The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we look back over the evolution of mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha, we get the impression that Christianity, the Christ Impulse, has only been able to live on within the European and American civilisations in the face of definite obstacles and in association with other streams of spiritual life. And a study of the growth and gradual development of Christianity reveals many remarkable facts.

To-day I want to describe in broad outlines the growth and development of Christianity in connection with what ought to live within the Anthroposophical Society: and not only ought to, but can live, because those persons who feel an honest and sincere urge towards Anthroposophy, have this urge from the very depths of their being.

If we take the facts of repeated earthly lives in all seriousness, we shall say: This inner urge to get away from the conceptions and habits of thought of those among whom life, education and social relationships have placed us, this urge that we feel to enter a stream of thought which really makes claims upon our life of soul, must have its origin in karma, in the karma coming from earlier lives on earth.

Now if we study the question of karma in connection with those personalities who find themselves together in the Anthroposophical Movement, it transpires that, without exception, before their present earthly life they have had one other important incarnation since the Mystery of Golgotha. They were already on earth once since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and are now there for the second time since that Event.

And then the great question arises: How has the previous earthly life, with respect to the Mystery of Golgotha, worked upon these personalities who now, out of their karma, feel the urge to enter the Anthroposophical Movement?

Even from exoteric study we find that men standing as firmly within the stream of Christianity itself as St. Augustine, have said: “Christianity did not begin with Christ; there were Christians before Christ, only they were not so called.” This is what St. Augustine says.

Those who penetrate more deeply into the spiritual mysteries of human evolution and can study these spiritual mysteries with Initiation Science, will strongly confirm such a view as is expressed by St. Augustine, for it is a fact. But it becomes necessary, then, to know in what form that which through the Mystery of Golgotha became the historical Christ Impulse upon the earth, existed in earlier times.

To-day I can speak of this earlier form of Christianity by starting from impressions which came in a place not far distant from Torquay (where our Summer Course has been held), in Tintagel, whence proceeded the spiritual stream connected with King Arthur. It was possible to receive the impressions which can still come to-day at the spot where King Arthur's castle with its Round Table stood—impressions which come above all from the magnificent natural surroundings of this castle.

At this place where nothing but ruins remain of the old citadel of King Arthur, where we look back as if in memory across the centuries that have elapsed since the Arthur stream went out from thence, we realise how stone after stone has so crumbled away that there is hardly anything to be recognised of the old castles which once were inhabited by King Arthur and those around him. But when with the eye of spirit we look out from the place where the castle once stood, over the sea with its iridescent colours and breaking waves, the impression we get is that we are able at this place to penetrate deeply into the elemental secrets of nature and of the cosmos.

And if we look back with occult sight, if we can visualise the point of time which lies a few thousand years ago, when the Arthur stream had its beginning, then we see that those who lived on Arthur's Mount had, as is the case with all such occult centres, chosen this spot because the impulses necessary for the tasks they had set themselves, for their mission in the world, needed the play of those forces which nature there displayed before them.

I cannot say whether it is always so, but when I saw the view there was a most wonderful play of waves surging and rippling up from the depths—in itself one of the most beautiful sights in all nature. These waves hurl themselves against the walls of rock and as they fall back again in seething foam the elementary spirits are able to rise up from below and come to living expression. From above, the sunlight is reflected in manifold forms in the waves of the air. This interplay of elemental nature from above and from below reveals the full power of the Sun and displays it in such a way that man is able to receive it into his being. Those who can imbibe what is given by this interplay of the beings born of the light above and the beings born in the depths below, receive the power of the Sun, the impulse of the Sun. It is a moment in which man can unfold what I will call “piety”—piety in the pagan sense. Christian piety is not the same as pagan piety which means inner surrender to the gods of nature working and weaving everywhere in the play of nature.

Those who lived around King Arthur absorbed this play of weaving, working nature into their very being. And most significant of all was what they were able to receive in the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

I want to tell you to-day about the character of this spiritual life that was connected with such centres as that of King Arthur's Round Table. And I must begin by speaking of something that is known to you all.

When a human being dies, he leaves his physical body and still has his etheric body around him for a few days. After these few days have elapsed he lays aside his etheric body and lives on then in his astral body and Ego. What happens thus to the man who has passed through the gate of death, appears to the eye of vision as if the etheric being were dissolving. After death the etheric human being expands and expands, his actual form becoming more and more indefinite as he weaves himself into the cosmos.

A remarkable phenomenon, and the exact opposite of this other, occurred in the world-historic sense when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. What was it that happened then? Up to that time Christ had been a Sun Being, had belonged to the Sun. Before the Mystery of Golgotha had come to pass, the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table stood on these rocks, gazed at the play between the Sun-born spirits and the Earth-born spirits, and felt that the forces living in this play of nature-spirits poured into their hearts and above all through their etheric bodies. Therewith they received into themselves the Christ Impulse which was then streaming away from the Sun and was living in everything that is brought into being by the Sun-forces.

And so, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Knights of King Arthur received into themselves the Sun-Spirit, that is to say, the Christ as He was in pre-Christian times. And they sent their messengers out into all Europe to subdue the wild savagery of the astral bodies of the peoples of Europe, to purify and to civilise, for such was their mission. We see such men as these Knights of King Arthur's Round Table starting from this point in the West of England to bear to the peoples of Europe as they were at that time, what they had received from the Sun, purifying the astral forces of the then barbarous European population—barbarous at all events in Central and Northern Europe.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. What happened in Asia? Over yonder in Asia, the sublime Sun Being, Who was later known as the Christ, left the Sun. This betokened a kind of death for the Christ Being. He went forth from the Sun as we human beings go forth from the earth when we die. And as a man who dies leaves his physical body behind on the earth and his etheric body which is laid aside after three days is visible to the seer, so Christ left behind Him in the Sun that which in my book Theosophy is called “Spirit-Man,” the seventh member of the human being.

Christ died to the Sun. He died cosmically, from the Sun to the earth. He came down to the earth. From the moment of Golgotha onwards His Life-Spirit was to be seen around the earth. We ourselves leave behind at death the Life-Ether, the etheric body, the life-body. After this cosmic Death, Christ left His Spirit-Man on the Sun, and around the earth, His Life-Spirit. So that after the Mystery of Golgotha the earth was swathed as it were by the Life-Spirit of the Christ.

Now the connections between places are not the same in the spiritual life as they are in physical life. The Life-Spirit of the Christ was perceived in the Irish Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Hibernia; and above all by the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table. So, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Impulse belonging to the Sun actually went out from this place where the impulses were received from the Sun. Afterwards the power of the Knights diminished but they lived at the time within this Life-Spirit which encircled the earth and in which there was this constant interplay of light and air, of the Spirits in the Elements from above and from below.

Try to picture to yourselves the cliff with King Arthur's castle upon it and from above the Sun-forces playing down in the light and air, and pouring upwards from below the elementary beings of the earth. There is a living interplay between Sun and earth.

In the centuries which followed the Mystery of Golgotha this all took place within the Life-Spirit of the Christ. So that in the play of nature between sea and rock, air and light, there was revealed, as it were in spiritual light, the Event of Golgotha.

Understand me rightly, my dear friends. If in the first five centuries of our era men looked out over the sea, and had been prepared by the exercises practised by the twelve who were around King Arthur and who were concerned above all with the Mysteries of the Zodiac, if they looked out over the sea they could see not merely the play of nature but they could begin to read a meaning in it just as one reads a book instead of merely staring at it. And as they looked and saw, here a gleam of light, there a curling wave, here the sun mirrored on a rocky cliff, there the sea dashing against the rocks, it all became a flowing, weaving picture—a truth whose meaning could be deciphered. And when they deciphered it they knew of the spiritual Fact of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha was revealed to them because the picture was all irradiated by the Life-Spirit of Christ presented to them by nature.

Yonder in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place and its impulse had penetrated deeply into the hearts and souls of men. We need only think of those who became the first Christians to realise what a change had come about in their souls. While all this of which I have been telling you was happening in the West, the Christ Himself, the Christ Who had come down to earth leaving His Spirit-Man on the Sun and His Life-Spirit in the atmosphere around the earth, bringing down His Ego and His Spirit-Self to the earth—the Christ was moving from East to West in the hearts of men, through Greece, Northern Africa, Italy, Spain, across Europe. The Christ worked here in the hearts of men, while over in the West He was working through nature.

And so on the one hand we have the story of the Mystery of Golgotha, legible in the Book of Nature for those who were able to read it, working from West to East. It represented, as it were, the science of the higher graduates of King Arthur's Round Table. And on the other hand we have a stream flowing from East to West, not in wind and wave, in air and water, not over hills or in the rays of the Sun, but flowing through the blood, laying hold of the hearts of men on its course from Palestine through Greece into Italy and Spain.

The one stream flows through nature; the other through the blood and the hearts of men. These two streams flow to meet one another. The pagan stream is still working, even to-day. It bears the pre-Christian Christ, the Christ Who was proclaimed as a Sun Being by those who were Knights of the Round Table, but also by many others before the Mystery of Golgotha actually took place. The pre-Christian Christ was carried through the world by this stream even in the age of the Mystery of Golgotha. And a great deal of this wisdom was carried forth into the world by the stream known as that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is possible, even to-day, to discover these things. There is a pagan Christianity, a Christianity that is not directly bound up with the actual historical Event of Golgotha.

And coming upwards to meet this stream there is the form of Christianity that is connected directly with the Mystery of Golgotha, flowing through the blood, through the hearts and souls of men. Two streams come to meet one another—the pre-Christian Christ stream, etherealised as it were, and the Christian Christ stream. The one is known, subsequently, as the Arthur stream; the other as the Grail stream. Later on they came together; they came together in Europe, above all in the spiritual world.

How can we describe this movement? The Christ Who descended through the Mystery of Golgotha drew into the hearts of men. In the hearts of men He passed from East to West, from Palestine, through Greece, across Italy and Spain. The Christianity of the Grail spread through the blood and the hearts of men. The Christ took His way from East to West.

And to meet Him from the West there came the spiritual etheric Image of the Christ—the Image evoked by the Mystery of Golgotha, but still picturing the Christ of the Sun Mysteries.

Behind the scenes of world-history, sublime and wonderful events were taking place. From the West came pagan Christianity, the Arthur-Christianity, also under other names and in another form. From the East came the Christ in the hearts of men. And then the meeting takes place—the meeting between the Christ Who had Himself come down to earth and His Own Image which is brought to Him from West to East. This meeting took place in the year 869 A.D. Up to that year we have two streams, clearly distinct from one another. The one stream, more in the North, passed across Central Europe and bore the Christ as a Sun Hero, whether the name were Baldur or some other. And under the banner of Christ, the Sun Hero, the Knights of Arthur spread their culture abroad.

The other stream, rooted inwardly in the hearts of men, which later on became the Grail stream, is to be perceived more in the South, coming from the East. It bears the real Christ, Christ Himself. The other stream brings to meet it from the West a cosmic Image of the Christ. This meeting of Christ with Himself, of Christ the Brother of Humanity with Christ the Sun Hero Who is there only as it were in an Image—this meeting of Christ with His own Image took place in the 9th century.

