The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will talk here about those forms of illness and their manifestations that are connected with our soul life and can only be properly understood in the light of spiritual science. Many disease phenomena depend on an unhealthy soul life.

(Example of a gentleman and a lady whom Dr. Steiner once met on the train. They lacked nothing but the strong will to be healthy.

Instead of castles and monasteries, you meet sanatoriums today. Description of a visit to such a sanatorium: The patients are often not really sick at all, but there was a seriously ill person there, namely the doctor in charge, who was suffering from a severe nervous disease.

It is often very important not to believe in certain symptoms of illnesses, even if they are present as such.

The etheric body and the physical body are products of the astral body. There are still some final after-effects of how the spiritual manifests itself in the physical body. We know the fact that our mouths water when certain feelings come over us. This proves the great influence of feelings on physical processes, especially on

It is similar when we turn pale with fear or blush with shame. Feelings are mental processes, but they have a direct effect on blood circulation.

Mere intellectual, sober ideas are often the seeds of many other ideas. Formative images, accompanied by feelings, must arise in our soul life if the body is to function in a healthy way. A merely rational, sober world view can have a very corrupting effect on the physical body. That is why it is so very important to have a correct world view. Then one also experiences the bliss of finding and inventing.

A large part of today's disease dispositions is based on an incorrect world view that has developed among the last generations. In earlier times, people still knew how important it is, even for physical well-being, when a person arouses appropriate feelings within himself. The tragedies of the ancient Greeks, for example, still had this healing power. Even the catharsis in the old, healthy aesthetics had, one might say, a medicinal purpose. There is a profound effect of the spirit on all that is alive. Even comedy, with the image of Auguste Clown falling from one foolishness into another, can have a healing effect in relation to this foolishness. Certain performances have a strangely suggestive effect on people.

If, in the face of such a wide diversity of phenomena, the necessary knowledge and insight into these things is lacking, a terrible discord is often caused by the abundance of impressions and by what the human being can inwardly process from them. Many people cannot cope with such a diversity of phenomena. But this is the cause of all hysterical phenomena.

Our time cannot stand still with its questions. Those who live only in empty abstractions never stop questioning because they are unable to fill these empty specters with content. The nonsensical drive for causality is also a basis for the development of hypochondria, which can have a profound effect on the body.

Hysteria is based on an inwardness that is too small and too weak in the face of an overwhelming external world with an immense diversity.

People who are unable to bring themselves into a harmoniously ordered relationship with the world are increasingly pushed back onto their own selves, and this failure to connect with the world gives rise to the phenomenon called hypochondria. It is essential that people should be able to arrive at a great and comprehensive understanding of the world, which ultimately only spiritual science can give them in this scope. Only then do we rediscover ideas, feelings and perceptions within us that have the right effect on our organism and result in the recovery of the body.

All those states of anxiety then disappear because they only arise from erroneous ideas about our environment. Ultimately, good health can only be brought about by a worldview that understands how to integrate the human being harmoniously into the course of the world.

Think of the mystical coordination of microcosm and macrocosm. Finally, a quote from Goethe's “Secrets”:

From the force that binds all beings,
Freed the man who overcomes himself.

It would have been nice if we could have opened our art room earlier and brought today closer to the anniversary of Ludwig Uhland's death on November 13. Since this was not possible, today at least we want to recall his life with some sounds that came to us from the great poet Ludwig Uhland. If one wanted to describe what is essential for his poetry, one could characterize Ludwig Uhland with a single word. One need only say: Uhland is one of those poets who are thoroughly healthy in every respect. Healthy in his feelings, in his thinking, healthy in his head and heart, that was Ludwig Uhland. And if you want to get to know him, if you want to feel your way into what inspired him to write poetry, you can see that there were two things that constantly filled his heart insofar as he was a poet. The first was a deep, emotional love of nature. However uplifting it might be for him to look at works of art that perhaps proclaimed the beauties of ancient times, he preferred to admire the great art of the forces of nature. And so it is spoken from the bottom of his heart when he says, as if in a creed in a poem:

Not in cold marble stones,
Not in temples dull and dead,
In the fresh oak groves
Weaves and rustles the German God.

And this was not just an artistic sentiment for him, but from his boyhood on, this feeling of being at one with nature was something that took hold of his entire being. He could say of himself:

There was no better pleasure in those days
than to penetrate the forest
where the thrush sings and the hawk cries,
where deer and roe deer leap.

Then his heart opened up to nature, and he felt the warmth in his soul, which is expressed in his strong, healthy poetic sounds.

The other thing was his preference for the times in European life when the great events of the people were told in legends, not just experienced in an external way. Today's man can no longer really understand these times of the Middle Ages. One must try to revive a little in oneself, before all observation, the soul that lived in people at that time, in order to feel what a person in Central Europe felt about the great deeds of world history, on which the weal and woe, the elevation and happiness and suffering of people depend. In those days, people did not learn history from schoolbooks; it was quite different from what it is today, when we sit down in school and the schoolboy begins to tremble when the teacher asks: When did Charlemagne reign? and he then says, sweating: Then he lived – and so on. It was not like that at all back then, but rather more like the way in which one is more likely to get an idea if one is still lucky enough to let the last remnants take effect on oneself, how people back then spoke to each other about such great people who were much involved in the weal and woe of history, as, say, about Charlemagne. And since personal experiences are always the most vivid, I would like to start with a little story that represents something like a last remnant of the way people in earlier centuries spoke of history.

When I was a boy, I knew an elderly man who was employed in a bookshop. He was from Salzburg. There is the Untersberg mountain there. And just as people say that Barbarossa is in the Kyffhäuser, they say that Charlemagne is still in the Untersberg. And that man once said to me: Yes, it's quite true, Charlemagne is sitting in our Uhntersberg. I said: How do you know that? He said: When I was a boy, I went to the Untersberg with a firm stick, and I found a hole. And since I was a bad rascal, I immediately let myself into this hole. I let my staff down and then let myself down. Right, I came down very deep. And there was a large palace-like cave, all lined with crystal. That's where Charlemagne and old Roland sit inside, and their beards have grown terribly long. – I don't want to encourage the boys present to do that; only a native of Salzburg can do that. Now I said, “Have you really seen Charlemagne and Roland, my dear Hanke?” He said, “No, but they are there!” You see, a piece of something that really existed in Central and Western Europe in the Middle Ages was still alive there. And when people sat around the stove in winter and the parents told the children about Charlemagne and his heroes, how did people tell the younger ones, for example, about the great Charles who once ruled over the Franks, and about his heroes, who included Roland, Olivier and so on?

If we could listen to such a story, as was common in those days, we would hear the following: Yes, Charlemagne was a wonderful person, blessed by Christ. He was completely imbued with the idea that he had to win Europe for Christianity. And just as Christ himself was surrounded by twelve apostles, so Charlemagne was surrounded by twelve people. He had his Roland, just as Christ had his Peter. And there were the heathens in Spain, against whom he marched, because he wanted to spread Christianity among them, with his twelve people.

At that time, the Bible was read less, but also treated more freely. The people told stories at the time of Charlemagne in such a way that the way they told them was reminiscent of biblical stories, because they did not look at what they knew from the Bible in such a rigid way, but took it as a model. And it became the case for medieval people that they talked about Charlemagne in a similar way to the way they talked about Christ.

Roland had a mighty sword, so it was said, and a mighty horn. He once received the sword Durendart from Christ himself when he felt very fervent as a champion of God. And with this sword, which he received from Christ, he, who was the nephew of Charlemagne, went to Spain. Now it was further told that Charlemagne not only did everything possible to ensure that Roland grew up to be an exceptionally capable and proven hero, but it was generally said of him that, with strength and perseverance, he became a champion of God to the greatest degree, as people rightly suspected.

When Charlemagne marched on Zaragoza, they wanted to try to convert the Moors to Christianity, and on the advice of Roland, an ally of Roland, Ganelon, was chosen to negotiate with the pagan population of Spain. Ganelon was spoken of as if he were the Judas among the twelve companions of Charlemagne. This Ganelon said: If Roland persuades Charlemagne to send me to the pagan population, they will persuade me to death. Ganelon negotiated with the enemies. They surrendered in pretence, so that Charlemagne withdrew, leaving only his faithful Roland behind. And when Charlemagne had left, the enemies approached Roland, and he saw himself surrounded by the whole horde of enemies, he, the strong hero, the champion of God.

Now there is a beautiful train that is always told, that should express something. They always told of the close relationship between Charlemagne and Roland. It was not so quiet for Charlemagne that he had left Roland behind. But then he heard Roland's call. From this, the saga has made that Roland blew into his horn Olifant. The name Olifant already suggests that Karl sensed it. And then the saga tells that Roland wanted to smash his sword on the rock; but it was so strong that it remained whole, only the sparks sprayed. Believing himself lost, he surrendered the sword to Christ.

This same Roland then lived on in the sagas with Charlemagne. And most of the sagas are such that one can see how people have adopted the poetically beautiful content of the Bible. You can see it in Roland's fight with the heathens. But this act, how Roland faces his enemies with his sword and horn and they surround him on all sides, how he wants to smash his sword on the rock and how he then dies for a cause that was told everywhere and found important, this is infinitely significant, as if predestined for poetry.

And the thoughts that have once sunk into the souls, we see them again, even where in the 12th century through the priest Konrad was inserted into the German language the death of Roland. And the connection of the human soul with the whole of nature, one could not imagine it differently at that time than when such a person dies, then everything possible also happens outside in nature. This scene was still being wonderfully depicted in the 12th century by the cleric Konrad.

He relies on his weak arm,
which he does not hold low,
which he extends up to
the Almighty Lord,
to whom he commands his soul:
with St. Michael,
St. Gabriel, St. Raphael,
he entrusts himself forever more.
When Ruolant from the world departs,
from heaven there comes a Michael light,
since after a while I was born in Pibble, the sun and the stars in the two empires of China and Spain. The winters were long there, they fell like the ancient trees; the people harvested their crops, they saw the fearful sky brighten, the sun shining, the rest; the heath was burning, she sank in the sun, in the water she drowned. The bright day
became dark as night.
The towers fell to the ground,
the beautiful palace was destroyed.
The stars scattered;
the weather grew worse:
they all wanted to prove
that the time had come
that the world should come to an end,
and God would have his judgment.

Thus they spoke of Roland's death. And at the same time we can form an idea of the changes in language since 1175. From this you will see how everything in the world changes and changes quickly. The language was richer and more intimate. Until the time of the Crusades, something like the saga of Charlemagne lived in almost every house in our regions, all the way down to Sicily and up to Hungary. It touched people's souls, and today we have no idea how these things were back then.

