The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Those of you who heard the last lectures given here will have understood from what was said in them that it is an absolute necessity of our time that the Science of Initiation, the real science of the spiritual life, should permeate the whole evolution of our present civilized society. I have already said much concerning the obstacles which hinder the permeation of our civilization, both present and in the future, by the science of the spiritual worlds. First, above all things, there is that feeling which I have often characterized as fear of spiritual knowledge. At the present time one has only to say such a thing openly for it to be received on all sides as a kind of insult. According to the views of most people, how can it be conceivable that in this age in which such splendid progress has been made, men should be afraid of any kind of knowledge? People today undoubtedly believe that with their powers of cognition they are in a position to comprehend everything, practically everything. The fear, however, of which I am speaking and of which I have so often spoken, does not lie within the consciousness of mankind. In his consciousness man persuades himself that he is courageous enough to face any kind of knowledge. But deep down in that part of the soul of which men know nothing, and of which indeed they wish today to know nothing, there lies this unconscious fear. And because men have this unconscious fear, all kinds of reasons rise up from the depths of their soul which they call logical, and they give out these reasons as logical objections to Spiritual Science. These are not logical objections. They are only the outcome of that fear of the science of the spirit, a fear which rules unconsciously in human souls. As a matter of fact, in the hidden depths of his soul-life everyone knows far more than he thinks, but he does not want this knowledge, which is rooted in the depths of his soul-life, to come to the surface, because in the presence of it he is afraid. Above all things man surmises one thing about the super-sensible worlds; he surmises that in all that he calls his thinking, in all that he designates as his world of thought, there is something contained of a super-sensible world. At the present time, even persons of a materialist turn of mind cannot altogether drive away the dim feeling that in the life of thought there is something contained which somehow indicates a super-sensible world. And at the same time man surmises something else about this thought-world. He divines that this world of thought relates itself to an actual reality, just as the image seen in a looking glass relates itself to the reality reflected by the looking glass. Just as the image in the looking glass is no reality, so man has to admit that his own world of thought is no reality. In that moment where man has the courage, the fearlessness, to admit that the world of thought is not a reality, in that moment he is also seized with yearning for a knowledge of the spiritual world. For after all, one would like to know what it is that is really there, but of which one only sees the reflection.

What I have just said has an important polaric counterpart. When through the Science of Initiation we cross the threshold of the super-sensible world, over into the spiritual world, then everything which man experiences here as sensible reality is transformed to a mere picture, to an appearance. We mount up into the super-sensible world and just as, let us say, here on earth the super-sensible world is a mirror-picture, existing only as a mirror-picture, so in the super-sensible world the earthly world exists only as a mirror-picture. He, therefore, who speaks from the Science of Initiation, speaks quite naturally of the realities of the sense world as of “pictures”. Now, human beings feel this; they feel that that on which they can stand so comfortably, that which they can breathe in so comfortably, which they can see so comfortably without having to do anything else than, at most, open their eyes when they get up in the morning and rub them—all this becomes a mere picture. They feel this and they begin to feel insecure, much as a man might who, taken for a walk, is led to the edge of an abyss and is then seized by the dizziness of fear. On the one side therefore, the human being feels that his thinking in the sense-world is a mere sum-total of pictures. On the other side he feels—and he feels it even if he deceives himself through that unconscious fear—that that which is told him of the super-sensible world makes this physical world a mere picture. As I have said, this is felt by men, and therefore they struggle against that which comes from the Science of Initiation. They rebel because they think that the secure foundation of existence falls away from them when their soul-life is, as it were, transformed to a mere picture.

