ -—belongs to the element of air, and the heart system to that of warmth, being entirely formed out of that element. Hence, this element which is the spiritual one is also the one which takes up the predisposition of our karma into the delicate warmth structures of the warmth organism.

Since the human being as a whole stands in a relation with the outer world, you can readily realize that the lungs have a particular relation to the outer world in connection with the earth element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for diseases which originate in the lungs. (This is of course to be considered in its broadest implications.) If you take what circulates in the plant, its circulation of juices, you will have the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver. Thus a study of the reciprocal relation of the organs with the outer world offers in fact the foundation for a rational therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empiric notes. One can reach a really rational therapy only by studying in this way the reciprocal relations between the domain of the human organs and the outer world. Of course the voluptuous longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no farther than the well-known “little divine flame” of Meister Eckhardt, and so on; if only the outpouring of inner delight is the aim, and the beholding of beautiful images without penetrating this element to the definite configuration of the inner organs, then important therapeutic knowledge cannot be acquired. For this knowledge is gained upon the path of genuine mysticism which advances to the concrete reality of the inner human organism.

We learn, by the detour through this inner knowledge, to discern the passage through the incarnations. In just the same way, when we regard the outer world, in penetrating this carpet of the sense impressions, we attain to the spiritual. We rise into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not reach through the detour of inner mysticism. The hierarchies are found through a more profound contemplation of the outer world. Upon this path there follow results which may be first expressed by analogies; yet they are not mere analogies, for there exist deeper connections and relations.

We breathe, do we not? And I recently reckoned for you the number of inhalations during twenty-four hours. If we count eighteen breaths to the minute we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25920 inhalations in a day and night.

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night. When you awake in the morning you draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and ego. This is also breathing. In the morning you inhale the astral body and ego, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath in 24 hours, in one day. That is 365 such breaths in a year. And take the average age of a human being, 72 years, and you have approximately the same result. If I had not started with 72, but somewhat lower, I should have reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of a human being, and count each single day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and exhalations of the astral body and ego as you have in and out breathings in 24 hours. You make in the course of your life as many in and out breathings of the astral body and ego as you make daily in your in and out breathing of air. These rhythms correspond absolutely, and show us how man is fitted into the cosmos. The life of one day from sunrise to sunset, as a single circuit, corresponds with an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see the human being becomes a part of the whole world organism; and I should like to close these considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think about it rather thoroughly, and to make it a subject of meditation. Science today postulates a cosmic process, and within this cosmic process the earth once arose. In the end the earth, when the entropy is fulfilled, will be consumed in cosmic heat. If today we form for ourselves a concept such as the Copernican, or any modification of it, then we take into consideration only the forces which formed the earth out of the primeval nebula, and human life really becomes a sort of fifth wheel on the wagon; for the geologist and the astronomer do not consider mankind. It does not occur to them to seek in any sense within mankind itself the cause of a future world organism. The human being is everywhere present in this cosmic process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon. The world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do with it. Consider it in this way: the world process comes to an end, ceases, is dispersed in space. It stops, and the causes of what ensues are always within the human being himself, inside his skin; there they find their continuation.

The inception of what is now the world lies far back within man of primeval ages. It is thus in reality. The books of ancient wisdom tell us this in their own language, and the saying of Christ-Jesus points to these things: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. All that constitutes the material world is dissolved, but that which issues from the spirit and soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives on into the future. The causes of the future exist within us, and need not be investigated by geologists. We should seek them among the inner forces of our organism which pass over into our next earth-life first, but then continue into other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look within man. Everything external perishes utterly.

The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called: the law of the conservation of energy. This law carries forward the forces of man's environment; but all these will dissolve and disappear. Only that which arises within humanity itself can create the future. The law of the conservation of energy is the most false imaginable. In reality its result is simply to make mankind a fifth wheel in the creative process of the cosmos. Not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy is correct, but that other saying: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. These two are in diametrical contrast; and it is simply thoughtlessness when today certain members of this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in the Bible and, at the same time, adherents of the theories of modern physics. This is sheer dishonesty which claims today to be something culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture—which it actually opposes—if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into ascending powers.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, Easter 1914, six lectures.

If I have the temerity to speak about this social question in three brief lectures you will, I am sure, understand that the time at my disposal will only allow me to give the vaguest outline, an outline that will have to take shape in what you, my respected audience, will make of what I have to say. Please regard the content of these lectures as the merest hints which may serve you as suggestions.

What can we make of the social question nowadays? If we look squarely at human life as it is today we certainly do not find a clear picture with any obvious solutions. What we see is a huge number of differentiated conditions of life spread across the face of the earth, conditions that have created great gulfs and abysses within humanity between internal human experiences and the external life of commerce and industry. The tremendous variety of differentiations becomes all too obvious when you look at the difference between life prior to the terrible World War and life now. If you look at any larger region of the earth you will find that the differentiations in social life prior to and following the War are entirely different from those that pertained even only 50 years ago in the same region.

Today—thank goodness, we should add—we tend to look on these conditions of life with our heart, we feel their tragedy. But our intellect, well trained though it has become over the course of recent centuries, cannot keep up. This is the strange thing about all social matters now, that real questions, questions of life itself, are so very pressing and yet human understanding cannot keep pace with them.

It is hard to find ideas that can truthfully be called genuinely fruitful. The thoughts people have tend to fail when they are applied to social life.

The direction social development has taken makes it necessary to link the question of social life with another question in which only factual knowledge can be decisive, only a direct, concrete understanding.

It is easy, ladies and gentlemen, to think about a paradise on earth in which human beings can live a good life and be contented; such a thing appears to be a matter of course. However, to state how an existence worthy of the human being is supposed to arise out of today’s economic life, out of the concrete facts that nature and human labour and our inventive spirit present us with requires a profounder knowledge of the matter than any branch of science can provide. Compared with the complicated facts of social, economic life, what we see under the microscope or in the sky through the telescope is exceedingly simple.

As a matter of fact, everyone has something to say about the social question although hardly anyone has the patience or tenacity, or even the opportunity, to acquire an expert knowledge of the actual facts. As far as the social question is concerned, we have just come through a period with regard to which we should thank God that it is behind us. This was the period of Utopia, the period when people imagined the kind of paradise on earth in which human beings should live in the future like characters in some kind of novel. Whether these Utopias have been written about or whether someone has tried to establish them in reality, as Owen®' did in Scotland or Oppenheimer has been doing in Germany, is irrelevant. As far as present-day social life is concerned, it is irrelevant whether a Utopia is described in a book—in which case it becomes obvious that it cannot be realized—or whether someone founds a little settlement like an economic parasite which can only exist because the rest of the world is there around it, which can only exist so long as it can maintain itself as a parasite on the commercial world and then perishes.

The important thing to be considered with regard to the social question is the need to develop an awareness of the social waves pulsating beneath the surface of humanity, an awareness of what existed in the past, what is there now in the present and what wants to work on into the future—for what is preparing to work on into the future already exists everywhere to a great extent in the subconscious part of human beings. It will therefore be necessary in these lectures to point very firmly to what is there in the human unconscious. Above all, though, we must gain a broad conception of social life as it has developed historically.

Ladies and gentlemen, what once existed long ago is still with us now in the form of tradition, a remnant, but we can only understand what is here amongst us if we understand what existed long ago. Similarly, future tendencies are already mingling with what is here now in the present, and we must understand those seeds of the future that are already planted in our present time. We must not regard the past solely as something that happened centuries ago; we must see it as something still widespread amongst us, something effective that we can only comprehend as a past in the present or a present from the past if we learn to assess its significance correctly. We can only gain some insight if we trace the external symptoms back to their deeper foundations.

Please do not misunderstand me, ladies and gentlemen. In describing things like this one sometimes has to emphasize them rather forcefully, so that one appears to criticize when one merely intends to characterize. I do not mean it as a criticism when I say that the past is still a part of the present. In fact I can admire this past and find it extremely attractive as it makes a place for itself in the present, but if I want to think socially I must recognize that it is the past and that as such it must find its proper place in the present. This is how I have to gain a feeling for social life as it really is.

Let me give you an example, and please forgive me for quoting something from the immediate present, for I mention this somewhat strange symptom without intending any slight whatsoever. Yesterday we met your respected chairman on the street wearing his cap and gown. He looked remarkably handsome and I admired him very much. Nevertheless, what I beheld before my eyes was not only entirely medieval but I even thought someone from the ancient oriental theocracies was approaching us in the midst of the present day.

Underneath the gown there was, of course, an entirely modern soul, an anthroposophist actually, who possibly even saw himself as embodying something of the future into the bargain. Yet the symptom, the actual face of what I saw was history, history in the present time.

If we want to understand social life, if we want to understand the economic interrelationships that have their effect on our breakfast table every morning and determine how much we have to take out of our purse in order to make it possible for our breakfast to be there, then we need to have an overall view of humanity’s social evolution. Yet this social evolution of humanity, especially with regard to the social question, is today almost exclusively approached from the materialistic point of view.

What we must do first is look back to those quite different conditions that once obtained in human history and prehistory We must look back to those social communities that were the social theocracies of the Orient, although to this day they still exercise a strong influence in the West.

These were very different social communities. They were communities in which social relationships were structured through the Inspiration received by priests who remained aloof from ordinary conditions in the world. From the spiritual impulses that came upon them people derived the impulses for the external world. If you look at ancient Greece or Rome you see a social structure involving an immense army of slaves with above them a self-satisfied, wealthy upper class—relatively speaking. It is impossible to understand this social structure without taking account of its theocratic origins in which people believed in it as something given by God, or by the gods; they believed this not only with their heads but also with their hearts and with their whole being. So the slaves felt they were occupying their rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Human social life in ancient times is only comprehensible if you take into account the way in which external, physical structures were filled with commandments received through Inspiration.

These commandments, received from beyond the world by priests who remained aloof from the world, determined not only what human beings needed for the salvation of their souls, not only what they thought and felt about birth and death, but also how they should relate to one another. From the distant Orient we hear resounding not only the words ‘Love God above all things’, but also ‘and thy neighbour as thyself. Today we take a phrase such as ‘thy neighbour as thyself very abstractly. It was not so abstract when it rang out to the crowds from the inspired priest. It was something that worked from individual to individual, something that later came to be replaced by all those concrete conditions we now summarize by the name of law and morality. These conditions of law and morality that only came to be a part of human evolution later were originally contained in the divine commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ through the very way in which they were brought into the world by the inspired priests of theocracy.

In the same way the duties of the economic life, what human beings were supposed to do with their cattle, with their land and soil, these things were also determined by divine Inspirations. You can find echoes of this in the Mosaic laws. With regard to their culture and spiritual life, with regard to their life of law and morality, and with regard to their economic life, human beings felt themselves placed into the earthly world by divine powers. Theocracy was a unified structure in which the various members worked together because they were all filled with a single impulse. The three members: the life of culture and spirit, the life of law—what we today call the life of the state—and the economic life, these were combined in a unified organism filled with impulses that were not to be found on the earth.

As human life evolved further these three impulses, spiritual/cultural life, state/legal/moral life, and economic life pulled apart from one another and became differentiated. The single stream flowing in the form of unified human life in the theocracies gradually divided into two, as I shall show next, and then into three. It is with these three streams that we are confronted today.

Ladies and gentlemen, theocracy in olden times rested on the Inspiration received by the Mystery priests which flowed into the social life, including the legal-moral life and also the economic life. Rules of conduct in the form of commandments could be derived from those Inspirations so long as economic life was based mainly on the soil, agriculture, animal husbandry and so on. Based on their special relationship with the land, human beings bore in their hearts something that went out to meet what came towards them from theocracy.

Once trade and commerce began to play a greater role in human evolution this changed. We can only understand the oldest theocracies if we know that essentially all economic life rests on the human being’s sense of belonging to the land and the soil, and that trade and commerce are merely superimposed on top of this. They existed, of course, but in the way they developed they followed on from what related to the soil, to agriculture. Looking at human evolution we can see how trade and commerce emancipated themselves from agriculture, initially in ancient Greece and much more so in the days of the old Roman Empire. Roman life as a whole received its characteristic configuration from the way the activities of trade and commerce became an independent element in the social structure.

The significance of this emancipation for people in the Roman Empire deeply touched the hearts of the Gracchi, Tiberius Sempronius and Gaius Sempronius, and the words they found with which to express what was in their hearts led to the great social struggles of Roman times. In fact the first social movement leading to strikes had taken place in ancient Rome when the plebeians streamed out to the ‘sacred mountain’ to demand their rights. That was when the urge arose to push for new social forms for the future.

Then for the first time it was noticed that something independent had arisen, something that had up to then been an integral part of the whole social structure, and this was the human being’s labour, which brings into being a specific relationship between one individual and another. When an individual is told by the commandments that he is more lowly than another, he does not ask how he ought to arrange his work since this arises naturally from the relationship between the two. But when labour manifests as something that has emancipated itself and become independent the question arises: How do I relate to my fellow human beings in a way that enables my labour to be integrated within the social structure in the right way? Trade, commerce and labour are the three economic factors that stimulate human beings to bring to birth their legal rights and also an independent morality, a morality that has been separated off from religion. So human beings felt the need to let two streams flow from the single stream of theocracy. Theocracy was allowed to continue, and a second stream, the stream of the military life and specifically of the law, then flowed along beside it.

So as eastern culture spread towards Europe we see how under the influence of trade, commerce and labour the ancient theocratic ideas moved over into legalistic thinking. We see how in place of old situations that were not legalistic at all legalistic conditions developed to regulate questions of ownership and other matters that express the relationship between one individual and another. (You must try to understand what this means in relation to ancient Mosaic legislation.)

The seeds for this were sown at the time of the Gracchi, and these germinated later in Diocletian’s day. You can see how the second stream gradually established itself alongside the first and how this expressed itself in human life as a whole.

In the ancient theocracies over in the East the spiritual knowledge human beings were to have about the supersensible worlds was self-evident theosophy. Theo-Sophia is the concrete wisdom that was received through Inspiration.

Then, when the stream moved on towards Europe, jurisprudence came to join it. Jurisprudence cannot be a ‘sophia’ for it is not something that is received through Inspiration; it is something that human beings have to work out for themselves through the way one individual relates to another. The capacity to form judgements is what counts. So ‘sophia’ was replaced by logic, and the jurisprudence that was then poured into the whole social structure became predominantly logical. Logic and dialectic triumphed not so much in science as in the life of the law, and the whole of human life became squeezed into this second stream, this logic. The concept of ownership, the concept of personal rights, all such concepts were realized as logical categories.

This second stream was so powerful that it began to colour the first, thus turning ‘theo-sophia’ into ‘theo-logia’. The first stream came to be influenced by the second. So then, side by side with a well-tried ‘theo-sophia>—who, a little less lively and somewhat skinnier than she had been in her youth, had turned into a ‘theo-logia’—there came into being a ‘jurisprudentia’ as well. This jurisprudence encompassed everything that emerged in various disguises right up to the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth century, and it is still at work in the whole of economic life.

It was at work in Adam Smith, even though his concern was the economic life. Read Adam Smith while retaining your sense of how legalistic thinking continues to rumble on. The economic life was beginning to arise, but it was into the old concepts of jurisprudence——obviously these concepts Were old by then—that he tried to squeeze the economic life and its complications arising out of the way scientific thinking had taken hold of technology and so on.

So for a while in the civilized world two streams developed. There was ‘theo-logia’, which on the one hand flowed into science; it is easily proved how the later sciences developed out of ‘theo-logia’. But meanwhile human beings had learnt to think dialectically and logically, and this, t00, they poured into science. This is how modern times have come into being. Social and economic conditions are developing an overwhelming complexity. People are still accustomed to thinking theologically and legalistically, and this they are now applying to science on top of everything else. The scientists have failed to notice this. When they put their eye to a microscope Or study the starry heavens through a telescope, or when they dissect a lower animal in order to study its organism, it does not occur to them that they are applying a historical phase of human thinking rather than anything absolute. In recent times this scientific thinking has most certainly been taking over human civilization. One is expected to think scientifically about everything, and this has become a habit not only amongst the well-educated, for it is rife in the whole of humanity down to the simplest people.

I hope you will not misunderstand me when I make the following observation. When we discuss things in the way 1 have been doing over the past few days with regard to education one must include spiritual aspects that can illumine the scientific aspect. But people educated in science react by presuming that there can be no truth in things that are not written down in a book on physiology or pronounced from the rostrum in the physiology department. They do not assume that things that cannot be pronounced in this way, things that I have said with regard to scientific matters, have in fact all been checked and that full account has been taken of what the physiology books and the professor on the rostrum tell us. But people today cannot discern how one thing develops from another. As a result today’s science which is so brilliant and which is fully recognized by anthroposophy becomes a hindrance not because of what it says but as a result of the way people see it. In fact you can use the latest developments in human evolution to demonstrate clearly the way in which it has become a hindrance.

Karl Marx is well known to you by name. In recent times he has spoken about social life in a way that has impressed millions and millions of people. How did he speak? He spoke in a way that a representative of the scientific age is bound to speak on social matters.

Let us imagine how this representative of the age is bound to speak. The scientist has thoughts in his head, but he is not too concerned with them. He only begins to take them into account when they have been verified by what he sees under the microscope or by some other experiment or observation. What he observes must be kept entirely separate from himself, it must not be linked with himself in any way but must come from outside. So someone who thinks scientifically is bound to see an abyss between his own thinking and whatever comes to him from outside.