I have given you here, my dear friends, an idea of the inner happenings during the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, when, as I have already said, the souls were living who are now again upon earth, and who have carried with them from their previous earthly lives the urge to come in sincerity into the Anthroposophical Movement.²

When we consider this significant Arthur stream from West to East, it appears to us as the stream which brings the Impulse of the Sun into earthly civilisation. In this Arthur stream is working and weaving the Michael stream as we may call it in Christian terminology, the stream in the spiritual life of humanity in which we have been living since the end of the seventies of last century. The Ruling Power, known by the name of Gabriel, who had held sway for three or four centuries in European civilisation, was succeeded at the end of the seventies of last century by Michael. And the Rulership of Michael will last for three to four centuries, weaving and working in the spiritual life of mankind. And so we have good cause at the present time to speak of the Michael streams, for we ourselves are living once again in an Age of Michael.

We find one of these Michael streams if we look back to the period immediately preceding that of the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Arthur Impulse going out from the West, from England, an Impulse which was kindled originally by the Hibernian Mysteries. And we find a still more ancient form of this Michael stream if we look back to what happened centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, taking its start from Northern Greece, in Macedonia, the international, cosmopolitan stream connected with the name of Alexander the Great arose under the influence of the conception of the world that is known as the Aristotelian. What was achieved through Aristotle and Alexander in that pre-Christian age took place under the Rulership of Michael, just as now once again we are living under his Rulership. The Michael Impulse was there in the spiritual life at the time of Alexander the Great, just as it is there now, in our own time. Whenever a Michael Impulse is at work in humanity upon the earth it is always a time when that which has been founded in a centre of spiritual culture spreads abroad among many peoples of the earth and is carried into many regions, wherever it is possible to carry it.

This came to pass in pre-Christian times through the campaigns of Alexander. The achievements of Greek culture were spread among men wherever this became possible. If one had asked Alexander and Aristotle: Whence comes your impulse to spread abroad the spiritual culture of your age?—they would have spoken, though under a different name, of that same Being, Michael, who works from the Sun as the Servant of Christ. For among the Archangels who in turn rule over civilisation, Michael belongs to the Sun. Michael was Ruler in the time of Alexander and is Ruler again in our own time. The next Ruling Archangel was Oriphiel, who belongs to Saturn. His successor, the Archangel Anael, belongs to Venus. While Zachariel, the Archangel who ruled civilisation in the 4th and 5th centuries, belongs to the sphere of Jupiter. Then came Raphael, from the Mercury sphere, at the time when a form of thought connected with medicine and healing lived in the background of European civilisation. After Raphael came Samael, whose Rulership extended a little beyond the 12th century. And then came the Age of Gabriel. Samael belongs to Mars, Gabriel to the Moon. And Gabriel was once again succeeded by Michael, who belongs to the Sun sphere, in the seventies of the 19th century. Thus in rhythmic succession these seven Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangels rule over the spiritual life of the earth.

And so as we look back—when was the last Rulership of Michael? It was in the Alexander period. It prevailed during that period when Greek civilisation was carried across to Asia and Africa, and finally concentrated in the great and influential city of Alexandria with its mighty heroes of the spiritual life.

It is a strange vista that presents itself to occult sight. In the age which lies a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see, going Eastwards from Macedonia—that is to say, once more from West to East but this time farther to the East—we see the same stream which proceeds from the English and Irish souls in the West and which also flows from West to East. During the Alexander period, Michael was the Ruling Archangel on the earth. During the Arthur period, when Michael was working from the Sun, the influences I have described were sent down from the Sun. But what happened later on, after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place? What happened to the kind of thought that had been carried by Alexander the Great over to Asia?

At the time when Charlemagne, in his own way, was establishing a certain form of Christian culture in Europe, Haroun al Raschid was living over yonder in Asia Minor. All the oriental wisdom and spirituality to be found at that time in architecture, in art, in science, in religion, in literature, in poetry—it was all gathered at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. And at his side there was a Counsellor, a man who was not initiated in all these arts and sciences at that time, but who had been an Initiate in earlier times, in a former life. Around these two men, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor, we find that all the wisdom which had been carried by Alexander into Asia, all the teachings which had been drawn from the old nature-wisdom and were imparted by Aristotle to those he was able to instruct—all this was changed. Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism were permeated and impregnated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid with Arabism, with Mohammedanism.

And then, all the learning thus permeated with Arabism was carried over into the stream of Christianity by way of Greece, but especially by way of Northern Africa, Italy and Spain. It was carried over, inculcated as it were into the world of Christendom.

But before this, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor had passed through the gate of death, and from that life which leads from death to a new birth they looked down on what was taking place on earth in the expeditions of the Mohammedan Moors to Spain. From the spiritual world they watched the form of culture which they themselves had promoted and which had been spread by their successors. Haroun al Raschid concentrated his attention from the spiritual world more on the regions of Greece, Italy and Spain; his Counsellor more on the stream going out from the East across the regions to the North of the Black Sea, through Russia and into Central Europe.

And now the question arises: What was the destiny of Alexander and Aristotle themselves? They were deeply bound up with the Rulership of Michael but they were not incarnated on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must try to get a clear conception of the two contrasting pictures. On the earth are those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ comes down through the Mystery of Golgotha, becomes Man, and from then on lives in the earth-sphere. And what is happening on the Sun? On the Sun there are the souls who at that time belonged to Michael, who were living in his sphere. These souls witnessed, from the Sun, the departure of Christ from the Sun and His descent to earth. On the earth there were those who witnessed His arrival. That is the difference. The experience of those who were on earth during the Michael Rulership at the time of Alexander, was that they saw as it were the other direction of the Christ Event, namely, the departure of the Christ from the Sun. They live on—I will not now mention unimportant incarnations—and they experience, in the spiritual world, that significant point of time in the 9th century, about the year 869, when there took place the meeting of the Christ with His own Image, with His own Life-Spirit brought over from pagan, pre-Christian Christianity.

Another meeting also took place in the spiritual world, a meeting of the individualities living in Alexander the Great and in Aristotle with the individualities who had lived in Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor. The wisdom from Asia, in a Mohammedanised form, living in Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor after their death, came into contact, in the spiritual world, with Alexander and Aristotle. On the one side Aristotelianism and Alexandrianism, but impregnated with Mohammedanism, and on the other, the real Aristotle and the real Alexander—not a weakened form of their teachings. Alexander and Aristotle had witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from the Sun.

Then a great spiritual exchange, a great heavenly Council, if one may call it so, took place in the spiritual world between Mohammedanised Aristotelianism and Christianised Aristotelianism which had, however, been imbued in the spiritual world with the Christian Impulse.

In the spiritual world which borders on our physical earth—it was here that Alexander and Aristotle met with Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor and consulted together as to the further progress of Christianity in Europe, with an eye to what should come at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, when Michael would again have the Rulership on earth. This all took place in the light raying from that other event, namely, the meeting of Christ with His own Image. That heavenly Council was permeated by the influence of this meeting. And the lines, the threads of the spiritual life of humanity were projected with great intensity in the spiritual world which borders on the physical earth.

Below, on the earth itself, the Church Fathers gathered together in Constantinople at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, where they formulated the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and Spirit, but only of body and soul, the soul possessing certain spiritual attributes. Trichotomy—the definition of man as body, soul and Spirit—was done away with and anyone who persisted in believing it was declared to be a heretic. The Christian Fathers in Europe never spoke of body, soul and Spirit, but only of body and soul.

The decisive event which took place in the year 869 in the super-sensible worlds as I have described it, cast its shadows down into the earthly world. The Dark Age, the Kali Yuga, received a special impetus, while what I have just described was taking place above, in the spiritual world.

Such was the real course of events. In the physical world the Council of Constantinople which eliminated the Spirit, and in the world immediately bordering on the physical, a heavenly Council such as I have described—coinciding with the meeting of Christ Himself with His own Image.

But it was known that it was a question of waiting until the new Michael Age had dawned on earth. There were, none the less, always a few Teachers who knew, even though in a somewhat decadent way, something of what takes place behind the veils of existence. There were always Teachers who knew how to present, if not always in very apt pictures, the spiritual content of the world, who could speak of what was happening in the spiritual world that is so near to the earth. And here and there these Teachers found ears willing to listen to them. Their listeners were men who learned something of true Christianity by catching here and there fragmentary words as to what would come in the 20th century after the Michael Rulership had begun once again.

In you yourselves, my dear friends, are the souls who were in incarnation at that time and listened to those who spoke of the coming Age of Michael and whose speech was influenced by impulses coming down from the heavenly Council of which I have told you.

From these experiences of a previous life in the early Christian centuries—not precisely the 9th century but before and after, chiefly before—arose the subconscious urge, when the Michael Rulership should be there once more, from the end of the 19th century onwards, to look for centres where the spiritual life is again cultivated under the influence of Michael. This impulse was rooted in the souls of those who had once heard of the teachings, who knew something of the mysteries of which we have spoken to-day.

And so the karmic urge lives in souls to find their way to that form of Christianity which was to be spread by Anthroposophy under the influence of Michael at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. What these souls had experienced in earlier times expresses itself in this incarnation in the fact that certain of them find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Knowledge resulting from a converging of old pre-Christian, cosmic Christianity with inward Christian doctrines, teachings which were connected with the spiritual workings of nature and yet also with the Mystery of Golgotha, continued to be taught on earth at the time when those souls who now in this later incarnation feel themselves drawn to Anthroposophy had passed through the gates of death and were living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some of them indeed came down to incarnation on the earth. The ancient teachings, with their cosmic view of Christianity, lived on, propagating traditions of the Mysteries of antiquity. This knowledge lived on in Schools in Europe like that of Chartres in the 12th century, with its great Teachers—Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others. And the teachings lived and worked too in the great teacher of Dante, Brunetto Latini, of whom I spoke to you in the last lecture. In this way we see how there is a continuation of the knowledge in which there was still connection between cosmic Christianity and the purely human, earthly Christianity which more and more gained the supremacy on earth.

The Council held in Constantinople was an earthly, shadow-image of something that took place in the spiritual world. A constant connection was maintained between what was proceeding in the physical world and in the immediately adjacent spiritual world. And because of this, the most illustrious Teachers of Chartres felt themselves inspired by the true Alexander and the true Aristotle, although in a still stronger way by Plato and by the Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought which prevailed in the mysticism of the Middle Ages.

Something of great significance now took place. Those who had grouped themselves around Michael, and who had for the most part been incarnated at the time of Alexander, were now living in the spiritual world. Looking down from thence they saw how Christianity was evolving under the Teachers of Chartres. But they waited until these Teachers—who were the last who taught of Christianity in its cosmic aspect—they waited until these Teachers of Chartres had come up into the spiritual world. And at a certain point of time, at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries, there gathered together in the spiritual sphere bordering on cur earth, the more definitely Platonic Teachers of Chartres and those who had in some way taken part in the heavenly Council in the year 869. There took place—if I may use trivial words of earth to describe such a sublime event—a kind of conference between the Teachers of Chartres who had just ascended into the spiritual world and were now to continue their existence there, and those who were on the point of descending to earth, among them the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle, who immediately afterwards incarnated in the Dominican Order. And then, in a body of teaching that is so misunderstood to-day but the deep significance of which ought to be realised, in Scholasticism, preparation was made for all that was to come later on in the next Age of Michael.

And now, in order that they might enter right into the heart of Christianity, the souls who belonged to the sphere of Michael, who had lived in the old Alexander time, who had not lived on earth during the first Christian centuries, or at least only in unimportant incarnations—these souls now came into incarnation in order to imbibe Christianity in the Dominican or other Orders, but mainly in the Dominican Order. Again they passed through the gate of death and continued their existence in the spiritual world.