Of course, it is not everybody in our present age who, quite unprepared, can go through that which has to be gone through by one who actually directly enters the world of Initiation. For anyone who enters the world of Initiation must not only know in it what every human being today should strive to know, but he has to live in it as well. He has to live in it, just as a man lives with his body in the physical sense world. That means he has to go through, as it were, by proxy what is only to be gone through in the physical sense-world at the moment of death. He has to gain the power to live in a world for which the physical, sensible part of him is not adapted. If we cut our finger we feel a certain pain, a discomfort. Why do we feel discomfort when we cut our finger? For the simple reason that the knife cuts the skin and muscle and nerve, but does not cut the super-sensible etheric body. If we have an uninjured finger, our super-sensible etheric body is adapted to it. If we cut the finger (and we cannot cut the etheric body) the super-sensible uncut etheric body is not adapted to it. That is the reason why the astral body then feels pain. The pain comes from non-adaptability to the sensible corporality. But when man crosses the threshold and enters the super-sensible world, then in his whole body he is no longer adapted to the sensible body. He gradually feels something similar to what he felt locally when he cut his finger. And this, my dear friends, this has to be thought of as enhanced to an unlimited degree.

Naturally, then, one cannot imagine what would come over human beings of the present-day, who often are so brave in their consciousness, and so sorry for themselves in their souls, if they suddenly received the power to live in the super-sensible world, if they had to experience everything which comes from non-adaptability to the super-sensible world.

But not only are human beings today so far advanced that with their healthy human understanding they can comprehend everything related by those who know the life in the super-sensible, but this knowledge of the super-sensible, this receptivity towards the science of the super-sensible, is an absolute, an unconditional, necessity for the healthy human understanding of the present age. Only this knowledge of the super-sensible can throw light upon all that is so chaotic, so destructive, in our modern surroundings. We are living in a world in which things are making their appearance, in which things are working themselves out, of which we must say: “They cannot go on like this, they must undergo transformation.” But human beings today have absolutely no insight into that which lives around them. To see through that which lives around man today is only possible through the Science of Initiation, is only possible when all the life of our present age can be compared with all the phenomena of life which have marked the evolution of mankind in the course of centuries, of millennia.

There has come a time when it must be said publicly that if any fruitful impulse is to be brought into life, into life with its modern destructive phenomena, it can be no other than the principle of the Three-fold Division of the Social Organism. By this means the eyes of men's souls will be directed to the three basic streams of our present life of civilization.

These three basic streams, as most of you today are fully aware, are the stream of the Spiritual Life (in the full meaning of the word spiritual), and that of the Political Life of Rights, and that of the external Life of Economy and Industry.

When these three basic streams of life are placed before the soul of man, when the name for each of these streams is uttered, in each case a great sum-total of the phenomena of Life is really included.

Let us now pass briefly before our spiritual vision these three streams in their sequence. We have today a Spiritual Life. In one way or another each individual has a part in this spiritual life: One, perhaps because his way of life is conditioned by economic circumstances or civic status, goes only to an elementary school; another perhaps is taken further on in our educational institutions. And that which is learnt in this way by human beings lives on at work amongst us in our social life. By this means we are linked to our fellow man.

Today the time has come when the question has to be put searchingly: “Where has this whole spiritual life come from, and what was it in the course of its descent, in the course of its evolution, which gave to it the character which it bears today?” If we go back to the real origin of this spiritual life, we must pass through certain stages on the way. That which characterizes the life of our schools, elementary and higher—I am leaving out the intermediate stages for the present—all goes back to a far-distant past. People usually do not know how far it goes back, e.g., in the case of the elementary school, that that goes back to the time of ancient Greece. Fundamentally our spiritual life today is nourished by impulses which existed in ancient Greece in a somewhat different form, and which have only been changed since then. But these impulses did not originate even in ancient Greece. They originated far away in the East. Thousands of years ago at their source in the East they had certainly another form than they had in ancient Greece. In the East these impulses belonged to the Wisdom of the Mysteries. If we leave aside our legal-political life, which is entangled chaotically as in a knot with the spiritual life, and also leave aside the life of industry, of economics; if we separate, abstract from these our spiritual life, then we can go back, mounting the path to certain Mysteries of the East, the origin of which lies undoubtedly thousands of years ago. That, however, which for us today in educational institutions is a dry barren abstraction, devoid of life, was then something altogether living. And if we transport ourselves in spirit back to those Mysteries of the East to which I am now referring, we meet as the leaders of these Mysteries men who may be designated as a kind of union of priest, of king, and at the same time, strange as it may sound to people today, of industrialists, economists. For in those Mysteries—I shall call them the “Mysteries of Light or of the Spirit”- an all-embracing knowledge of life was pursued, a knowledge which, in the first place, aimed at directing the study of the nature of man by means of the facts of the world of the Heavens, and the world of the Stars. But this knowledge was also a wisdom which aimed at regulating the rights of man's communal life in accordance with the knowledge thus acquired. Thus from these Mystery centres instruction was given for the tending of the cattle, for ploughing the fields, for laying the water courses, and so on. This Science of Initiation of hoary antiquity had an impelling power for social life; it was something which gave scope to the whole man. It was in a position not merely to say lovely things about the good and the true, but also by the Spirit itself it could rule practical life, could organize it and give it form.