Karl Marx learnt this way of thinking that one wants to keep separate from the outside world not quite from the newest science but in a somewhat older form, namely, Hegelian dialectics. In fact this is only a slightly different colouring of scientific thinking. While he was learning this scientific way of thinking he was living within his own surroundings. But as a representative of the scientific age he could make nothing of it. As a German he was at home within the German way of thinking logically and dialectically. But he was unable to make anything of his thoughts, just as the scientist cannot make anything of his thoughts but has to wait and see what the microscope or telescope will show him, namely, something from outside. Karl Marx was incapable of doing anything with his thoughts, and as he was unable to escape from inside his own skin he escaped from Germany instead and came to England. Here he found himself confronted with external social conditions just as the scientist is confronted by the microscope or telescope. Now he had a world outside of himself. This enabled him to speak and establish a social theory in a scientific way, just as the scientist establishes his theory—and since people are totally immersed in this way of thinking he became immensely popular.

When one talks about human beings in terms of external nature—as Karl Marx did—then human beings, including the social conditions in which they live, are made to look as though they were in fact nature. I can say what I have to say about Jupiter, about the violet, about the earthworm equally well in Iceland, in New Zealand, in England, in Russia or anywhere else. There is no need for me to speak in concrete terms, for everything must be kept general.

So if you establish a social theory along scientific lines it seems that this is something that has validity all over the world and can be applied anywhere. In fact the main characteristic of the legalistic political way of thinking—of which Marxism is merely the culmination—is that it wants to take general abstractions and apply them anywhere. You will find this even where there is as yet no sign of socialist thought, but only a legalistic, logical way of thinking, as in Kant with his categorical imperative which is also perhaps known to you as something from beyond your shores.

Ladies and gentlemen, this categorical imperative states: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be valid for all people.?! Such a thing has no application in real life, for you cannot say to someone: Get the tailor to make you a jacket that will fit anyone. This is the logical model on which old-fashioned legalistic, political thinking is founded, and it has reached its culmination in Marxist social thought.

So you see how what Marx observed scientifically by applying his German thinking to the English economic situation was initially realized. This he then transported back to Central Europe where it lived in people’s will impulses. Subsequently it was also carried further eastwards where the ground had even been prepared for this application of something totally abstract to real human situations. In the east Peter the Great had even prepared the ground for Marx. Peter had already inserted western thinking into Russian life. Even though Russia bore many oriental traits in its soul while its people were still steeped in theocracy he brought in legalistic, political thinking and side by side with Moscow set up St Petersburg further to the west.

People overlooked the fact that here were two worlds, that St Petersburg was Europe and Moscow was Russia where pure oriental theocracy still had a profound role to play. So when Soloviev created a philosophy it was theosophical rather than dialectic and scientific like that of Herbert Spencer. Soloviev belonged to Moscow, not St Petersburg. Not that things in Russia can be divided neatly in accordance with geography. However much he remains attached to Moscow, however far eastwards he might travel, Dostoevski belongs to St Petersburg.?® Experiences in Russia take account of the interplay between St Petersburg and Moscow. Theocratically speaking, Moscow is Asia, even today, while St Petersburg is Europe.

St Petersburg had been prepared in a legalistic, political way for what Leninism perpetrated in Russia when something that was the final outcome of the Western European soul was impressed upon the Russian soul, to which it was completely foreign. It was so abstract, so foreign that what Lenin>® did in Russia might just as well have been done on the moon. He could have chosen anywhere else, but he happened to want to rule Russia.

So conditions have arisen that we entirely fail to understand in a concrete way if we only look at the social situation. We must make an effort to understand them in a concrete way, ladies and gentlemen. We must understand that in human evolution the spiritual, cultural life came before legalistic, political life which established itself as a second stream beside the first one. We must understand that the time has perhaps now arrived for something new to happen, something that goes beyond the way the legalistic life has coloured ‘theosophia’ and transformed it into ‘theo-logia’. Perhaps it is time for spiritual, cultural life to reawaken in a new form.

The fact is that in human evolution many aspects of the spiritual, cultural life have retained the forms they had in olden times. Not only cap and gown but also thought forms have remained. These thought forms no longer fit in with a world in which trade, commerce and labour have emancipated themselves in a way that has left the spiritual, cultural life behind as a separate aspect alongside the rest of life. This is more the case the further west one travels.

It is least of all the case in the Russia of Moscow. In Central Europe all the struggles, including the social ones, concern the fact that people cannot find a proper way of relating the dialectical, legalistic, political element with the theocratic element. They cannot work out whether cap and gown should be retained when the judge takes his seat or whether they should be discarded. Lawyers are already rather embarrassed by having to wear gowns, while judges still find they enhance their dignity. People cannot decide. There is a fierce struggle going on about this in Central Europe. In Western Europe the theocratic element has become strongly preserved in thought forms.

Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the fact that the second stream has established itself in human evolution. On the one hand there are those who—symptomatically speaking—have retained the ancient ways including cap and gown. But now people want to see them take these off in order to find out what they are wearing underneath. Whether it be a king’s mantle or a soldier’s cloak it will have to be something that does justice to a legalistic situation, a political situation. When we meet such people in the street we want to remove their cap and gown in order to see them as complete individuals; underneath we want to find a kind of soldier’s cloak or some garment that would be appropriate for a solicitor’s office. Then we should see before us both the streams living side by side within the person.

I must confess—in jest, of course, although I mean it quite seriously—that when I meet someone in the street wearing a cap and gown I cannot help asking myself whether such a person would know whether the next letter he writes should bear the date of 768 BC or—if perhaps the gown conceals a legal scholar—ap 1265. It is difficult to decide on a date, since the distant past and the medium past appear side by side in two streams. The last to occur to me would be today’s date, for there is no question of taking the present time into consideration just yet. The two different pasts relate to one another as does Moscow to St Petersburg.

We are faced with the question of how the aspects that proceed side by side today can be brought into a meaningful organizational structure. We shall see how the twofoldness about which I have been speaking leads on to a threefolding in modern times, a threefolding in which the three elements also proceed side by side.

When I speak of threefolding, ladies and gentlemen, I do not mean that there is at present a beautiful unity in social life which we are to cut into three pieces so that three elements can evolve side by side. I mean that a threefoldness already exists, just as it does in the human being who has a system of head and nerves, a thythmic system, and a system of metabolism. The three must function properly together, however, and to each must be assigned what belongs to it. If the digestive system works too little, leaving too much for the head to do, the result is all kinds of migraine-like disorders.

If the spiritual, cultural element—which is the head in the social organism—does not function well, leaving too much to the economic element, then all kinds of social ills will ensue.

To observe social life in depth we have to see such things in the context of human evolution, for this is the best way of avoiding superficiality. We must succeed in putting cap and gown into a context that enables us to conceive of two different historical dates as being one inside the other. This then becomes the present time. Otherwise the past remains the past with its two streams flowing side by side and continuing to be the fundamental cause of the social ills present in the world today, even though people do not wish to see it like this. There will be some more to say in the third part of my lecture.

Ladies and gentlemen, as it has grown rather late I will be brief in what I still have to tell you today. This will bring us up to the present time and I shall save the greater part for the next lecture.

From the beginning of the fifteenth to sixteenth century, but most clearly from the nineteenth century onwards, the two streams I have been describing came to be accompanied more and more by a third one. This has become increasingly apparent the further civilization and culture have moved westwards. To what was originally theocratic and adapted to the land and the soil, to agriculture, there was added in the middle regions the legalistic element adapted to trade, commerce and labour. And now in the West a further element has come to join these, the element that later came to be termed industry, everything industrial including all the technical things this involves.

Consider what the introduction of the actual industrial element into human evolution has meant. It would be an easy calculation to adapt what I am about to say to present-day conditions, but I shall refer to an earlier point in time, roughly the 1880s. At that time it was said that the population of the world amounted to 1,500 million human beings. But this was not a correct calculation of the earth’s population. It would have been correct for the most ancient antiquity when virtually every individual laboured manually in some way, or with something closely connected to human life such as guiding the plough or leading the horse and so on. But by the nineteenth century another entirely new population had entered the world, namely, the machines that relieved human beings of a part of their labour. Even for the 1880s if you calculate the amount of labour from which human beings had been relieved by machines you arrive at a world population of 2,000 million, about a quarter more. Today—and this was much more so before the War—if we count the number of human beings on the earth purely physically, we arrive at a completely erroneous total. To accord with the amount of work done we have to add another 500 million human beings.

This has indeed added an entirely new element to the ancient theocratic and legalistic streams, an entirely new stream, in fact, for instead of bringing human beings closer to their environment it has thrown them back upon themselves. In the Middle Ages one part of the human being was, let’s say, the key he had just crafted, or even the entire lock. What a human being did passed over into his work. But when a person is operating a machine he does not much care what kind of a relationship he has with that machine—relatively speaking, of course. So he is turned more and more in upon himself. He experiences his humanity. The human being now enters evolution as an entirely new being, for he is detaching himself from what he does externally.

This is the democratic element that has been arising in the West over the last few centuries, but so far it is only a requirement, a postulate, and not something that has been fully realized. These conditions are overwhelming people, for they are only capable of thinking in a theocratic or a legalistic manner. Yet life is becoming more and more industrialized and commercialized and confronting human beings with overwhelming demands. They have not penetrated this with their thoughts. Even someone like Marx thought only legalistically, and the manner in which millions and millions of people have come to understand him is merely legalistic.

In this way, then, a third stream, about which we shall speak tomorrow, has come to join the other two. The proletarian human being is born, and what rumbles in the inner being of this proletarian comes to life in a particular conception of capitalism, of labour. Life itself is forcing human beings to come to grips with these problems and only now can we really say that human evolution has reached the present time.

There stands the man in his cap and gown, handsome and lordly, radiating towards us from the far past. And there stands the man with his soldier’s cloak and sword as an embodiment of the legalistic element—for the soldierly aspect is only another side of the legalistic—belonging to the more recent past but not yet to the present. We might even take the man in cap and gown for a good lawyer as well, since this is the image he has been presenting to humanity for centuries, and the uncomfortable fit is therefore not yet too noticeable for us. But if he were to plant himself into economic life—well, unless he is able to enter this fully despite his cap and gown, then I fear his only achievement will be to lose his money. People have in general not yet succeeded in entering upon what this third stream means in life, and neither has humanity as a whole. That is why the social question confronts us as a question for all humanity. The human being finds himself placed beside the machine. We must grasp the social question not as an economic problem, but as one concerning humanity as a whole, and we must understand that it is within the human sphere that we have to solve it.

As yet we lack the necessary thought impulses such as existed for the theocratic and the legalistic streams. We do not yet have such thought impulses for the economic stream. Today’s struggles are all about finding thought impulses for the economic stream such as existed for the theocratic and the legalistic stream. This is the main content of the social question today, and large-scale beneficial solutions are proving even more difficult to come by than are small-scale ones. States that have suddenly been confronted with having to take on an industrial economic life tried to encompass it within the old legalistic forms. Having failed to do this they have now found a kind of safety-valve that is enabling them to avoid allowing the economic life to develop in a real way alongside the life of the state. This safety-valve is colonization. Having failed to find vigorous social ideas within, they sought evasive action in founding colonies.

This worked for England but not for Germany. Germany undoubtedly failed to encompass its industrialization because it was unsuccessful in founding colonies. The great question facing humanity today is: How is the human being to cope with industrialization in the way he once coped with theocratic life and then with legalistic life?

People today think that a purely materialistic solution can be found for this great problem. Everyone wants to solve it on the basis of economic life. I intend to show the modest beginnings of a spiritual way in which it can be solved. This is what I shall speak about in the next two lectures.

On Founding an Association for Further Work along the Lines of these Lectures

Ladies and gentlemen, from the way I have been presenting these lectures you will have gathered how much importance I attach to the sum-total of impulses amongst which a particular education method is only, you might say, a partial expression—a partial expression of what, in my opinion, ought to come about at the present moment in human evolution through a deeper understanding of life, an understanding of life founded on reality. Having noted the fundamental tone I believe I have managed to sustain during these lectures, you will believe me when I thank you most warmly—not so much in my own name as in the name of this matter as a whole for which, as you know, I would like to pledge my whole existence—when I thank you most warmly for your decision to take the matter in hand for this part of the world.

We can only hope that in the association you intend to create as the result of intentions that have ripened here there will be a number of persons who will have the strength to carry what you hope will arise out of the meetings we have had today.

For matters of this kind, ladies and gentlemen, it is important that there should be persons capable of carrying the impulse. The anthroposophical movement, as we call it, can only make progress in the world if it is carried by individual human beings. Of course there have to be associations or societies, but the most important thing is that personalities emerge from such societies who with their own individual strength can carry whatever it is that comes to be regarded as important.

If we consider the very important position in which the population of this country, in particular, finds itself in the present historical situation, and if we take seriously the responsibility arising out of this position, we have to say that something exceptionally important could arise out of the decision you have taken today. The number of those who say that the world needs a push towards the spirit is small as yet. On the degree to which this small number becomes an ever-growing crowd will depend whether world evolution can make any progress at all through new impulses.

As I said in the lecture this morning, the old impulses have more or less come to a standstill. We still use the old words; numbers and strong parties talk in old-fashioned terms. Let us endeavour to talk in new-fashioned terms, and let us strive to take these things into the real world. But do not let us become over-enthusiastic about our intention of bringing spiritual values into evolution. Let us not get over-excited! ‘Bringing spiritual values into reality’ can become a slogan just like any other.

The most important thing is that with our whole heart, in the fullness of our being, we can stand for what can be guided, thought and willed from real life, through real life and for real life. It is this that is essential.

Perhaps your association will initially bring to fruition things that can and, I believe, must be directed towards education. Whatever the case may be, something extraordinarily positive, something connected with the evolution of humanity in our present age, will come from your decisions.

I wanted to say these few words of warmest gratitude to you for attaching your hearts to what has been expressed in these lectures in the form of ideas, something with serious intent that needs to be elicited from human evolution by human beings with true feelings in order to become an impulse for evolution on into the future.

Today I hope to conclude my remarks about human society in the present time and the social demands it makes on us, but I am only too aware that all I have been able to say and still intend to say here can amount to nothing more than a very scanty guideline. The social question in our time is extremely wide-ranging, and there are two main aspects that need taking into account if we are to reach some clarity about it. These are firstly the present historical moment in human evolution and secondly the immediate external circumstances in the world.

The present historical moment in human evolution needs to be approached with the utmost impartiality. Our understanding is all too easily clouded by preconceptions and an emotional approach that leads us to skate over the surface of what is going on in the depths not so much of the human soul as of the very nature of the human being as such.

We are easily misunderstood when we say that we are living in an age of transition, for this has been said in almost every age. Obviously we always live in a time of transition from past to future, but the point is to discern the nature of the particular transition in question. To do this it is necessary to realize that ‘the present’ does not mean this year or even this decade but a much longer period of time. The present time has been in preparation since the fifteenth century, and the nineteenth century was its culmination. Although we are now right in the midst of this age, people in general have little appreciation of the particular character of this particular moment in world history.

To put it plainly, to gain any kind of insight into social life today we have to investigate the way human beings are straining to extricate themselves from old social forms because they long to be free, independent human beings pure and simple.

To use a German term, we need a Weltanschauung der Freiheir, a universal conception of freedom or—since ‘freedom’ in this country has other connotations—a universal conception of spiritual activity in deed, in thought and feeling deriving from the spiritual individuality of the human being.

Early in the 1890s in my book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I endeavoured to paint a picture of what human beings are now striving for not so much in their conscious as in their subconscious activity. In former times human beings were bound within a social context as far as their thoughts and actions were concerned. Look at someone in the Middle Ages: he was not an individual in the sense we mean today, but rather a member of a class or a particular station in life; he was a Christian, or a nobleman or a citizen. All his thoughts were bourgeois or aristocratic or priestly. Itis only in recent centuries that individuals have extricated themselves from these structures. If one wanted to fit into society in a social way in former times one had to ask oneself: ‘What is priestly behaviour? How should a priest behave towards others? How should a citizen behave towards others? How should a nobleman behave towards others?” Nowadays we ask: ‘How should one behave in a way that is in keeping with one’s worth as a human being and one’s rights as a human being?’

To find the answer one has to look for something within oneself. We now have to seek within ourselves the impulses that formerly showed us how to behave in society in consequence of being a citizen, a nobleman or a priest. These impulses are not in our body but in our spirit which is impressed into our soul. That is why in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I described the moral impulse that is at the same time the most profound social impulse guiding the human being as ‘moral intuition’.’? Something needs to come to fruition in us that can guide us even in the most concrete situations and tell us: This is what you must do now.

Then, you see, everything depends on the individual. Then you have to look at the individuality of each human being with the presupposition that moral intuitions reside in his or her heart and soul. All education must be aimed at awakening these moral intuitions, so that every individual can express the sense: ‘I belong not only to this earth, I am not solely a product of physical heredity; I have come down to the earth from spiritual worlds and as this particular individual I have a specific task to do here on earth.’

But to know that we have a task is not enough; we also need to find out what that task is. In each concrete situation we must find within ourselves what it is that we have to do. Our soul must tell us. Vague pricks of conscience must develop into individual moral intuition. This is what it means to become free as a human being; it means to build only on what we can discover within ourselves.