Ludwig Uhland was unique in this field, delving so deeply into things. And he not only expressed what he felt in many a beautiful poem, but there are also books in which he brings to life the ancient times of the German people. The fact that Uhland, on the one hand, had an infinite love for nature and, on the other, a warm heart for the lost sagas that have lived and that today only need to be artificially invoked, is something that one should actually know better than one knows it. And one can hope that even if some of the fashions in poetry that are around today can sometimes “inspire” hearts, a time may come again when one can gradually learn to create like Uhland. He loved communicating directly from soul to soul the most of all. And it actually dawned on me what Ludwig Uhland was able to be to young people, also in turn, when I was able to feel an echo in my own life.

I had learned most of all how to express thoughts in language, and to grasp thoughts that now introduced me to the spiritual life with my heart, by being allowed to participate with my late teacher Karl Julius Schröer in what he called “exercises in oral presentation and written expression”. He would listen to us and then say a few words in which he placed himself at the level at which we ourselves were. It was a very stimulating experience. Where did Schröer get that? Because he knew Uhland! It was a very lively collaboration with the young people. Uhland did it.

And so we may say: the 50th anniversary of the death of Ludwig Uhland, who died on November 13, 1862, may mean something in the hearts of people who are still receptive to genuine, healthy poetry and have feelings , may mean something, may mean that one must always return to those who, in connection, bring us together as people who live in the present, with all that humanity has experienced in earlier and ever earlier times.

Uhland's connection to earlier times was twofold. First, he himself still had much of the character and personality of strong, indomitable characters, who are becoming increasingly rare in the present day. One need only recall that in 1849 Uhland spoke the weighty words that he could not imagine a German empire without a drop of democratic oil having been poured into it. He stands there like a refreshing and, in its strength, self-reinforcing German oak. He also rejects, with all his striving and living, with his art in times when the intimate, far-reaching folk fantasy flourished and lived, which brings together the past and the present in a heartfelt way, the inheritance of the soul that humanity has from its predecessors with that which moves the present.

We do not always think about how small the time span is that separates us from something that is very different from us. Let us think, it is about 800 years that separate us from the time when people in Germany spoke and wrote as I have read to you. There are twenty-four generations in eight hundred years. If you imagine these generations reaching out to each other, you have the time when Pfaffe Konrad tried to write this touching scene into German hearts. And it was Uhland's particular concern to renew this, to allow some of it to be felt again.

So it is that we remember today, albeit a little late, the anniversary of the death of Ludwig Uhland, and on this day we remember the man who tried to capture so much of the beauty and grandeur of nature, of the beauty and grandeur of Central European prehistory, in his poetry. He deserves to be revived in the hearts of people who want to know about such healthy, genuine, true poetry, and they will always be there, as will some fashionable illnesses and fads that would like to separate souls from this poetry of the real and the true.

The order of the poems in the lecture is not known.

I would like to say a few words in advance about the event “On the Essence of the Folk Song,” which is to take place here in the form of recitation. We can picture the scene that Goethe presented to friends and visitors at the Weimar court on December 18, 1818. There was a great masked procession, a great procession of living pictures. Among them were two that we would like to look at in particular. One depicted one of those old singers who, since time immemorial, have traveled from country to country singing to the people about the deeds of many a hero, but also about the feelings and emotions in the hearts of ordinary people. The other was a woman who was to represent the legend, the popular tale of good, noble deeds, of good, noble happenings. And these two figures were addressed by Goethe, the speaker who had to explain everything. Among other things, she said:

A noble man, eager to fathom
How man's purpose springs up everywhere,
Listens to the world for sound as a word,
That flows through the lands with a thousand springs;
He passes through the oldest, the newest regions
And listens in all zones.

And so from nation to nation he hears singing,
What stirred everyone in the mother's womb,
He hears tell of the good things
That the word of the forefather brought to the father.
All this was delight and teaching,
Feeling and action, as if it were one.

What suffering may bring and what is enough,
Bewilders confuses and unhoped unites,
That is what a thousand languages and idioms have meant,
From paradise to today.

So the bard sings, speaks legend and saga,
We feel it as if it were our own days.

When black the rock, surrounded by atmosphere
For dream images of dark lamentation forces,
There bright sunshine in the open sea
The high song of the delighted soul sounds;
They mean well and piously, they want
Only the human thing that everyone should want.

Where it is hidden, he would know how to find it,
Seriously veiled, disguised slightly as a game;
In the highest sense of the future to establish,
Humanity is our eternal goal.
Oh, why doesn't he look these days
Cured by humanity, the worst plagues!

This man had already been dead for fifteen years in 1813. Goethe had met him in Strasbourg in 1770. He describes in his “Poetry and Truth” how he entered a house in Strasbourg and encountered a man who, like himself, was about to go up the stairs and who immediately made a great impression on him. This man looked a little strange on the outside, like a poet, but at the same time like a clergyman; he was one, because it was Herder. He had a long silk coat, this coat he had hanging down, the tips tucked into his pocket. Herder was already sick at the time, but a person searching for greatness wherever it could be found. Goethe became friends with him and now the two of them collected folk songs and folk poems in Alsace. One may ask: why did they do that? Why did they go to the country roads, to the villages, to collect folk songs? And why, fifteen years after Herder's death, does Goethe praise the voices that come from the most diverse countries and peoples? Because even then, Goethe and Herder felt a certain urge within themselves to infuse poetry, which had strayed far from all that is genuine and true, with the sounds of the genuine popular heart. Herder went further in this than Goethe; it was he who rekindled the German people's love for the folk song. He collected folk songs wherever he could find them, from the northern Lapps to the southern peoples of the Orient. In 1778/79 he published the “Stimmen der Völker” (Voices of the Nations). It was a general surprise when people realized what poetry lives in the people, poetry that expresses the truest human feeling. Today we can discuss some of these matters in more detail than Herder was able to at the time. We have since learned a lot about the origin of these folk songs, but Herder already sensed all of this. That people originally accompanied everything, work and everything, with the sung word, in which there was rhythm and dance, that Herder already sensed, as did whooping and being sad in the folk song. He was the first to examine these things, then it went away; Uhland, Achim von Arnim continued to seek what people in the simplest of circumstances had written. And it was realized that what Goethe and Herder had written in their youth had an untruth in it; it was only customary in those days to write poetry. When Herder compares a Lappish poem with a poem by a distinguished poet, a poem by Ewald von Kleist, he has to say: What is it that Major von Kleist has written when you read the folk song in comparison? They were looking for what was genuine feeling, genuine poetry, in the folk song. Uhland, Mörike, Goethe himself would not have become such great poets if they had not first recognized the genuine. Today it is no longer possible to accompany work in this way with songs; work has lost all poetry, work has become a heavy burden. But one must see clearly that the folk song did not arise out of the fog.

So how did it come about? It is the human soul's moods that make people joyful or sad, that dismay them, that make them happy or unhappy; everything is in it. And it is always individual people who can feel with the people, who give poetic expression to what lives in the people; they are never numerous, they do not grow like cabbages in the field. Folk fantasy does not create as today's scholars would have it done off the cuff. That is simply nonsense. It is always individual people who have this ability. Even today there are still such people, even if they are very rare.

Depending on the time, folk songs took on different forms, for example in the 16th century. Who started a folk song then? It was wandering people who wandered around with views that had no rights; traveling people from country to country who didn't have much money in their pockets, so there were often cravings for the other pocket that was not with them: such feelings are also expressed, one can say honestly in a folk poem like “Schwartenhals – Schwartenhals” (literally: “The rind of the pork neck”), because others eat the pork neck and the meat, and he only gets the rind; “I came to a landlady's house – he had to leave me his pocket.”

Besides these there are also folk poems in which there is something sublime. All this was collected, and the poets learned an enormous amount from the truth and naturalness of feeling. The best of Goethe's poems, which so beautifully express human mood, human suffering and human desire, are inspired by folk songs. Everything that has ever been alive in the people, as long as the people have not yet grown tired, is expressed in their poetry. An example will be given of how a people in the 19th century still felt about those people whom they knew were their heroes. And Goethe felt this by translating the Neo-Greek-Epirotic heroic songs. They are the songs of the Albanian people; they are very significant and beautifully translated by Goethe. They sing of how the Albanian people feel about their enemy, the Turks, and how they long for freedom and want to summon all their strength against the Turkish occupation. One can say of such poems that they are timely, if not current. How people long to take up the sword to free themselves, something like the roaring of the wind lives in these heroic songs of the Epirotic Albanian people. And these feelings were already alive in Goethe's time. The rhythm and words resound with rushing and roaring feelings of freedom. The final poem is particularly beautiful: Charon, the guide of the dead; more than a guide, a charioteer. People who know modern Greek say that in this, Goethe has achieved something particularly beautiful in imitating what lives in these modern Greek poems.

Finally, a poem will be recited that best shows how folk poetry has been incorporated into art poetry. Genuine ballad tones are conjured up before us by Goethe's “Erlkönig”. This could only have been created by a person like Goethe, who, guided by Herder, then became a ballad poet himself. Goethe's “Etlkönig” is connected to the folk-style poem, as previously collected by Herder, through rhythm and tone.

The following poems by Goethe were recited: “Heidenröslein” (text see p. 28); also “Der König in Thule” and “Der Fischer”.

THE KING IN THULE

There was a king in Thule
Most true in life,
And dying, to his love
A golden cup he gave.

Nothing was better for him,
He emptied it at every feast;
His eyes overflowed
Every time he drank from it.

And when he came to die,
He counted his towns and his kingdom,
Gave everything to his heirs,
But not the cup at the same time.

He sat at the royal table,
The knights around him,
On high Father's Hall,
There at the castle by the sea.

There stood the old reveller,
Drank his last life's glow,
And threw the sacred cup
Down into the flood.

He saw him fall, drink
And sink deep into the sea.
His eyes would sink:
Never drank another drop.

THE FISHERMAN

The water rushed, the water swelled,
A fisherman sat there,
Looking at the fishing rod, peaceful,
Cool up to the heart.
And as he sits and listens,
The flood parts up:
From the moving water rushes
A wet woman.

She sang to him, she spoke to him:
What lures you, my brood
With human wit and human guile
Up into the heat of death?
If only you knew how it is for little fish
So comfortably on the ground,
You would descend as you are,
And would only be healthy.

Does not the dear sun delight,
Does not the moon delight in the sea?
Breathing in waves, does not her face
Return twice as beautiful?
Does not your own face beckon you
Back in eternal dew?

The water rushed, the water swelled,
Wetting his naked foot;
His heart swelled so full of yearning,
Like greeting from his sweetheart.
She spoke to him, she sang to him;
Then it happened to him:
Half drawn, half sank he,
And was no longer seen.

NEW GREEK EPIRUS HERO SONGS

I.

When fields have become Turkish,

II.

A black ship cleaves the waves
Near the coast of Kassandra,
With black sails above it,
And the blueness of the sky above them.
If a Turkish ship comes towards it,
Its scarlet pennants shine brightly,
“Strike your sails immediately,
Lower the sails dul'
No, I do not lower the sails,
Never do I let them down,
Do you threaten me as if I were a bride,
Bride, that is to be frightened.
I am Jannis, son of Stada,
Son-in-law of Bukovalas.
Come, my friends, to work! With his sword in his fist;
The beams drip with blood
And the waves are reddened.
Allah! Allah! Scream for mercy
The unbelievers on their knees.
Sadly, the winner calls, life! Stay now for the defeated!