In the 15th century and lasting on into the 16th—and it must be remembered that time-relationships are quite different in the spiritual world—there took place in the super-sensible world the great process of instruction instituted by Michael himself for those who belonged to him. A great super-sensible School was founded, a School in which Michael himself was the Teacher and in which those souls took part who had been inspired by the impulses of the Alexander Age and had later steeped themselves in Christianity in the manner described. All the discarnate souls who belonged to Michael took part in this great School in the super-sensible world during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. All the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai who belonged to the Michael stream, as well as many elementary beings, also took part in it.

In this super-sensible School, a wonderful review was given of the wisdom of the ancient Mysteries. Detailed knowledge in regard to the ancient Mysteries was imparted to the souls partaking in this School. They looked back to the Sun Mysteries, to the Mysteries of the other planets. But a vista of the future was given too, a vista of what should begin at the end of the 19th century in the new Age of Michael. All this passed through these souls who now, in the present Michael Age, feel drawn to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Meanwhile, on earth, the last bout of the struggle was taking place. Haroun al Raschid had incarnated again as Lord Bacon of Verulam and in this new incarnation had set the impulse of materialism on foot. The universality in the teachings of Bacon, but also his materialism, came from his incarnation as Haroun al Raschid. Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid. The Counsellor, who had taken the other path, incarnated in the same epoch, as Amos Comenius.

And so while Christianity illumined by Aristotelian and Alexandrian thought was going through its most important phase of development in the super-sensible worlds during the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries—during this very same period we find materialism being established on earth in the minds of men, established in science by Bacon, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and in the realm of education by Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. The two souls worked together.

When Amos Comenius and Bacon had once again passed through the gate of death, a remarkable thing came to pass in the spiritual world. After Bacon had passed through the gate of death, it happened that because of the particular mode of thinking he had adopted in his incarnation as Bacon, a whole world of “idols,” demonic idols, went forth from his etheric body, and spread themselves out in the spiritual world which was peopled by those who were the pupils of Michael.

As I have shown in my first Mystery Play, things that happen on earth work powerfully into the spiritual world. Bacon's mode of thinking on the earth worked so shatteringly into the spiritual world that it was flooded by a whole host of “idols.”

And the materialistic form of educational science inaugurated by Amos Comenius provided the sphere, the cosmic atmosphere, as it were, for the idols of Bacon. Bacon provided the idols; and just as we human beings have around us the mineral and plant kingdoms, so these idols of Bacon were surrounded by other kingdoms which were necessary to their existence. And these were provided by what Amos Comenius had instituted on earth.

The individualities who had once lived on the earth as Alexander and Aristotle set themselves to fight these demonic idols. And the conflict continued until the time when the French Revolution broke out on the earth.

The idols, the demonic idols which it had not been possible to overcome, which had as it were escaped from the fight, descended to earth and became the inspiring forces of the materialism of the 19th century with its many consequences. These forces are the inspirers of the materialism of the 19th century.

The souls who had remained behind, who with the assistance of the individualities of Aristotle and Alexander had profited by the teaching of Michael, came back to earth, bearing the impulses I have described, towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And many of these souls can be recognised in those who come to the Anthroposophical Movement. Such is the karma of those who come to the Movement with inner sincerity.

It is a shattering experience to hear of what is happening immediately behind the events in the outer world at the present time. But it is something which, under the impulse of the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum must be implanted in the hearts and souls of those who call themselves Anthroposophists. It must live in their hearts and souls, and it will give them the strength to work on, for those who are Anthroposophists to-day in the true sense will feel a strong urge to come down again to the earth very soon. And with a faculty of prophecy connected with the Michael Impulse, it can be foreseen that many anthroposophical souls will come again to the earth at the end of the 20th century in order to bring to full realisation the Anthroposophical Movement which must now be established on a firm and sure foundation.

Every Anthroposophist should be moved by this knowledge: “I have in me the impulse of Anthroposophy. I recognise it as the Michael Impulse. I wait and am strengthened in my waiting by true activity in Anthroposophy at the present time in order that after the short interval allotted in the 20th century to anthroposophical souls between death and a new birth, I may come again at the end of the century to promote the Movement with much more spiritual power. I am preparing for the new Age leading from the 20th into the 21st century” ... It is thus that a true Anthroposophist speaks. Many forces of destruction are at work upon the earth! All culture, all civilised life must fall into decadence if the spirituality of the Michael Impulse does not so lay hold of men that they are capable of bringing upliftment to the civilisation that is hurrying downhill.

If there are to be found truly anthroposophical souls, willing to bring this spirituality into earthly life, then there will be a movement leading upwards. If such souls are not found, decadence will continue to spread. The great War, with all its attendant evils, will be merely the beginning of still worse evils.

Human beings to-day are facing a great crisis. Either they must see civilisation going down into the abyss, or they must raise it by spirituality and promote it in the sense of the Michael Impulse.

That, my dear friends, is what I had to say to you on this occasion and my desire is that it shall work on and bear fruit in your souls. For as I have often said at the conclusion of a happy and satisfying visit, when we have worked together for a time, we know, as Anthroposophists, that it is our karma to have been able to do so. We know too that we still remain united, even when divided in physical space. We shall remain united in the signs that can reveal themselves to the eyes of spirit and to the ears of soul if what I have said in these lectures has been received in full earnestness and has been understood.

• 2. See: Karmic Relationships, Vol. III.

What I have been saying about the boundaries of man's knowledge of Nature should have given some indication at least of the difference between the cognition of higher worlds, as we call it in Spiritual Science, and the cognition of which we speak in our ordinary, everyday consciousness or in ordinary science. In everyday life and in ordinary science we let our powers of cognition remain at a standstill with whatever we have acquired through the ordinary education that has brought us to a certain stage in life, and with whatever this education has enabled us to make out of inherited qualities and out of qualities possessed by mankind in general. What is called in anthroposophical Spiritual Science the knowledge of higher worlds depends upon a man himself deliberately undertaking further training and development; upon the realisation that as life continues on its course a higher form of consciousness can be attained through self-education, just as a child can advance to the stage of ordinary consciousness. And it is to this higher consciousness that there are first revealed the things we otherwise look for in vain at the two boundaries of the knowledge of Nature, at the boundary of matter and at the boundary of ordinary consciousness.

It was of consciousness enhanced in this sense, through which realities at a level beyond that of everyday reality became accessible to men, that the Eastern sages spoke in ancient times, and through methods of inner self-training suited to their racial characteristics and stage of evolution, they strove to achieve this higher development. Not until we realise what it is that is revealed to man through such higher development can the meaning of the records of ancient Eastern wisdom be discerned.

In characterising the path of development adopted by those sages, we must therefore say: It was a path leading to Inspiration. In that epoch, humanity was, so to speak, adapted by nature for Inspiration. And in order to understand these paths of development into the higher realms of knowledge, it will be a useful preparation to form a clear picture of the essentials of the path followed by the sages of the ancient East. At the very outset, however, let me emphasise that this path cannot be suitable for Western civilisation, because humanity is evolving, is advancing. And those who in their search for ways of higher development see fit to return—as many have done—to the instructions given by ancient Eastern wisdom are really trying to turn back the tide of evolution, as well as showing that they have no real understanding of human progress.

With our ordinary consciousness we live in our world of thought, in our world of feeling, in our world of will, and through acts of cognition we bring to apprehension what surges up and down in the soul as thought, feeling and will. Moreover, it is through outer perceptions, perception of the things of the physical world, that our consciousness first awakes in the real sense.

The important point is to realise that for the Eastern sages, for the so-called Initiates of the ancient East, a different procedure was necessary from that followed by man in ordinary life in regard to the manner of dealing with perceptions, and with thinking, feeling and willing.

Some understanding of the ancient path of development leading into the higher worlds can be acquired by considering the following. At certain ages of life we develop the spirit-and-soul within us to a state of greater freedom, greater independence. During the first years of infancy it works as an organising force in the body, until with the change of teeth it is liberated, becomes free in a certain sense. We then live freely with our Ego in the element of spirit-and-soul, which is now at our disposal, whereas previously it was occupied with harmonising and regulating the body inwardly. But as we grow on into life there arise those factors which in the sphere of ordinary consciousness do not, to begin with, permit the liberated spirit-and-soul to develop to the point of penetrating into the spiritual world. As men in our life between birth and death we must take the path which places us into the outer world as beings qualified and fit for life in that world. We must acquire the faculties which enable us to establish our bearings in the physical world, and also those which can make each of us a useful member in the life of social community with other men.

Three faculties come into the picture here. Three faculties bring us into the right connection and regulate our intercourse with the outer world of men: speech, the capacity to understand the thoughts of our fellow-man, and perception of the Ego of another person. In speaking of these three faculties: perception of the sounds of speech, perception of thoughts, perception of the Ego of another human being, we are expressing something that appears to be simple but is by no means found so by earnest and conscientious seekers for knowledge.

In the ordinary way we speak of five senses only, to which one or two inner senses are added by modern psychology. External science presents no complete system of the senses. I shall be speaking to you some time on this subject¹ and will now say only that it is an illusion to believe that understanding of the sounds of speech is implicit in the sense of hearing, or in the organisation which is supposed by modern physiology to account for hearing. Just as we have a sense of hearing, we have a sense of speech—a sense for the sounds of speech. By this is meant the sense which enables us to understand what is perceived in the sounds of speech, just as the auditory sense enables us to perceive tones as such. And if some day we have a really comprehensive physiology, it will be known that this sense for the sounds of speech is entirely analogous to the other, that it can rightly be called a sense on its own. It extends over a larger area within the human organism than several of the other, more localised senses, but for all that it is a definitely circumscribed sense.

We also have a sense, extending over nearly the whole of our bodily frame, for perception of the thoughts of another person. What we perceive in the word itself is not yet the thought it conveys. We need other organs, an organic apparatus different from that required for the perception of the word as such, when we want to understand through the word the thought which the other person is communicating to us.

We are also equipped with a sense that extends over the whole of our body: we can call it the sense for the perception of the Ego of another person. In this connection even philosophy has become childish in the modern age, for to-day one can, for example, often hear it argued: We meet another person; we see that he has a human form like our own, and because we know that as human beings we are endowed with an Ego, we conclude, as it were by subconscious inference, that he too must have an Ego within him. This is quite contrary to the psychological reality. A genuine observer knows that it is a direct perception, not an inference drawn from analogy, through which we perceive the Ego of the other person. There is really only one man—a friend or associate of the Göttingen school of Husserl, Max Scheeler by name—who has hit upon this direct perception of the Ego of another person.

Above and beyond the ordinary human senses, therefore, we have to distinguish three others: the sense for the sounds of speech, the sense for another person's thoughts, the sense for another person's Ego. It is primarily through these three senses that we establish intercourse with the rest of mankind. They are the means whereby we are introduced into social life among other human beings. But the path connected with the functions of these three senses was followed differently by the ancient sages, especially by the ancient Indian sages, for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge. In this quest for higher knowledge the soul of the sage did not endeavour to understand through the words the meaning of what another person was saying. The forces of his soul were not directed to the thoughts of another person in such a way as to perceive them, nor to the Ego of another in such a way as to perceive and experience this Ego. All such matters were left to everyday life. When after his efforts to attain higher knowledge the sage returned from his sojourn in spiritual worlds to everyday life, he used these three senses in the ordinary way. But when he was endeavouring to cultivate the methods for acquiring higher knowledge, he used them differently. In acts of listening, in acts of perceiving the sounds of speech, he did not allow the soul's force to penetrate through the word in order to understand what the other person was saying, but he remained with the word as such, without seeking for anything behind it. He guided the stream of soul-life only as far as the word itself. His perception of the words was thereby intensified, and he deliberately refrained from attempting to understand anything else through the word. With his whole soul he penetrated into the word as such, using the word or the sequence of words in such a way that this penetration was possible. He formulated certain aphoristic sayings, simple but impressive sentences, and tried to live entirely in the sound, in the tone and ring of the words. With his whole soul he followed the ring of the words which he repeated aloud to himself.