A good many people have taken strong exception to this because they imagine it would lead to placing the whole moral sphere in society at the mercy of individual caprice. But this is not the case. The moral sphere then rests on the only basis suitable for society, which is, on the one hand, the basis of mutual trust. We must learn to acquire this mutual trust in the larger concerns of life, just as we already have it in small things. If I come up against Mr K. in the doorway as I leave, I instinctively trust that he will not come straight for me and knock me down. I myself act in accordance with the same trust and we both make way so as not to knock into each other. We already do this in the lesser events of life, but it is something that can be applied in all our affairs if we learn to see ourselves rightly as free beings. There has to be trust between individuals—what a golden word this is! In educating ourselves and others to trust and believe in the individual human being, rather than just the nation or humanity as a whole, in working towards trust in the individual we are doing the only thing that can generate an impulse for social life in the future, for only such trust can create community among individuals. This is the one aspect. The other is that when there is no longer anyone telling us what to do or compelling us to do it, we shall have to find the necessary impetus within ourselves not only to act but also to respond to situations with feeling, to be active in our soul. What does this mean? If someone was a priest in former times he knew his station in society. Without having to look it up in a book he knew how to behave when he wore the habit of a religious order, and that certain obligations were connected with this. Likewise if he wore the sword of the nobility he knew that his place in human society was based on being a nobleman. He had his specific place in the social order, and the same applied to the citizen.

Whether we like it or not, this is something that is no longer appropriate in human society. Of course there are plenty of people who want to go back to those days, but world history is telling us otherwise. There is absolutely no point in establishing abstract programmes for all kinds of social set-ups. The only useful thing we can do is look at what current history is telling us.

So now we have to ask ourselves what the emotive impulse for our social actions can be when we are no longer pushed along by virtue of being a priest, a citizen, a nobleman or a member of the fourth estate. Only this: we must have as much trust in our dealings with other people as we have in a person whom we love. To be free means to realize oneself in actions carried out with love.

One golden word that must rule social life in the future is ‘trust’. The other is ‘love’ for the task we have to do. In future, actions will be good for society as a whole if they arise out of love for the whole of humanity.

But first we have to learn what love for the whole of humanity means. It is no good jumping to the conclusion that it already exists. It does not, and the more we tell ourselves that it does not yet exist the better it will be. Love for the whole of humanity must be a love of deeds, it must become active and must realize itself in freedom. Then it will gradually move on from the domestic hearth or the local pulpit and become a universal, world-wide appraisal.

From this point of view I now want to ask how you think a worldwide appraisal of this kind can be applied, for example, to that most dreadful and heartbreaking example of social chaos now taking hold in Eastern Europe, in Russia.

In such a situation it is important to ask the right question, and the right question is: ‘Is there too little food on the earth for the whole of mankind?’ We have to refer to the whole globe, for since the last third of the nineteenth century we have a world economy, not national economies, and it is important to take this into account in the social context. No one will reply that there is too little food on the earth for the whole of humanity. Such a time may come, and then people will have to use their ingenuity to solve the problem. But for now we can still be sure that if countless people are going hungry in any corner of the earth, it is because human arrangements in recent decades have brought this about. It is these human arrangements that are preventing the right food supplies from reaching the starving corner of the earth in time. It is a question of distributing the food supplies in the right way at the right time.

What has happened? At a specific moment in history Russia has isolated a huge territory from the rest of the world by instituting a continuation of Tsarism on the basis of a purely intellectual abstraction. A feeling of nationalism extending over a large territory has locked Russia away from the rest of the world, thus preventing global social arrangements from enabling human hands to let nature from one part of the world help out generously in another where nature has failed for once.

When we can find the right angle from which to view these things, the sight of such social distress will lead each of us to cry: “Mea culpa.’ For although we feel we are all individuals, this does not deprive us of a sense of unity with the whole of humanity. In our human evolution we have no right to feel ourselves as individuals unless we also have a sense of belonging to humanity as a whole.

I should like to call this the fundamental ground from which any ‘philosophy of freedom’ must spring, for such a philosophy must place each individual human being in the social context in an entirely new way. Our questions, t00, will then become quite new.

Very many questions have been asked about society in recent centuries, and especially in the nineteenth century; and what have the proletarian millions made of these questions which arose first among members of the higher classes? Why is there such a widespread view that the proletarian millions are on the wrong track? It is because they have taken erroneous doctrines on board from the higher classes. They have become the pupils of the higher classes; the doctrines are not their own.

We must learn to see things clearly. Some maintain that human beings are the product of their environment, that they are produced by the social circumstances and arrangements all around them. Others say that social circumstances are what people have made them. All such views are just about as clever as asking: Is the human physical body the product of the head or of the stomach? The physical human being is the product of neither but rather of a continuous interaction between the two. The two have to work together; the head is both cause and effect, and the stomach is both cause and effect. Indeed, if you look a little deeper you will find that the stomach is made by the head, for in the embryo the head is created before the stomach is formed; but on the other hand it is the stomach that forms the organism.

So we must not ask whether human beings have been created by circumstances or circumstances by human beings. It is essential to understand that each is both cause and effect, that everything affects everything else. The foremost question to ask is: “What social arrangements will enable people to have the right thoughts on matters of social concern, and what kind of thoughts must exist so that these right social arrangements can arise?’

In practical life people tend to think in terms of doing one thing after another. But this leads nowhere. We can only make progress if we think in circles, but many people do not feel up to doing this because it would be like having a mill-wheel turning in their head. It is essential to think in circles. Looking at external circumstances we must admit that they have been created by people but also that people are affected by them. And looking at the things people do we must realize that these actions bring about the external circumstances but also that they are sustained by these same external circumstances. To arrive at reality we must skip back and forth in our thoughts, but people do not like doing this. They want to set up a procedure and make a programme: Point 1, Point 2, Point 3, right up to, let us say, Point 12, with Point 1 coming first and Point 12 last. But there is no life in this. Any programme should be reversible, so that we can begin with Point 12 and work back to Point 1, just as the stomach nourishes the organism, and if the nerves situated underneath the cerebellum are not in good order we cannot breathe properly. Just as things can be reversed in life, so must we also see to it that they can be reversed in social life.

In the same vein, when I wrote my book Towards Social Renewal I had to assume, on the basis of the social situation at the time, that it would find readers who would be capable of going both forwards and backwards in their ideas. But people do not want this. They prefer to begin at the beginning and read through to the end, at which point they know that they have finished. They are not interested in being told that the end is also the beginning. The worst misunderstanding connected with this book with its social intentions was that people read it the wrong way; and they continue to do so. They do not want to adapt their thoughts to life; they want life to adapt to their thoughts. This, however, is not at all the precondition for social arrangements with which we are dealing here. I shall continue with this theme after the translation.

When people began to discuss the idea of a threefold social organism I heard about an interesting opinion. The idea of a threefold society draws attention to the three streams in social life that I have been describing over the last few days. Firstly there is the cultural, spiritual stream which is today the heritage of the old theocracies, for all cultural life can ultimately be traced back to the origins of theocracy. Secondly there is what I have called the sphere of political, legal affairs, and thirdly what can be termed economic life. When attention was focused on the threefolding impulse, on these three ideas, there were people of good standing in the world, manufacturers perhaps, or clergymen, people with a specific position in society, who came and pronounced on the matter: ‘How delightful to discover a new suggestion emerging that will once again validate Plato’s grand ideas.” These people thought I had breathed new life into Plato’s division of society into the order of agricultural producers, the order of soldiers and the order of statesmen and scholars.

All I could say was that perhaps this might seem so to those who rush to the libraries to ascertain the origins of any new idea. But for those who understand what I mean by a threefolding of social life it will be obvious that it is the opposite of what Plato meant by his three orders, for Plato lived a good many years prior to the Mystery of Golgotha. His three orders were appropriate in his time, but to bring them back to life now would be absurd. The idea of a threefold organism is not concerned with dividing individuals into groups with some being producers, others soldiers and yet others statesmen. What we want to do now is create arrangements, institutions in which every individual can partake in turn, for today we are concerned with human individuals and not with orders or categories. There will be arrangements in which the cultural, spiritual life of humanity can be cultivated, this being built solely on people’s individual capabilities. Secondly there will be independent arrangements that govern political and legal life without wanting to swallow up the other two elements of the social organism. And thirdly there will be arrangements dealing solely with economic affairs.

The political, legal life will deal with agreements people have to make with one another, with things that are determined between individuals.

In the cultural, spiritual sphere not everyone will be able to make judgements, for in this sphere only those can judge who have the necessary competence in a particular subject. Here everything emanates from the individual human being. There is a wholeness in the cultural life; it has to be a coherent, uniform body. You will object that this is not so, but I shall come to this in a moment.

The political, legal sphere requires individuals to work together in the sense of present-day democracy in matters that require no specialist knowledge, so that every individual is competent to form judgements. Such a sphere exists; it is the legal and political life.

Thirdly there is the sphere of economics. Here individuals do not make judgements; indeed, an individual opinion is irrelevant, for it can never be correct. In associations or communities of individuals judgements arise when opinions merge in a common judgement.

The whole point in all of this is not the division of the state, or for that matter any other community, into three parts. The important thing is that each of the three aspects is in a position to make its own contribution to the health of the overall social organism.

The way of thinking I have represented here is capable of holding its own in the midst of life. Suppose someone wants to apply his capabilities and do something, using the necessary skills or techniques. What this person does is then carried forward by others. It is important that I should do something, but it is not the main thing. The main thing is that a second, third, fourth person or any number of people carry my action further in an appropriate manner. For this to happen the social organism must be so managed that traces of my activity do not disappear. Otherwise I might do something here in Oxford that is carried on further for a while, but by the time it reaches Whitechapel there is no trace of it. All that remains visible are the external symptoms of the hardship prevalent there. Hardship will inevitably arise if human forces cannot enter into the social organism in the right way.

Look at the misery in Russia. What causes it? It is there because social forces cannot come to grips properly with the social organism, because the social organism is not structured in the right way according to its natural three parts. The actions of individual human beings will be able to percolate through the whole social organism like blood through the human body only if that social organism is so arranged that the cultural life depends freely on individuals, if there is a legal and political life that orders all the business that falls within the competence of every individual regardless of each person’s level of education, and if, thirdly, there is an independent economic sphere concerned solely with production, consumption and distribution.

Such a thing can indeed result from a true and realistic insight into the world so long as people really do come to grips with it on the basis of a realistic understanding. But if such things, once stated, are merely explained away by Marxist theories and doctrinaire intellectualism, then of course they remain incomprehensible. No one then knows what is meant by someone who does not look at hardship superficially but who delves down more deeply, saying: ‘You cannot improve matters in this way. First you must create social interrelationships of a kind that enables the hardship to be sent packing.” That is where the problem lies.

We must begin to realize how far what was once theocracy has retreated from real life. The original theocrats did not need libraries; their science was not neatly stored in libraries. To study a science there was no need to sit down and pore over old books, for what they did was go and dwell with living human beings. They paid attention to human beings. They asked how best to do what was right for human beings. The real world was their library. Instead of studying books they looked into human faces, they took account of them; instead of reading books they read the souls of human beings. Today all our science has been swallowed up by libraries or stored by other means, well away from human beings.

We need a sphere of spirit and culture firmly rooted in the real world; we need a sphere of spirit and culture in which books are written from life and for life, full of ideas for life and ways and means of living. Especially in the sphere of spirit and culture we must emerge from our libraries and go out into life. We need education for our children based on the children present in the classroom, not on rules. Our education must be derived from knowledge of the human being; what should be done each day, each week, each year must derive from the children themselves.

We need a legal and political sphere in which human being encounters human being, where the only basis for decisions is the legitimate competence of each individual, as I have already pointed out, regardless of profession or whatever other situation each is in. The legal and political sphere exists for all the situations in which human beings meet one another as equals.

What else will belong to the sphere of spirit and culture if this sphere is accepted in the form I have described? Little by little the administration of capital will move of its own accord from the economic to the spiritual, cultural sphere.

However much we may rail against capitalism there is nothing we can do about it, for we need it. What matters about capital and capitalism is not that they exist but what the social forces are that work in them. Capital has come into being through the intellectual ingenuity of human beings; it came into being out of the cultural, spiritual sphere through the division of labour and intellectual knowledge. Merely as a way of illustrating the possibilities, and not to make a Utopian statement, I described in my book Towards Social Renewal how capital might stream towards the spiritual, cultural sphere of the social organism. Just as the copyright on books lapses after 30 years, so that their content becomes common property, so, I suggested, might someone—having amassed capital and had capital working for him while he was himself engaged in the work which his capital generated—transfer his capital to the common good after 30 years or so. I did not state this as a Utopia but merely as a possibility of how, instead of stagnating everywhere, capital might begin to flow and enter the bloodstream of social life. All the things I wrote were illustrations, not dogmas or Utopian ideas. I merely wanted to hint at what might be brought about by the associations.

What actually happens may turn out to be something quite different. When one has brought life into one’s thinking one does not set down dogmas to be adopted, one counts on human beings. Once they are embraced in the right way by the social organism they themselves will discover what is meaningful and useful socially in the environment in which they find themselves. In everything I say I count on people, not dogmas. Unfortunately it has been my experience that what I really meant in my book Towards Social Renewal is never discussed. Instead people ask questions such as: Is it really possible for capital to be inherited by the most capable after the passage of a specific number of years?’ People do not want realities, they want Utopias. This is what militates against an unprejudiced reception of the threefolding impulse.

Once the legal, political sphere is able to function properly people will notice that it will involve itself with questions of labour. Today labour is entirely enmeshed in the economic life and is not treated as something to do with how people relate with one another. In 1905 I wrote an article on the social question in which I demonstrated that with today’s division of labour, labour is reduced to a commodity as it flows into the rest of the social organism. Qur own labour only has an apparent value for us. What others do for us has real value, and what we do for them also has value. This has been achieved by technology, but our moral outlook has not kept pace with it. Within the social order as it is today one can, technically speaking, make nothing for oneself, not even a jacket. If you make it yourself it still costs as much, taking the whole social structure into account, as if it had been made by someone else. The economic aspect of the jacket is universal in the sense that it is determined by the community at large. It is an illusion to imagine that the jacket made for you by a tailor is cheaper. If you work it out in figures it might appear cheaper. But if you were to calculate its price as part of the overall balance sheet you would see that by making your own clothes you can no more jump out of your own skin than you can remove the process from the economic sphere or change that sphere in any way. The price of the garment you make for yourself remains an item in the total balance sheet. Labour is what one person does for another. It cannot be measured by the number of man/hours required in a factory setting. The value put on labour is a supreme example of something belonging in the realm of law, the legal, political sphere.

You can tell that this is not an outdated idea by the way labour is everywhere protected and safeguarded by laws. But these regulations are not even half-measures, they are quarter measures. No regulations will be properly effective until there is a proper threefolding of the social organism. Only when this has happened will human beings meet each other as equals. Only then will labour be rightly regulated when human worth meets human worth in that sphere where all are competent to speak.

You might want to object: ‘Perhaps there will sometimes not be enough work to go round if work is determined in this way in a democratic state.’ This is indeed one of the areas where the social life is affected by history, by the evolution of humanity as a whole. The economic sphere must not be allowed to determine the amount of work available. The economic sphere must be bounded on the one hand by nature and on the other by the amount of labour determined by the legal, political sphere. You cannot get a committee to decide in advance how many rainy days there are to be in 1923 so as to enable the economy to run on course in that year. Just as you have to accept the limitations set by nature, so in an independent economic organism will you have to reckon with the amount of labour available being determined by the legal, political organism. I can only mention this in general terms here, as an example.

Within the economic sphere of the social organism there will be associations in which consumers, producers and distributors will together reach an associative judgement based on practical experience—not an individual judgement that can only be irrelevant in this sphere. The small beginnings being tried today show that this is not yet possible, but the fact that these small beginnings are being tried shows that unconsciously humanity does have the intention to form associations. Co-operatives, trade unions, all kinds of communities show that this intention exists. But when co-operatives are founded side by side with ordinary social life as it exists today they will perish unless they conform to this social life by charging the same prices and using the same marketing practices. In working towards a threefold social organism we should not be trying to create new realities based on Utopian concepts; we should be coming to grips with what is already there. Institutions already in existence, consumers, producers, the entrepreneur, everything already in existence needs to come together in associations. There is no need to ask how to create associations. The question to ask is: ‘How can existing economic organizations and institutions be inte grated in associations?’

If such associations can be achieved, commercial experience will enable something to arise that can indeed lead to a genuine social ordering, just as a healthy human organism leads to a healthy life. There will be circulation in the economy, circulation of production money, loan money and gift money. There can be no social organism without these three. We may want to rail against gifts and donations, but they are a necessary part. You deceive yourself if you say that a healthy social organism should make gifts unnecessary. Yet you pay tax, and taxes are merely a roundabout way of making donations to schools and other facilities.

People deserve to have a social order in which they can always see how things flow without having to make suppositions. When social life has been extricated from today’s general muddle, in which everything is mixed up together, we shall begin to see—just as we can already observe the blood circulating in the human organism—how money circulates in the form of production money, loan money and gift money. ‘We shall see the different way human beings relate on the one hand to money they invest—money for trading, production and purchase—which goes back into production because of the way it earns interest, and on the other hand to the money they give as donations, which must flow into an independent cultural sphere.

People can only participate in social life as a whole through associations which make visible how the life of society flows. Then the social organism will be healthy. Abstract thinking is incompatible with the idea of a threefolding of the social order; only living thinking can encompass it.

Yet even in the economic sphere our thinking is no longer alive. Everywhere we have abstraction. Where is there any life in the economic sphere today? How did it begin in the days when people jotted down their income and expenditure on odd scraps of paper? As things grew more complicated clerics were employed to do the job; they became the clerks. They ran external life to the best of their ability. And who are the successors of those clerks taken from the church to record the economic affairs of princes? They are today’s bookkeepers. In some districts you still occasionally come across a small reminder of those early times. If you turn to the first page in their ledgers—is this the case in your country also?—you see the inscription: “With God’. But there is little in subsequent pages that is ‘with God’. What you find there is an abstraction of something that ought to be full of life, something that ought to be present as life in the associations and not stored up in ledgers.