Now the path which these Mystery leaders took and, which so far as was possible to them, showed to the people who belonged to such a Mystery, was a path leading from above downwards. First, these Mystery leaders strove for a revelation of the spiritual world, then grasping the spirit in the concrete in accordance with the basic principles of atavistic clairvoyance, they worked down to the political life, to the political shaping of the social organism, then down to economy and industry. That was Wisdom, with impelling force for life itself. By what road did this wisdom with its impelling life-force actually come among mankind?

If we go back to the ages before the Mysteries to which I am now referring became authoritative, we find in the regions of civilized humanity people with a primeval atavistic clairvoyance, human beings who, if they spoke of the needs of life, could invoke the impressions of their heart, of their soul, of their inner vision. These people were spread over the regions now called India, Persia, Armenia, North Africa, South Europe, etc. One thing, however, we do not find in the souls of these human beings. It is that which today we consider our proudest soul-treasure—Intellect, Reason. The inhabitants of the civilized world of that time did not yet need reason. What our reason does today, was done by those human beings out of the promptings of their souls, and these promptings were guided and directed by the leaders whom these men had. Later there came into these regions another human race, quite a different race from the earlier population. In the Sagas and Myths, and indeed also in history, we are told that from the highlands of Asia certain people came down in very ancient times who brought a form of civilization to the south and south-west. Spiritual Science is required to establish what kind of men these were who came down upon those earlier human beings, who simply from their own inner promptings received the guiding powers for daily life. Through investigation by Spiritual Science we find that those who brought in a new population-element combined two qualities, one of which the earlier people did not possess. The original inhabitants had atavistic clairvoyance without reason, without intelligence. Those who came down amongst them also had something of the clairvoyant power, but at the same time in their souls they had received the first germ of intelligence, of reason. They brought, therefore, into the civilization of that time, a clairvoyance impregnated with reason. These were the first Aryans, of whom history tells us, and out of the mutual opposition of the ancient early people living by atavistic powers of the soul, and those who impregnated the ancient soul-powers with reason, out of that opposition there arose the first distinction into Caste, external, physical and empirical, which still works on in Asia, and of which Tagore, for instance, speaks.