This practice then led to a state of complete absorption in the aphoristic sayings themselves, in the “mantras,” as they were called. The “mantric” art, the art of becoming completely absorbed in these aphoristic sayings, consisted in this. A man did not understand only the content and meaning of the words, but he experienced the sayings themselves as music, made them part of his own soul-forces, remained completely absorbed in them and by continually repeating and reciting them, enhanced the power of his soul.

Little by little this art was brought to a high stage of development and was the means of transforming into something different the faculty of soul we otherwise possess for understanding the other person through the word. Through the recitation and repetition of the mantras, a power was generated which now led—not to the other person, but into the spiritual world. And if working with the mantras had brought the soul to the point of being inwardly aware of the weaving flow of this power—which otherwise remains unconscious because attention is focussed entirely upon understanding the other person—if a man had reached the point of feeling this power to be an actual power of the soul in the same way as muscular tension is felt when the arm is being used for some purpose, then he had made himself fit to grasp what is contained in the higher power of thought. In ordinary life a man tries to find his way to the other person through the thought. But with this power he grasps the thought in quite a different way—he grasps the weaving of thought in external reality, penetrates into that external reality and rises to the level of what I have called “Inspiration.”

Along this path, instead of reaching the Ego of the other person, we reach the Egos of individual spiritual Beings who are around us just as are the beings of the material world. What I am now telling you was a matter of course for a sage of the ancient East. In his life of soul he rose to the perception of a spirit-realm. In a supreme degree he attained what can be called Inspiration and his organic constitution was suitable for this. Unlike a Western man, he had no need to fear that his Ego might in some way be lost during this flight from the body. And in later times, when owing to the advance in evolution made by humanity a man might very easily pass out of his body into the outer world without his Ego, precautionary measures were used. Care was taken to ensure that the individual who was to become a pupil of the higher wisdom should not enter this spiritual world without guidance and succumb to that pathological scepticism of which I have spoken in these lectures. In very ancient times in the East the racial character was such that this would not, in any case, have been a matter for anxiety, but it was certainly to be feared as the evolution of humanity progressed. Hence the precautionary measure that was strictly applied in the schools of Eastern Wisdom, to ensure that the pupil should rely upon an inner, not an outer, authority. (Fundamentally speaking, what we understand by “authority” today first appeared in Western civilisation.) The endeavour in the East was to develop in the pupil, through a process of natural adaptation to prevailing conditions, a feeling of dependence upon the leader, the Guru. The pupil perceived what the Guru represented, how he stood firmly within the spiritual world without scepticism, indeed without even a tendency to scepticism, and through this perception the pupil was able, on passing into the sphere of Inspiration, to maintain such a healthy attitude of soul that he was immune from any danger of pathological scepticism.

But even when the spirit-and-soul is drawn consciously out of the physical body, something else comes into consideration as well: a connection—a still more conscious connection now—must again be established with the physical body. I said in the lecture this morning that if a man comes down into his physical body imbued only with egoism and lacking in love, this is a pathological condition which must not be allowed to arise, for he will then lay hold of his physical body in a wrong way. Man lays hold of his body in the natural way by implanting the love-instinct in it between the ages of 7 and 14. But even this natural process can take a pathological course, and then there will appear afflictions which I described this morning as pathological states.²

It might also have happened to the pupils of the ancient Eastern sages that when they were outside the physical body they found it impossible to connect the spirit-and-soul with the body again in the right way. A different precautionary measure was then applied, one to which psychiatrists—some at any rate—have again had recourse when treating patients suffering from agoraphobia. This precautionary measure consisted in ablutions, washings, with cold water. Expedients of an entirely physical nature were used in such circumstances. And when you hear on the one hand that in the Mysteries of the East—the Schools of Initiation that were to lead men to Inspiration—the precautionary measure was taken of ensuring dependence on the Guru, you hear on the other hand of the use of all kind of devices—ablutions with cold water, and the like.

When human nature is understood in the way made possible by Spiritual Science, customs that otherwise seem very puzzling in these ancient Mysteries become intelligible. Man was protected from a false feeling of space, due to a faulty connection of the spirit-and-soul with the physical body—a feeling that might cause him to have a morbid dread of public places, or also to seek social intercourse with other human beings in an irregular way. This is indeed a danger, but one that every form of guidance to higher knowledge can and must avoid. It is a danger, because when a man is seeking for Inspiration in the way I have described, he does in a certain sense by-pass the paths of speech and of thinking, the path leading to the Ego of the other person, and then, if he leaves his body in an abnormal way—not with any aim of gaining higher knowledge but merely owing to pathological conditions—he may fail to cultivate the right kind of intercourse with other men.

In such a human being, a condition which through properly regulated spiritual study develops normally and profitably, may develop in an abnormal, pathological form. The connection of spirit-and-soul with the body then becomes one which causes the man to have such an intense feeling of egotism in his body—because he is too deeply immersed in it—that he reaches the point of hating all intercourse with others and becomes an utterly unsocial being. The consequences of a pathological condition of this kind can often take a truly terrible form. I myself have known a remarkable example of this type of person. He came from a family in which there was a tendency for the spirit-and-soul to be loosened from the physical body in a certain way and it included individuals—one of whom I knew very well indeed—who were seeking for the path leading to the spiritual worlds. But in a degenerate member of this family the same tendency developed in a pathological form, until he finally came to the point where he would allow nothing whatever from the outside world to contact his own body. He was naturally obliged to eat, but ... we are speaking here among grown-ups ... he washed himself with his own urine, because any water from the outside world put him into a panic. I will not describe what else he was in the habit of doing in order to shut off his body entirely from the outside world and make himself into an utterly anti-social being. He did these things because his spirit-and-soul was too deeply immersed in his body, too strongly bound up with it.

It is entirely in keeping with Goetheanism to contrast the path leading to the highest goal at present attainable by us as earthly men with the path leading to pathological phenomena. Only a slight acquaintance with Goethe's theory of metamorphoses is needed to realise this. Goethe is trying to detect how the single parts of the plant, for example, develop out of each other, and in order to recognise the process of metamorphosis he has a particular preference for observing the states arising from the degeneration of a leaf, or of a blossom, or of the stamens. Goethe realises that precisely by scrutiny of the pathological, the essence of the healthy can be revealed to a perceptive observer. And it is also true that a right path into the spiritual world can be taken only when we know where the essence of man's being really lies, and in what diverse ways this complicated inner being can come to expression.

We see from something else as well that even in the later period of antiquity men of the East were predisposed by nature to live in the word itself, not to penetrate through the word to what lies behind it. An illustration of this is afforded by the sayings of the Buddha, with their many repetitions. I have known people in the West who treasured those editions of the Buddha's sayings in which the repetitions had been eliminated and the words of a sentence left to occur only once. Such people believed that through this condensed version they would get at the essentials of what the Buddha really meant. This shows that Western civilisation has gradually lost all understanding of the nature of Eastern man. If we simply take the literal meaning of the Buddha's discourses, the meaning which we, as men of the West, chiefly value, we are not assimilating the essence of these teachings; that is possible only when we are carried along with the repetitions, when we live in the flow of the words, when we experience that strengthening of soul-force induced by the repetitions.² Unless we acquire a faculty for experiencing something from the constant repetitions and the rhythmical recurrence of certain passages, we do not get to the heart of what Buddhism really signifies.

Knowledge must be gained of the essence and inner nature of Eastern culture. Without this knowledge there can be no real understanding of the religious creeds of the West, for when all is said and done they stem from Eastern wisdom. The Christ Event itself is a different matter—it is an accomplished fact, and present as such in earth-evolution. During the first Christian centuries, however, the ways and means of understanding what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha were drawn entirely from Eastern wisdom. It was with this wisdom that the fundamental event of Christendom was first of all understood. But everything moves on, and what had once existed in the Eastern primeval wisdom, attained through Inspiration, spread across to Greece and can still be recognised in the achievements of Greek culture.

Greek art was, of course, bound up with experiences different from those usually connected with art to-day. Greek art was still felt to be an expression of the ideal to which Goethe was again aspiring when he spoke of the deepest urge within him in the words: He to whom Nature begins to unveil her manifest secrets, longs for her worthiest interpreter—art. The Greeks still regarded art as an initiation into the secrets of world-existence, as a manifestation not merely of human imagination but of what comes into being through interaction between this faculty and the revelations of the spiritual world received through Inspiration. But the spiritual life that still flowed through Greek art grew steadily weaker, until finally it became the content of the religious creeds of the West. Thus we must conceive the source of the primeval wisdom as a spiritual life of rich abundance which becomes impoverished as evolution proceeds, and when at last it reaches the Western world it provides the content of religious creeds. Therefore men who by then are fitted by nature for a different epoch can find in this weakened form of spiritual life only something to be viewed with scepticism. Fundamentally speaking, it is the reaction of the Western soul to the now decadent Eastern wisdom that gradually produces in the West the atheistic scepticism which is bound to become more and more widespread unless it is confronted by a different stream of spiritual life.

As little as a living being who has reached a certain stage of development—a certain age, let us say—can be made young again in every respect, as little can a form of spiritual life be made young again when it has reached old age. Out of the religious creeds of the West, which are descendants of the primeval wisdom of the East, nothing can be produced that would again be capable of satisfying Western humanity when this humanity advances beyond the knowledge acquired during the past three or four centuries from the science and observation of Nature. Scepticism on an ever-increasing scale is bound to develop. And anyone who has insight into the process of world-evolution can say with assurance that a trend of development from East to West is heading in this direction. In other words, there is moving from East to West a stream of spiritual life that must inevitably lead to scepticism in a more and more pronounced form when it is received into souls who are being imbued more deeply all the time with the fruits of Western civilisation. Scepticism is simply the outcome of the march of spiritual life from the East to the West, and it must be confronted by a different stream flowing henceforward from the West to the East. We ourselves are living at the point where this spiritual stream crosses the other, and in the further course of these studies we shall see in what sense this is so.

First and foremost, however, attention must be called to the fact that the Western soul is predisposed by nature to take a path of development to the higher worlds different from that of the Eastern soul. The Eastern soul strives primarily for Inspiration and possesses the racial qualities suitable for this; the Western soul, because of its particular qualities—they are qualities connected less with race than with the life of soul itself—strives for Imagination. To experience the musical element in mantric sayings is not the aim to which we, as men of the West, should aspire. Our aim should be different. We should not keep particularly strictly to the path that comes after the spirit-and-soul has emerged from the body, but should rather follow the later path that begins when the spirit-and-soul has again to unite consciously with the physical organism.

The corresponding natural phenomenon is to be observed in the birth of the love-instinct. Whereas the man of the East sought his wisdom more by sublimating the forces working in the human being between birth and the 7th year, the man of the West is better fitted to develop the forces at work between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, inasmuch as the being of spirit-and-soul is now led to new tasks in keeping with this epoch in the evolution of humanity. We come to this when—just as on emerging from the body we carry the Ego with us into the realm of Inspiration—we now leave the Ego outside when we plunge down again into the body; we leave it outside, but not in idleness, not forgetting or surrendering it, not suppressing it into unconsciousness, but allying it with pure thinking, with clear, keen thinking, so that finally we have this inner experience: Your Ego is charged through and through with all the clear thinking of which you have become capable. This experience of plunging into the body can be very clear and distinct. And at this point it may perhaps be permissible to speak about a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean.