In working towards a threefolding of society we certainly do not aim to juggle about in old ways with concepts such as cultural life, political life, economic life, mixing them up perhaps in slightly different ways, as has been done in recent times. Our main concern is to comprehend what an organism really is, and then to bring back into real life those things that have become such total abstractions. The most important task is to rescue things from abstraction and bring them back to life. Every individual will belong to the associations of the economic sphere, including representatives of the cultural sphere, for they, too, have to eat, as do the representatives of the legal, political sphere. Conversely, too, every individual also belongs to each of the other spheres as well.

There is a necessary consequence of all this that shocks people a good deal when the subject is brought up, especially when the examples one uses are somewhat exaggerated so as to be more explicit. I once told an industrialist, an excellent man at his job, what was needed in order to bring things back to life: ‘Suppose you have an employee who is fully integrated in the life of your factory. Then along comes a technical college and snaps this man up, not someone recently trained but someone who is fully immersed in the life of the factory. For five or ten years this man can talk to the youngsters about what the life of a factory really is. Then, when he gets a bit stale, he can return to the factory.” Well, such things will make life complicated, but they are what our time requires. There is no getting away from it.

Just as new life must continually flow through the social organism if it is not to decay, so must people either become full human beings, which means that they must be able to circulate through all the spheres of the social organism, or we shall fall into decadence. Of course we can choose decadence if we like, by standing still with our old points of view. But evolution will not allow us to stand still. This is the salient fact.

In conclusion I should like to add that I have developed the subject of my lectures more from a feeling angle. It should not be taken one-sidedly as being purely spiritual except in the sense that it arises out of the spirit of real life. I have only been able to give you a kind of feeling for the impulses that are to arise out of these social ideas. More is not possible in only three lectures.

However, as I bring these lectures to a close I want to thank you in the warmest possible way for allowing me to speak to you about these things. I especially want to thank Mrs Mackenzie who has chaired the committee, for without her efforts this whole Oxford enterprise would not have taken place.’* I also thank the committee for all they have done to assist her. Another thing I am especially grateful for is the opportunity given us here in Oxford during this meeting to bring in the artistic endeavours, eurythmy specifically, which we are trying to send out into the world from Dornach. Thank you all for your endeavours!

You will sense how seriously I want to express my thanks when I remind you that everything we are starting in Dornach is only a beginning that cannot become reality without such efforts as have taken place here in Oxford. The understanding and stoutness of heart we need in Dornach is expressed in a fact which I also want to mention to you, although this is not in any way at all intended as a hint. It is likely that by November we shall have to break off our building work in Dornach because by then we shall have run out of funds. These funds do exist in the world, I believe, but somewhere there is a blockage in this connection. If things were to proceed as they ought in a rightly functioning social organism, then . .. The fact that this work has begun but may well have to be interrupted because of the unfavourable times if an understanding for the need to continue does not emerge in time—this is something that oppresses us greatly in Dornach. I have mentioned this to show you how very heartfelt and cordial are the thanks I have expressed to you.

I have endeavoured to speak to you about education on the one hand, and about social matters on the other. From Dornach these things will be cultivated in a general way. When the anthroposophical movement was founded the point of departure initially was that of a world view and a theoretical understanding. Then people began to see and feel what strong forces of decline exist in our time, whereupon they realized that something needed doing in education and in social life. That was when they began to approach me with the question: “What has anthroposophy got to offer with regard to the establishment of schools that take the fullness of real life into account, and with regard to a future that needs to emerge from the deeper layers of humanity?’ For there is not much to be gained for the future from the more superficial layers of human existence.

The education movement did not arise out of some fad or abstract idea. It came about because people began to enquire what anthroposophy had to offer on the basis of real life rather than out of some kind of sectarian effort.

This was even more strongly the case with the social question. Here, too, people whose hearts were filled with dismay at today’s signs of decay came to ask what anthroposophy might say out of its encounter with genuine reality about impulses that could be sent towards the future.

I am immensely grateful to have been met with understanding here, for what needs saying must go forth into the fullness of life; from this college it must send its effects out into the world where real human beings are at work. I am grateful that it is not antiquated knowledge, for the centres of cultural life must send out impulses to ensure that the right people are in position in the factories, the people who know how to administer capital that generates life. You will not take it amiss that I endeavoured to demonstrate this by means of such examples as came to hand, for on the other side I want to repeat what I have already said before: I have been most happy to explain these impulses here in Oxford where every step you take outside in the street brings inspiration from ancient times and where such strong influences come to the aid of someone wanting to speak out of the spirit.

The spirit that lived in former times was not the one that is needed now to work on into the future. But it was a living spirit that can still inspire. Therefore it has been deeply satisfying to give these lectures and suggestions for the future here in Oxford surrounded by impressions of ancient, venerable learning.

Finally, yet more thanks remain to be expressed. I am sure you will all understand how grateful I am to Mr Kaufmann who has done all the translating with such great love. When you know how much effort goes into translating quite complicated texts and how much this effort can deplete a person’s strength in quite a short time you can appreciate the work Mr Kaufmann has done here during this holiday conference over the past weeks. I want to express my sincere thanks to him, and I hope that many of you will also do so. I now ask him to translate these final words as accurately and faithfully as he has translated all the previous things I have said.

The Revelations of John seek to tell us what will happen in the course of time. The Apocalypse is written in pictures that express the appearance of the eternal spirit of the world. John, who beholds them, is to record these highest mysteries.

We are, to begin with, concerned with seven communities, represented symbolically by seven lamp stands and seven stars. The stars are the communities' geniuses watching over them.

In the second vision John sees the four apocalyptic living beings, the lion, the bull, the eagle, and Man, surrounding a throne where sits the spirit of God. Twenty-four elders are sitting around the throne of the spirit of God. “And I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals.” (Rev. 5:1) A lamb opens the book. The book contains, with the opening of the first four seals, what is expressed symbolically in the four apocalyptic riders; with the opening of the fifth seal the martyrs appear. These are those who have lifted themselves up to knowledge and life in the spirit. The opening of the sixth seal is followed by a horrible earthquake. With the seventh the revelation becomes audible: the seven trumpets sound forth. Mysterious pictures are then revealed; for example, a being whose legs are like two pillars, one foot stands in the sea, the other on the earth. “Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He had a little scroll open in his hand.” (Rev. 10:1,2) John must eat the secret of this book. Then a woman appears dressed with the sun, and the moon at her feet.

We read further: “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads.” (Rev. 13:1) The sound of trumpets accompanies this vision. The victory of good over evil is shown us in a picture. A beast is shown which, in a certain sense, is supposed to represent to us the principle of evil. It is the beast with seven heads and ten horns.

Then a beast appeared with two horns like a lamb, a beast that will appear in the future. “Then I saw another beast which rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast ... And it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave to be marked on the right hand or the forehead so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast, or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom; let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” (Rev. 13: 11, 16–18)

It is further related how all enemies are eliminated: Michael conquers the dragon, the evil elements; then a new world arises. In the first Christian centuries this was prophesied and always understood as a reference to the future. Admittedly, the exegetes soon knew little more than that; but again and again, also in the Middle Ages, there were those who came forward to explain it. The year 1000 A.D. was often thought to be the time for the beast's appearance. The later the era the more senseless the explanations became, especially in the nineteenth century—when the ancient commentators were seen as children still able to believe in prophecy. The Apocalypse was seen as a historical document, as if everything described therein had already taken place when John wrote it. There were wars after the appearance of Christianity. John could have meant to express them with the red horse. The white horse would then symbolize the martyrs. Earthquakes such as John described with the opening of the sixth seal were also to be found at that time in Asia Minor. And neither was it difficult to prove the existence of locust plagues. But the passage concerning the two-horned beast was a real cross for the commentators. They had heard a rumor concerning the way numbers are to be read but it was dripping with occultism. How does one read in numbers? Every letter also signifies a number; the esotericists wrote in numbers when they wanted to hide something. One had to replace each number with the correct letter; one had to be able to read the letters and then also know what the resulting word meant. Who then, is the beast whose number is 666? The commentators thought it must be something in the past. One wrote the letters in Hebrew—wrongly—in the place of the numbers. That resulted in “Nero.” The horns were then related to the generals or the enemies of the Romans, for example, the Parthians. If one had written correctly with Hebrew letters (right to left) and then read correctly (also from right to left), the following would have resulted: 60, Samech, 6 Waw; 600 was written by esotericists as 200 + 400: 200 Resch + 400 Taw. Hence, we get 666, which in Hebrew letters spells “Sorat.” Sorat is also the corresponding word in Greek. Sorat has meant “Demon of the Sun” since ancient times. Every star has its good spirit—its intelligence—and its evil spirit—its demon. The adversary of the good powers of the sun is called Sorat. Christ was always the representative of the sun, namely, the intelligence of the Sun. Sorat is, then, the adversary of Christ Jesus. The sign for Sorat looks like this:

The sign of the intelligence of the Sun is the following:

This is, at the same time, the occult sign of the lamb. The lamb receives the book with the seven seals. “And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.” (Rev. 5:6) The seven corners of the sign are called “horns.” But what do the “eyes” mean?

In occult schools the signs of the seven planets are written next to the seven eyes. The seven eyes signify nothing other than the seven planets, while the names of the planets designate the spirits incarnated in them as their intelligence. “Saturn” is the name of the soul of Saturn. The names of the planets come from the spirits of the seven planets found around the earth. These have an influence on human life. The lamb, Christ, contains all seven. Christ is the alpha and the omega; the seven planets are related to him like members to an entire body. The entwining of the lines of the sign portray in a wonderful way the interaction between the seven planets. From Saturn one rises to the Sun, from there down to the Moon, then on to Mars, Mercury, and so forth. The same thing is expressed in the names of the seven days of the week: Saturday, Saturn; Sunday, the Sun; Monday, the Moon; Tuesday, Mardi, Mars; Wednesday, Mercredi, Mercury; Thursday, Jeudi, Jupiter; Friday, Vendredi, Venus. Christ is the regent of all these world spheres; their actions constitute only part of his being; he unites them all. In Rosicrucian schools a lamb is often drawn as a sign for the intelligence of the Sun.

We determine time according to the movement of the heavenly bodies. Was the method for calculating time always the same as today's? Important things have changed. If we look into the past a little we see the Atlantean culture before the great flood on earth. The Lemurian age preceded it. If we go even further back into the past the earth, sun, and moon are still united in a single body. Back then time had to he determined differently than today. Day and night were entirely different. In Lemuria, conditions for the whole earth were the same as it is today at the north pole, half a year day and half a year night. When sun, moon, and earth were still one this unified mass moved through space. Already back then this movement was calculated by occult wisdom, just as today one calculates time according to the sun which moves across the sky through the signs of the zodiac. Eight hundred years before Christ the sun stood in the sign of Aries. Christ was originally worshiped under the sign of the cross, with a lamb lying at the foot of the cross. The cross with Christ upon it appeared only in the sixth century. Before that the Bull, Taurus, was worshiped when the sun stood in its sign. Earlier, it was the Twin, Gemini, that was worshiped in Persia. The team of goats that pulled Thor's chariot had the same significance. Before that the Crab, Cancer, was worshiped, and so forth.

Before the Lemurian age the sun, moon, and earth, united in one body, moved forward in terms of the zodiac. Time was measured following this movement. For this reason, the twelve signs of the zodiac are characterized as the heavenly clock and drawn as such.

A planet alternates between pralaya, a cosmic night, and manvantara, a cosmic day, just as we alternately pass through day and night. The planet passes through the signs of the zodiac during both pralaya and manvantara; for that reason the twelve signs of the zodiac are counted twice, just as we also count two times twelve to equal twenty-four hours. The hours symbolize the signs of the zodiac. The united sun, moon, and earth also moved through the cosmic days and nights according to the heavenly clock. Then their separation occurred. But at that time human beings were not the same as we are now. The soul only gradually descended, and only gradually did the human being develop from the generic into a specific individual being. If one had taken together the generic souls of human beings during the Lemurian and Atlantean times, then one would have perceived something very strange. The aura of the human being is constantly changing; like all astral beings it is in constant motion. The generic souls were reflected in the forms of animals, for example, in sphinxes and so forth. The ancient Atlantean and Lemurian generic souls were constantly changing but they expressed themselves again and again in a fourfold way. The fourfold nature of human generic souls is characterized by the four living creatures of the Apocalypse: lion, bull, eagle, and Man. The lower human being is portrayed through these four living creatures, and the lamb symbolized the perfected human being—that is, the fifth living creature.

Twice twelve heavenly constellations and four living creatures were once the regents of the world. Mighty cosmic powers ensouled the signs of the zodiac and the four living creatures. The twenty-four elders in the Apocalypse are the two times twelve stars on the world clock who were once rulers. The evolution of the human being can be portrayed in this drawing:

The lowest point designates clear day-consciousness. In pre-Lemurian times the human being had a dull clairvoyance. At that time human beings were closer to God than today. Then they acquired day consciousness. Human beings will take that consciousness with them in the course of their further evolution when they again approach God and become clairvoyant. Every point on the descending line corresponds to a point on the ascending line. If we could live backward we would see all the things that we will see in the future in a different, clairvoyant way. In the future we will again see the twelve spirits of the planets, and the sun, moon, and earth will once again be united, “... and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood ...” and so forth. (Rev. 6:12)

When the soul first descended from the womb of God it found a human animal on earth. These human animals looked grotesque; they needed to be transformed, overcome. In the future, there will also be such an animal to overcome. That is what the beast with the two horns would say to us.

Only someone who explains the Apocalypse within its entire context can understand it properly. The Apocalypse is a cosmic explanation of the world. The author was an initiate. He spoke of universal laws that apply to the world from the beginning to the decline, from the alpha to the omega.

We should allow the holy symbols given in the Apocalypse to work upon us. The sign of the Sun intelligence, for example, should not remain a mere sign for us; we should immerse ourselves in this sign until we feel it is no longer dead but flowing with life. The signs should be for us doors connecting the physical to the spiritual world. Then we have fulfilled our duty: to connect the physical and the spiritual worlds.

Eight days ago began with a presentation to help us understand the language of John. We considered how the Apocalypse is to be read and what is hidden behind some of the mysterious expressions, for example, behind the lamb as the beast with seven eyes and seven horns. We also sought to explain the beast with two horns and considered the number 666 as an example of how we must live into this mysterious book. Today, we again seek to find the meaning of this book.

The record of the New Testament is a record of initiation. Using individual images as examples we have seen how deep their meaning really is. All the images have shown us that the Gospels express, in pictorial form, the deepest imaginable meaning of the evolution of the world. It could occur to someone to ask why there are contradictions in the individual Gospels, why they do not correspond to each other. What needs to be said concerning this is already laid out in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact.¹ The Gospels are not records of the biography of Christ Jesus, but rather records concerning initiation. And the Apocalypse is the profoundest record. Augustine said: What is now called the “Christian religion” is the ancient true religion. What was the true religion, now is called the Christian religion.²

We understand what is meant by this statement when we consider the fundamental assertion of Christianity: “Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.” John 20:29) In this way something entirely new has come into the world. The teachings are already contained in other religious systems. Among those who understood who “Christ” is the main emphasis was never placed on the content of this teaching. One can also find this content in records from earlier times. What is important with Christ is what this individual means for humankind. We can acquire an understanding for this most readily if we take a look at the ancient mystery centers.

Until the time of Christ only a few specially chosen people were initiated. After severe testing they were permitted to learn the teachings that can now be found in my book Theosophy.³ One had to wait a long time until the higher degrees of vision were permitted. Only the most initiated knew the tradition of how to carry out an initiation. If someone wanted to become a pupil, as a first step they had to do this, as a second step, that, and so forth. The initiation concluded when the pupil had gone through the preparatory stages and was led by the wise ones into the mysteries themselves. That took place in a state of consciousness called “ecstasy,” a state of existence outside the physical body. It was connected with a diminution of consciousness, but at the same time with a vision of the spiritual world. An inner schooling consisting of certain will impulses, meditations, and a purification of the desires brought the pupil to a point where the last step was possible. Then the pupil was put by the initiator into a state that lasted three and a half days, a state like the one we enter when we fall asleep at night. External sense impressions disappeared. When we are asleep, nothing enters into the place where the sense impressions of sight and sound have disappeared, but with those being initiated a new world appeared. They were surrounded by a new world, a world of astral light, not the darkness, nothing of what today's human being experiences in the night appeared to them. The darkness was permeated by spiritual light and beings that are incarnated within the spiritual light. These beings became visible in the astral light. Then, after awhile, the astral world full of flowing light began to resound with the music of the spheres. What had merely been seen earlier began to be heard; it was a pure, spiritual music. External music is only a shadow-like reflection of the sounds of the spheres the seer hears, the seer who also perceives the inside of spiritual beings. Suppose we enter a large room filled with people; only when they begin to speak do they reveal their inner life to us. That is how it is in the spiritual world. First the beings become visible, then the inner life of the beings speaks to us. That is the harmony of the spheres.

Then, when the initiates were led back to vision of the physical world, they experienced themselves fully transformed into new human beings. Everyone who returned in this way then typically expressed: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me!” (Compare Matt. 27:46 and Mark 15:34)⁴

And so they returned, knowledgeable concerning the spiritual world out of their own experience. They were then seen as messengers from the spiritual world. What they had experienced up to the point of entering the spiritual world was prescribed precisely, stage by stage.