III.

Bow, Liakos, to the Pasha,
Bow to the Vizier.
Before thou wast Armatole,
Lord of the land thou now shalt be.
“If Liakos only live,
He will never bow.
His sword is his Pasha,
His vizier is his gun."
Ali Pasha, hearing this,
is angry with the unwelcome guest,
writes the letters, the orders;
he decides what is to be done:
Veli Guekas, hurry vigorously,
through the cities, through the countryside,
Bring me Liakos at once, From the rampart's lofty stand:
Hearty, my children! to work,
Children of mine, to the fray!
Liakos appears nimbly,
Holding the sword in his teeth.
Day and night the fighting raged,
For three days and three nights.
Albanian women weep,
Dressed all in black in mourning;
Veli Guekas returns only to be
Strangled in his own blood.

IV.

What a noise? Where is it coming from?
What a mighty shaking?
Are they bulls before the slaughterhouse,
Wild beasts in fierce battle?
No! Bukovalas, leading fifteen hundred fighters to war,
Fights between Kerasovo
And the great city district.
Gunshots, like rain,
Bullets, like the lock's blow!
A blonde girl calls down
From the window of the gatehouse:
Stop the fighting, Janny,
This loading, this shooting!
Let the dust fall down,
Let the gun smoke blow away,
And then count your warriors,
So that you know who lost!
Three times the Turks were counted,
And four hundred dead lay,
And as the fighters were counted,
Only three faded away.

V.

The sun has set,
The crowd comes to the leader:
Up, companions, draw water
Share in the evening meal! Braid them into my bed;
Bring the confessor to the place,
That I may confess to him,
Reveal to him the deeds
I have done for my life.
Thirty years I am Armatole,
Twenty years a fighter already;
Now I will steal away to my death,
That I may be well satisfied.
Now prepare my grave,
That it may be high and spacious,
Upright, that I may be able to fight,
Able to load the pistols.
On the right I want an open window,
That the swallow may herald spring,
That the nightingale in May
May sing of the loveliest things.

It was followed by: Der Olympos, the Kissavos; Charon (see p. 30 for texts); Herder: Erlkönig's daughter (see p. 28/29 for text).

ERLKÖNIG

Who rides so late through night and wind?
It is the father with his child;
He has the boy well in his arms,
He holds him securely, he keeps him warm.

My son, why do you hide your face so anxiously?
Do you not see, Father, the Erl-King?
The Erl-King with crown and tail?
My son, it is a fog bank.

"You dear child, come, go with me!
I will play very beautiful games with you;
Many a colorful flower is on the beach,
My mother has many a golden robe.

My father, my father, and do you not hear
What the King of the Alders promises me softly? —
Be calm, stay calm, my child:
The wind whispers in dry leaves.

“Will you, dear boy, come with me?
My daughters shall wait on you well;
My daughters lead the nightly round,
And sway and dance and sing you to sleep.”

My father, my father, and do you not see there
Erlking's daughters in the gloomy place? —
My son, my son, I see it clearly:
The old willows seem so gray.

“I love you, I am attracted by your beautiful form;
and if you are not willing, I will use force.”
My father, my father, now he is touching me!
Erlking has harmed me!

The father is horrified, he rides away,
He holds the groaning child in his arms,
He barely reaches the farm;
The child is dead in his arms.

J. W. Goethe

A Christmas Gift

It could easily seem as if the simple, loving joy that has expressed itself in hundreds and hundreds of hearts over long periods of time, when such a play about the divine child and his destiny on earth passed by these hearts , it might easily seem as if this simple, loving joy were affected by our spiritual-scientific worldview, by the seemingly so complicated, so much-evoked insights of Christ Jesus, to which we must strive within our worldview. Every heart and every mind will certainly be joyfully seized when it can become aware of such a play again, as it has been throughout the centuries during this Christmas season in the hearts of people, both in the cities and in the most lonely deserts, of those people who have gone through a certain spiritual life and of those people who remained in the simplicity of rural life, how all these hearts felt drawn to the divine child, in whom they perceived the forces that once entered into the becoming of humanity and saved this becoming from the spiritual death to which it was otherwise believed to be subject by virtue of the eternal laws of the world. Every heart, every mind must be seized when it sees again how this divine child has been worshiped.

And yet, it is only apparent if one wanted to believe that through our increasingly complicated knowledge of the miracle of Bethlehem, this direct warmth, this elementary feeling, could somehow be affected. It is, I say, only seemingly looked at the circumstances if one can think so. For we live in a very different world today, and will increasingly live in a very different world from the centuries that passed such plays in their seasons, not in the way we do, but in the way of direct life. Our complicated time, which has looked so deeply into scientific thinking and imagining, needs a different impulse of the soul in order to be able to look up again to the divine child who has brought the greatest impulse into the becoming of humanity. Only seemingly more complicated is our view, which speaks of the two Jesus children, of the Solomon-like and the Nathan-like Jesus child. For we see in the Nathanian Jesus child, as it were, the child of the whole of humanity, that being of humanity which remained behind when the other humanity began its earthly path, remained behind in spiritual worlds, before the tempter, the Luciferic principle, approached humanity. We see that it remained, as it were, at the stage of human childhood and was retained as the spiritual childhood impulse of humanity in the spiritual realm until 'the time was fulfilled', when it was born as an exceptional human being in the Nathanian Jesus child and appeared as a human that did not pass through the incarnations on earth before, but that appeared for the first time in an earthly embodiment and that, immediately after birth, addressed his mother in a language that only she understood, a language that sounded like it came from the heights of heaven. And more and more people will be convinced that, in order to understand the different way in which humanity is understood in our time, we need to look up to the divine child, whom we revere in the boy Jesus, the son of Nathan, who remained behind on the childhood stage of humanity in the spiritual realm, who was born with those human qualities, with those original characteristics that all human beings would have had if they had not entered into earthly existence through the luciferic temptation. It was with all these qualities, which were the very property of humanity before the luciferic temptation, that the Nathanic Jesus-child entered into humanity.

We need to know this today, we need to know that we have the childhood of all humanity in this boy Jesus, so that we can feel from the depths of our soul the same feelings that simple people of the past felt – but only felt, which we can know if we want to continue along the spiritual path – when they encountered the glorification of the divine child in such games. What speaks most to our soul in such a play, as it has come to us, is precisely the child's deepest innocence, humanity's own divine child innocence in the face of what the tempter in the guise of Lucifer or the later Ahriman, who is to be seen as the medieval “devil”), has made of humanity. The contrast between Herod, who was seduced by the devil and then killed by him, and the child of humanity who preserves the principle of human innocence and leads to eternal life, is deeply moving.

Such ideas, as they live in such plays, they truly did not come from superficial feelings. They arose from the intuitive recognition of the deepest secrets of the world, which were known, even if only intuitively, from the Middle Ages, from the cities to the deserts of the mountains and the countryside. Only the way in which human souls turned to those secrets was different from the way in which we must fathom them again.

And it is easy for the soul's gaze to turn from such a play to representations in which, one might say, with all the means of the highest art, as they arose in the 13th and 14th centuries from the abundance of Christian feeling, the whole mystery of the coming of humanity to earth and the relationship of the human soul to that which lives as the eternal divine in the human being was depicted. So today, when we want to celebrate the holy Christmas in our own way, I would like to turn my gaze away from these games to a magnificent representation, in which we are able to admire the very origins that lead from the highest feeling and, one might say, from “scientific-artistic knowledge” for the Middle Ages, to such simple games. I would like to direct our view to one such supreme artistic representation, which contains, as it were, the very origins of what is then found in such simple games.

In Pisa, the western Italian city, is the famous cathedral where, as we have mentioned several times, Galileo observed the swinging church lamp, and through his genius discovered the laws without which modern physics would be unthinkable. Adjacent to this church, we find the famous Camposanto, enclosed by high walls, on which medieval art has embodied what was thought about the divine secrets and the connection of man with these divine secrets, with the eternal spiritual principle thought in the human being. Some of these medieval secrets are picturesquely depicted on the walls of the Camposanto of Pisa. This churchyard was covered with soil that the crusaders brought from the tomb of Jesus Christ. And anyone who visits this churchyard today and picks up a handful of earth can get the feeling that there is something under this earth that the crusaders once brought from Palestine to spread out on this churchyard, which was to be considered particularly sacred.

Among the paintings on the walls of the Camposanto is one called “The Triumph of Death”. However, it has only been called that since 1705. Before that, everyone who saw it and knew it and spoke of it called it “Purgatory”. And there certainly were also a “heaven” and a “hell” on the walls of the Camposanto. But this Purgatory contains most profoundly the way in which the medieval soul viewed the mystery of the human soul and its connection with the eternal in the human being. Today, much of this image has already been corrupted. But through the corrupted, one can still see what the painter, unknown to history today, wanted to conjure up on the wall of the great mysteries of becoming human.

First we see a procession of kings and queens emerging from a mountain cave and developing mightily, full of self-confidence and arrogance and imbued with the feeling: We know what one is on earth if one belongs to such a class! The procession emerges from a mountain cave and, as it comes out of the cave, it encounters three coffins guarded by a hermit. Suddenly, the hunting party finds itself standing before these three coffins. The contents of the coffins are characteristically different: one contains a skeleton, the second a corpse that has already begun to decompose, with worms gnawing at it, and the third a recently deceased person who has only just begun to decompose. The procession stops before these three coffins. A hermit is sitting in front of these coffins, as if to indicate with his gesture: Stop! Look at what you really are as human beings at this memento mori. Further up, above the mountain, on a second ascending hill, we see three hermits sitting, some of them bringing food, but some of them also deeply absorbed in their books, pondering the secrets of becoming human. The whole thing is arranged in such a way that the one mountain at the top forms the ceiling, as it were. Where the hunting procession encounters the coffins, the three hermits are seated at the top, representing peace and having the ability to enter the depths of the human soul to find the connection between that human soul and the realms of the eternal. And if we look further, we see all kinds of dismembered people immediately joining the hunt, which is standing in front of the memento mori. Further on, we see people listening to the sounds of a harp; behind the harp stands a figure with a finger to its mouth. Above them, we see a host of angelic beings on one side, and devilish ones in hideous images – the painter has used all his imagination to depict the devils – on the other. So that on the far right of the picture we see the angels leaning down to the people listening to the harp. Between them and the mountain, from whose crater fire is coming, we see the devils developing.