I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. This book is a modest but real attempt to achieve pure thinking, that pure thinking in which the Ego can live and maintain a firm footing. Then, when this pure thinking has been achieved, we can endeavour to do something else. This thinking that is now left in the power of the Ego, the Ego which now feels itself a free and independent spiritual being—this pure thinking can then be achieved from the process of perception, and whereas in ordinary life we see colour, let us say, and at the same time imbue the perception with the mental concept, we can now lift the concepts away from the process of elaborating the perceptions and draw the perceptions themselves directly into our bodily constitution.

That Goethe had already taken the first steps in this direction is shown by the last chapter of his Theory of Colours, entitled “The Sensory and Moral Effects of Colour.” With every colour-effect he experiences something that at once unites deeply, not with the faculty of perception only, but with the whole man. He experiences yellow, or scarlet, as active colours, as it were permeating him through and through, filling him with warmth: while he regards blue and violet as colours that draw one out of oneself, as cold colours.³ The whole man experiences something in acts of sense-perception. The perception, together with its content, passes down into the organism, and the Ego with its thought-content remains as it were hovering above. We detach thinking inasmuch as we take into and fill ourselves with the whole content of the perception, instead of weakening it with concepts, as we usually do. We train ourselves in a particular way to achieve this by systematically practising something that came to be practised in a decadent form by the men of the East. Instead of grasping the content of the perception in pure, strictly logical thoughts, we grasp it in symbols, in pictures, allowing it to stream into us, so that in a certain sense it by-passes our thoughts. We steep ourselves in the richness of the colours, in the richness of the tone, by learning to experience the images inwardly, not in terms of thought but as pictures, as symbols. Because we do not permeate our inner life with the thought-content, after the manner of association-psychology, but with the content of perception expressed through symbols and pictures, the living forces of our etheric and astral bodies stream out from within and we learn to know the depths of our consciousness and of our soul. It is in this way that genuine knowledge of the inner nature of man is acquired. The obscure mysticism often said by nebulous minds to be a way to the God within leads to nothing but abstraction and cannot possibly satisfy anyone who wishes to experience the fullness of his manhood.

So, you see, if it is desired to establish a true physiological science of man, thinking must be detached and the picture-forming activity sent inwards, so that the organism reacts in Imaginations. This is a path that is only just beginning in Western culture, but it is the path that must be trodden if the influence that streams over from the East, and would lead to decadence if it alone were to prevail, is to be confronted by something equal to opposing it, so that our civilisation may take a path of ascent and not of decline.

Generally speaking, however, it can be said that human language itself is not yet sufficiently developed to be able adequately to characterise the experiences that are here encountered in a man's inmost life of soul. And it is at this point that I should like to tell you of a personal experience of my own.

Many years ago I made an attempt to formulate what may be called a science of the human senses. In spoken lectures I did to some extent succeed in putting this science of the twelve senses into words, because there it is more possible to manipulate the language and ensure understanding by means of repetitions, so that the deficiency of our language—which is not yet equal to expressing these super-sensible things—is not so strongly felt. But strangely enough, when I wanted many years ago to write down what I had given in lectures as pure Anthroposophy in order to put it into a form suitable for a book, the outer experiences, on being interiorised became so delicate and sensitive that language simply failed to provide the words, and I believe the beginning of the text—several sheets of print—lay for some five or six years at the printer's. It was because I wanted to write the whole book in the style in which it began that I could not continue writing, for the simple reason that at the stage of development 1 had then reached, language refused to furnish the means for what I wished to achieve. Then came an overload of work, and I have still not been able to finish the book.

Anyone who is less conscientious about what he communicates from the spiritual world might perhaps smile at the idea of being held up in this way by a temporarily insurmountable difficulty. But one who feels a full sense of responsibility and applies it in all descriptions of the path that Western humanity must take towards Imagination knows that to find the right words entails a great deal of effort. As a path of training it is comparatively easy to describe, and this has been done in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But if one's aim is to achieve a definite result such as that of describing the essential nature of man's senses—a part, therefore, of the inner make-up and constitution of humanity—it is then that the difficulties appear, among them that of grasping Imaginations and presenting them in clear contours by means of words.

Nevertheless, this is the path that Western mankind must follow. And just as the man of the East experienced entry into the spiritual world through his mantras, so must the Westerner, leaving aside all association-psychology, learn how to penetrate into his own being by reaching the world of Imagination. Only so will he acquire a true knowledge of humanity, and this is essential for any progress. Because we in the West have to live in a much more conscious way than men of the East, we must not adopt the attitude which says: “Whether or not humanity will eventually master this world of Imagination through natural processes can be left to the future.” No—this world of Imagination, because we have passed into the stage of conscious evolution, must be striven for consciously; there must be no coming to a standstill at certain stages. For what happens then? What happens then is that the ever-increasing spread of scepticism from East to West is not met with the right counter-measures, but with measures ultimately due to the fact that the spirit-and-soul unconsciously has united too radically, too deeply, with the physical body and that too firm a connection is made between the spirit-and-soul and the physical body.

Yes, it is indeed possible for a man not only to think materialistically but to be a materialist, because the spirit-and-soul is too strongly linked with the physical body. In such a man the Ego does not live freely in the concepts of pure thinking. And when he descends into the body with perceptions that have become pictorial, he descends with the Ego together with the concepts. And when this condition spreads among men, it gives rise to the spiritual phenomenon well known to us—to dogmatism of all kinds. This dogmatism is nothing else than the translation into the domain of spirit-and-soul of a condition which at a lower stage is pathological in agoraphobia and the like, and which—because these things are related—shows itself also in something which is merely another form of fear, in superstition of every variety. An unconscious urge towards Imagination is held back through powerful agencies, and this gives rise to dogmatism of all types. These types of dogmatism must be gradually replaced by what is achieved when the world of ideas is kept firmly in the sphere of the Ego; when progress is made towards Imagination and the true nature of man becomes an inner experience.

This is the Western path into the spiritual world. It is this path through Imagination that must establish the stream of Spiritual Science, the process of spiritual evolution that must make its way from West to East if humanity is to achieve real progress. But it is supremely important at the present time for humanity to recognise what the true path of Imagination should be, what path must be taken by Western Spiritual Science if it is to be a match for the Inspiration and its fruits that were once attained by ancient Eastern wisdom in a form suited to the racial characteristics of the people concerned. Only if we are able to confront the now decadent Inspiration of the East with Imaginations which, sustained by the spirit and charged through and through with reality, have arisen along the path to a higher spiritual culture, only if we can call this culture into existence as a stream of spiritual life flowing from West to East, are we bringing to fulfilment what is actually living deep down in the impulses for which mankind is striving. It is these impulses which are to-day breaking out in cataclysms of the social life because they cannot find other expression.

In the next lecture we will speak further of the path of Imagination, and of how the way to the higher worlds is envisaged by anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

• 1. See, for example, The Study of Man (14 lectures) (Anthroposophical Publishing Co.); also Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, Pneumatosophy (in typescript only).
• 2. Dr. Steiner had referred to agoraphobia, claustrophobia, astrophobia.
• 2. From the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, revised edition, 1958, p. 158: “The many repetitions in the sayings of the Buddha are not comprehensible to people of our present evolutionary stage. For the esoteric student, however, they become a force on which he gladly lets his inner senses rest, for they correspond with certain rhythmic movements in the etheric body. Devotional surrender to them with perfect inner peace, creates an inner harmony with these movements, and because the latter are an image of certain cosmic rhythms which also at certain points repeat themselves and revert to former modes, the individual listening to the wisdom of the Buddha unites his life with that of the cosmic mysteries.”
• 3. See Goethe's Theory of Colours, Part VI. Translated by Charles Eastlake, F.R.S. (published by John Murray, 1840).

Yesterday I tried to show the methods used by Eastern spirituality for approaching the super-sensible world. I pointed out how anybody who wished to follow this path into the super-sensible more or less dispensed with the bridge linking him with his fellows. He preferred to avoid the communication with other human beings that is established by speaking, thinking and ego-perception. I showed how the attempt was first of all made not to hear and understand through the word what another person wished to say, but actually to live in the words themselves. This process of living-in-the-word was enhanced by forming the words into certain aphorisms. One lived in these and repeated them, so that the soul forces acquired by thus living in the words were further strengthened by repetition.

I showed how in this way a soul-condition was attained that we might call a state of Inspiration, in the sense in which I have used the word. What distinguished the sages of the ancient Eastern world was that they were true to their race; conscious individuality was far less developed with them than it came to be in later stages of human evolution. This meant that their penetration of the spiritual world was a more or less instinctive process. Because the whole thing was instinctive and to some extent the product of a healthy human impulse, it could not in ancient times lead to the pathological disturbances of which we have also spoken. In later times steps were taken by the so-called Mystery centres to guard against such disturbances as I have tried to describe to you. What I said was that those in the West, who wish to come to grips with the spiritual world, must attempt things in a different way.

Mankind has progressed since the days of which I was speaking. Other soul forces have emerged, so that it is not simply a matter of breathing new life into the ancient Eastern way of spiritual development. A reactionary harking back to the spiritual life of prehistoric times or of man's early historical development is impossible. For the Western world, the way of initiation into the super-sensible world is through Imagination. But Imagination must be integrated organically with our spiritual life as a whole. This can come about in the most varied ways: as it did, after all, in the East. There, too, the way was not determined unequivocally in advance. To-day I should like to describe a way of initiation that conforms to the needs of Western civilisation and is particularly well suited to anyone who is immersed in the scientific life of the West.

In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described a sure path to the super-sensible. But this book has a fairly general appeal and is not specially suited to the requirements of someone with a definite scientific training. The path of initiation which I wish to describe to-day is specifically designed for the scientist. All my experience tells me that for such a man the way of knowledge must be based on what I have set out in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I will explain what I mean by this.

This book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, was not written with the objects in mind that are customary when writing books to-day. Nowadays people write simply in order to inform the reader of the subject-matter of the book, so that he learns what the book contains in accordance with his education, his scientific training or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not basically my intention in writing The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. For this reason it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader use his own processes of thought on every page, In a sense the book is only a kind of musical score, to be read with inward thought-activity in order to be able of oneself to advance from one thought to the next. This book constantly expects the reader to co-operate by thinking for himself.

Moreover, what happens to the soul of the reader, when he makes this effort of co-operation in thought, is also to be considered. Anybody who works through this book and brings his thought-activity to bear on it will admit to gaining a measure of self-comprehension in an element of his soul-life where this had been lacking. If he cannot do this, he is not reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. He should feel how he is being lifted out of his usual concepts into thoughts which are independent of his sense-life and in which his whole existence is merged. He should be able to feel how this kind of thinking has freed him from dependence on the bodily state. Anyone who denies experiencing this has fundamentally misunderstood the book. It should be more or less possible to say: “Now I know through what I have achieved in the thought-activity of my soul what true thinking really is.”

The strange thing is that most Western philosophers utterly deny the reality of the very thing that my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity seeks to awaken in the soul of the reader. Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist, but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense-perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics, or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical mechanics. The degree of specialisation required to-day will alone account for the fact that a great deal of philosophising goes on nowadays without the remotest understanding of mathematical thinking. Philosophy is fundamentally impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking. Goethe's attitude to this has been noticed, even though he made no claim himself to any special training in mathematics. Many would deny the existence of the very faculty which I should like readers of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to acquire.