The most prominent members of the race, who possessed at the same time ancient soul-vision and the intellect which was dawning in humanity, were the leaders of those Mysteries of which I have just spoken, the Mysteries of Oriental Light. From these proceeded the Mysteries of Greece. Thus we may say: From the Mysteries of the East there went forth later the stream of the Spirit, that living wisdom with its living practical impulse of which I have just spoken. In the course of time it came over to Greece. Its influence is still to be traced in the most ancient Greek civilization. But in the progress of Greek civilization the influence became weakened, the leaders lost their ancient soul-vision, and reason more and more freed itself from the old clairvoyance. Thereby the leadership of this civilization lost its meaning, because this once only had meaning as long as the leaders were endowed with spiritual soul-vision as well as intelligence. History tells us that that which had a meaning in ancient times is preserved into a much later epoch. Thus we find humanity in the later Greek civilization still grouped in a way which had a meaning for that ancient time, when the leaders of the Mysteries were actually messengers of the Gods. That which once was wisdom with an impulse for life, was transformed into Greek logic and dialectic, into the wisdom of the Greeks, wisdom which is already strained thin compared with its old Oriental origin. In the old Oriental times every one knew why there were people who obeyed when the leaders gave them directions in economics. In Greece we find the division into masters and slaves. The division of mankind was still there, but the meaning had been gradually lost. And that which for the Greeks still had much meaning, for at least they knew that it came from the ancient Mysteries, was still more weakened as it passed into our modern life of education. In our modern life of education, everything has become devoid of living connection. We pursue today an abstract science. We find no longer a connection between this abstract science and external life. The stream from Greece has gone into our Colleges, into our elementary and secondary schools, into the whole popular cultural life of modern humanity. One curious thing may be observed today. We meet among the men with whom we are surrounded some whom we call “noblemen”, “aristocrats”. We try in vain to find the reason why one person is an aristocrat and another is not, for mankind has long stripped off that which distinguishes the aristocrat from the non-aristocrat. The aristocrat was the leader in the old Oriental Mysteries of Light. He could be the aristocrat, because from him came everything which had a real living impulse in political and economic affairs. The wisdom has become watered thin, the divisions into which it made groups of people have become an external abstraction without meaning for those whose lives are cast in it. From that stream proceeded what we call Feudalism. In external social life this Feudalism lives on, tolerated by some, perhaps vexatious to others, meaningless. No one thinks any more about the meaning, because it is not to be found in life today, but in our modern age of chaos the feudal origin of our abstract science and knowledge shows itself pretty clearly. And when our modern Spiritual life became entirely the spiritual life of the journalistic world, a term was invented which really is a verbal atrocity. Through this term men sought to bring about a transformation of our life, but it was merely the expression of an utterly rickety spiritual life—they invented the term, “spiritual aristocracy”. If anyone tried to explain exactly what is meant by this term he could only say: “It is that which now squeezed dry to the uttermost had once upon a time in the Mysteries of the East, an impelling force which worked down into the furthest limits of practical life.” The term in those days had a meaning, but today it has lost all meaning. And if anyone wishes to describe our Spiritual life, he has to think of a desperately tangled coil of wool where all the threads are twisted together. There are three threads in particular which are entangled. One of them I have just described to you. Our essential task is to unravel the tangle.

Let us now turn the eyes of our soul to the second stream. This second stream had another origin, which also lies far back in the evolution of mankind; it, too, was essentially united with the Mysteries, and in particular with the Mysteries of Egypt. I called the first stream “the Mysteries of the East” or “the Mysteries of Light”. I shall call this second stream “the Mysteries of Man”. These Mysteries were directed above all to obtaining at the Egyptian source, that Wisdom which gives the power to organize human communal life, to establish a relation between one human being and another. This stream from the Mysteries spread through the South of Europe, and then, just as the first stream went through the life of Greece, this second stream found its way to the people of Rome, a people lacking in imagination. I might call it “the stream of Rights”. It took its path through Rome. All that which, bit by bit, in the course of human evolution has been inoculated as Jurisprudence, as legal distinctions in Equity, is the attenuated remnant of knowledge of these Mysteries of Man.

The second thread in our tangle of civilization has come to us in this way, but very much changed, transformed after having passed through the unimaginative mind of Rome. We shall not understand modern life, until we know that men even today are still unproductive both in the life of Spirit and in the life of Rights; until we know that both of these have been received by us from outside—the first after it had traveled the long way from the Mysteries of the East through the Mysteries of Greece, the second, the long way from the Mysteries of Egypt through Rome. Present-day humanity has been sterile with regard to both the life of Spirit and the life of Rights. We could bring forward many cases to prove this assertion, but it will suffice if I point out paths taken by Christianity.

When Christianity sought to enter the world, where had Christ Jesus to appear so that what He had to give to the world could find a foothold? He had to appear in the East. It was in that which lived in the East that He had to place what He had to give to humanity. The Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. What mankind knows about it is in process of evolving. What people first had to say about the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in that which was still left to them from the Mysteries of the East. They surrounded the Mystery of Golgotha with the Science and Wisdom of the Mysteries of the East, and with that Wisdom they tried to understand it. In the early Greek Fathers of the Church we find there is still something of this Christianity.