Although the rites of initiation were not recorded exactly, still there were canons of initiation containing prescriptions for all the steps. Everywhere, whether in the Egyptian schooling of Hermes, or in the Persian school, or in the Greek mysteries, or with the Druidic or Drotten mysteries, there were typical, traditional rules concerning what was to be experienced by anyone wanting to become an initiate.

Typical, similar characteristics appear wherever the lives of the great apostles of religions or world-views are described. The lives of Orpheus, Pythagoras, Hermes, and Buddha have many features in common, features that are important for all religious heroes. Why is this? Superficial researchers have believed that one borrowed from the other. But that is not true. Nevertheless, all of these typical religious heroes passed through these steps up to the highest stage of initiation. There were no biographies in ancient times that took into consideration the external conditions of a person's life. The further back we go before the turning point of time, the less value we find ascribed to the externals of life. Absolutely nothing was said concerning what the very greatest heroes of humankind experienced externally on the physical plane. Their lives were entirely dedicated to initiation. Telling the story of their initiation meant telling the story of their life. The main thing about a Hermes or a Buddha was what he had experienced until the initiation. Since the stages of initiation were similar everywhere, one heard a spiritual description of the life of the great initiates.

What in the past had been experienced only in secret became historical fact in Christianity. What could be described of Herme' experience took place in inner mysteries, at locations far removed from profane eyes.

In Christianity, for the first time, something was experienced as an external physical event that otherwise only took place in the mystery centers. The course Christ's life followed is the same as that experienced by all initiates when, to begin with, they had their etheric bodies lifted out of their physical. Everything that Christ Jesus experienced physically, on the physical plane, they had experienced in the etheric realm. Their last words were also, “My God, my God, how you have glorified me!” They had experienced earlier in the etheric body what Christ experienced in a physical body. In this way the prophecies of the prophets were fulfilled. This one time only experience of Christ represents the greatest decisive turning point in our world history and separates it into two parts.

The evangelists did not write ordinary biographies, but took rather the existing canonical initiation books. All four Gospels are to be seen as initiation writings, each presented from a different perspective. Since, however, initiation is described everywhere in the same way, the Gospels are in agreement on the most important things. We can describe the life of an initiate if we consider it as a life dedicated wholly to initiation. It would have seemed unholy to the evangelists to give an ordinary, external, historical biography of Christ Jesus. They had to take the building blocks for their writings from books derived from the mysteries. Hence, to a certain extent, what the prophets had said was fulfilled.

In a certain sense the Apocalypse represents a new kind of initiation; it shows how the old mysteries were transformed into Christian mysteries. When we look back at the old mysteries we find in them a more or less unified feature. It consisted of the following: Whether we go to Egypt, or to Persia, or to India, whether we are deepened in the Orphic or the Eleusinian mysteries, we find there complete agreement in one feature: a prophecy concerning the One who is to come.⁵ This trait is also found in the Northern European mysteries. There was an initiate in the most ancient times who was signified by the name “Sig.” The Drotten mysteries, which were in Russia and Scandinavia, the Druidic mysteries in Germany all derived from an initiate with the name Sig, who was the founder of the northern mysteries. What happened in the mysteries has been preserved in the various myths and legends of the German nation and other Germanic peoples. The myths and legends are pictorial representations of what was experienced. In the Siegfried legend⁶ we see most clearly that feature that seeks for an end. This feature is expressed in mythological terms in the “Gotterdammerung,” the twilight of the gods.⁷ This is characteristic of all the northern mysteries.

In all mysticism the image of the feminine is used for the soul; this image is also used by Goethe in his “chorus mysticus,” in the concluding scene of the second part of Faust. It is the eternal in the human being, the divine soul that draws the human being forward. Just as initiation was described in ancient Egypt and Persia as the union of the soul with the spiritual, so was it also described here in the north. Here in the north it was understood best that a man proved his worth on the field of battle. Those who counted for something in the north were honored as fighters who fell in the field of battle; those were the ones who entered into eternal life; the others died in their sleep. The fallen fighters were received by the Valkyries,⁸ their own soul; union with the Valkyries was union with the eternal. It was said of Siegfried that he had already united with the Valkyries here on earth; that shows he was an initiate. The meaning of the story, that Siegfried had already experienced union with the Valkyries here on earth, is that he was an initiate. This legend tells us something with the death of Siegfried. When experiencing initiation in the ancient mysteries the initiate is told: We can only bring you to a certain point ... further than this only another can bring you—this other one is Christ Jesus—all that we can give you will be darkened when he comes, the One who will bring the new initiation. Siegfried is vulnerable to Hagen⁹ on his back because the cross has not yet been placed on the back of the one who will take over from the ancient initiation. This part of the body will one day be made invulnerable when the cross has been laid across it. In this way the northern mysteries alluded to Christ Jesus.

All the ancient mysteries looked toward him who was to come, who will live on the physical plane so as to found a new world order. The new initiation is what will occur through the impulses he gave. We find a portrayal of this in the Apocalypse. It tells us how initiation will proceed until Christ Jesus comes again in a new form. The Apocalypse refers to the time when an organ for receiving Christ will be developed. The time until Christ Jesus again will approach is described in the Apocalypse. We will understand the individual words if we adopt the way of thinking of one who has experienced such an initiation. We remember here the words of Christ—if we understand them we will also understand the Apocalypse—“Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58) Christ directs his view from the past over to the present because for him there is an eternal present.

If we wish to understand what is meant by this we need only remember the fourfold human being who consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. When the I lights up in the course of evolution then the astral and etheric bodies are changed; and then finally the physical body too. The I is here for eternity; it is born out of the womb of a higher spirituality. Whether we look into the past or into the future, this I is what is eternal. If we observe an individual we can ask the question: What transformation has this person's I gone through? If we look back to the great Atlantean flood and then further back we do not find the I in a body such as exists today. At that time we were in a state wherein we could not think as well as we can now. When we look into the future we find the I in bodies ever more perfect, bodies having a perfection that we today with our thinking cannot even imagine. We cannot now imagine the perfection of thinking, the purity of feeling, and so forth in the future bodies of humankind. Initiates must make use of the form the human body has at any given time. Christ, too, had to use the ordinary form of the human body in his time. Still, when we look deeper we see in him a stage of evolution that humankind will only achieve in the distant future. Christ Jesus was the first born among those who could overcome death.

Let us compare the two ways of developing. The human being is born, goes through a life on earth, dies, goes through an astral condition, through devachan, and is then born again. When we go back to the beings who were present before the Lemurian age we have beings who do not die and are not reborn. They are constantly exchanging sheaths, as we do between physical birth and death. Then a certain revolution enters in. Today, human beings alternate between spiritual and physical life. With the group souls of animals it happens this way: Individual animals discard their bodies but the group souls themselves never die.

If we try to imagine the very highest being, the one who was as highly developed at the beginning as others will be at the end of evolution, then we have the image of Christ. He was the I that was as highly developed at the beginning as the human being will be at the end. “Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come ...” (Rev. 1:4) He is the first and the last.

The one who gives the Revelation to John is thus described. It is a Christian book; that is proven by the passage that reads: “... and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first born of the dead and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” (Rev. 1:5,6)

Christianity represents the greatest possible individualization of the human being, the freedom of the human being as an individual. At the beginning of the human race we see small communities held together by blood ties. Love was limited to those of the same blood. Now Christ Jesus comes and expands all ethnic groups and communities to include all of humanity. All ethnic religions are overcome through him. Christianity is the religion of the world. Within it there are only human beings; Christianity knows only human beings. Christianity would never be able to speak of the community of religions, but only of community of human beings. An age began when the secret mysteries became accessible to everyone through the mystery of Golgotha, which was placed in the center of the world. The chosen priests and kings gradually cease to exist. A final state is pointed to wherein everyone is a priest and a king, a state wherein all distinctions are swept away and all human beings are made equal. Therefore, the Apocalypse speaks of: “... a Kingdom, priests to his God and Father.” (Rev. 1:6)

The book portrays a real initiation, an ascent, to begin with, through learning on the physical plane. This step is portrayed in the words concerning the seven letters to the seven communities. The seven letters present what must first be learned. Then a number of pictures lead us to the astral plane. We see groups of beings undergoing transformation in the astral light: “... and he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian, and, round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald.” (Rev. 4:3) “And before the throne there is as it were a sea of glass, like crystal.” (Rev. 4:6) The quality and being of the astral light is indicated by the transparency. In the astral light we can see through objects; they appear like glass. The entire astral world is like a glass sea.

The four living creatures then follow; they are to represent the human group souls. They were full of eyes within and without and had no peace day or night. There is constant movement in the astral world—astral eyes are everywhere and everything is transparent to them, both within and all around.

We see how, at first, the mysteries of the physical plane are described and then, out of the sealed book, the astral imaginations. They approach us in pictures.

After the seer has perceived the spiritual beings in the astral light for awhile, they begin to sound forth. This is described in the resounding of the trumpets when the sixth seal is opened. That is the condition of devachan. The seer becomes “clairaudient,” able to hear spiritual sounds—the spiritual ear is opened.

The stage then follows when the seer expands his consciousness over the entire earth. This is indicated in the swallowing of the book. It expresses the ascent into the higher regions of the spiritual worlds.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact (Hudson, N.Y.:Anthroposophic Press, 1993).
• 2. Actual words: “For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and was not lacking from the beginning of the human race until ‘Christ came in the flesh.’ From that time, true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christian.” Augustine, The Retractions Book I, chapter 12, section 3, trans. Mary Inez Bogan in The Fathers of the Church (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968).
• 3. Steiner, Theosophy (GA 9) (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1993).
• 4. ompare lecture of September 12, 1910 in The Gospel of St. Matthew (GA 123) (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press. 1965).
• 5. Compare the lecture cycle Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, and Revelations of the Spirit (GA 129) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1963); Mystery Centers (GA 232) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973); and World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 6. Compare the lecture of October 21, 1904: “Die Siegfriedsage” in Esoterik und Weltgeschichte in der grieschischen und germanischen Mythologie [“The Legend of Siegfried” in Esoteric and World History in Greek and German Mythology] (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1955).
• 7. Compare the lecture of August 14. 1908 in the lecture cycle Universe, Earth and Man (GA 105) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1987).
• 8. he virgin heroines of Germanic mythology.
• 9. One of the main heroes of the Nibelungen saga: he treacherously suffocates Siegfried after a hunt while Siegfried is drinking at a fountain.

A day of remembrance such as we have today¹ means much to those who belong to the theosophical movement, who feel that they belong to a spiritual movement. It means something entirely different from a day of remembrance for others, for those departed human beings who were firmly anchored in our materialistic culture. Such a day for us is also a day of gathering together; for what would the teachings of Theosophy be if they did not enter into every fiber of our hearts and there enrich our innermost life of feeling? If a soul has been separated from its physical body, that means only that a person's inner being has entered into a different relationship to us. It is just such a relationship to the founder of the theosophical movement that we would like to especially enliven on this day. We want to be filled with a feeling for our connectedness with the founder of our movement. We want to become fully conscious that thoughts and feelings are invisible powers in our soul, that they are facts. Feelings are living forces. If we today unite all our thoughts with what is included in the name “Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,” if we are united with the spirit who left her earthly sheaths behind on May 8, 1891, then our feelings and thoughts are real forces and create a real, spiritual bridge to another form of existence. Another world finds access to our souls across this bridge. For human beings who see, such thoughts and feelings are really living rays, rays of spiritual light that shoot forth from a human being, and are then united in a point that meets with the spiritual being. Such a festive moment is a reality. When our soul, dwelling in our body, wants to work on the physical plane, then it must form a body for itself: it must build and form matter and forces in such a way that it can express itself through them. If the matter and forces did not fit together then this soul could no longer live its life on the physical plane. Just as it is here on the physical plane, so it is also on the higher planes for spiritual beings. If we want to understand correctly Helena Petrovna Blavatsky then we must realize that all of her efforts are bound up with the proper progress of the theosophical movement. And so it has been since her soul freed itself from her physical body. Even now she is working as a living being within the Theosophical Society. If she is to be able to work then matter and forces must be at her disposal. From where could they be better taken than from the souls of those who understand her being within the theosophical movement. As our souls take hold of matter and forces on the physical plane, so also does such a being take hold of the matter and forces in human souls in order to work through them. If those people who are members of the theosophical movement were not willing to place themselves at the disposal of this being, then she could not find expression on the physical plane. We ourselves must create a place in our souls for reverence, love, and devotion, thus creating the forces through which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky can work, just as our soul works trough our bodies of flesh. We must become aware that we are truly creating something when, in this moment, we are loving and receptive. It is true that all the love and devotion that today streams up to the soul of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky are powerful forces that are called upon to connect with her.

We must correctly understand what this personality signifies within our cultural life. The nineteenth century will one day be described as the materialistic century in the history of humankind. The people of the twentieth century cannot really imagine how deeply the nineteenth century was entangled in materialism. Only later when people have again become spiritual will that be possible. Everything, even the religious life, was permeated by materialism. Anyone who can look upon human evolution from higher planes knows that in the forties of the nineteenth century there was an extreme low point in the spiritual life. Science, philosophy, and religion were in the grip of materialism. It was incumbent upon the leaders of humankind gradually to allow a stream of spiritual life to flow into humanity. It is most telling that, within the widest circumference of spiritual life in Occidental culture, no one was found as suitable as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to guide the stream of spiritual life into the world, the stream that should refresh humankind and begin to pull it out of materialism. In the light of this one fact, the impact of all the attacks against her swirling around in the world today fade away. For, among many other things, the Theosophical Society must teach us the feeling of positivity. We must acquire an attitude that seeks, above all, to see what speaks of greatness in a human being. Then, in comparison to this greatness, all the little faults that incite criticism must fade away. Just as with other great personalities many things that were seen by their contemporaries with critical eyes have disappeared, so too will all these things fall away from her. But the great things she has accomplished will remain.

Let us learn to regard the mistakes of human beings as their own affair and the accomplishments of human beings as something that concerns all of humankind. People's errors belong to their karma; their deeds concern humanity. Let us learn not to be troubled by people's mistakes; they themselves must atone for them. Let us rather be thankful for their accomplishments, for the entire evolution of humanity lives from them.

This year's White Lotus Day, a day of remembrance for souls who have struggled free from the body and lift their experiences in another form up into the heights like a lotus flower, is the first day of this kind that we are not celebrating in community with Henry Steel Olcott, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's associate. He, too, has left the physical plane, he who stood there as the great organizer, as the form-giving power. [Here follows an indecipherable sentence.] To him we direct our grateful, revering, and love-filled thoughts; these thoughts will flow into the spiritual world and we ourselves will thereby be strengthened. We should continue the celebration on the other days of the year as we send out our thoughts as rays of light, as we apply the strength we have received to the work that we call the theosophical movement. We will only work as they would if we are devoted to the spiritual life in an entirely undogmatic, nonsectarian way. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky did not ask for blind faith. What can be asked of her followers is that they let themselves be stimulated by her spirituality. There is a spring of spiritual power in what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky left to the physical plane, a spring that will be a blessing to us if we let it influence us in a living way. The letters on the page can stimulate us, but the spirit must become alive within. One thing that can be said of the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is this: Only someone who does not understand them can underestimate them. But someone who finds the key to what is great in these works will come to admire her more and more. That is what is significant about these works—the more one penetrates them the more one admires them. It is not the case that there are no mistakes to be found in them. But those who really take hold of life know, if they strive to evermore penetrate these works, that what is therein expressed could only have come from the great spiritual beings who are now guiding world evolution. This is how we must read Isis Unveiled,² a book containing truths which, although sometimes caricatured like a beautiful face seen in a distorting mirror, are truly great.

A person who would merely like to speak out of a critical spirit might perhaps say: It would have been better not to give any such distortion. But anyone seeing matters in the proper light will say: If someone places their weak spiritual forces at the disposal of spiritual powers who wish to reveal themselves, and knows that these forces will produce only a distorted picture but that there is no one else who could do it any better, then that person, through their devotion, is making a great sacrifice for the world. All renderings of the great truths are distortions. If someone wanted to wait until the whole truth could be manifested, then they would have a long wait. Selfless are those who devote themselves to the spiritual world saying: It doesn't matter if people tear me apart, I must present the truth as I can. This sacrifice is much greater than a moral sacrifice, this noble sacrifice of the intellect—an expression so often misused by a wrong-headed conception of religion—it signifies the yielding up of the intellect for instreaming, spiritual truth. If we are unwilling to offer up our intellect then we cannot serve the truth. When we look toward Helena Petrovna Blavatsky with gratitude, we do so above all because she is a martyr in the sense just described, a martyr among the great martyrs for the truth. This is how we consider her when we gladly and willingly regard her as a model in the Theosophical Society. Therefore, when I speak about regions of the spirit inaccessible to her it will not profane this day.

I will speak about spiritual streams in the world that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky least understood on the physical plane. We serve her best by placing ourselves in the service of that to which she could find no access. She would much prefer to have followers rather than worshipers. Although much of what I say may sound opposed to her, nevertheless we know that we are acting according to her wishes; by taking this liberty we esteem her the most.