Let us imagine a reader who simply sets about working through The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity within the framework of his ordinary consciousness in the way I have just described. He will not of course be able to claim that he has been transported into a super-sensible world; for I intentionally wrote this book in the way I did so as to present people with a work of pure philosophy. Just consider what advantage it would have been to anthroposophically orientated science if I had written works of spiritual science from the start. They would of course have been disregarded by all trained philosophers as the amateurish efforts of a dilettante. To begin with I had to concentrate on pure philosophy: I had to present the world with something thought out in pure philosophical terms, even though it transcended the normal bounds of philosophy.

However, at some point the transition had to be made from pure philosophy and science to writing about spiritual science. This occurred at a time when I had been asked to write about Goethe's scientific works, and this was followed by an invitation to write one particular chapter in a German biography of Goethe that was about to appear. It was in the late 1890's and the chapter was to be concerned with Goethe's scientific works. I had actually written it and sent it to the publisher when another work of mine came out, called Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. This book was a link between pure philosophy and philosophy based on Anthroposophy. When this came out, my other manuscript was returned to me. Nothing was enclosed apart from my fee, the idea being that any claim I might make had thus been met. Among the learned pedants there obviously was no interest in anything written—not even a single chapter devoted to the development of Goethe's attitude to natural science—by one who had indulged in such mysticism.

I will now assume that The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has already been studied with one's ordinary consciousness in the way I have suggested. We are now in the right frame of mind to guide our souls in the direction briefly indicated yesterday—along the first steps of the way leading to Imagination. It is possible to pursue this path in a form consonant with Western life if we simply try to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we absorb them without thinking about them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but in the very act of doing so we are always permeating out perceptions with concepts. Scientific thinking involves a systematic interweaving of perceptions with concepts, building up systems of concepts and so on. In acquiring a capacity for the kind of thinking that gradually results from reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, we become capable of such strong inner activity that we are able to perceive without conceptualising.

There is something further we can do to strengthen our soul-forces so that we are enabled to absorb perceptions in the way I have just described: that is, by refraining from elaborating them with concepts in the very act of absorbing them. We can call up symbolic or other kinds of images—visual images, sound images, images of warmth, taste, and so on. If we thus bring our activity of perception into a state of flux, as it were, and infuse it with life and movement, not in the way we follow when forming concepts, but by working on our perceptions in an artistic or symbolising manner, we shall develop much sooner the power of allowing the percepts to permeate us in their pure essence. Simply to train ourselves rigorously in what I have called phenomenalism—that is, in elaborating the phenomena—is an excellent preparation for this kind of cognition. If we have really striven to reach the material boundaries of cognition—if we have not lazily looked beyond the veil of sense for metaphysical explanations in terms of atoms and molecules, but have used concepts to set in order the phenomena and to follow them through to their archetypes—then we have already undergone a training which can enable us to keep all conceptional activity away from the phenomena. And if at the same time we turn the phenomena into symbols and images, we shall acquire such strength of soul as to be able, one might say, to absorb the outer world free from concepts.

Obviously we cannot expect to achieve this all at once. Spiritual research demands far more of us than research in a laboratory or observatory. Above all an intense effort of will is required. For a time we should strive to concentrate on a symbolic picture, and occupy ourselves with the images that arise, leaving them undisturbed by phenomena present in the soul. Otherwise they will disappear as we hurry through life from sensation to sensation and from experience to experience. We should accustom ourselves to contemplating at least one such image—whether of our own creation or suggested by somebody else—for longer and longer periods. We should penetrate to its very core, concentrating on it beyond the possibility of being influenced by mere memory. If we do all this, and keep repeating the process, we can strengthen our soul forces and finally become aware of an inner experience, of which formerly we had not the remotest inkling.

Finally—it is important not to misunderstand what I am going to say—it is possible to form a picture of something experienced only in our inner being, if we recall especially lively dream-pictures, so long as they derive from memories and do not relate directly to anything external, and are thus a sort of reaction stemming from within ourselves. If we experience these images in their fullest depth, we have a very real experience; and the point is reached when we meet within ourselves the spiritual element which actuates the processes of growth. We meet the power of growth itself. Contact is established with a part of our human make-up which we formerly experienced only unconsciously, but which is nevertheless active within us. What do I mean by “experienced unconsciously?”

Now I have told you how from birth until the change of teeth a spiritual soul force works on and through the human being; and after this it more or less detaches itself. Later, between the change of teeth and maturity, it immerses itself, so to speak, in the physical body, awakening the erotic impulse—and much else besides. All this happens unconsciously. But if we consciously use such soul-activities as I have described in order to observe how the qualities of soul and spirit can penetrate our physical make-up, we begin to see how these processes work in a human being, and how from the time of his birth he is given over to the external world. Nowadays this relation to the outer world is regarded as amounting to nothing more than abstract perception or abstract knowledge. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of colour, sound and warmth and by all kinds of sensory impressions. As our thinking gets to work on them, our whole being receives yet further impressions. When unconscious experiences of childhood come to be experienced consciously, we even find that, while we were absorbing colour and sound impressions unconsciously, they were working spiritually upon us. When, between the change of teeth and maturity, erotic feelings make their first impact, they do not simply grow out of our constitution but come to meet us from the cosmos in rays of colour, sound and warmth.

But warmth, light and sound are not to be understood in a merely physical sense. Through our sensory impressions we are conscious only of what I might call outer sound and outer colour. And when we thus surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms and so on which are imagined by modern physics and physiology. Spiritual forces are at work in the physical world; forces which between birth and death fashion us into the human beings we are.

When once we tread the paths of knowledge which I have described, we become aware of the fact that it is the outer world which forms us. As we become clearly conscious of spirit in the outer world, we are able to experience consciously the living forces at work in our bodies. It is phenomenology itself that reveals to us so clearly the existence of spirit in the outer world. It is the observation of phenomena, and not abstract metaphysics, that brings the spiritual to our notice, if we make a point of observing consciously what we would otherwise tend to do unconsciously; if we notice how through the sense-world spiritual powers enter into our being and work formatively upon it.

Yesterday I pointed out to you that the Eastern sage virtually ignores the significance of speech, thought and ego-perception. His attitude towards these activities is different, for speech, perception of thoughts and ego-perception tend at first to lead us away from the spiritual world into social contact with other human beings. We buy our way into social life, as it were, by exposing our thoughts, our speech and our ego-perception and making them communicable. The Eastern sage lived in the word and resigned himself to the fact that it could not be communicated. He felt the same about his thoughts; he lived in his thinking, and so on. In the West we are more inclined to cast a backward glance at humanity as we follow the path into the super-sensible world.

At this point it is well to remember that man has a certain kind of sensory organisation within him. I have already described the three inner senses through which he becomes aware of his inner being, just as he perceives what goes on around him. We have a sense of balance, which tells us of the space we occupy as human beings and within whose limits our wills can function. We have a sense of movement, which tells us, even in the dark, that we are moving. This knowledge comes from within and is not derived from contact with outside objects that we may touch in passing. We have a “sense of life,” through which we are aware of our general state of health, or, one might say, of our constantly changing inward condition.

It is just in the first seven years of our life that these three inner senses work in conjunction with the will. We are guided by our sense of balance: and a being that, to begin with, cannot move about and later on can only crawl, is transformed into one that can stand upright and walk. When we learn to walk upright, we are coming to grips with the world. This is possible only because of our sense of balance. Similarly, our sense of movement and our sense of life contribute to our development as integrated human beings.

Anybody able to apply laboratory standards of objective observation to the study of man's development—spirit-soul as well as physical—will soon discover how those forces that form the human being and are especially active in the first seven years free themselves and begin to assume a different aspect from the time of the change of teeth. By this time a person is less intimately connected with his inner life than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement and processes of life. As emancipation from them gradually occurs, something else is developing. A certain adjustment is taking place to the three senses of smell, taste and touch.

A detailed observation of the way a child comes to grips with life is extraordinarily interesting. This can be seen most obviously, of course, in early life, but anybody trained to do so can see it clearly enough later on as well. I refer to the process of orientation made possible by the senses of smell, of taste and of touch. The child in a manner expels from himself the forces of equilibrium, movement and life and, while he is so doing, draws into him the qualitative senses of smell, taste and touch. Over a fairly long period the former are, so to speak, being breathed out and the latter breathed in; so that the two trinities encounter each other within our organism—the forces of equilibrium, movement and life pushing their way outward from within, while smell, taste and touch, which point us to qualities, are pressing inwards from without. These two trinities of sense interpenetrate each other; and it is through this interpenetration that the human being first comes to realise himself as a true self.

Now we are cut off from outer spirituality by speech and by our faculties of perceiving the thoughts and perceiving the egos of others—and rightly so, for if it were otherwise we could never in this physical life grow into social beings. [See previous lecture.] In precisely the same way, inasmuch as the qualities of smell, taste and touch wax counter to equilibrium, movement and life, we are inwardly cut off from the last three—which would otherwise disclose themselves to us directly. One could say that the sensations of smell, taste and touch form a barricade in front of the sensations of balance, movement and life and prevent our experiencing them.

What is the result of that development towards Imagination of which I spoke? It is this. The oriental stops short at speech in order to live in it; stops at thought in order to live in it; stops at ego-perception in order to live in it; and by these means makes his way outward into the spiritual world. We, as the result of developing Imagination, do something similar when we absorb the external percept without conceptualising it. But the direction we take in doing this is the opposite to the direction taken by an oriental who practises restraint in the matter of speech, thought-perception and ego-perception. He stays still in these. He lives his way into them. The aspirant to Imagination, on the other hand, worms his way inward through smell, taste and perception; he penetrates inward and, ignoring the importunities of his sensations of smell, taste and touch, makes contact with the experiences of equilibrium, movement and life.

It is a great moment when we have penetrated the sensory trinity, as I have called it, of taste, smell and touch, and we stand naked, as it were, before essential movement, equilibrium and life.

Having thus prepared the ground, it is interesting to study what it is that Western mysticism so often has to offer. Most certainly, I am very far from decrying the elements of poetry, beauty and imaginative expression in many mystical writings. Most certainly I admire what, for instance, St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg and others have to tell us, and indeed Meister Eckhardt and Johannes Tauler; but all this reveals itself also to the true spiritual scientist. It is what arises if one follows an inward path without penetrating through the domain of smell, taste and touch. Read what has been written by individuals who have described with particular clarity what they have experienced in this way. They speak of an inner sense of taste, experienced in connection with the soul-spiritual element in man's inner being. They refer also to smell and touch in a special way. Anybody, for instance, who reads Mechthild of Magdeburg or St. Theresa rightly will see that they follow this inward path, but never penetrate right through smell, taste and touch. They use beautiful poetic imagery for their descriptions, but they are speaking only of how one can smell, taste and touch oneself inwardly.

It is indeed less agreeable to see the true nature of reality with spiritually developed senses than to read the accounts given by a sensual mysticism—the only term for it—which fundamentally gratifies only a refined inward-looking egotism of soul. As I say, much as this mysticism is to be admired—and I do admire it—the true spiritual scientist has to realise that it stops half-way. What is manifest in the splendid poetic imagery of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Theresa and others is really only what is smelt, tasted and touched before attaining to true inwardness.