To point to another manifestation of the same kind, when the civilization of the West had spiritually become utterly sterile, and a spiritual restorative was sought for, through one of its representatives, what happened? In England and America a few people came together and borrowed the Wisdom from the conquered and enslaved people of India. That is to say, they went once more to the East to seek there the spiritual stream, to seek in the East what remained of that ancient spiritual stream. From this arose Theosophy of the English-American dye, which sought to draw water from this source, but in the form it has assumed at the present day. It is the sterility of modern Spiritual life which strikes one most forcibly, especially in Western lands.

The second stream, then, is that which is concerned with Politics and Rights, and which passed through Rome. In it we find the origin of our life of Politics and Rights. This stream which has flowed into, and is still active in our life of Rights, only came by the side-channel of the Roman world. Hence, in our civilization, that which passed into our Spiritual life also has been received by way of the Roman political-legal system. This accounts for so many anomalies. Even Christianity, which spread in the West on Roman lines, took on a form conditioned by this fact. What did the religious element become on its passage through the Roman world? It became that great System of Law which we call the Roman Catholic religion. There, God with his attendant gods, is essentially a Being who rules according to the Roman conception of justice, only He is in the super-sensible world. Here we find established the ideas of debt, of default, which are really only legal ideas, ideas which never existed in the Mysteries of the East or in the Greek philosophy of life. In this Christianity the juristic concepts of Rome are established. It is a religious stream saturated with legalities. Everything which finds expression in life can assume a form of beauty, but we must confess that even that juristic-political scene in which the God of the World becomes the Judge of the World, and winds up the whole evolution of the earth by a legal Act, even that magnificent painting of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, is only a glorious expression of Christianity saturated by legalism. It is just this Christianity saturated by legalism, which finds its culmination in the “Last Judgment”.

We must unwind the tangle of our spiritual, political, and industrial life so that we may see what is really contained inside it. For we live in a chaotic civilization. Three streams are working in it; we must separate them from one another.

The third stream which has come into our chaotic civilization, originated more in the North. Much has filtered into it also, but in another way. This stream has been preserved till today, especially in the social organization of England and America. I shall speak of this stream as “the Mysteries of the Earth”, the Mysteries of the North or of the Earth. Now this stream which developed first as primitive spirituality out of the Mysteries of the Earth, took a different course from that of the essentially Spiritual life of the East. I have said that in the East the path led from above downwards, first revealing itself as the Mysteries of the Heavens and of the Light, then passing down into Politics and Economics. Here, in the North things rose out of Economics, out of the life of Industry. The origin has, of course, vanished from ordinary modern life. We notice it at most in ancient customs which still survive here and there; such customs as are described in accounts of ancient Nordic civilization, of which the English civilization is a branch, e.g., processions through the villages at a certain season of the year, with the bull, which has to fertilize the herd of cows, crowned with wreaths. That is to say, from below upwards there arose a longing after the Spiritual life. The path leads from below upwards. Everything, even that which existed as primitive spirituality, was taken from the industrial-economic life. All the festivals originally were connected with the life of Economy, of Industry, all expressed something of the meaning of the life of Economy. Just as in the Oriental civilization the path led from above downwards, so here, in the North, the path had to lead from below upwards. Mankind had to be raised from below, out of Economics, through the life of Rights, into the Mysteries of the Spirit. Mankind has not as yet advanced very far on this path from below upwards.

If we investigate the Legal life, the life of law and justice, as it has developed in the regions of Western Europe, we find it completely orientated to Rome. If we investigate the Spiritual life, we do not find it so plainly orientated to the East as that Indian Theosophy is of which I have just spoken. But we do find that that which has survived as innate Spiritual life which was not taken from the East, nor saturated with legalities from Rome, we do often find this original Spiritual life struggling to release itself from the Economic life, and with hard labour working itself free.