But all this is actually there for the one who looks at it, to draw attention to something that one might not want to notice on superficial examination, but which gradually leads to an insight into the deepest human secrets. What is it that is supposed to be depicted here? It is characteristic of the medieval science when we see how the hunting party stops in front of the three corpses: first a skeleton, then the second, a corpse already eaten away by worms, and then the third, a bloated body, one that has only recently died – a motif that we often find in the Middle Ages. We understand it only when we ask: Why do people come out of the mountains? What are those who are there in the hunt? — and when we know: These are not the living, these are the deceased who are in Kamaloka! The image says: Such bodies do you have on you - the skeleton as the physical body, the corpse eaten by worms as the etheric body, and that which belongs to the recently deceased as the astral body. Remember, you who are living, what you should see of the secrets of existence after death! Thus we see the mystery of the three human covers expressed in a medieval way.

One would like to say: strange and wonderful. The hermit, who is sitting a little elevated directly in front of the three coffins, indicates to us through his whole gesture that man needs to penetrate into the mysteries of existence in order to recognize how he is connected to the eternal sources for his temporary existence. The picture is completed by the mountain itself arching over the whole, and the hermits sitting at the top, in silent contemplation and a peaceful life in nature, showing us, as it were, how one can connect with the inner workings of human nature by turning inward.

That is what the painter wanted to depict, and not a “triumph of death”, as the painting was later called when its meaning was no longer understood. From the painting itself, we can see how right those were who spoke of the Purgatory, that is, of what we call Kamaloka. What the painter intended was to show that we, as we are in life, do not always belong to those who recognize the meaning of life after death and relate to the eternal in human nature in the right way , as the painter shows us in those who are no longer in life but in the life after death; for we are dealing with those who are in the hunting procession with people who are in Kamaloka, who have already died. They see what happens to the body after death.

And when we look at the sick, at the ailing people, we see on the one hand what is physical, and on the other hand we see how the devils and the angels depart with the human souls. And we see the depths that are revealed before us: Every devil has a soul in his claws, which he leads away, and every angel carries a soul under his wings, but these souls are different. And that is what I would like to point out at this Christmas hour. The souls that are taken by the devils, who are rightly deformed but formed with the right understanding, are souls that have the form of older people. And those who are taken by the angels to the bliss of heaven are souls that the painter shaped as children. In this we sense the view that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages: that something in man must remain childlike throughout his earthly existence, that people can retain something, however old and outwardly aged they become , of childlikeness, of innocence of feeling throughout their whole life; that, on the other hand, there are people who grow old not only physically but also in soul, because they have accepted the soul-earthly. For only on earth do we grow old. Those who grow old can only do so through guilt, through that which distracts from the eternal heavenly. Therefore, their souls look like people who have grown old, whereas the souls of those who remain connected to that which maintains the connection with the eternal in the spiritual world retain the childlike form.

That is what speaks so powerfully to the observer in this image from the Camposanto in Pisa: that there is something in human nature that we can recognize as expressing the eternal in man in the first three years of childhood, which I tried to show in the little book 'The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity'. This sense of being at home with the divine spiritual heights that occurs in childhood was felt in the Middle Ages. This was expressed even in such magnificent works of art as in this picture of the Camposanto in Pisa, which is perhaps the most interesting picture of the early Middle Ages in this respect, and which was so magnificent that it was attributed to Giotto and many other great contemporaries, which is impossible because it was painted after Giotto. The way in which the medieval human being related to the child is most magnificently expressed in this picture. We encounter this feeling everywhere. We find it so wonderfully expressed in these simple Christmas carols, we find it in the fact that the legend of the Christ Child has found its way into all hearts with inexpressible warmth, and how this legend of the child has made people aware of their connection to the Christ impulse. People needed the certainty that the principle of the child had come to save the eternity of the human soul. Just as the human being who has preserved his or her own eternity is brought by the angels into the realm of the blessed as a human being in the form of a child, as depicted by the painter, so too must one imagine that in the form of the innocent child, that which we know to have united itself with the Christian divine impulse, with the Christian divine essence, in his thirtieth year.

Thus, I would say, the connection between the heights of medieval spiritual life, as they present themselves to us in such a picture in the Camposanto at Pisa, and the simple games, which, admittedly, only originated later in the way one was presented here, but which all contain the impulses that express what we are again seeking in the tone and manner of our time. So it was not just — as people today would like to persuade people — how the souls of people in earlier centuries related to the child Jesus. Just as we must now assimilate the teaching of the Nathanic Jesus Child, who in His twelfth year of life took up the I of Zarathustra and in His thirtieth year the Christ-being, as we must understand it in order to realize what had to happen in the process of becoming human, In order to save the eternal in his being, medieval man did not need all the science that is given in concepts and 'theories, but rather what was given in such grandiose views of the nature of the human soul, as expressed in the image just characterized. Different times demand different ways of presenting eternal mysteries, and different times have had their different ways of presenting eternal mysteries. Time and again, it is the manifestation of the fact that man may have great hope for his soul. In the time before the mystery of Golgotha, it was the hope that there would come what corresponds spiritually in man to what the sun is physically in our planetary system. What we can know today, was felt deeply at all times.

In spring we see life, the plants sprouting from the earth and sprout and see them grow towards summer. We look up at the sun and know: they emanate from the sun, the forces that fertilize the earth, so that it can bring forth the living life of the sprouting and sprouting plants and the other beings. And in addition to what takes place so regularly from year to year in a sacred order, we see the regularity of the sun's path, which at its exact hour fills every place with the power of blessing, with which it must be filled, that which that belongs to the earth's atmosphere itself, such as the storms that sweep across the fields, the rain that pours down from the clouds, and the fog that spreads over the earth. We may see order and rule in what emanates from the sun for life on earth. In spring and summer, if we observe nature carefully, we have the feeling that the sun, triumphantly hurrying over the earth, is able to do something about the wind and weather that the earth, so to speak, allows to arise on its surface. But when we approach autumn and winter, and the power of the sun loses its strength and intervenes less in earthly existence, then we feel the changeable nature of our own earthly activities in a different way. And anyone who contemplates this alternation between spring and summer on the one hand and autumn and winter on the other with a little reflection can say: in spring, the sun with its holy order triumphs over the fickle effects that the egoism of the earth brings forth from the nature of the earth. But winter is the time when the earth forms that which is in the egoistic atmosphere, where that which is in it conquers that which blesses the earth from the cosmos.

The person who observes his inner being in thinking, feeling and willing sees how the impulses of feeling, the affects, the forces of will arise in him in a disorderly fashion from the moment he wakes until he falls asleep. He can feel how this changeable nature in his own inner being can only be compared to that which is in the earth's atmosphere. And indeed, just as the earth's atmosphere changes, so does what dominates our thinking, feeling and willing. Our soul has the same forces within it, albeit only in embryonic form, as those that work outside in air and weather and in the elemental forces. They dominate our thinking, feeling and willing as forces within us. Outside, they are elemental forces, demonic powers that live in air, water and fire and in what we have around us in lightning and thunder, in the changeable effects of our atmosphere. When we think, feel and will, we are fundamentally only related to what the earth develops out of its own selfishness in winter. And this has been felt at all times. When winter approached, when the earth's egoism became more effective with the elemental forces, which now did not follow the sun as they followed the ruling sun in spring and summer, then it was felt that all this was related to man's own inner being. O winter time, man felt, even if he did not express it clearly, you are related to my own inner being! But when the depth of the winter night came, when the time of the winter solstice came, then man felt by the way the sun now developed its new strength so that it could grow and grow more and more and gain strength towards spring and summer, man felt: the sun's power always conquers the selfishness of the earth. And then man felt courage and hope within himself and could say to himself: Just as in the physical world the cosmic sun always triumphs over the terrestrial forces of the earth, however the sun rises on a dark winter's night, if only we can feel it, so there must also be something in the depths of the soul that reigns as a spiritual sun, which will come and triumph — as the annual sun triumphs in the winter solstice — which will come as a spiritual sun in the great winter solstice! First it was hoped, then it was known, that the time of the great winter solstice had come, when one learned to understand the time of the Mystery of Golgotha as the rising of the spiritual sun within man.

And now we look back to those ancient times in the evolution of the earth, when there was an earthly spring and an earthly summer, before the Mystery of Golgotha had come. Then man still carried within him the legacy of the old times, the old clairvoyance, which made it possible for him to see into the spiritual world, where the consciousness of the connection with the divine-spiritual world still existed. But we live in the winter of the earth, that cannot be denied, in the time when it has really come about that we are not only surrounded more and more by mechanical forces outside, which are at work in machines, in industry, in the industry, in the commercial conditions of the earth's economy, but we also live in such a way that we no longer have the spiritual-divine world around us, as we did in the time of the earth's spring and summer. But what the human being felt as a symbol, the victory of the sun at the winter solstice as the victory of the spiritual sun in the depths of the human soul, that is what today's humanity can feel in the face of the Mystery of Golgotha and its preparation through that birth, which we celebrate every year renewed at Christmas. Just as a person who lives through the winter need never despair of the power of the sun, but may hope that the joys taken from him by the fall will reappear after the depths of the winter night, so too may a person look at what has taken place in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: Even if, like the winter storms on winter's winter night, so too may selfishness, the winter night of the human soul, rule without order in our own inner being. Yet we can never lose hope, for whatever may appear in our own soul that is contrary to the weather, must be counteracted by that which, since the Mystery of Golgotha, is connected with all human life on earth: the Christ impulse, which entered the evolution of humanity through the body of the Nathanian Jesus child , which could enter through the fact that in the Nathanic Jesus was born the child of humanity, the child with those qualities that belonged to the human soul when it had not yet gone through earthly incarnations, which had not yet been implanted with what comes from entering into earthly incarnations, the child that still had the qualities of the spiritual heights in which it may be eternal.

I wanted to present these ideas to you so that we can see from them how, in view of the human child's powers, which are at the same time his eternal powers, people can feel a supreme sense of what one has always felt and should continue to feel at the sight of the divine child at Christmas. And even if our knowledge must become different, even if we must gain the other conceptions in place of what the medieval conception saw in the picture that I indicated — the conception of the two Jesus children, the drawing over of the essence of the one into the other, the taking possession of the body of the Nathanian Jesus child by the Christ essence — then we can look with our most sacred feelings and with our strongest hopes to the realization that since the Mystery of Golgotha something lives in our human becoming that has been drawn into our earthly aura, to which we need only appeal in our joy of celebration, as hope for the indestructibility of our human being.

It is just as necessary for us to remember this as it was for the people who took joy in the simple games. Indeed, we may say something else: we take no less joy in the simple games. We feel connected to those people who found joy in these games because, in our way, we appreciate what was given to people when the child of humanity entered into earthly existence. We appreciate how they were given the strongest hope, the strongest impulse that human beings need to of Golgotha, can be sustained by the vision that, as in the physical cosmos the sun triumphs over earthly egoism, so in the depths of the human soul will live ever more and more the impulse that flowed out through the Mystery of Golgotha as the spiritual solar impulse of human evolution on earth. Once the event was there as a historical one, through which this impulse entered into earthly life, but it is meant to awaken again and again in remembrance, as can happen through such festivals. For it is true, on the one hand, that the Christ-being once entered into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha; and on the other hand, what Angelus Silesias said with the beautiful words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem

And not in you, you will remain lost forever!