Truth can be unpleasant, perhaps even cruel, at times. But modern man has no business to become rickety in soul through following a vague incomplete mysticism. What is required to-day is to penetrate the true mysteries of man's inner nature with all our intellectual powers—with the same powers that we have disciplined in the cause of science and used to effect in the outer world. There is no mistaking what science is. It is respected for the very method and discipline it demands. It is when we have learnt to be scientific that we appreciate the achievements of a vague mysticism at their true worth but we also discover that they are not what spiritual science has to foster. On the contrary, the task of spiritual science is to reveal clearly the true nature of man's being. This in turn makes possible a sound understanding of the outer world.

Instead of speaking in this way, as the truth demands of me, I could be claiming the support of every vague, woolly mystic, who goes in for mysticism to satisfy the inward appetite of his soul. That is not our concern here, but rather the discovery of powers that can be used for living; spiritual powers that are capable of informing our scientific and social life.

When we have come to grips with the forces that dwell in our senses of balance, life and movement, then we have reached something that is first of all experienced through its transparency as man's essential inward being. The very nature of the thing shows us clearly that we cannot penetrate any deeper. What we do find is quite enough to be going on with, for what we discover is not the stuff of vague mystical dreams but a genuine organology. Above all, we find within ourselves the true nature of balance and movement, and of the stream of life. We find this within ourselves.

When this experience is complete, something unique has taken place. In due course we discover something. An essential prerequisite is, as I have said, to have worked carefully through The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The Philosophy is then left, so to speak, on one side, while we pursue the inward path of contemplation and meditation. We have advanced as far as balance, movement and life. We live in this life, balance and movement. Parallel with our pursuit of the way of contemplation and meditation, but without any other activity on our part, our thinking in connection with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has undergone a transformation. We have been able to experience as pure thought what a philosophy such as this has to offer; but now that we have worked upon ourselves in another sphere, our inner soul life; this has turned into something quite different. It has taken on new dimensions and is now much more full of meaning. While on the one hand we have been penetrating our inward being and have deepened our power of Imagination, we have also lifted out of the ordinary level of consciousness the fruits of our thinking on The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Thoughts which formerly had a more or less abstract existence in the realm of pure cerebration have now become significant forces. They are now alive in our consciousness, and what was once pure thinking has become Inspiration. We have developed Imagination; and thinking has been transformed into Inspiration.

What we have attained by these two methods in our progress along this road has to be clearly differentiated. On the one hand we have gained Inspiration from what was, to begin with, pure thought. On the other hand, there is the experience that comes to us through our senses of balance, movement and life. We are now in a position to unite the two forms of experience, the outer and the inner. The fusion of Inspiration and Imagination brings us to Intuition.

What have we accomplished now? I can answer this question by approaching it from the other side. First of all I must draw attention to the steps taken by the Oriental seer, who wishes to advance further after being trained in the mantras and experiencing the living word and language. He now learns to experience not only the rhythms of language but also, and in a sense consciously, the process of breathing. He has, as it were, to undergo an artificial kind of breathing by varying it in all kinds of ways. For him this is one step up; but this is not something to be taken over in its entirety by the West.

What does the Eastern student of yoga attain by consciously regulating his breathing in a variety of ways? He experiences something very remarkable when he breathes in. As he does so, he is brought into contact with a quality of air that is not to be found when we experience air as a purely physical substance, but only when we unite ourselves with the air and so experience it spiritually. A genuine student of yoga, as he breathes in, experiences something that works upon his whole being, an activity that is not completed in this life and does not end with death. The spiritual quality of the outer air enters our being and engenders in us something that goes with us through the gate of death. To experience the breathing process consciously means taking part in something that continues when we have laid aside our bodies. To experience consciously the process of breathing is to experience both the reaction of our inner being to the drawing in of breath and the activities of our soul-spiritual being before birth: or let us say rather that we experience our conception and the factors that contribute to our embryonic development and work on us further within our organism as children. Breathing consciously means realising our own identity on the far side of birth and death. Advancing from the experience of the word and of language to that of breathing means penetrating further into an inspired realisation of the eternal in man. We Westerners have to experience much the same—but in a different sphere.

What in fact is the process of perception? It is only a modification of the breathing process. As we breathe in, the air presses on our diaphragm and on our whole being. Brain fluid is driven up through our spinal column into our brain. This establishes a connection between breathing and cerebral activity. Breathing, in so far as it influences the brain, works upon our sense-activity in the form of perception. Drawing in breath has various sides to it, and one of these is perception.

How is it when we breathe out? Brain fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of brain fluid is bound up with the activity of will and also with breathing out. Anybody who really makes a study of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will discover that when we attain to pure thinking, a fusion of thinking and willing takes place. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. So it comes about that what we have characterised as pure thinking is related to what the Easterner experiences in the process of breathing out.

Pure thinking is related to breathing out, just as perception is related to breathing in. We have to go through the same process as the yogi, but in a more inward form. Yoga depends on the regulation of breathing, both in and out, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What should Western man do? He can transform into soul-experience both perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which would otherwise only come quietly together in a formal abstract way, so that he has the same experience inwardly in his soul and spirit as he has physically in breathing in and out. Breathing in and out are physical experiences. When they are harmonised, we experience the eternal.

We experience thought-perception in our everyday lives. As we bring movement into our soul life, we become aware of rhythm, of the swing of the pendulum, of the constant movement to and fro of perception and thinking. Higher realities are experienced in the East by breathing in and out. The Westerner develops a kind of breathing process in his soul and spirit, in place of the physical breathing of yoga, when he develops within himself, through perception, the vital process of transformed in-breathing and, through thinking, that of out-breathing; and fuses concept, thought and perception into a harmonious whole. Gradually, with the beat of this rhythmical breathing process in perception and thinking, his development advances to true spiritual reality in the form of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I indicated as a philosophical fact that reality is the product of the interpenetration of perception and thinking. Since this book was designed to deal with man's soul activity, some indication should also be given of the training that Western man needs if he is to penetrate the spiritual world. The Easterner speaks of the systole and diastole, breathing in and out. In place of these terms Western man should put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of soul-spiritual breathing in the course of cognition through perception and thinking.

All this should perhaps be contrasted with the kind of blind alley reached by Western spiritual development. Let me explain what I mean. In 1841 Michelet, the Berlin philosopher, published Hegel's posthumous works of natural philosophy. Hegel had worked at the end of the eighteenth century, together with Schelling, at laying the foundations of a system of natural philosophy. Schelling, with the enthusiasm of youth, had built his natural philosophy in a remarkable way on what he called intellectual contemplation. But he reached a point where he could make no further progress. His immersion in mysticism produced splendid results in his work, Bruno, or concerning the Divine and Natural Principle in Things, and that fine piece of writing, Human Freedom, or the Origin of Evil. But for all this he could make no progress and began to hold back from expressing himself at all. He kept promising to follow things up with a philosophy that would reveal the true nature of those hidden forces at which his earlier natural philosophy had only hinted.

When Hegel's natural philosophy appeared in 1841, through Michelet, the position was that Schelling's expected and oft-promised philosophical revelations had still not been vouchsafed to the public. He was summoned to Berlin. But what he had to offer contained no spiritual qualities to permeate the natural philosophy he had founded. He had struggled to create an intellectual picture of the world. He stood still at this point, because he was unable to use Imagination to enter the sphere of which I have been speaking to you to-day. So there he was at a dead end.

Hegel, who had a more rational intellect, had taken over Schelling's thoughts and carried them further by applying pure thinking to the observation of nature. That was the origin of Hegel's natural philosophy. So Schelling's promise to explain nature in spiritual terms was never fulfilled, and we got Hegel's natural philosophy which was to be discarded by science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not understood and was bound to remain so, for there was no connection between phenomenology, or the true observation of nature, and the ideas contained in Hegel's natural philosophy. It was a strange confrontation: Schelling travelling from Munich to Berlin, where something great was expected of him, and it turned out that he had nothing to say. This was a disappointment for all those who believed that through Hegel's natural philosophy revelations about nature would emerge from pure thinking. The historical fact is that Schelling reached the stage of intellectual contemplation but not that of genuine Imagination; while Hegel showed that if pure thinking does not lead on to Imagination, it cannot lead to Inspiration and to an understanding of nature's secrets. This line of Western development had terminated in a blind alley.

There was nothing—nothing permeated with the spirit—to set against Eastern teaching, which only engendered scepticism in the West. Anyone who has lovingly immersed himself in the true Schelling and Hegel, and has thus been able to see, with love in his heart, the limitations of Western philosophy, should turn his attention to Anthroposophy. He should work to bring about an anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science for the West, so that we come to possess something of spiritual origin to compare with what the East has created through the interaction of systole and diastole.

For us in the West, there is the spiritual-soul rhythm of perception and thinking, through which we can rise to something more than a merely abstract science. It opens the way to a living science, which on that account enables us to live in harmony with truth. After all the misfires of the Kantian, Schellingian and Hegelian philosophies, we have come to the point where we need something that can show, by revealing the way of the spirit, how truth and science are related. The truth that dwells in a spiritualised science would be a healing power in the future development of mankind.

Goethe often described, in many different ways, a feeling of which he was persistently aware. He said, in effect: When I see the irrelevance manifesting in the passions, emotions and actions of men, I feel the strong urge to turn to all-powerful Nature and be comforted by her majesty and consistency. In such utterances Goethe was referring to what since time immemorial humanity had brought to expression in the Festivals. The Festivals are reminders of the striving to turn away from the chaotic life of men's passions, urges and activities to the consistent, harmonious processes and events in Nature. The great Festivals are connected with definite and distinctive phenomena in the Heavens and with ever-recurring happenings in Nature. Easter is one such Festival. For Christians today, Easter is the Festival of the Resurrection of their Redeemer; it was celebrated not only as a symbol of Nature's awakening but also of Man's awakening. Man was urged to awaken to the reality underlying certain inner experiences.

In ancient Egypt we find a festival connected with Osiris. In Greece a Spring festival was celebrated in honour of Dionysos. There were similar institutions in Asia Minor, where the resurrection or return of a God was associated with the re-awakening of Nature. In India, too, there are festivals dedicated to the God Vishnu. Brahmanism speaks of three aspects of the Deity, namely, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The supreme God, Brahma, is referred to as the Great Architect of the World, who brings about order and harmony: Vishnu is described as a kind of redeemer, liberator, an awakener of slumbering life. And Shiva, originally, is the Being who blesses the slumbering life that has been awakened by Vishnu and raises it to whatever heights can be reached. A particular festival was therefore dedicated to Vishnu It was said that he goes to sleep at the time of the year when we celebrate Christmas and wakes at the time of our Easter Festival. Those who adhere to this Eastern teaching celebrate the days of their Festival in a characteristic way. For the whole of this period they abstain from certain foods and drinks, for example, all pod-producing plants, all kinds of oils, all salt, all intoxicating beverages and all meat. This is the way in which people prepare themselves to understand what was actually celebrated in the Vishnu Festival, namely, the resurrection of the God and the awakening of all Nature.

The Christmas Festival too, the old festival of the Winter solstice, is connected with particular happenings in Nature. The days leading up to this point of time become progressively shorter and the Sun's power steadily weakens. But from Christmas onwards greater and greater warmth again streams from the Sun. Christmas is the Festival of the reborn Sun.

It was the wish of Christianity to establish a link with these ancient Festivals. The date of the birth of Jesus can be taken to be the day when the Sun's power again begins to increase in the heavens. In the Easter Festival the spiritual significance of the World's Saviour was thus connected with the physical Sun and with the awakening and returning life in Spring.