Let us take a characteristic example. Such philosophers, such students of natural science as Newton, Darwin, Hume, Mill, Spencer, can only be understood if we see how they developed out of the Economic life, how they endeavoured to take an upward path. Mill, for example, as a national economist, can only be understood if we understand the economic conditions surrounding him. We can only understand the English philosophers if we clearly grasp the economic basis of their environment. That basis is something inseparable from the third stream, the stream of “the Mysteries of the Earth”, the stream which works its way from below upwards. This, the third stream, is as yet quite unrefined.

Here then, in the tangle of our so-called civilization, we have the three threads chaotically at work. Always in a certain sense there has been a revolt against this tangle, in the West at least. In America, where the Economic life is derived from the Mysteries of the North, we find theories built up scientifically, but devoid of Spirit, alien to Spirit. America obtained her Legal-Political life by way of Rome. Spiritual concerns were borrowed from the East. In Central Europe, too, there was a good deal of revolt, and various endeavours were made to grasp these things in their primitive clarity; in the Spiritual life with most penetration in what I must call Goetheanism. Goethe, who sought to get rid of a Law-code in the sphere of natural science, Goethe is characteristic of this revolt against the purely Oriental life of Spirit. For the legal element has entered into natural science too. We speak of “Laws of Nature”. The Oriental would never have spoken of the Laws of Nature, but of the Rule of Cosmic Will. The term “Natural Law” was derived from the side-stream of Jurisprudence. It crept into nature knowledge as through a window and became “natural law”. Goethe wanted to grasp the pure phenomenon, the pure fact, the primal phenomenon. Until we purge our Natural Science from its dependence on Jurisprudence, we can never reach a purified cultural life. For this reason Spiritual Science everywhere lays hold on facts, and indicates so-called “laws” as secondary phenomena only.

We find also a certain revolt against the Roman system of Rights, a revolt which is still in the minds of many persons inclined to socialism. For instance, a Prussian minister, Wilhelm van Humbold, in his fine treatise on “The Limits of State Action”, shows stirring within him something of this impulse to free the Cultural life and the life of Economics from the mere life of the State. In that little book there lives the impulse to strip off the political from the other directing forces. Thus in German philosophy, too, there lives this revolt against that which is merely “old”. But only through a healthy insight into that which the Science of Initiation can give concerning the origin of our present cultural life, can man gain a sure foot-hold; only through such insight can healing, can health, come into the evolution of human civilization.

In the East of Europe especially, there has always been a feeling for the necessity of a right co-operation of the three elements in our present life of culture. Of these three streams the one most characteristic in expression is that which came from the North to the West. In the West everything is overpowered by the Economic-industrial life. Of the legal element there is much in Central Europe, whilst much of that which arose from the Mysteries of the East, the Mysteries of Light, is to be found in Eastern Europe and Asia. There, where the caste system still prevails, we find something of the meaning of that old Feudalism which came forth from the Spirit. The life permeated with legalities has bred the modern Bourgeoisie. The Bourgeoisie is the outcome of the stream of Rights. These things have to be seen with perfect clarity now; and the impulse towards this clear recognition lies already in the unconscious part of man, but it is only Spiritual Science which can bring this longing, this impulse, to real clarity.

In the nineteenth century, again and again, we can see how men strove amid all the confusion of very indefinite impulses, to reach ideals for the future. Men wanted especially to put an end to the abstract relations which prevail today between man and man. The life of the Spirit has been watered down so that it lives in us as an abstraction; and the life of Economics is grasping and struggling to find the way upward from below.

In Eastern Europe, where things of such disturbing, devastating significance are now working themselves out, it was shown for the first time in the much-confused nineteenth century how men attempted to prepare for the revolt against this chaos of civilization. The Russian revolutionaries of the second and last third of the nineteenth century, attempted in particular to fertilize the remnant still left in the East of an early stage of Spiritual life, with that element in Central Europe which had already revolted against tradition. We find among such Russians in their correspondence with each other, how they point out that already in Central Europe, the intellect, the pure abstract life of reason has endeavoured to permeate itself with a certain spirituality. Again and again there appears some such sentence as the following: “In German philosophy the attempt has been made once more to raise the intellect, which has lost its ancient soul-vision, to a certain spirituality.” In Eastern Europe they wanted to make themselves intimately acquainted with this attempt in Central Europe, and this intimate knowledge reflects itself in the way these Russian revolutionaries write to one another. They greatly esteemed the philosopher Ivan Petrovitch. They spoke much of his philosophy, how he had raised himself to pure thought, attempting to bring Spirit again into the dialectic play of thought of Western Culture. They tried to draw conclusions from his philosophy. The better to mark their own feeling of relationship to him, they called him not “Hegel”, but “Ivan Petrovitch”. In their endeavours we see foreshadowed that which later on had to work so destructively.