What is born in Bethlehem should be born deeper and deeper in our own soul, so that we see fulfilled in this own soul what the medieval sensibility wanted to see fulfilled by seeing the destiny of souls permeated by the Christ impulse in those childlike figures, into the realms of the blessed and do not fall into the claws of Ahriman, to whom only those souls remain that have become so attached to earthly life that they appear old, while the destiny of the soul is not to grow old on earth, but to remain young. And only the fate of the body on earth is to grow old. Man's higher destiny is to preserve spiritual youth in this aging body in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, so that he may feel more and more within himself the hope that, however the winter storms may prevail in the soul and however the temptations temptations may live in the soul, the living confidence can never die that what has flowed into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha can arise from the depths of the soul, and what we want to revive in our souls through such festivals.

So I tried to summarize what we can feel as the Christmas spirit from a reflection that seeks to combine with these few words what we feel about Christmas from our anthroposophical worldview with what people in earlier times experienced from the message of the divine child in a play like the one we presented. The words express this:

In the depths of man's soul
The spiritual sun lives confident of victory;
The right powers of the mind
They are able to sense it
In the winter of the inner life,
And the heart's hope:
He sees the victory of the spiritual sun
In the Christmas blessing light,
As the symbol of the highest life
In the winter's deep night.

When we see something, we ask how it has come about, presupposing something else from which it has arisen. Only applicable to things that happen in the physical world. We have to presuppose something where we no longer ask whence it has arisen. That is the Logos. Nor should the question be put: when did the Logos arise, for saying that it [arose] earlier or later would impose limits on it. All notions of time cease to have meaning with regard to the Logos. What we are saying now about the Logos applies as it has applied countless millennia ago. The Logos is not in time but before all time.

We are going to develop some concepts.

If we refer to something which is absolute in itself, which does not have any of the things we know, as being beyond existence, we have established an abstract concept of what we think the Logos to be—absolute, established, complete, resting in itself. First Logos - sat - Father.

If this Logos is accepted on its own, it rests in itself, there and not there, beyond existence, never perceptible as it is beyond all perception, beyond existence. It follows that this Logos is the absolutely occult, hidden principle, being beyond all revelation. If it is not to be occult, it must reveal itself. We then have its mirror image, with Logos revealed. If we consider this we will immediately see that there at two concepts in this concept, and we thus have something threefold, for in the revealer there must be activity of self revelation:

[Indian] sat, ananda, chit

[Christian] trinity of

1) Father
2) Son, Word
3) Holy Spirit

Initially these three are so sublime that for anything we call evident or perceptible in the ordinary sense we have to call them occult. Three occult principles, therefore. They must first of all be revealed. There are only three, and so they can only reveal themselves to one another:

The Father reveals himself to the Word, The Word reveals itself to the Holy Spirit, The Holy Spirit reveals itself back to the Father.

These are three ways of revelation. We think of them as applied to three principles, so that the activity of these three principles consists in that they take on the task of translating this. The three can enter into different relationships:

It is possible for the Father to hide in the Word, making himself known in this hidden state. The Father principle veils itself in the Word and reveals itself to the Spirit.

It is also possible for the Word to veil itself in the Holy Spirit and thus veiled reveal itself to the Father.

It is also possible for the Holy Spirit to veil itself in the Father and reveal itself to the Word.

The only remaining possibility is that the Father principle veils itself in both, Word and Spirit, and is revealed to itself.

What we have—1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th—we think of as existing in essence; this intrinsic quality, the [seven] relationships between the three Logoi, thus arises in seven essential forms.⁸⁷

Thus the principles arose in mutual fructification. These are the seven rulers, the seven mights that stand before the throne [of God], and these are their qualities. The qualities arise from the relationships of the three Logoi. Only seven are possible.

All Might consists in the Father principle revealing itself to the Word. This is known as first creation, or chaos.

When All Might had done its work, All Wisdom reigned, ordering everything according to measure and number.

When All Wisdom had done its work, All Love reigned, bringing the element of sympathy and antipathy to the whole of creation.

When All Love had done its work, All Justice came; it reigned, bringing in karma, which means birth and death. When All Justice had done its work, All Redemption takes up its work, bringing redemption to everything, which is last judgement.

When the last judgement has done its work, All Hallowing will begin its work, and then All Harmony [bliss] will begin. Let us think of this spread among seven planets. In truth, all seven are present, but one of them always has the power (the others hold lesser offices).

If we take the fourth orb, it is ours. The device for us is therefore: The Father principle veils itself in the Word and reveals itself to the Spirit. And that is Christianity.

With this Cherub we have the key word and hence also the meaning of Christianity.

Miracle of Pentecost ...

All is made through the Word, which on the one side contains the Father in involution; hence John: [In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the Beginning with God. Through him Everything entered into existence and without him nothing entered into existence.’ Kalmia Bittlestone translation]

The task for the next planet, Mercury, 5) All Redemption—the Word veils itself in the Spirit and reveals itself to the Father. When the Word, the Christ, which is in our evolution, veils itself and reveals itself to the Father, it is the next...

Never will the Son be able to come to you but through me, Spirit. If it, Spirit, is to live, to be spread out, evolve, in the next planet, the Word must veil itself in Spirit.

The element, which will set the tone in the next planet, must be prepared for in this one. The Word must go into involution to prepare for the Holy Spirit. This, however, means death here. The mission can only be accomplished if the Word veils itself unto death, and that is the meaning of the death on the cross.

We have come so far as to understand that he was crucified to death ...

This is the meaning of the central Christian mystery. ... In the Bible, Jesus says: I do not go against the book of law in the meaning of Melchizedek.⁸⁸ Melchizedek is the Angel of the Earth’s orbital period.

In the next planetary evolution, the Son will thus provide for the Father what he will then have gathered through the Spirit.

• 87. Elsewhere also called ‘the seven unutterable secrets of life’; full description in Zur Geschichte ... (S. 241 ff.) note 86.
• 88. Biblical name of manu, one of the highest initiates on Earth. In ancient Atlantis leader of the Sun oracle and founder of post- Atlantean civilization. See lectures given in Berlin on 15 February 1909 and Munich on 7 March 1909 in The Principle of Spiritual Economy GA 109, tr. P. Mollenhauer, Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1986. Also lecture given in Berne on 4 September 1910 in The Gospel of St Matthew GA 123, tr. D. S. Osmond, M. Kirkaldy, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1965.

In thinking of the evolution of a planetary system we have to consider the following. Evolution happens in such a way that for every entity, two processes, evolution and involution, are always alternating.⁸⁹ We therefore have to think of the seven as going through evolution and involution.

In the next planet, each of the rules has to advance by one level. 8 is the evolved 7. In evolving further, they evolve into the other. When the 7th has been reached, the process cannot continue. If 7 were to become 8, the process would have existed before, it would be nothing but repetition of the first, or 7 at another level. As we move on, we see that the leaders themselves change. We then have 12 regents and a 13th who is superfluous. This 13th takes the whole planet to a state, which is as it was in the beginning, only at a higher level.

We have to end with 12. In every planetary chain system we thus have not 7 but 12 sublime guiding spirits. Among them, only the 8th is not in action in the first, and so on. (Our concepts belong to the rupic mental world, these spirits are beyond our ability to conceive; we thus speak not of one proceeding from another but of relationships - timeless).

These spirits have been acknowledged as regents in symbols, for instance in the zodiac, with the sun moving through them. Enhancement of conscious awareness in microcosmic evolution also corresponds to the stages in the macrocosm. So that the number 12 has always been important and there have always been 12 guiding spirits everywhere: 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles, 12 knights of the Grail. Both macrocosmically and microcosmically, 12 is therefore the sacred number on which everything is based. 7 are in action, 5 have other work to do. For the physical planet, only 7 come into consideration, which is also why only 7 of the 12 principles of the human being are taught.⁹⁰

Mental derivation from spirits that lie beyond the mental.

We can best get an idea of how evolution relates to involution if we consider some aspects of history.

Evolution and involution always go together as opposites. Consider Greek sculpture. The form was brought out; the intrinsic essence remained inward. Let us now consider Renaissance painting. In Greek sculpture we had involution of colour, evolution of form. When we let painting develop from sculpture we have form in involution, colour in evolution. Something, which before had been involution changed later to become evolution.

The 16th century marked the beginning of personal mental and knowledge-related development. It was preceded by the age of painting (from Cimabue onwards) in the High Renaissance. In the work of Michelangelo, the personal kama manasic element is in involution, colour and sculpted form on the other hand in evolution. The kama manas principle applied, but not through itself; it was in involution. As development proceeded, kama manas, intelligence, had to evolve in the present age. We see, therefore, that the element, which called itself ‘science’, took over from painting. People were descending out of the paintings, as it were, and saying things themselves. The painters had foreseen future, as it were, but in form and colour. People [of the modem age] have transformed into science what was there in involution. If we let Michelangelo rise again, we have Galileo [1546–1642]. The rational mind was thus evolving, whilst wisdom was involving; it was evolving in creative writing. Creative writing became the guardian of the wholly wisdom-filled. The final element was thus given not with an initiate in theory, but in creative writing. [Goethe?]

Someone who knows his mission in the present age must therefore transform the wisdom, which is there in involution, into wisdom which is thought. These are the alternating periods of involution and evolution. We can only consider a phenomenon rightly if we take account not only of what is evolved but also of what has gone through involution.

Every evolutional state of the planets that follows thus signifies a state of evolution which preceded it. Everything which is rational mind on Earth today, was involution in the preceding planet. The element which today has been cast out and down is in evolution on the other hand; kama rupa [astral or desire body], sense-perceptible nature, played the same role then as kama manas [rational mind] does today.

Not all pitris reached the normal status. Their highest principle is still kama rupa today, therefore, and they seek above all to enhance kama rupa. If, therefore, our goal or ideal is to enhance kama manas to its highest peak, we cannot say that this goal comes from this world; it is only being evolved by us. Anything of this world is kama rupa; it is given. Kama manas is the ideal. The ideal of those who consider kama rupa to be the ideal is of this world.

Thus there are two things on this Earth, apart from all else: the human being whose ideal is not of this world. For him, tempters are those who say: Stay with the pleasures of this world. These spirits, whose highest nature relates to our lowest, are called ‘Satan’ or ‘wrongful prince of this world’ in Christian esoteric language. If one who [presents himself] as a guide, someone also called ‘one who goes with the Sun’, truly wants to show the ideal, he must wholly overcome the tempter. Hence the allegorical indication that the overcoming of the final evolutional stage is represented by the temptation. The spirit which is working its way out of involution and into evolution will always fight the one that has already evolved—knight and dragon, Siegfried and the dragon.