Our transition now to the Apocalypse is not sought after, not forced. For if we wish to understand more deeply the world mission of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, then we must imagine evolution as consisting of two streams. Eighteen forty-one was the low point of humanity's spiritual life. The opponents of spiritual life had, in 1841, the strongest point of attack in the evolution of humankind.³ They did the groundwork necessary to prepare for many of the things described in the Apocalypse as prophetic visions of the future. What is represented by the beast with the horns of the ram and the number 666, the beast with the seven heads and so forth—that is prepared by the powers who, in 1841, found their moment for attacking the evolution of humankind. Those elemental beings who, at that time, found suitable soil, those powers have taken possession of a large part of humanity and, from that position, are exerting their influence. Otherwise, the adversarial powers that find expression in the two beasts would not reside in humanity pulling it down. Against this downward pull there is another movement drawing us upward. What is accomplished today for this upward movement is a preparation for all those who are to be sealed, who enter the stream of spiritual evolution. This stream found an instrument precisely in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. We do not understand our present age if we do not recognize the deep necessity for this spiritual stream. We stand now in the fifth subrace of the fifth root race and are living toward the sixth and seventh subrace, then the sixth ground-race. What does it mean to say that we are living toward these races?⁴ It means that an understanding of Christ is contained in the sixth epoch—be it in the sixth epoch of the sixth subrace prophetically announced, or the sixth root race—for the human being who wants it.

At that time there will be human beings who are Christ filled, who have been sealed; in the ages of future spirituality the opening up, the breaking of the seals of human souls will take place. That the five wise virgins have oil burning in their lamps, that the bridegroom finds illuminated souls, signifies that a portion of humanity will have revealed to it the mystery that is still today closed to humankind. The book with the seven seals will be deciphered for a portion of humankind. The writer of the Apocalypse, John, wants through signs to point to this time, wants to proclaim prophetically this age. In one sentence we read: “And a great sign appeared in heaven ...” (Rev. 12:1) That means we are dealing in the Apocalypse with signs representing the great phases of the evolution of humanity. We must then decipher these signs. We remember that our present fifth root race was preceded by the Atlantean race, which was destroyed by a flood. What will destroy the fifth race? The fifth race has a special task: the development of egotism. This egotism will, at the same time, create what causes the downfall of the fifth root race. A small part of humankind will live toward the sixth main race; a larger part will not yet have found the light within. Because egotism is the fundamental power in the soul, the war of all against all will rage within this larger part of humanity. As the Lemurian race found its end through the power of fire, the Atlantean through water, so will the fifth race find its destruction in conflict between selfish, egoistic powers in the war of all against all. This line of evolution will descend deeper and deeper; when it arrives at the bottom everyone will rage against everyone else. A small part of humankind will escape this, just as a small part escaped during the destruction of the Atlantean race. It is up to every individual to find a connection to the spiritual life in order to be one of those to go over into the sixth root race. Mighty revolutions stand before humankind; they are described in the Apocalypse.

First, seven letters to seven communities are placed before us. If human beings are to find the path to that great point in time, they must have something to hang on to, something that enables them to ennoble the seven sheaths of their human constitution, so that they are prepared when the time comes. There are places on the earth where, through religious exercises, the main emphasis is on the development of the physical body. In other places the emphasis is on the development of the etheric body. In other locations the emphasis is on the development of the astral body, or the I. There will also be more and more places where special attention will be given to the development of manas, or budhi, or atma.⁵ We would not believe in reincarnation in the proper sense unless we would say: If a person has once been born in a location where the primary emphasis is on the physical body, then, another time, he or she would be born in a place where more attention was paid to the other bodies, and so forth.

Seven letters are directed to seven separate geographical regions where particular emphasis is placed on one of the seven parts of the human being. The first letter is directed to the Ephesians. They put great stock in the development of the physical body. The Phrygians in Smyrna emphasized the etheric body; in Pergamon people worked especially on the astral body.

We want to consider why seven geographical regions signify special kinds of development for humankind in relation to the seven members of the human being. Let us assume that someone lives in a region where the physical body is especially developed; if that person then neglects the physical body, it then becomes a caricature of what it might have become. If what is supposed to be brought to a certain perfection is not developed, then something arises inwardly that makes such a person receptive to the evil manifestations in the evolution of humankind.

The first letter is directed to the community in Ephesus, the place consecrated to Diana.⁶ It emphasizes the beautiful formation of the human body. Where does the development of the physical body lead? We can become increasingly clear about this if we realize that the physical body must be evermore purified, and must become more and more an expression of the etheric body. The etheric body must itself become an expression of the astral body, which in turn should become an expression of the I.

Numbers played a large role in the ancient Pythagorean schools. Let us remember that in the world of devachan, everything is ordered according to measure and number. Of course, this is the case with everything. What would it mean to seek the laws of nature, if they did not already exist? We weigh and measure the bodies of the world as we do substances on a smaller scale. We must put this fact together with another. We can think of this space as filled with the “sound forms” of a sublime musical composition, for example, the sounds of the “Good Friday Spell” from Wagner's opera Parzifal. That is the higher, soul form for what a physicist would express in numbers for the frequency of the sound vibrations. The spirit of these vibrations of the music flows through our souls. If we think of the numbers being heard by the ear of the spirit, then we have the music of the spheres. If a physicist would record in numbers the vibrations in the air he or she would record the magic of “Good Friday” just as little as a mathematician describes Pythagorian ideas in measure and number. The numbers express only the harmonies. When Pythagoreans wanted to express the four members of the human being, they expressed the harmony in the ratio: 1:3:7:12. That signifies the sound wherein the four numbers harmonize in the same way as do the four parts of the human being. The three sounds: I, the sound of the sun; II,—the sound of the moon; III, the sound of the earth—resound into the astral body.

• Physical body : 12 Ephesus
• Etheric body : 7 Smyrna
• Astral body : 3 Pergamon
• I : 1
• Spirit self
• Life spirit
• Spiritualized human being

What comes forth from the earth, sun, and moon sound together in our astral body. But what comes forth from the planets sounds in our etheric body. There is a sevenfold influence from the planets on the etheric body, as there is from the seven musical intervals: the unison interval, major second, major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, major sixth, major seventh—Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. These seven planets resound into our etheric body. There are twelve influences from the signs of the zodiac that resound into our physical body. The seer experiences twelve fundamental tones on the devachanic plane. They influence our physical body. Everything in the I, astral body, etheric body, and in the physical body resounds in tones. One tone resounds in the I, three tones in the astral body, seven tones in the etheric body and twelve tones in the physical body. Altogether this results in harmony or disharmony.

There is an expression in occultism: the twelve goes into the seven, which means that the physical body is constantly becoming more like the etheric body. If the physical body sounds right then we can hear the seven tones of the stars through the twelve tones. “Become such that the twelve becomes the seven, that the seven stars appear” is said to the Ephesians, because with them the physical body is especially developed. They should turn to look at the seven stars. We know that the development of Christianity means a transition from the old forms of community based on blood ties to spiritual love, that the spiritual will take over from the flesh. Those who tell us that we should endeavor, above all, to insure that the sensual, the elemental gets its due—those people were called the Nicolaitans: They wanted to remain rooted in the material forces of the blood; hence, the warning concerning the Nicolaitans.⁷ They are the ones who will bring about the downfall.

Opposing them are those who want to overcome material evolution, who want spiritual life. The letter closes with the symbol of the tree of life: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna ...” (Rev. 2:17)

The second letter is directed to the community that is supposed to be most concerned with the cultivation of the etheric body. The etheric body must gradually be developed into life spirit. The human being now goes through birth and death, but later this etheric body will become life spirit. Then it will have overcome death. In the Sermon on the Mount we read: “Blessed are those who pray for spirit, for they find through themselves the Kingdom of Heaven” (compare: Matt. 5:3) Those who pray for spirit are blessed; that means that soul permeates their life. Just as the physical body is developed by the Ephesians, so, too, in the second community, is the etheric body developed into a body of soul. When they strive for this blessing they are called “beggars for spirit”; they pray for a blessing through the enlivening of the etheric body. This is indicated by the words: “Be faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life.” With these words the development of the etheric body is clearly expressed.

The Apocalypse is one of the greatest spiritual documents. There are hardly any great spiritual truths whose significance is not to be found there. The study of the Apocalypse is not without its connections to theosophical evolution.

By understanding such a work we allow ourselves to be stimulated by the spirit who spoke through Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. What the Theosophical Society seeks to achieve must strike us like a trumpet proclamation sent to humankind. The more we understand the Apocalypse the more we understand the task of our movement.

• 1. Day of remembrance of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (born 1831) who died on May 8, 1891. In 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott (1832 – 1907) she founded the Theosophical Society.
• 2. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, 2 vols. (New York: J.W. Bouton, 1877).
• 3. Compare Rudolf Steiner's lecture of October 14, 1917 in The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (GA 177) (Forthcoming from Rudolf Steiner Press).
• 4. Steiner uses the old theosophical term “root race” to designate the seven epochs of earth evolution: the Polarian, the Hyperborean, the Lemurian, the Atlantean, Post-Atlantean and the last two, the sixth and seventh epochs. Each of these epochs consists of seven “subraces” It should be noted that Steiner used the word “race” only in the early, the theosophical, period of his work. Furthermore, his use of the word has little in common with the word's use today. On June 20, 1908 he said, “... we speak of ages of civilization, in contradistinction to races. All that is connected with this idea of race is still the remains of the epoch preceding our own, namely, the Atlantean. We are now living in the age of cultural epochs. Atlantis was the age in which seven great races developed one after another. Of course, the fruits of this race development extend into our epoch, and for this reason races are still spoken of today, but they are really mixtures and are quite unlike those distinct races of the Atlantean epoch. Today the idea of civilization has already superseded the idea of race” (The Apocalypse of St. John, London: The Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1958, 61).
• 5. Characterized by Rudolf Steiner in his book Theosophy. as Spirit-self, Life-spirit, and Spirit-Man.
• 6. Ancient Roman goddess of the forest, protector of wilderness and women. She was identified with the Greek goddess Artemis.
• 7. The Nicolaitans mentioned in chapter 2 of the Book of Revelation are pagan Christians from Pergamon. They disregarded the Old Testament proscriptions concerning the consumption of food sacrificed to idols and certain marital unions characterized as sexually immoral.

With our study of the Apocalypse we have reached the point that leads us to the so-called third letter. This third letter portrays to us—entirely in keeping with what we have seen in the first two letters—the evolutionary secrets, so to speak, of a certain geographical territory. In order to find our way into the following train of thought we must once again briefly call to mind the basic tendency and goal of the Apocalypse.

We have seen that the Apocalypse is a book of initiation. It describes the steps to be taken by a candidate for initiation in order to develop the highest vision of the spiritual world. We have seen that acquiring knowledge of all aspects of the physical plane is the first step. Those to be initiated must raise themselves to the astral plane, and then to the devachanic plane. It has become clear to us that human beings who raise themselves to the astral plane are surrounded by a world of pictures, which are much more real than anything we call pictures in our poor language. These astral pictures are much more real than what exists here. These pictures experienced by the seer are the fundamental forces of the physical world. The physical world is formed out of this world of pictures. When human beings have worked through to the astral plane, then they raise themselves to the devachanic plane; this plane's world of pictures resounds with the so-called music of the spheres, which constitutes the inner being of all things. Progressing then from the astral plane to the devachanic the seer hears for the first time what the Pythagorean school characterized as “the music of the spheres.” The music of the spheres finds only an abstract expression in what we call the higher numbers. But what are ordinary numbers and measure? What are the numbers physicists speak about when they discover wave motion, when they speak of oscillations? What are these numbers compared with what our ears hear when they hear the sounds themselves? What we find in the philosophical books concerning the “mysticism of numbers” is nothing more than a babbling. But what Pythagoras described is what the seer perceives after the spiritual ear has been opened, when it hears the sounds that make the wave movement or hears what is expressed in such wave movement. The devachanic world is nowhere else. You can remain standing in the same location and experience the physical world fading away. The world is enlivened with colors and forms—and then you can experience that this world of light is penetrated by tones.

In the Apocalypse you will find a description of how Christian mysticism describes the devachanic world. If you raise yourself to that elevated condition as the servant of the Lord did, then you first experience what is taking place on the physical plane. This is described to us in a certain way in the seven letters to the seven communities. Then the enlightenment achieved through knowledge of the physical plane is put into signs in the seven seals. When human beings raise themselves to the astral plane they experience a world flooded with light, pictures, and forms. That is described to us in the picture of the man surrounded by the four living creatures, of the lamb receiving from his hand the book with the seven seals. As these picture-seals are unsealed the astral world comes to meet us, and the trumpeting angels signify the harmony of the spheres on the plane of devachan.

With the Apocalypse we are confronted by a book of initiation. Such a book is, at the same time, always a prophetic book. One who experiences the events of the astral and devachanic planes also, at the same time, experiences the events of the future—a profound mystery of the future is present here. What is found today on a higher plane will appear in the future on the physical plane. Place yourself with a seer presently on the astral plane; the seer can only rise to this world if his or her spiritual eye is opened. Think of everything that you experience on the astral plane condensed, grown solid like water to ice; then you have the condition of your own physical world in the near future. The present, today, in the astral world, is the future in the physical, so that the seer can see today the future state of humankind on the astral plane. Initiation means, at the same time, penetrating the secrets of future events. Hence, the Apocalypse is first of all a book of initiation and secondly, a prophetic book. This prophetic wisdom we want now to illuminate a little more closely; we want to see how this wisdom encompasses the meaning of the evolution of our humankind.

You have heard that the Apocalypse speaks of very bad conditions of our earth, devastating conditions. We have just studied the task of Theosophy within our human evolution. Let us look at the future: There will he terrible conditions, conditions that devastate the earth. Human beings will be in a moral state that will allow egotism to attain heights compared with which our present-day state is mere child's play. One might ask how will it be in the future with souls of the present day? Must they be condemned to incarnate in a morally degenerate humanity, in an evil race? We must answer with a decisive “no.”

A wonderful legend describes to us the state of development of the soul. The soul is in a different line of evolution than the body of the human being. The difference between soul and racial development can be seen if we look into the past. Souls were incarnated many times in the Atlantean race; all of you were Atlanteans at that time. The souls worked themselves out of that situation and the remaining human bodies belonged to the races that had become decadent and were falling into decline. The souls left the bodies of the races and rose up to higher races. Human bodies afflicted with fundamental evil will not have souls within them that are striving to rise above their present state to a higher one. Souls that proceed with their development, who rise above themselves, will have, through their work, achieved different kinds of bodies in the sixth root race. But there is also something in Christian esotericism called the melting of human beings with their race. There is a great difference between a human being who says: I will raise myself above what I am capable of giving today to something higher; and another who says: I will stay in the life that surrounds me today. Those who do not strive to go beyond the present-day configuration, who fuse with their race, will be condemned to lead further lives in the bodies of the later races that are left behind.

When we look to the great leaders of humankind who are our pathfinders, we look to them as leaders who will show us how to go beyond the evolution of races in order to dwell in bodies that are more perfect in the future. The fact that a human being can say: I want to stay where I am! is expressed in a legend that has lived for a long time and found various explanations. However, it is really only explained by Theosophy. Think of the pathfinder whom we call Christ Jesus, the one who points to the passage in the Apocalypse we have just discussed. It is the passage he most often refers to—the place where he speaks of the overcoming of death. When you find human souls sitting along the way who are not interested in evolving—what do they experience? They must again and again be born in the same race because they have rejected the signal from the redeemer. This tragedy is expressed in the Ahasuerus legend;¹ Ahasuerus, “the wandering Jew,” created his own destiny because he had pushed the redeemer away from himself.

We must, then, distinguish between the evolution of the soul and the evolution of races; and we are shown how souls climb ever higher. But we are also shown how races sink deeper and deeper in a terrible way. We have now explained how present day evolution is described in the seven letters. We think of the letters as directed to the seven communities of our earth.

If we divide the earth into seven zones geographically, a letter is directed to each. The first territory is one where human beings, particularly today, work to perfect their physical bodies into a higher form. In the second region etheric bodies are the focus and in the third astral bodies are especially cultivated. So you will find one aspect emphasized in one territory, and another aspect in another. Think of these regions spread over the earth. What we refer to as the various peoples or folk groups cultivate particular parts of the human constitution: one folk especially develops the physical human being, another folk cultivates another aspect. But we have mentioned that it is not true to say that at one location only the astral body, at another only the physical body, is cultivated. In our various incarnations our souls must learn the lesson of each individual region. The seven letters are directed to every human being because every human being must pass through the seven stages of evolutionary development. The letter to the community in Ephesus is directed to a territory where the physical body is especially cultivated. The individual words characterize wonderfully just this kind of development. The third letter, to the Pergamonians, goes to the region where the astral body is particularly developed.

Let us keep together all the different facts we have discovered in the course of time. The evolution of the human being proceeds in such a way that the I works into the astral body, spiritualizing it. That part of the astral body transformed by the I is designated by the term “spirit self” or “manas.” Cultivating the astral body means, then, to work manas into the astral body. As much as you have cultivated your astral body—to that extent have you worked manas into it. In Christian esotericism the word “manna” means the same as manas; what is indicated as manna in the Bible is what we mean when we speak of the manasic nature flowing into the human being.

In the third letter we read: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches (communities). To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna.” (Rev. 2:17) That is clearly stated; and with this letter the other side of the issue is also indicated, that those who do not undergo this development bring their bodies down, bring them into decline. In Christian esotericism the degeneration of the astral body is indicated in a very radical way.

In the Lemurian age the higher part of the human soul descended into the three human members. Remember, at that time the external human being was at a stage just somewhat higher than today's highest animals. From that time onward human beings have been working to form and develop their astral body because the soul is dependent on it. The soul is dependent on the astral body which, when the soul first entered it, was almost at the stage of animality. The progress of humankind consists just in this, that we work on the astral body, that we purify the animalistic emotions and instincts.