In our age, clear thinking must spread over the whole earth. Everything must be done to help forward the victory of clear thinking. But we must be quite conscious of all that is against us when we make the attempt to reach this clear thinking, and that, amongst many other things, we have against us man's love of ease. We must wean ourselves from the habit of regard for the comfort of men. For mankind needs the Spirit, and the triumph of the Spirit is not brought about by the comfortable paths so often trodden today. Today men fight against the coming in of Initiation with the most significant weapons.

I was recently informed of something which is significant in historic culture. You will correct me if I make a mistake, for I was not there myself. At a meeting where a Protestant clergyman was in the chair, one of our friends made some quotations from the Bible. The truth of these did not please the chairman, who then used the expression, “Here Christ is wrong!” Have I repeated that correctly? (Assent.) Today when one can no longer justify one's own view, it is man who is infallible, and the Christ who is wrong! We have come as far as this.

All these things bear witness to the true character of that which is stirring as Spiritual life in mankind today. Where Spiritual life has reached the most utter abstraction, it can no longer keep within the sphere of truth. But we must become aware of what really exists.

The periodical, The Threefold Social Organism, recently published a notice of a gathering held here at Stuttgart, where from the Roman Catholic side, but in harmony with the Protestant, opposition was made to the teaching given as Spiritual Science. And the leading cleric is reported to have said that no discussion was necessary because people can inform themselves concerning the doctrines of Dr. Steiner from the writings of his opponents, but the writings of Dr. Steiner himself may not be read because the Pope has forbidden it. In fact, this is the latest decree from the Holy Congregation, and it applies especially to Catholics—the decree that it is forbidden to Catholics to read Anthroposophical writings. Roman Catholics, therefore, are officially bound to seek information upon what I teach from the writings of my opponents, but they are not allowed to read what I write myself. Anyone on the other side who knows the whole constitution of the Roman Catholic Church, how the individual is so dovetailed into it that he is only a representative of the whole organization, must in all earnestness, out of the depths of his soul, bring forward the question regarding the moral aspect of such a procedure. Is such a procedure to be reconciled in any way with human morality? Is it not profoundly immoral? Such questions must be put bravely today, without any leniency. We are living in a serious time, and may not go on sleeping in the easy comfort-loving, lazy way. We must express ourselves unreservedly about these things. If we show the immorality of modern untruth in the right light, it will bring about a healing.

Recently an article by a doctor in Sociology was brought to me. It began somewhat as follows: “What a distance there is between the clear thoughts of Waxweiler and the obscure thoughts of Dr. Steiner! But then, this Dr. Steiner was the intimate of William II, and it has been suggested that he helped William II with important advice, especially in recent years. So one can even call this man the Rasputin of William II.” His next sentence runs: “We will not make ourselves the transmitters of such a rumour.” And there are today many people with this mentality, people forsaken by every spirit of truthfulness, and whatever they say is beyond the sphere of truth.