• 89. These two concepts are among the most important in Rudolf Steiner’s science of the spirit. See e.g. lectures given in Berlin on 11 November and 23 December 1904 in The Temple Legend (see note 22). In two public lectures given in Berlin on 3 November and 1 December 1904 [in German] in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen GA 53, he considered an aspect of the alternation between form and life in cultural history. The Appendix to Part 2 in this volume shows that a third concept, ‘creation out of nothing’, goes hand in hand with these two.
• 90. (see note 3): ‘As the external eye looks into distant grey mists, so the inner eye of the seer looks in wide expanse of spirit at another five forms of conscious awareness which, however, are quite impossible to describe. All in all we may thus speak of twelve levels of conscious awareness.’

What we have to understand exactly are the relationships between the concepts of existence, life and conscious awareness. What are they seen to be in mystic terms? Let us think of a child learning to write and of all the situations connected with the process, each on its own—the teacher, materials put ready in preparation, with the child not present. If we think of this as the first thing which is part of writing, we have the first aspect of existence. Now [let us consider] on their own all the activities, the movements of the hand which the child learns—life seen separate from existence. We then leave the first and second aspects aside and take the one we have when the child has finished with those activities. All we consider now is what has given the child the power to write—conscious awareness. We always have the three aspects of existence, life and conscious awareness.

Let us define these terms exactly, for wrong ideas tend to creep in when people speak of existence (form), life and conscious awareness in theosophy. It is a matter of existence interacting with life, resulting in conscious awareness. Let us now apply the terms we found in yesterday’s lesson [evolution, involution]. If we look at the interaction between existence and life, we find that existence merges into life, life takes it into itself. Anything of a life taken into existence in this way veils itself in involution again, merging into conscious awareness. We are thus able to say that any conscious awareness is evolution of life and existence which are in involution. If we are able to investigate a conscious mind we ask: What kind of life is in involution in this conscious awareness, and what kind of existence in this life?

Let us now take our conscious awareness, the awareness we have now—self-awareness. If we investigate it we will characterize it the way I tried to do in the book [Theosophy], taking up Jean Paul’s thought: self-awareness is—I am I.⁹¹

Let us now look for anything which is in involution in this. The life of this conscious awareness must be in involution. This conscious awareness, which is now self-awareness, must earlier on have been a life in awareness, and this life in awareness is in involution in there. If we leave aside the ‘I am I’—the ‘I’, then this conscious mind is not saying: ‘I’ [am conscious mind] but ‘I am life.’ The conscious mind has only evolved from it. Being at the level of self-awareness we have aware conscious awareness and not living awareness. Before, we had the extant conscious awareness: I am existence.

Let us do a proper translation of this.

‘I am the I’ is easy to translate: the given situation which the human being experiences.

‘I am life’ is something where we need to take a closer look. Doing so we’ll find that we go beyond the mere ‘I’ to the foundation and have to ask ourselves how ‘I am life’ has developed. There must be interaction between existence and life. Existence is in involution within life. If we consider this, we get a concept of the human being himself, for it is the human being before he became I who lives in the concept ‘I am life’. ‘Human’ is general, ‘I’ specific. The human being is in involution within the I, it comes to evolution in the ‘I’. Uttering the words at this lower level [‘I am life’], we have to say: ‘I am a human being’. When we say these words we bring out from the most inward part what has been woven into it in an occult way, and understand what we no longer are but once have been and what is contained in us in a state of involution.

Third statement: ‘I am existence’. Taking this, we must be clear in our minds that this is a sum of external circumstances which have now slipped wholly into the inside, as the inmost core, the third layer, which lies hidden deep down in us.

I am I = what is given today; I am life = [gap]; I am conscious mind: we address the whole outside world on the level of the conscious mind; we have our essence as such, which is our foundation, for before there was no conscious mind and life, but conditions, conditions that came together and became our inmost essence. We must then change the words to ‘I am an element’. For that is the elemental.

We thus have three levels of conscious awareness which we are able to trace within us:

1) I am I
2) I am a human being
3) I am an element.

If we were to go further, the thread of our three concepts would leave us, but it repeats itself all the time. It becomes ‘existence’ again by connecting with others.

The fourth, then, is union. So that in moving higher we come to the words: I am in union. The I then is like the earlier given situations that united to find their way into life. I-awareness is thus taken up into existence again. In the same way existence has been conscious awareness before. So that the first existence already had an earlier state of consciousness in involution within it. If we now go back from the words ‘I am an existence, an element,’ we come to ‘I am a pre-awareness’. This may also be put as ‘I am a dhyan chohan.’ In Christian esoteric language it is put like this:

I am a god
I am a glory (element)
I am a might (human being)
I am a power (princedom)

Earlier, we called this

All awareness (now pre-awareness)
Life awareness (or plant awareness, i.e. the elemental)
Human-animal awareness or dream consciousness (I am human, humanity awareness)
(now reached) intellectual awareness: (self-awareness).

We thus have the microcosm once more, in its chain.

Let us consider that now the next level breaks through. In union, the I becomes element again.

I am a dhyan chohan = pre-awareness
I am an element = existence
I am a human being = life
I am I = awareness - self-awareness
Existence = psychic awareness
Life = hyperpsychic awareness
Conscious awareness = spiritual awareness

Now self-awareness is raised to existence. What we grasp in our thinking today becomes existence, so that we shall one day have awareness of the whole of humanity in that we make the I cover all human beings. This is then called psychic awareness. The next level will be the one where the I of every other individual comes alive in us—hyperpsychic awareness. At the highest level of all we take the whole world into our conscious awareness: all is in us—spiritual awareness. (Everything that is outside is already inside—divine awareness.)

Let us imagine [demonstrating with a sheet of paper] that the paper is the pre-awareness. Now it narrows down:

1) I am an element

Now it narrows down to something less than that:

2) I am human

Then:

3) I am I

1) The I then itself becomes
2) existence and goes to the outside.
3) It also shines out over life.
4) It shines out over the whole of elemental existence and then comes out again into what it was before.

Recapitulating we find that in the I lies an involution which is as great as we can imagine, so that it contains the complete triad in involution; its essential nature keeps this I completely hidden in the dark. If we examine what entered into this dark element, we find it was life; it brought light into the darkness, shone into it. And before this, existence shone into life, and in existence pre-awareness was in involution. The revelation of pre-awareness is once again the Word.

We are thus able to say: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Through him everything entered into existence and without him nothing entered into existence. What existed was life in him and the life of the light of mankind. And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not taken hold of it.’

The I must let what it is inside, occult, shine out. Nothing from the outside must harm the I, the I must grow strong. What it has inside must emerge in outer strength. What does it find? The tempter, the serpent which evolved earlier and is twisting and turning out there. The I must overcome the serpent, and now we have to understand that this is the sign that someone has given birth to the living Christ in himself in overcoming the deadly, the tempter, death, the prince of this world.

Mark 16: 17-18. Those who believe will have signs which accompany them. In my name they will cast out demons, and they will speak in new tongues. They will pick up serpents and if they drink any poison it will certainly not hurt them. They will place their hands on sick people and they will be well.

If your eye be single, your whole body will be full of light. (It will let the light pass through).

If, however, you are a rogue, there will be darkness in you. If there is darkness in you, how great, then, must darkness be altogether.⁹²

State before the year 30:

I - superhuman I - Christ
I - human chela I - Jesus : Palestine
I - human chela I - John the evangelist: Alexandria
State after 30: Christ in Jesus; Jesus in John

• 91. humorist. Here reference is made to his description of his first Iexperience, published [in German] in his Theosophie (1. Kap., Abschnitt Leib, Seele, Geist): ‘I’ll never forget something which happened in me and which I have never told anyone; it was the birth of my self awareness, and I am able to state the place and the time. One morning I was standing in the front door, a very young child, looking to the left, where the firewood was stacked, and suddenly the inner vision ‘I am an I’ came to me like a bolt of lightning from heaven; it has remained, luminous, ever since. There I saw my I for the first time and for ever.’ First described [in German] in Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben. Kindheitsgeschichte von ihm selbst geschrieben (3 Hefte in 2 Baenden), Breslau 1826 - 1828; 1. Heft, S. 33.
• 92. Matthew 6: 22-23.

It can be seen from what has been said about evolution and involution that it is possible to ask with every phenomenon: What has evolved? [What is in involution?]

Looking at the physical Earth we will find different states of aggregation—solid, fluid, gaseous and ether-like. Physical substances are only perceptible to human [senses] from the outside; they also have an inner aspect, and this is in involution. The outer one, which is evolved, is perceptible to the senses.

Taking fire, air and water, we can say that they are representative of the three levels of which we have spoken:

fire - level of existence air - level of life water - level of conscious awareness.

The way we put it is to say that water is in some way related to conscious awareness, since for the physical human being the astral is the principle in which he becomes aware of himself in sentience.

When we go to the Earth, we have reached the level of existence; when he [the human being] becomes earthly, he gains self-awareness. These four states of aggregation thus represent four states in the human being: existence, life, conscious awareness and then again existence.

Let us go back to the state in which the human being was the way which has been described so often: like jellyfish or gel, not yet having reached the stage then of using air as such in himself. He was a water human being. It is evident that the organ used to take in air would have served no purpose then. It did not [exist], in fact and [hence also] not the creatures of the air, the birds. We were in the process of preparing for the lung human being and the creatures which arose in consequence.

The human being was preparing to take in air, which could only be done by ... him preparing an outer form for himself in which the formless principle concerned would be able to live. The lung is nothing but the evolution of the principle which is in involution in the air. The lung is thus the evolution of life [air].

Let us remember: The human being evolved from a lungless animal to one with lungs, he created form for himself, and life was able to enter into the form. The concomitant was the bird world. The gel-like human being grew solid, taking chaotic matter, dust-like at the time, into himself, and parallel to this assimilation of matter went that of air. Two things happened: assimilation of earthly dust and absorption of the principle of life with the air. He became living from within, in the soul.

We must also note the following. The bird world is something which remains as an eternal symbol of the living human soul. Hence the phoenix forever rising from the ashes in renewal and perishing in the flames.

A process such as the creation of a form through a principle must be seen as something typical.

Earlier, the air as such was the outer vestment of the life principle contained in it, and now the lung [which] is the outer vestment for the life principle contained in the human being.

The relationship between macrocosmic life and air is like the relationship between microcosmic human life and lung.

Once again the Bible can be taken literally: putting together earth dust and the living human being.

If we consider the whole of evolution, every mineral state of life is preceded by three earlier states, and there are three to follow. Let us ask ourselves, what is the relationship between these seven states? In the middle one we have a particular relationship between existence, life and conscious awareness. It is more or less in balance. If we think of them being evenly distributed, we get the middle planet, balance:

existence of body \(a\), life or soul \(b\), spirit or conscious mind \(c\). The planet is in its middle state:

Other relationships are possible (\(=\) equal, \(>\) predominant):

No others are possible.

When existence is grossly preponderant over the other states, so that life and conscious awareness are seed-like, we have the arupa state. If we let life be such that it contains existence, we have form, rupa. If conscious awareness preponderates ... [gap], we have the astral. When they are equal [we have] the physical.