As in the case of all ancient festivals, the fixing of the date of the Easter Festival was also determined by a certain constellation in the heavens. In the first century A.D. the symbol of Christianity was the Cross, with a lamb at its foot. Lamb and Ram are synonymous. During the epoch when preparation was being made for Christianity, the Sun was rising in the constellation of the Ram or Lamb. As we all know, the Sun moves through all the zodiacal constellations, every year progressing a little farther forward. Approximately seven hundred years before the coming of Christ, the Sun began to rise in the constellation of the Ram (Aries). Before then it rose in the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). In those times the people expressed what seemed to them important in connection with the evolution of humanity, in the symbol of the Bull, because the Sun then rose in that constellation. When the rising Sun moved forward into the constellation of the Ram or Lamb, the Ram became a figure of significance in the sagas and myths of the people. Jason brings the golden fleece from Colchis. Christ Jesus Himself is called the Lamb of God and in the earliest period of Christianity He is portrayed as the Lamb at the foot of the Cross. Thus the Easter Festival is obviously connected with the Constellation of the Ram or Lamb. The Festival of the Resurrection of the Redeemer is celebrated at the time when, in Nature, everything awakens to new life after having lain as if dead during the Winter months.

Between the Christmas and the Easter Festivals there is certainly a correspondence but in their relation to the happenings in Nature there is a great difference. In its deepest significance, Easter is always felt to be the festival of the greatest mystery connected with Man. It is not merely a festival celebrating the re-awakening of Nature but is essentially more than that. It is an expression of the significance in Christianity of the Resurrection after death. Vishnu's sleep sets in at the time when, in Winter, the Sun again begins to ascend. It is precisely at this time that we celebrate our Christmas Festival. When the Easter Festival is celebrated the Sun is continuing its ascent which had been in process since the Christmas Festival.

We must penetrate very deeply into the mysteries of man's nature if we are to understand the feelings of Initiates when they wished to give expression to the true facts underlying the Easter Festival. Man is a two-fold being—on the one side he is a being of soul-and-spirit, and on the other side a physical being. The physical being is an actual confluence of all the phenomena of Nature in man's environment. Paracelsus speaks of man as the quintessence of all that is outspread in external Nature. Nature contains the letters, as it were, and Man forms the word that is composed of these letters.

When we observe a human being closely, we recognise the wisdom that is displayed in his constitution and structure. Not without reason has the body been called the temple of the soul. All the laws that can be observed in the dead stone, in the living plant—all have assembled in Man into a unity. When we study the marvellous structure of the human brain with its countless cells cooperating among themselves in a way that enables all the thoughts and sentient experiences filling the soul of man to come to expression, we realise with what supreme wisdom the human body has been constructed. But in the surrounding world too we behold an array of crystallised wisdom. When we look out into the world, applying what knowledge we possess to the laws in operation there, and then turn to observe the human being, we see all Nature concentrated in him. That is why sages have spoken of Man as the Microcosm, while in Nature they beheld the Macrocosm.

In this sense Schiller wrote to Goethe in a letter of 23rd August 1794: “You take the whole of Nature into your purview in order to shed light upon a single sentence; in the totality of her (Nature's) manifold external manifestations you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organisation you proceed, step by step, to the more complex, in order finally to build up genetically from the materials of Nature's whole edifice the most complex organisation of all—Man.” The wonderful organisation of the body enables the human soul to have sight of the surrounding world. Through the senses the soul beholds the world and endeavours to fathom the wisdom by which that world has been constructed.

With this in mind let us now think of an undeveloped human being. The wisdom made manifest in his bodily structure is the greatest that can possibly be imagined. The sum-total of divine wisdom is concentrated in a single human body. Yet in this body there dwells a childlike soul hardly capable of producing the most elementary thoughts that would enable it to understand the mysterious forces operating in its own heart, brain and blood. The soul develops slowly to a higher stage where it can understand the powers that have been at work with the object of producing the human body. This body itself bears the hallmark of an infinitely long past. Physical man is the crown of the rest of creation. What was it that had necessarily to precede the building of the human body, what had to come to pass before the cosmic wisdom was concentrated in this human being? The cosmic wisdom is concentrated in the body of a human being standing before us. Yet it is in the soul of an undeveloped human being that this wisdom first begins to manifest. The soul hardly so much as dreams of the great cosmic thoughts according to which the human being has evolved. Nevertheless, we can glimpse a future when people will be conscious of the reality of soul and spirit still lying in man as though asleep. Cosmic thought has been active through ages without number, has been active in Nature, always with the purpose of finally producing the crown of all its creative work—the human body.

Cosmic wisdom is now slumbering in the human body, in order subsequently to acquire self-knowledge in man's soul, in order to build an eye in man's being through which to be recognised. Cosmic wisdom without, cosmic wisdom within, creative in the present as it was in the past and will be in future time. Gazing upwards we glimpse the ultimate goal, surmising the existence of a great soul by which the cosmic wisdom that existed from the very beginning has been understood and absolved. Our deepest feelings rise up within us full of expectation when we contemplate the past and the future in this way.

When the soul begins to recognise the wonders accomplished by the cosmic wisdom and when clarity and illumination have been achieved, the Sun may well be accepted as the worthiest symbol of this inner awakening. Through the gate of the senses the soul is able to gaze into the external world because the Sun illumines the contents of that world. Fundamentally speaking, what man perceives in the external world is the result of the Sun's reflected light. It is the Sun that wakens in the soul the power to behold the external world. An awakening soul, one that is beginning to recognise the seasons as expressions of cosmic thought—such a soul sees the rising Sun as its liberation.

When the Sun again begins its ascent, when the days lengthen, the soul turns to the Sun, declaring: To you I owe the possibility of discerning, outspread around me, the cosmic thought that sleeps within me and within all other human beings.

Such an individual is now able to survey his earlier existence—one which preceded his present understanding of the activities of cosmic thought. Man himself is more ancient than his senses. Through spiritual investigation we are able eventually to reach the point in the far past when man's senses were in process of coming into existence, when only their very earliest beginnings were present. At that stage the senses were not yet doors enabling the soul to become aware of the environment.

Schopenhauer realised this and was referring to the turning-point when man acquired the faculty of sensory perception, when he stated: This visible world first came into existence when an eye was there to behold it.

The Sun formed the eye for itself and for the light. In still earlier times, when as yet man had no outer vision, he had inner vision. In the primeval ages of evolution, outer objects did not give rise to ideas or mental conceptions in man, but these rose up in him from within. Vision in those ancient times was vision in the astral light. Men were then endowed with a faculty of dim, shadowy clairvoyance. It was still with a faculty of dim, hazy vision that they beheld the world of the Germanic Gods and formed their conceptions of the Gods accordingly. This dim clairvoyance faded into darkness and gradually passed away altogether. It was extinguished by the strong light of the physical Sun whereby the physical world was made visible to the senses. Astral vision then died away altogether.

When man looks into the future, he realises that his astral vision must return, but at a higher stage. What has now been extinguished for the sake of physical vision will return and combine with physical vision in order to generate clairvoyance—clear seeing in the fullest sense. In the future, a still more lucid consciousness will accompany man's waking vision. To physical vision will be added vision in the astral light, that is to say, perception with organs of soul. Those whom we have called the leaders of men are individuals who through lives of renunciation have developed in themselves the condition which later on is established in all mankind—these leaders of men already possess the faculty of astral vision which makes soul and spirit visible to them.

The Easter Festival is connected spiritually not only with the awakening of the Sun but with the unfolding of the plant world in Spring. Just as the seed-corn is sunk into the soil and slumbers in order eventually to awaken anew, so the astral light in man's constitution was obliged to slumber in order eventually to be reawakened. The symbol of the Easter Festival is the seed-corn which sacrifices itself in order to enable a new plant to come into existence. This is the sacrifice of a phase in the life of Nature in order that a new one may begin. Sacrifice and Becoming are interwoven in the Easter Festival.

Richard Wagner was conscious of the beauty and majesty of this thought. In the year 1857 in the Villa Wesendonck by the Lake of Zurich, while he was looking at the spectacle of awakening Nature, the thought came to him of the Saviour who had died and had awakened, the thought of Jesus Christ, also of Parsifal who was seeking for what is most holy in the soul.

All the leaders of humanity who know how the higher life of man wakes out of the lower nature, have understood the Easter thought. Dante too, in his Divine Comedy describes his awakening on a Good Friday. This is brought to our attention at the very beginning of the poem. It was in his thirty-sixth year, that is to say, in the middle of his life, that Dante had the great vision he describes. Seventy years being the normal span of human life, thirty-five is the middle of this period. Thirty-five years are reckoned to be the period devoted to the development of physical experience. At the age of thirty-five the human being has reached the degree of maturity when spiritual experience can be added to physical experience. He is ready for perception of the spiritual world.

When all the waking, nascent forces of physical existence are amalgamated, the time begins for the spiritual awakening. Hence Dante connects his vision with the Easter Festival.

Whereas the original increase of the Sun's power is celebrated in the Christmas Festival, the Easter Festival takes place at the middle point of the Sun's increasing power. This was also the point when, in the middle of his life, Dante became aware of the dawn of spiritual life within himself. The Easter Festival is rightly celebrated at the middle point of the Sun's ascent; for this corresponds with the time when, in man, the slumbering astral light is reawakened. The Sun's power wakens the seed-corn that is slumbering in the earth. The seed-corn is an image of what arises in man when what occultists call the astral light is born within him. Therefore, Easter is also the festival of the resurrection that takes place in the inner nature of man.

It has been thought that there is a kind of contradiction between what a Christian sees in the Easter Festival, and the idea of Karma. There seems at first to be a contradiction between the idea of Karma and redemption by the Son of Man. Those who do not understand very much about the fundamentals of anthroposophical thought may see a contradiction between the redemption wrought by Christ Jesus and the idea of Karma. Such people say that the thought of redemption by the God contradicts the fact of self-redemption through Karma. But the truth is that they understand neither the Easter thought of redemption nor the thought of the justice of Karma. It would certainly not be right if someone seeing another person suffer were to say to him: you yourself were the cause of this suffering—and then were to refuse to help him because Karma must take its course. This would be a misunderstanding of Karma. What Karma says is this: help the one who is suffering for you are actually there in order to help him. You do not violate karmic necessity by helping your fellow man. On the contrary, you are helping him to bear his Karma. You are then yourself a redeemer of suffering.

So too, instead of a single individual, a whole group of people can be helped. By helping them we become part of their Karma.

When a Being as all-powerful as Christ Jesus comes to the help of the human race, His sacrificial death becomes a factor in the collective Karma of mankind. He could bear and help this Karma, and we may be sure that the redemption through Him plays an essential role in its fulfilment.

The thought of Resurrection and Redemption can in reality be fully grasped only through a knowledge of Spiritual Science. In the Christianity of the future there will be no contradiction between the idea of Karma and Redemption. Because cause and effect belong together in the spiritual life, this great deed of sacrifice by Christ Jesus must also have its effect in the life of mankind.

Spiritual Science adds depth to the thought underlying the Easter Festival—a thought that is inscribed and can be read in the world of the stars.

In the middle of his span of life the human being is surrounded by inharmonious, bewildering conditions. But he knows too that just as the world came forth from chaos, so will harmony eventually proceed from his still disorderly inner nature. The inner Saviour in man, the bringer of unity and harmony to counter all disharmony—this inner Saviour will arise, acting with the ordered regularity of the course of the planets around the Sun. Let everyone be reminded by the Easter Festival of the resurrection of the Spirit in the existing nature of man.