Assume for a moment the opposite; the consequence is not that the astral body remains unchanged but rather that it sinks down into a condition lower than it was in during Lemuria. Such neglect is portrayed as the temptations of Satan. For a Christian esotericist, “Satan” is a being who seduces human beings into bringing their astral bodies into decline rather than into ascent. When the writer of the Apocalypse wants to describe the other side, he says: If you develop your astral body then you will enjoy the heavenly manna. But there are regions where people do not develop the astral body—they experience the temptations of Satan. He describes this pull downward on the astral body: “I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is ...” (Rev. 2:13)

The fourth letter—to the community in Thyatira—is addressed to the region where humanity's sense of personality finds expression. This I plays a large role with all those wanting to lead human nature into a descent. Especially in middle European esotericism, the I is presented altogether as the middle point, as what is actually active and at work within the human being. The human being is like a flowing together of forces, forces that flow together in the astral body, etheric body, and physical body; and the I is presented as what is at work on these three members. In Germanic mythology this is portrayed by the tree, the world-ash, the symbol for threefold human nature. The middle point for this threefold human nature is the I; through its incorporation in the three members it carries the entire tree of human growth and evolution. “Ygg” is the ancient form for growth and evolution. You will find that in the ancient forms of speech as a characterization for what has been incorporated, the world-ash is called “Yggdrasil.” Yggdrasil means, “the carrying I”; and the name of the god who is connected with the formation of the I is also derived from it.

In the course of evolution the human being first learned how to inhale; in Hebrew that is connected with the word “Jehovah.” In old High German that corresponds to Odin, who is a god of the wind and races around in storms. “Jach” (Jahweh) is the “blower,” and when we speak of Wotan, and his army that rushes here and there, then we are speaking of the Odem, who was necessary for the growth of the I. In Christian esotericism a very special value is placed on this word altogether. It is seen as the name for the eternal in the human being and is, therefore, portrayed as what carries the other bodies, as what forms their middle point. Consider only this passage: “... and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received power from my Father; and I will give him the morning star.” (Rev. 2:27,28) This I means the same thing as the actual name of Christ Jesus. Here, in almost every sentence, the word I appears again to tell us that it is the eternal in the human being. You will find this meaning expressed again and again by the words in the Apocalypse.

I will cite only a very special passage. The sixth letter must be addressed to a community where budhi is especially cultivated. What does that mean? If manas is especially cultivated, and if the human being has become a knower, then what we previously knew will pass over into our living feelings; it becomes for us a natural, given, feeling. It becomes a passion for us. If you realize that justice should prevail, that justice should live, if you realize that humankind cannot live without the beautiful and the good, then you are on the way to develop budhi. If higher things have become your second nature, if your soul is fully permeated with enthusiasm for the beautiful and the true, then you are on the path to budhi. Budhi takes its substance from the realm of feelings; and atma from the realm of the will. And when humankind finally reaches the point where it has made enthusiasm for the good into a reality, then what is called the Christian ideal of brotherhood will have appeared. This sixth territory can receive its name only from the ideal of brotherhood, and “Philadelphia” is the city of brotherly love. If you read the relevant passage you will see the city described this way: “I know your works. Behold, I set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut; I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.” (Rev. 3:8) They did not deny the name that comes from fraternal duty.

The seventh letter is taken from the realm of atma, the atma or breath of the human being. When we have come as far as the physical breath we take in, when the I has worked down into the physical body—perhaps you know that in Christian esotericism this is designated by the word “amen”—then the esotericist, when speaking of this, will refer to the “amen,” and to the Angel of the Church (community) in Laodicea write: “The words of the amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation.” (Rev. 3:14)

I have been able to select only some of the passages. If we could discuss everything, then you would see that we have messages for regions in our own time in these seven letters.

Let us now go from the past into the future. What does the writer of the Apocalypse think of the future? He speaks entirely in the following way: What you can see today on the astral plane is nothing other than the formation of the physical future of human beings. Look at what is on the astral plane and you will experience the future of humankind. There is no future that does not result from the present.

You know that the human being is enveloped in an astral body that permeates the physical body. You know, too, that there are sense organs in the astral body that are entirely different from the sense organs in the physical body. We speak of the lotus blossoms or wheels. What the human being can develop today in terms of such astral senses, the human physical body will have in the future as physical senses. The astral is on the way to becoming physical. How do human beings form these organs of the future, which today are still astral? Through what we achieve today in terms of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Work and deeds of today form the foundation for organs in the future. There was a time when human beings did not have eyes—they couldn't perceive light and color. Human beings acquired eyes through their actions at that time. They had other organs previously—by turning to the light they developed eyes. Present deed is future destiny; the deeds of the past were such that eyes could be created, and from your deeds in the present day, your sense organs of the future will be created.

Human beings who are active in terms of the true, the beautiful, and the good will have normal organs in the future. If they strive against the true, the beautiful, and the good then they will have crippled organs in the future. It is impossible to erase what we do in the present. A deed laid down in the present in order that it emerge in the future is termed “sealed” in Christian esotericism. In terms of Christian esotericism one says: Today you have eyes that were nonexistent in the past but you did this or that. Your eyes were “sealed,” now they are “unsealed.” Your eyes are the “unsealing” of your past deeds. We have now the sealing of what will be unsealed on the physical plane in the future. For anyone who looks only at the physical plane, evolution is a book with seven seals. Anyone who looks at the astral plane can see all future organs already laid out. The organs reveal themselves as pictures. An esotericist would say: If you look to the middle point, which is characterized as the lamb, then the lamb will put the book into your hand; and the book is unsealed in such a way that what will have form in the future can only be expressed in pictures. Therefore, what can occur is expressed through pictures, piece by piece. In the first seal a future condition is portrayed pictorially by a horse, a further condition is revealed in the second seal through another horse and so forth. In order to discern the meaning we will consider one image, let us say, the third horse. This is the picture that appears when the third seal is broken. It is presented in the following way: “When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw, and behold, a black horse, and its rider had a balance in its hand.” (Rev. 6:5)

What does this mean? A future condition of the human being is here portrayed, a condition that proceeds from the evolution of the third member of the human being, the astral body, which has been worked on and purified by the I. An unpurified astral body is one that knows only itself, that finds everything that does not belong to it to be antipathetic. A purified astral body is one that receives everything coming to it weighed out with a just balance. If we rightly purify the astral body, an organ is created that can be expressed pictorially by a rider with a balance. An organ in the astral body arises for the human being out of just deeds in the present. This is expressed here pictorially. We could explain the other pictures in the same way. Then we would see the inadequacy of the usual explanations that are given.

When the fifth seal is opened we are told something very significant: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne ...” (Rev. 6:9) What happens to a soul that develops itself up to the fifth step? It is strangled in its lower soul; the impurities that cling to it are done away with, and the soul thereby appears clothed in innocence: “And they were each given a white robe ...” (Rev. 6:11) The soul is white; it has become innocent when it has developed to the fifth step.

If we ascend higher we arrive at the place where the astral pictures go over into the devachanic, to the sounding of the trumpets. The Ahasuerus human beings form one group of humanity; the others will be those who can enter into other beings. Now, it will appear obvious to us that what has fallen behind must be described with pictures that can only be described as repulsive. While the souls that have developed further are hearing the trumpets, the others will have achieved the peak of egotistical development. Those who have advanced, who have developed their souls, will live like lofty initiates today.

I have told you that initiates progress through various stages. They must transform not only something of their astral body, but also something of their etheric body, and even something of their physical body. In earlier times initiates were kept in a state such that their etheric body existed outside their physical body for three and one-half days while the physical body lay there as if dead. Meanwhile, the hierophant lead the etheric body through higher worlds.

The writer of the Apocalypse describes to us what a present-day initiate experiences. He describes it as something similar to the initiation process of three and one-half days. Remember that there is actually a passage in the Apocalypse that says two witnesses of God appear, who lie as if dead for three and one-half days and then again become alive: “... and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange gifts, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth. But after three and one-half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them.” (Rev. 11:10,11) The Apocalypse speaks of these two prophets in addition to the leader of humankind, whom the people could see. You have here a description of a process of initiation. You see how everything fits together.

There is something else that will show you how deeply the writer of the Apocalypse has penetrated into the mysteries of the world. I can best explain this if I relate to you the Golden Legend,² which has played an especially large role in Christian esotericism.

We are told that Seth was able to journey to Paradise, that the cherub with the flaming sword permitted him to pass and actually enter Paradise. He encountered there a vision: The crowns of the two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, had grown together. Seth took a seed from this tree that had grown together; this seed he placed in the mouth of his deceased father, Adam. From this seed then grew a tree with three trunks, which provided wood for various things. It was especially important that Seth could see how a kind of flaming script was formed in the branches of this tree. The following words appeared: “Ejeh, Ascher, Ejeh,” which mean, “I am he who was, he who is and he who will be. The wood from this tree was used to make the staff with which Moses performed his miraculous deeds; the wood was used to build Solomon's temple; then it was used for a bridge over the Bethesda pool, which Jesus walked over. Finally, the wood was used to make the cross on which Christ Jesus was crucified. What do these two symbols mean, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge? What does it mean that they have grown together? And what does the tree signify, the tree that provided the wood even for the cross?

The fact that Seth could enter Paradise means nothing other than that he had become an initiate, that he could penetrate into mysteries that were closed to others. Now let us ask ourselves: What do the trees that he saw signify? That is something found in every human being, something present in every individual.

How did the human being become a knower? The answer is connected with the inhalation of air through the lungs, where the “used” blue blood is transformed into red blood. In this way the human being could take up the Odem, the breath of God. This is the becoming of the individual human I: through the infiowing of the Odem of God through which the human being became a knowing soul. A real tree is actually incorporated in the human being, a tree you can still see today if you study the human body. This is the tree created by the main arteries, which branch off into smaller and smaller capillaries throughout the entire body. There is no being in the world that can become a knowing being if it cannot, like a human being, take up the oxygen from the air—the oxygen that is so necessary to create red blood—so that human beings can take into themselves the tree of knowledge through the red blood.

The other tree, the tree of blue veins, has been taken away from the human being in terms of human mastery over it. It contains the used, blue blood which is a poison, filled with death. Before the human being descended from the bosom of God, it was the tree of life. By becoming earthly, the human being was divided into two parts, comprising the veinal and arterial, the blue and the red blood vessel systems. The blue blood streams up to the heart and must unite with what the plants give. The human being breathes out carbon dioxide; plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. In this way human breathing, which expresses itself in our actual “I-ness,” is an intertwining of the red and blue “blood trees.” This is, however, only possible if the human being has a tool, and that is the plant, without which the human being cannot live. The plant is what allows us to intertwine the blue and the red “blood trees.”

The alchemy of the human being is this: what the plants do for us today, human beings in the future will be able to accomplish within and through their consciousness. What is outside the human being today will be intertwined within the physical body when we have taken in the entire plant world, when we have expanded our consciousness to include the entire world of plants. That is the future condition of humanity. Then, what exists outside in the natural world surrounding us will be entirely different.

Our entire cosmos will be changed with us. Earlier conditions will return at a higher level. There was a time when the earth and the sun were united with one another. At that time the human being existed within the being of the sun. But by entering into a physical body, the human being actually left the Mars state—and it is this state that someday humankind will once again attain. At that time the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were intertwined; at that time the human being did not need any external tool. That will be the case again in the future. What humankind will have then attained has always been indicated symbolically by drawing the sun, and then indicating the earth at a higher stage of development—with the human being also more highly developed. What will bring human beings to that point is the union of the red and blue bloodstreams by means of an expanded consciousness. This is indicated with two metal pillars—those are the two bloodstreams—and the sun is what will be ... [omission in manuscript]. Then the blue blood tree will no longer be a tree of death.

The seer must see this condition in astral signs. To describe this condition the writer of the Apocalypse must indicate it with pictures. “Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun and his feet were like pillars of fire.” (Rev. 10:1) We have here a picture of this condition. In the same way the entire Apocalypse is composed with occult signs.

Christian esotericism sees the earth as the body of Christ. When Christian esotericism speaks of the body of Christ, it is speaking of the planetary body of the earth. Therefore, you must take words such as the following seriously: “He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.” (John 13:18) When we eat the bread of the earth we are treading on it with our feet.

If so, the writer of the Apocalypse can say even something more. We have seen that Seth was an initiate. Abel was a man of God who voluntarily lived from what was given to him. Cain was a farmer who himself built whatever he needed. Two lines of development are spoken of. One could be called the Seth or Abel direction, while the other included those who themselves had to change the form of everything. They will have to work for a long time; therefore tilling the soil, the work of the farmer has always been a symbol for those who transform the earth. The children of Abel or Seth stand over against the servants of Cain, who are the successors of Cain or the people of Cain. Those who have received revelations from the beginning have seen from the beginning, but also those who diligently work and strive will become initiates and behold the one who is the spirit of the earth, the planetary spirit of the earth. If the writer of the Apocalypse wants to indicate that the spirit of the planet will be seen by those who themselves transform the earth, then he will say: “All eyes will see Christ Jesus, also those who have pierced him.” Therefore, the writer of the Apocalypse says, right at the beginning, “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him.” (Rev. 1:7) Those are, at the same time, words that describe the goal, the essence, the leitmotif of the Apocalypse. Precisely these profound words show us that the Apocalypse is really a prophetic book, that we can read from it the future that is here portrayed in pictures. It is our task as Theosophists to see things that Christ Jesus could not speak about in those days because the people could not yet understand. But he did point to them with signs.

What Christ Jesus has poured into these signs must become clear to us for the sake of the stream of Theosophy in the world. It must stand before our eyes symbolically during the next days of our Congress through the seven seals of the Apocalypse, through the motifs on the pillar capitals, and through the five planetary seals that we find as vignettes in the program. These five vignettes were not invented; they are rather five vignettes from the occult script.

If we learn to understand every line, all the curves and marks, then we have understood something of how human evolution has been written in the occult language of signs. Theosophy must point out this language of occult signs.

We meet together in order to work for knowledge. Everything else will come by itself through this work for knowledge. Therefore, the moral admonition, “You should love your brother” is just like saying to a stove: Your task is to heat the room! Saying so does not make the room warm. But when you put wood in the stove then it will warm the room by itself without having to be told.

By striving for knowledge, by accomplishing the work of knowing, you heat the human soul and this leads to the great work of the brotherhood of humankind. The Theosophical Society must be a society that promotes work toward esoteric knowledge, otherwise it will not thrive. If we absorb something from these ideas, then we will be able to do some of what the Theosophical Society must do, also on the occasion of this Congress.³ If Theosophy is also connected with what is described in the book of wonders, the Apocalypse, then we must also do something in order to break the seals ourselves. Only when within our society we open the seals of the books that have been given to us by great individuals, only then are we striving toward that which the Theosophical Society should be, if it wants to be a real influence on our modern culture.

• 1. Ahasuerus is a figure in Christian legend fraught with mystery and ambiguity. A reference in John 18, 20–22 to an officer who struck Jesus is sometimes seen as the origin of the story. Another possible source, the English Flores Historiarum (1228) describes a man in Armenia, Cartaphilus, who later converted to Christianity. Cartaphilus had been Pontius Pilate's doorkeeper. He had struck Jesus on the road to Calvary and Jesus responded: “I go, and you will wait until I return.” This legend was revived in Germany in 1602 in a pamphlet entitled, “A brief description and narration regarding a Jew named Ahasuerus.” Since then the tale has been the subject of many plays, poems, novels, and paintings. Rudolf Steiner's acquaintance, the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling, for example, wrote an epic Ahasver in Rom (1862), while Edgar Quinet in Ahasverus (1833) used the legend to symbolize the progress of humanity.
• 2. Compare the lectures in part II of The Temple Legend (GA 93) “Concerning the Lost Temple and How It Is to Be Restored in Connection with the Legend of the True Cross, or Golden Legend” (London:Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985)
• 3. IV Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, May 18 – 21, 1907.

We have often said that Theosophy should not be regarded as something new. Other, external approaches of knowledge often want to see something new. But Theosophy wants to be, and should be, an expression of the striving for wisdom appropriate for our time, a manifestation of the striving that has existed through all time. Theosophy sees in all the temporal manifestations the various forms of a primal wisdom that has been flowing through all ages.

The Apocalypse, which belongs among the oldest ancient documents of Christianity, has been explained in the most various ways during every age of Christianity. These explanations always carry a subjective imprint of the understanding characteristic of different epochs.

On the whole, if we quickly survey the centuries of Christian development, we see, even in the earlier ages, a dawning materialistic interpretation brought to bear on this book. We find the mistake soon made of seeing in the pictures of the Apocalypse certain events in the evolution of the earth and humanity, for example, the descent of the Messiah who had been proclaimed, or even the establishment of a heavenly kingdom in the physical sense in this world. When the subsequent ages neither fulfilled nor revealed any of this, people in the various regions of the Occident believed that a mistake had been made in calculation; the date for the fulfillment of these prophesies was pushed more and more into the future. Around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Apocalypse began to be interpreted in a more inner way. At that time people began to see the kingdom of the Antichrist in the externalization of Christianity. For many, the Roman church itself became the expression of this kingdom of the Antichrist; the Roman church, on the other hand, saw the same thing in Protestantism.

In more recent times, times entirely permeated with a materialistic attitude, it has been said that, of course, the writer of the Apocalypse could not have known anything about the future; he was describing events that lie in the past. It was thought, for example, that he saw in the beast with two horns an opponent of Christianity as great as Nero. When the descriptions then went on to include earthquakes, swarms of locusts, and so forth, it was not hard to prove that such events did occur in those regions at that time. That is what is called “objective research”; nevertheless, it is wholly prejudiced by subjective understanding.