In the arupa state we have existence in evolution, life and conscious awareness in involution. Rupa state: existence and life evolved, conscious awareness in involution. Astral state: all three evolved, but existence and life greater than conscious awareness. In the physical, approximate equality of proportions.

We have now tried to approach these things from different points of view, keeping our concepts fluid as we attach them to these things.

An important occult maxim is to see any form of understanding merely as a vestment for the essential nature. This must live in us. We must all the time make garments and vestments of the nature of the thing in us, but be aware that the nature of the thing is not in those vestments and garments. The moment we have found a form that expresses the inner nature of the thing we have made the esoteric exoteric. The esoteric can thus never be told in any but an exoteric form.

Create forms of understanding all the time, but also always overcome the forms of understanding you have created for yourself. First it is you, secondly are the forms of understanding you have created, thirdly it is you again, having made those forms your own and overcome them. This means that you are existence first, then life in the forms you have created, and thirdly conscious awareness in the life forms which you have assimilated. Or: you are you and need to evolve in your forms, so that you may then let the evolved forms go through involution in you.

Human understanding is thus also existence, life and conscious awareness.

It is impossible to see the all and everything of a truth in a dogma or teaching; the dogma is only the second element. We need to overcome it; then we have seen the truth of things for ourselves. Hence the important maxim:

Human beings have to be dogmatic in order to perceive the truth, but they must never consider the dogma to be the truth. And this gives us the life of someone seeking the truth; he can recast the dogma in the fire of concept.

Occultists therefore work with dogma in the freest possible way.

This insight, this stroke in the world of concept and then again counter stroke, is called ‘dialectics’, whilst holding fast to concepts is called ‘logic’. Dialectics is therefore the life of logic, and someone who understands the spirit of dialectics will transform dead, rigid concepts into living ones when he comes to the higher regions of perceptive insight, that is, he will assign them to particular persons. He will transform logic into dialogue. Thus Plato made logic into dialectics, transforming it into dialogue.

Goethe's green serpent⁹³

God - wisdom
Light - form in which wisdom comes into its own

What is more glorious than light? Dialogue!

Conclusion of Rudolf Steiner’s Eleven European Mystics, Angelus Silesius:⁹⁴

My friend, it is good so. In case you want to read more Go and be yourself the script, yourself the essence.

• 93. Refers to Goethe’s Tale of the Green Snake and the Fair Lily. See Rudolf Steiner’s Goethe’s Standard of the Soul GA 22, tr. D. S. Osmond, London: Anthr. Publ. Co. 1925.
• 94. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modem Age GA 7, tr. K. E. Zimmer, Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980.

The first, from which all else arose, was godhead unmanifest. From it the second then arose, which is life, or also unmanifest creative substance. This life then went through the most manifold variety of forms and was named akasha or mahat in the forms. This akasha or mahat contains everything that there is in the world by way of forms of life. All the hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Powers, Powers of Origin, Archangels and Angels came forth through life and created the forms under which this one life appears.

The first power, unmanifest godhead, is also called the Father; the second power is the Son, being at the same time life and creative substance; and the third power is the Spirit. Together these powers of origin thus appear as Father, Son and Spirit, as conscious awareness, life and form. The power of life is under the guidance of Michael, the one who belongs to the Sun; the power of form is under the guidance of Samael, who belongs to Vulcan, where all life will have been transformed into living forms. The power of conscious awareness is under the guidance of Anael, who encompasses everything there is. Thus the upper three are:

These three are reflected in the higher triad of the human being

Atman is the part of the human being he must reach through evolution. In it, life spirit is reflected in two reflections in his spirit—as rational soul and sentient soul. And the Spirit Self is reflected in his soul in the astral as sentient body and ether double body. Finally atman is reflected in him as his physical body.

A reflection of the highest three is also in the human being, but as the element which goes below the actual physical level, his lower nature, in him.

The descent of man really went down as far as the fourth planet, the fourth round, the fourth globe and the fourth root race. Then humanity had descended so far into form that the right moment had come for ascent, to bring ascending evolution to expression as well in the form. But the human physical body went beyond this lowest point of descent, and the development which came after this time in the physical human being was really below the level of the actual physical human being. These are the lower forces, which drag the human being down and prevent him from moving forward. These powers, ruling in man as the lower triad, do, however, contain the reflection of the highest triad, but their use does take one on the path of black magic. These are the forces that took the original Turanians⁹⁵ to perdition. They are also beginning to be known again in our time, taking people on the black path. A white magician only uses such higher powers as the human being has in his head. Through the seven gates in his head he is connected with the seven reflections of cosmic forces, [right and left eye, right and left ear, right and left nostril, mouth = 7]. Through an organ up in the top of the head, which has not yet been opened, the human being is connected with atman; through the right eye, life spirit, budhi, flows into him; through the left eye, Spirit Self, manas, flows into him.

Budhi is reflected in his spirit as rational and sentient soul. With the right ear he is connected with everything which flows through the world as thought; through the left ear, the sensations of the world flow into him. Manas is reflected in his soul as sentient body and ether double body.

Through the right nostril, he is connected with the nutrient powers of cosmic life, which flow into his sentient body; through the left nostril he is connected with the powers of growth in the world, which flow into his ether double body. Through his mouth, the human being is connected with the spirit human being—atman. Through his mouth, the highest which is in him comes to expression. Because of this, words should be sacred to human beings, and they should not talk to no purpose but only when they want to express thoughts. They must get used to a chastity of words.

If the human being enters inwardly into the significance of his sense organs, he can connect with the cosmic powers through his sense organs. Everything which is below the level of physical evolution must be cast off. The real human being is the one who lives in his head and is connected with the powers of the cosmos through the seven gates of his head.

• 95. 4th Atlantean sub race. See Cosmic Memory (note 11), chapter on our Atlantean forebears.

The lecture cycle on the basic elements of Theosophy that I recently announced will have to be given later at a more appropriate time. I have postponed those lectures and decided for now to dedicate Thursdays to the subject of cosmology, the evolution of the world, that is, the teaching about the inception of the world and the shaping of the human being within this world in a theosophical sense.

I am aware that this involves the most difficult chapter of theosophical teaching, and I can inform you that several of our branches have decided not to even touch upon this chapter because it is too difficult. Nevertheless, I have decided to do so, because I believe that the indications I am able to give may be useful to many of you. Even though we cannot cover the subject completely at once, we can nevertheless receive indications that will serve to allow us to penetrate more deeply into the material later.

Those of you who have been involved in the theosophical movement for a long time will know that these questions—How did the world begin? How did it evolve to the point where human beings can inhabit it?—are the first ones taken up in the theosophical movement. Not only one of the first books that brought the attention of the west to the ancient world view, “Isis Unveiled” by H. P. Blavatsky, treated the questions about the beginning and evolution of the world, but also the book to which we owe the majority of our oldest followers, “Esoteric Buddhism”, by Sinnet. How does a solar system form? How did the planets and the star groups come into existence? How did our Earth develop? What stages did it go through and which ones still stand before it? These questions are dealt with in depth in “Esoteric Buddhism”. Then at the end of the 1880s Blavatsky's “The Secret Doctrine” appeared, and in the first volume it deals with the question: How did the world system evolve?—and in the second volume: How did the human race evolve on Earth?

I only need to point to one thing in order to show the difficulties involved. When you open the first volume of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”, you find that certain assertions in Sinnet's “Buddhism” are described as erroneous and are partially corrected. The theosophical writers misunderstood some of these things and some of them were incorrectly described. Therefore Mrs. Blavatsky corrected them. She said that a kind of Babylonian speech confusion occurred and that the leading personalities [of the Theosophical Society] were not really knowledgeable concerning these questions. You all know that exalted masters who are far beyond our average development imparted the teachings in “The Secret Doctrine”. Already before the “Secret Doctrine” a book appeared in which Sinnet, the author of “Esoteric Buddhism”, published a series of letters from a Mahatma. We see from this the difficulties in understanding this secret doctrine, and we understand how Sinnet and Blavatsky, so diligent in receiving this teaching, were downright desperate at the difficulty in understanding it. “Oh”, one of the teachers said, “you are accustomed to grasp things with a different intellect and so cannot understand what we have to say even though you make a great effort to do so”. If we consider this statement, the difficulty becomes apparent. Misunderstandings arise everywhere that cosmology is taught. Having explained all that, I ask your indulgence if I now try to contribute something about this teaching.

I would like to begin by clarifying the position of theosophical cosmology in relation to modern science and its methods. Some could say: look at the advances our astronomers have made; we can attribute that to the telescopes, the mathematical and photographic methods that have given us knowledge of distant stars. Present day science with its thorough methods seems—in their opinion—to be the only reliable source of knowledge about the evolution of the world system. They feel they have the right to ridicule whatever is said from the other side concerning this subject. Many an astronomer will object: What you theosophists tell us about astronomy is ancient wisdom that the Chaldeans or Veden priests taught and that belongs to the oldest stores of wisdom that humanity possesses; but what meaning can what was said thousands of years ago have when it is only since Copernicus that astronomy has acquired a relatively firm basis. Therefore, what Blavatsky says in “The Secret Doctrine” seems only to contradict what our telescopes and so forth make clear to us astronomers. But the theosophist does not need to contradict what the astronomer claims. It isn't necessary, although there are theosophists who think they must fight against present day astronomy in order to make room for their own teaching. I know very well that the leaders of the theosophical movement think they can instruct astronomers. I would like to illustrate the theosophists' [correct] attitude in respect to astronomers with one simple example.

Take a poet whose work gives us pleasure. This poet may find a biographer who will try to explain the inner spiritual aspects of the poet's being. There is, however, another possibility—the physiological, the scientific way. Let's say that a natural scientist studies the poet. He will only take into consideration the poet's physiological and physiognomic characteristics; he studies him from the natural scientific point of view, and will tell us what he can see and combine with a natural scientific understanding. We as theosophists would say that this investigator describes the poet from the standpoint of the physical plane. He won't say a word about what we call the poet's biography—the soul-spiritual aspect. So we would have two coexisting ways of describing the poet, which do not need to contradict each other at all. Why shouldn't the natural scientific and the soul-spiritual coexist and each be relevant in its own way? One doesn't have to contradict the other.

It is the same with natural scientific cosmology, with what our astronomers tell us about the structure of the world and the evolution of the world system. They will say what their physical senses reveal to them. Alongside this, however, the soul-spiritual way of looking at things is possible, and when we look at it this way, we will never collide with astronomy; on the contrary, both ways of thinking will sometimes support each other. When, for example, scientific brain physiology was far less advanced than it is now, there were authors who wrote biographies of important people. The astronomer cannot therefore object that the esoteric way of thinking is antiquated and impossible just because Copernicus gave astronomy a new basis. The esoteric sources are completely different; they existed long before the eye learned to observe the heavens through telescopes and before the stars could be photographed. Copernican and esoteric research have quite different things to say; and the force of the one in the human soul is not dependent on the other. The force that gives us information about the soul-spiritual aspects goes so far back that no historian can tell us when this way of describing the world structure began. It is not possible to discover how the spiritual leaders came upon these esoteric views.