Theosophy should become an instrument for us to spiritually comprehend the Apocalypse again and thereby penetrate its meaning. One could also think that the explanation given by Theosophy is as subjectively colored as all the other explanations. In a certain sense it is, but there is a difference between it and the other explanations. Those who describe history externally want to be objective, but they can only be subjective. We, however, want to explain subjectively in the sense that we are aware, in all modesty, that the wisdom of the world is always in harmony with advancing evolution, with the advance of time. When we do what is right for our time it is a force that works into all of the future. Theosophy must not become a dogmatism. What we teach today as Theosophy will not change in its essence but in its form. When the souls of the present age are born again in future times, they will be mature enough to take up other, higher, future forms of the spiritual life. Our explanation of the Apocalypse will age; future ages will go beyond it. But the Apocalypse itself will not, therefore, age. It is much greater than our explanations and will find even higher, even loftier explanations.

Let us place before our souls the first lines of the Apocalypse as they are read in truth. We are told that the mystery of Jesus Christ is given to us in signs, that these signs are to be interpreted and that the writer is attempting to explain—to the best of his ability—as much of the signs as possible. The Apocalypse was written with a different intention than John's Gospel. We are dealing with a personal experience when the writer tells us that he is describing the revelation of Jesus Christ, the appearance of Christ. It is something similar to Paul's experience on the way to Damascus, similar to the mystery of Paul.

Paul is the one who did the most to proclaim and spread Christianity despite his not being one of the disciples who experienced the events in Palestine with Jesus. Neither did he experience the tragic ending of those events: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Through the descriptions in the Gospels we know how all of this entered into the hearts of humankind at that time. Paul had heard about all that is described in the Gospels. Paul knew exactly what had happened in Palestine; nevertheless, he simply could not imagine that the one who had ended up on the cross was the promised Messiah, the redeemer. The Messiah, Paul said to himself, could not end up like a common criminal. Paul is not well understood unless we look deeply into his soul, unless we look at what lived in him as the knowledge of a Jewish initiate. He knew that the savior, the Messiah, had proclaimed himself ahead of time in the burning bush, in the fire of Mount Sinai. Christ points to this when he says, “But if you do not believe his [Moses'] writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:47) With these words Christ is saying that he had announced himself earlier through external means, through the power of the elements, and that he then, however, went on to reveal himself through life, suffering and dwelling in a human body—that he had descended, so to speak, from the fire of Sinai. Certainly the Jewish initiate, Paul, knew of the Christ who had been previously announced; for behind the mystery of Moses lay the following.

During the time of the Old Testament and in ancient Jewish occult teaching there were, as in all ages, mysteries and initiates. Let us bear in mind the fundamental principle, that initiation must adapt to the conditions prevailing during any given age. If we consider initiation according to that principle, then we must begin by thinking of the human being as the human being presented by Theosophy or spiritual science. We must think of the human as a four-fold being, a being with four members—as endowed with a physical body in common with the mineral world; an etheric body in common with the plant kingdom; an astral body in common with the animal kingdom; and finally with an I or I-bearer. Standing before us, the human being consists of these four members. During the day they are bound together with one another but at night the I and the astral body are in the spiritual world. During the night the present-day human being perceives nothing. When human beings develop to a higher spiritual vision, they must apply certain methods of inner development to themselves. Anyone wishing to ascend to higher worlds must allow meditations and concentration to work on their soul. They must immerse their souls in certain things; one example among hundreds is the Rose Cross.

When human beings of the present day are asleep what they experience during the day does not make a strong enough impression on their astral body for it to continue working at night. When a normal person of the present day falls asleep in the evening, day life is as if extinguished. With students of initiation it is different, even if they do not notice the transformation of their astral body for a long time. In a meditant who has begun and practices the exercises prescribed in occult schools, a clairvoyant sees entirely different streams, other forms and organs than those unorganized and chaotic forms seen in ordinary people. This shows itself as the results of the exercises even if the students themselves have not noticed any results for a long time. The astral body changes, it becomes a different being even if the meditation is very short. The astral body was chaotic before and everything the human being did was drowned out by the impressions of the day. Only the prescriptions from the occult school provide something that drowns out the impressions from everyday life. Therefore, this transformation of the soul is called purification or catharsis. The student is purified while the astral body continues to be chaotic and unordered in an ordinary person.

Now, the teacher must also make the student aware of the nature of the surrounding spiritual world. For what happens in the astral body to carry over into the etheric body, the following steps were undertaken with the student in earlier times. When the students were ready, at the peak of their initiation, so to speak, they had to spend some time, usually three and a half days, lying down, during which time the initiator brought them to a state of complete lethargy or torpor. The etheric body was then lifted out of the physical body and the astral body impressed into the etheric body all that had been prepared in the astral through occult exercises. Otherwise the physical body is a hindrance to bringing to consciousness what the person experiences in the spiritual world. In this moment, when the initiator led the etheric body out of the physical body, enlightenment occurred and the enlightened one experienced the spiritual world; after three and a half days the student was an initiate who could tell others about the spiritual world.

We can find the same process in the mysteries of various ancient peoples. But initiation was different with the initiates of the Old Testament, for they experienced yet again what Moses had experienced at Sinai. In this way they were able to tell the people that the Messiah would appear, that the Messiah would come forth from the nation itself, that he would incarnate the principles of development for all human evolution in a body of flesh. That was the supreme moment of the initiation—when the enlightened Hebrew was allowed to experience that the Christ would arise in the future. Paul, as a Jewish initiate, knew all of this; nevertheless, before the Damascus event he could never have believed that the one who died on the cross was the same one as the Messiah.

Paul said of himself that he was a “premature birth,” that is, an initiate through grace. He stresses that he did not receive initiation through a training that required a sequence of steps. But he stood closer to the spiritual world than those people who had descended deeper into matter. He was able to experience the “crown of life,” the last act in Old Testament initiation. This was the crowning through the appearance of Christ. What the Old Testament initiates always experienced appeared to them in a glorious light. What they had experienced as a future event, he now saw as a vision that told him this being was the same one who had lived and died in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Now he knew that the Messiah, the Christ, is already here.

The greatest element of the old initiation had been the knowledge that the Messiah was to come, that he had died and yet still lived, now united with earthly existence—and continues to work in the evolution of humankind—this we see from all the letters Paul wrote. He saw this event as something that had already become present.

Let us put ourselves in the place of all the other initiates who were not ancient Hebrews and not Christian. They knew that in the ancient Atlantean times we come to a form of the human being entirely different from that of the present. The etheric body creates and forms the physical body, of course, and through initiation they could always see the etheric body that formed the basis for the physical body. In the spiritual world they had to do without a picture of the physical human body; they saw only the etheric body of the human being.

But the ancient Hebrew initiates always saw the physical human being spiritualized and placed in the spiritual world as its crowning, and such people understood the Christ to be the first real human form that could be seen in the spiritual world from the point of view provided by the physical world. In this way those receiving the Hebrew initiation saw how, in the distant future, the “Son of Man,” the Christ, would heal and purify the physical form. For this reason Paul knew that what appeared to him before Damascus in human form could be none other than the Christ.

The writer of the Apocalypse describes the same thing to us when he speaks of the “Son of Man.” He calls the seven communities the “seven stars,” and he saw the “Son of Man” as the spiritualized, purified form of the physical body, not only the etheric body, but the spiritual-physical form of “Man,” the human being, now purified and sanctified.

In this way he places before us the same being that Paul beheld outside Damascus. Then he details what the impulse behind this Christ event should mean for all humanity. He speaks to us of the seven communities in seven letters to the communities. They are messages concerning the tasks of the seven post-Atlantean cultures. In the seven seals, he portrays the seven cultures following our fifth main epoch. [This fifth main epoch is called the post-Atlantean. It consists of seven cultures of which we are now in the fifth with two more to pass before the start of the next main epoch.] And in the seven trumpets, he portrays the seven cultures of the seventh great main epoch.

What takes place in our present-day culture we can see in the physical world. But what will take place in the sixth great main epoch can be seen ahead of time in the pictures of the astral world. The seventh great main epoch, on the other hand, can be experienced in the sounds heard in the harmony of the spheres, in the devachanic world. They are experienced as a result of an impulse given by Christ.

In this way, the Apocalypse is a portrayal of what the Christian initiate experienced. It is a description of Christian initiation, a picture of the experiences of a man initiated in the Christian sense who has understood what has come into the world through Christ.

Now that we have seen what Theosophy has to say concerning the historical evolution of humanity, we will consider what the Apocalypse can tell us about it.

To understand this we must go beyond our culture back to the Greco-Latin cultural epoch, the fourth in our great post-Atlantean epoch. In spiritual science we calculate it to have begun in the eighth or ninth century of the pre-Christian age. Further back in the past we arrive at the Egypto-Chaldean cultural epoch, then the most ancient Persian age, concerning which the historical research of our day knows only the last faint echoes. Then we go further back to the primal holy age of the ancient Indian culture. In this way we finally arrive back at the time of the great Atlantean culture which is reported to us by all ancient religious writings. Before the great Atlantean water catastrophe, between Europe and America there existed the ancient Atlantean continent. That is where the precursors of humanity lived, those whom we call the Atlanteans.

We want to consider now the spiritual life of the Atlanteans; for, of course, the same souls who are present today lived there, but they were equipped with other soul abilities or states of consciousness that are of interest now to the spiritual researcher.

During the fullest blossoming of the Atlantean culture, we find the modern human being's capacity for perception present only in its first rudiments. The ancient Atlanteans did not see external objects as we do today, with sharply defined contours; they saw them rather surrounded by an aura. When they fell asleep at night, the external picture disappeared for them but they were conscious in the spiritual world. They had a dim form of clairvoyance. But they did not have any of what we today call counting and computation, the power of judgment or logical thinking. They had none of the mental abilities that our present-day culture has created; for example, they did not know about the power hidden in coal. Instead, they had magical abilities with which they could awaken the powers hidden in plant seeds and then put these powers in their service. In this way they possessed clairvoyant and magical powers. Those people in Atlantis best able to make use of their magical powers were the best technicians and engineers. What our present-day scholars and natural scientists represent, we can compare to the people most highly gifted with powers of clairvoyance in Atlantean times.

There were great mystery centers at that time. Our present-day mystery and occult schools work much more secretly than theirs did. The mystery centers of Atlantean times were generally known as both school and church. Piety and wisdom were cultivated at the same time. The leaders of that time can be called the great teachers of the mysteries. They taught in these Atlantean oracles of which there were seven. Students who had become sufficiently mature were initiated into the mastery of magical powers and into a conscious vision of the spiritual world. Unlike our culture, which is limited to the three lower kingdoms, Atlantean wisdom stretched over the physical earth and beyond to spiritual realities. Present-day science limits itself to the three kingdoms that do not go beyond the earth. However, through clairvoyant development, the Atlantean initiate also achieved a vision and experience of higher spiritual beings that work beyond the earth, even up to the region of the stars.

During those times there were mystery centers that were especially concerned with the various planets in our solar system and the spiritual powers standing behind them. For this reason there were Mars, Venus, Sun, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, and Moon oracles. However, the greatest and loftiest was the ancient sun oracle. The initiates of this sun oracle could survey all the other oracles and watch over them. The great sun initiate of the sun oracle stood at the top; he saw prophetically the water catastrophe of Atlantis. Therefore, he had the task of seeing to it that the culture was guided through and beyond the catastrophe.

Now those human beings who had possessed the best talent for clairvoyance were of no use at all for the post-Atlantean cultures. These new cultures required the selection of people who had nothing left of the ancient magic. Like a sunrise over the great post-Atlantean culture, they developed the individual spiritual capacities of thinking and judgment in their first primitive forms. The simplest people were precisely those best suited for the future.

They were led by the great sun initiate to a colony near present-day Ireland; later they were led to the middle of Asia. Those were the people whose consciousness was already then closest to our present-day consciousness. Furthermore, for the sake of this advanced population copies of etheric bodies of the greatest initiates of the Atlantean oracle were incorporated into those individuals who came from the various oracles with the best aptitude for present-day culture. This was necessary for the future.

It is a law of spiritual economy that what has once been achieved for humankind is not lost. If we were to survey the various oracles we would find everywhere what is achieved through occult training; the etheric body is transformed and organized through and through by the I. The etheric body of ordinary people who have not undergone this transformation dissolves at death into the world ether. However, with the highest initiate something different happens. An etheric body transformed in this way is preserved for the blessing and healing of humankind. The great sun initiate preserved the etheric bodies of the seven great Atlantean initiates as spiritual treasure and took them along to Asia. These were then imprinted into seven of the very best individuals so that they grew up endowed with the etheric bodies of the greatest initiates of ancient Atlantis. Through many generations the great sun initiate exercised his educational skills on the health and spiritual discipline of the people so that he developed, so to speak, the very best human material.

These seven individuals were in external life simple people; they had their I and their astral body for themselves, but in certain states of consciousness their speaking was inspired by higher powers. They were then sent by the great sun initiate down to ancient India, to those still longing to return to the true primal home of humanity and who characterized everything external as maya or illusion. That was the chorus of the seven holy Rishis. What this chorus harmonized together as a spiritual symphony was the primal wisdom of the pre-Vedantic age. We are looking into an age much more ancient than the Vedas. What is written in the Vedas is nothing more than an echo; it reaches us only in broken rays through the wisdom of the holy Rishis.

Now we come to the ancient Persian culture. In place of the seven Indian teachers came the first Zarathustra. He was himself an initiated student of the great sun initiate, who stood behind the Rishis. Because of this he could proclaim the great teaching concerning the spiritual being of the sun, concerning Ahura Mazdao. We see here how the great teachers of humanity guided the evolution of human development in wisdom.

From the beginning the ancient Indians were protected from falling into materialism. Their longing for clairvoyance, for the spiritual, for the feeling of connectedness with God was still too great. The Persians, on the other hand, were farmers and fighters. Therefore, in order not to fall into materialism, they had to receive the teaching concerning the great Ahura Mazdao, the spirit of the sun, the highest being. Zarathustra initiated one of his students in such a way that he brought the student's astral body to a higher stage of development. With another student he developed the etheric body to the highest stage of clairvoyant consciousness so that the student became able to read the Akashic chronicle by means of this etheric body which is, of course, always the vehicle for our memory.

Now, the first of these two students was reborn as Hermes, the great impulse giver for the Egyptian culture; his astral body was especially well developed. When he was reborn as the Egyptian Hermes, he bore within himself the astral body of the great Zarathustra and was therefore able to work with the intentions of Zarathustra.

The other student also became one of the most important personalities of post-Atlantean culture when he was born again as Moses. That is why Moses already as a child had to be brought to the point where his etheric body and I could be wholly influenced by Zarathustra's etheric body. For this reason he had to be placed in a basket deep in the water at a tender age;¹ this is a symbol for his calling. And so he became the great Akashic visionary who could write down the pictures he perceived in the Akashic chronicle. These are the majestic images found in Genesis. In these ways events of the past are led over into the future—behind the scenes of the physical, external development of humankind.

Zarathustra was also able to become the greatest teacher of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Living in the Near East in the sixth century before Christ's birth he was known as Zarathos or Nazarathos. He was the teacher of the most important Greek teachers and initiates—Pythagoras, for example, was his student.

These four post-Atlantean cultures were inspired by the great sun oracle of ancient Atlantis, and the culture of the ancient Hebrew nation continued to develop uninterupted on a parallel course—a subgroup of this Hebrew nation always living contemporaneously with one of the named cultural epochs. The ancient Indian culture was initiated in the secrets of the spiritual world and the planetary states; the ancient Hebrew ... [gap in the manuscript.] Then, living contemporaneously with the Persian culture of Zarathustra, the Hebrew ancestors developed a teaching much like that in Persia concerning Ormuzd and Ahriman, a teaching concerning good and evil. The third, the Egypto-Chaldean culture, then followed. The exodus out of Egypt under Moses' leadership took place at the same time. Then the Greco-Latin culture developed during the time of the great Hebrew initiate-prophets, Elijah, Jeremiah, and so forth. Already in primal ancient times these prophets had been given the idea of the great being, Ahura Mazdao, announced to them by Melchizedek. In this way, the same nuances were at work simultaneously in the Hebrew culture as in the other nations through the epochs.

Now, such cultures always had their second blossoming. That of Hermes soon encountered a decline. It had contained deep mysteries for the ancient Egyptian culture but had fallen in the worst way and entered into the most terrible decadence as black magic. The ancient Indian culture had fallen into decadence the least.

So we see how all that had appeared successively was still maintained in the ancient Hebrew nation. In various groups they preserved the feeling and the states of consciousness of various other cultures. These groups could be addressed with the names of the ancient cultures, according to how their states of consciousness had been maintained.

When the writer of the Apocalypse speaks of the “community at Ephesus” he means the representative of the first, the Indian culture; the Persian finds its representative in the “community at Smyrna”; the Egypto-Chaldean in the name of the “community at Pergamon”; and finally, the fourth, the Greco-Latin culture in the “community of Thyatira.” He was able to address the representatives of the four ancient cultural epochs in concurrently existing groups.

Then he looked further into the future and saw our cultural blossoming in the “community at Sardes.” The “community” following ours—for which we are consciously preparing through the theosophical movement—he characterizes with the name “Philadelphia.” After that, humanity will finally reach the “community at Laodicea,” where new impulses can no longer be brought forward. When we work and act in the fifth epoch as conscious representatives of the theosophical spiritual life we are introducing the age of Philadelphia or brotherhood.

The seven spirits of God, the seven stars, are what we find in theosophical teachings concerning the evolution of the earth through the planetary states. These teachings should lead us up to an understanding of the secrets of the stars and their spirits. In this way we enter consciously the community of Philadelphia when we absorb the teachings of spiritual science.

• 1. In Exodus 2:3 we read: “And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river's brink.” RSV.