Esoteric schools existed in Europe before the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875. The knowledge was only disseminated in small circles, however. A strict rule stated that the knowledge was not to pass beyond the walls of the schools. If someone wanted to enter a school, he had to work hard on himself before the first truths were communicated to him. It was held that a person had to make himself ready before receiving these truths. There were many degrees in the schools through which one had to pass—trial grades; and whoever was considered not ready had to prepare himself further. If I described those degrees to you, the strictness of the trials would make you dizzy. The things about the evolution of the world were considered to be the most important and were communicated only to those who had reached the highest degrees. During the 17th century, which had a great influence on culture, this knowledge was in the hands of the Rosenkreuz (Rose Cross) movement, which was originally based on oriental knowledge, and this knowledge was passed on to the European adepts in the various degrees. At the end of the 18th century and especially at the beginning of the 19th century, these esoteric schools disappeared from the European cultural scene and the last Rosenkreuz adepts withdrew to the Orient. It was the era in which men were to organize life according to external knowledge; the invention of the steam engine, scientific research into cell biology and so on came about. Esoteric wisdom had nothing to contribute then and those who had reached the highest points of this wisdom, the highest grades, withdrew to the Orient. Although there were esoteric schools later on, they do not interest us much now; but I must mention them because Mrs. Blavatsky and Mr. Sinnet, when they received cosmological knowledge from the Tibet-Buddhist esoteric schools, went to the basic sources.

A long spiritual development in Europe had brought the European brain, the European thinking ability, to such a point that difficulties arose for the understanding of esoteric truths. These truths were understood only through great exertion. When this knowledge was first made public partly by “Esoteric Buddhism”, partly by “The Secret Doctrine”, the followers of the esoteric schools took notice, and it seemed to them a mistake that the strict rule not to let anything go beyond the walls of the schools had been broken. The followers of the theosophical movement knew, however, that it was necessary to make some of these things known. Western science could not accept what they said because no one was able to prove what Mrs. Blavatsky and Sinnet had written. Especially puzzling was the beautiful cosmological song that comes from the so-called Dzyan verses,¹ which introduce both volumes of Madame Blavatsky's book. The authenticity of these verses, which relate the history of the universe, was challenged; no scientific investigator could make anything of them; it all seemed a slap in the face of everything European scholars knew. There was one researcher, an orientalist named Max Müller,² whom I greatly respect, who energetically stood up for oriental wisdom. Everything he was able to learn about oriental wisdom he made available to Europe. But neither Max Müller nor any other scientist could do anything with what Madame Blavatsky proclaimed. They all said that the contents of “The Secret Doctrine” were pure fantasy. The scholars had never found anything like it in Indian documents.

Madame Blavatsky said that the place where she had obtained her secrets still contained great treasures of ancient literature, but that the most important parts of this wisdom had been kept protected from western eyes. Even the little that was revealed wasn't understood because of the European way of thinking; the commentary that contained the key to understanding was lacking. The books that showed how the individual propositions were to be understood were carefully hidden by the native Tibetan instructors—at least that's what Madame Blavatsky said. But other thinkers claimed that this literature testifies that an ancient wisdom existed that went far beyond anything the world knows about spiritual matters today. The oriental wise men say that ancient wisdom is contained in those books, which they have carefully protected, and that this ancient wisdom has not been handed down by people like us, but they derive from higher beings, that they derive from divine sources. The Orientals speak of a divine ancient wisdom. But Max Müller said in a lecture to his students that it is not possible to verify that such an ancient wisdom existed. When a great Brahmin Sanskrit scholar heard about this from Mrs. Blavatsky, he said: Oh, if only Max Müller were a Brahmin and I could take him to a temple; I could convince him there that a divine wisdom exists.

The things that Blavatsky revealed through the Dzyan verses are in part from such hidden sources. If Mrs. Blavatsky had invented these verses by herself we would be facing an even greater wonder.

We are not obliged, however, to take the esoteric messages about the origin of the world from the old writings. There are forces in man that enable him to observe and investigate the truths himself, when he develops these forces in the right way. And what one can experience in this way agrees with what Mrs. Blavatsky brought from the Far East. It turns out that the occultists in Europe also protected knowledge that the teacher passed on from generation to generation without ever entrusting it to books. The occultists could therefore assess what Blavatsky indicated in “The Secret Doctrine” according to their own knowledge, especially what they had acquired through their own capabilities. It was tested and confirmed,³ but it is nevertheless difficult for the European occultist to come to terms with it. I will just mention one point: European esoteric knowledge is in a very definite way determined by Christian and Cabbalistic influences and has therefore taken on a one-sided character. If we take this into consideration though, and go back to the basis of this knowledge, full agreement with what has been revealed through Mrs. Blavatsky is possible.

Although a kind of verification of what Mrs. Blavatsky told us about cosmology was possible, it is difficult to make the scholars understand what is meant when the origin of the world is spoken of based on esoteric knowledge. It is of course amazing what the scholars have accomplished in deciphering the old documents, how they struggle to decipher the Babylonian cuneiform characters and the Egyptian hieroglyphics; but Max Müller said that these inscriptions give no indication about the origin of the world. We see how the scholars work around the edge of things and don't get to the core. I am not criticizing the great care and the exact mosaic work the scholars have performed. I will only point to the books that have appeared concerning the Bible-Babel arguments.⁴ That is all fine mosaic work, but the scholars are stuck at the periphery. One feels that they have no idea of how to arrive at the key to these mysteries. It is like when one begins to translate a book written in a foreign language. At first it is imperfect. It's the same with the translations of the old creation myths by our scholars. These are mutilations of the ancient teachings that were handed down from generation to generation. Only those who reached a certain degree of initiation could know something about them. At the end of these lectures I will come back to this.

Initiates are those who have attained knowledge of these things through their own experience. You may ask: what is an initiate anyway? In Theosophy and in the esoteric societies so much is said about so-called initiates. An initiate is one who has developed to a high degree the force that slumbers in every person—and which can be developed by every person. The initiate has cultivated these forces and adapted them to the point that he can understand what kind of forces in the universe are the subjects of what I want to explain. Well, you will say: we are always told that such occult forces exist which slumber in men, but that doesn't make it certain. That is the result of a misunderstanding. The mystic, the occultist, does not assert anything that a scholar cannot assert in his field. Let's say that someone tells you a mathematical truth. If you haven't studied mathematics you don't have the necessary knowledge to verify this truth. No one will deny that to judge a mathematical truth the necessary capacities must be attained first. No authority can decide about such a truth, only the individual who has experienced it can judge. And only someone who has experienced an esoteric truth can judge it. Our contemporaries, however, demand that the occultist prove what he says to the satisfaction of every average intelligence. They stand by the sentence: what is true must be provable and everyone must be able to understand it. The occultist, however, asserts nothing else than what any other scholar asserts in his own field, and he demands nothing more than every mathematician also demands.

You could ask: why are occult truths reported today? The previous method used by the esoteric schools was to keep them in small groups. This method is still used by the occultists of the “right”. Whoever has experience and can read the signs of the times, however, knows that this is no longer correct. And the fact that it is no longer correct is the reason for the origin of the theosophical world movement. What is most developed in our times is understanding. We thank the advances in industry and technology to our combining thinking with the senses. This understanding, or intellectualism, celebrated its greatest triumphs in the 19th century. Intellectual thinking has never been so strongly developed as it is today. I said that the oriental wise men possessed an ancient wisdom, but it was in a completely different form than that of today's thinking. The great teachers of the Orient did not have this cleverness of logical thinking, this pure logic; they didn't need it. Therefore it was difficult to understand them. They had intuition, inner vision. True intuition is not acquired through logical thinking; rather a truth appears directly before the spirit of the person concerned. He knows it. It doesn't need to be proven to him.

The Teachers of the theosophical movement now have the right to impart a certain part of this esoteric wisdom. We have the right to clothe in the modern form of thinking the wisdom that has been imparted to us in the form of intuition. Thought is a force like electricity, like steam power, like the power of heat. And whoever receives the thoughts that are taught within the theosophical movement and devotes himself to them without being mistrustful from the start, in him these thoughts are a force. The listeners don't realize it at first; the seed begins to grow later. No theosophical teacher asks anything more than to be heard. He doesn't demand blind faith, only listening. Neither believing acceptance nor unbelieving rejection are correct standpoints. The listener should only consider the thoughts conveyed to him, free from belief or doubt, free from Yes or No. He must be “neutral” and allow the teachings to work “on probation”. Whoever does this has not only thoughts flowing into him, but also a spiritual power that acts.

People find the easiest access through thinking because Western European culture has developed this capacity to such an extent. Even the most faithful church-going Christians cannot imagine to what extent people believed earlier. This source of conviction no longer flows. Today we must fructify our thought in a completely different way. In the past spiritual communications had to be imparted in secret esoteric schools because thinking was not cultivated as it is today. Today we must combine spirituality with the force of thinking, by which we kindle the thoughts so they live. The spiritual speaker speaks in a different way to his listeners than does a common speaker. He speaks so that a kind of spiritual fluid, a spiritual force flows from him. The listener should be objective, without a Yes or No; he should live with this thought, meditate on it and let it work in him. Then a force will be lighted in him.

Today we must announce esoteric truths about the origin and evolution of the world in the form of European thinking and science. These lectures will describe in this way the conditions that preceded the formation of our earth. We will be led back to the most ancient times where, in the grayest light of dawn, those beings formed who later developed into human beings. We will be led to the stage where this human being was imbued with earthly forces, where he was surrounded by earthly matter, to the point where he now stands. We will learn and see the pre-earthly and earthly evolution of our world, and how Theosophy gives us an outlook into the future. We will see where the evolution of the world is going. We want to show all that without opposing the ideas of today's astronomers. If we develop the forces that slumber in us, we will see for ourselves the great goal to which we are heading: the acquisition of cosmological wisdom. We will consider this cosmological wisdom in the next lectures.

• 1. Later, the Tibetologist David Reigel identified these verses as a part of the “Kui-Te” books, probably also as the fifth, esoteric part of the “Kalachakra-Tantra” with the title “Jnana”.
• 2. Max Müller, 1823-1900, one of the most well-known orientalism, speech and religion experts. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, as long as it stood on a purely Indian philosophical basis.
• 3. An obvious reference to “The Transcendental Universe, 6 lectures on occult science, theosophy and the Catholic faith”, London 1893/94.
• 4. Friedrich Delitzsch, 1850-1922, Professor of Assyrology and Semitic languages, found a certain relationship between the Old Testament and Assyrian creation myths (“Bibel und Babel”, Leipzig 1902). His lectures on the subject generated vehement arguments and many articles contradicting him.