We see two things here. First, the moral degradation of a man who makes himself the bearer of this rumour, and then his fine logic when he says, “Because I spread this rumour among my readers, I do not make myself a spreader of this rumour.” Countless people think in this way. What they say has no reality in it. I cannot say, “I say something because I do not say it.” This is what Monsieur Ferriere says, the man who wrote the article from which I have just read. We cannot enter into relationship with such morally degenerate individuals. I can only maintain, and I hope that it will be brought before this writer's notice, that I have had the following relationships with William II. Once about 1897, I was sitting in a theatre in Berlin, in the middle of the front row, above, and William II sat in the Royal Box, and I saw him, as far away as from here to the end of this room. The second time was when he walked behind the coffin of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and that was quite far away. The third time was in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, where, with his following, with the Marshal's baton in his hand, he rode through the streets, all the people shouting “Hurrah!” after him. These are all the relationships with William II, I have ever had. I have never had any others nor sought them. Thus assertions arise today, and much of what you read on paper in printer's ink is of no more value than that dirty rumour which is used to make Anthroposophy a heresy in Latin countries. Today such things have to be traced to their origin. It is not enough to take them as mere parlance. People must accustom themselves to go to the origin of what is affirmed.

A sense for the true origin of facts in the external world will only develop in mankind out of a deepening in real Spiritual Science.

When I have had occasion in recent years to speak on any of the great yearly festivals, Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide, I have felt bound to say that we have no right, especially under the conditions that obtain today, to commemorate these occasions in the old accustomed manner; we have no right to forget the widespread suffering, the widespread sorrow of the times, and to recall only the greatest Event which took place in earthly evolution. It is our duty, standing as we do on the ground of our Spiritual conception of the World, so fully to realize all that which indicates decline in human civilization today, that this realization permeates our thoughts even round the Christmas tree. It is clearly our duty so to receive the birth of Christ Jesus into our hearts, into our souls, that we do not close our eyes to the fearful deterioration that has overtaken the so-called culture of mankind.

At this very time it is for us to bring forward the question: “Has not the thought of Christmas also suffered the fate of being seized by the forces of general deterioration?” When Christmas is spoken of today are we still conscious of that of which man ought to be conscious when he raises his thoughts and feelings to the contemplation of the festival of Christ? Are men in general conscious of the true meaning of what entered human evolution at the Mystery of Golgotha?

We light up our Christmas trees, we repeat the customary words and phrases associated with the Christmas festival, but all too often we avoid opening our eyes fully, we avoid awakening our consciousness fully to the need of saying to ourselves: “Here, too, there is decline. Where art Thou, O Christ-Power, Thou who canst actively bring about a new ascent?” For it must have been very clear to you in the lectures which for many years have been given in our circles, that only by the power of Christ will it be possible to permeate declining civilization with that impulse which can give it a new uplift.

In these days we must often think of men, in the middle of the nineteenth century, or towards the last third of it, who, from a certain materialistic mentality, spoke quite differently from the way many men speak today. They spoke more honestly than most men do today. I should like to recall to you one personality, a truly materialistic mind—David Friedrich Strauss. You know that his book, The Old Faith and the New, is a kind of Bible of materialism.

Among the questions Strauss asks in this book is the following: “Can we still be Christians?” He answers this question, and the unusual thing about his answer is that it comes from a mind fundamentally materialistic, but at the same time honest.

David Friedrich Strauss constructed a world-edifice of thoughts, of ideas, formed entirely according to materialistic, physical laws. He placed man within it in a world-order in which human nature contained none but physical laws. From these convictions, Strauss answered the question “can we still be Christians?” with an emphatic “No”. For men who held the views on natural science which Strauss held in accordance with the consciousness of his times, could not be Christians.

Thus a fatal, but entirely honest opinion is expressed in this “No” of David Friedrich Strauss, and the feeling often occurs to us today: Would that the official advocates of this or that religious faith were as honest as was David Friedrich Strauss. Could they but see that though they use the name of Christ they are really active opponents of Christianity.

My dear friends, we dare not surrender ourselves in these days to a love of ease, nor close our eyes to the essentially important happenings of the present time. It may not seem to you to be associated with Christmas, though it does indeed seem so to me, when I refer to an experience which came to me through a kind of spiritual investigation of an actual fact of the present day.

You all know those persons who to a great extent are responsible, especially in Central Europe, for the dreadful conditions into which we have drifted, so far as any human being can be called responsible for these things. What did these men do when misfortune broke over Europe? They wrote books! We had books written by all kinds of people.

Now, the following experiment can be made with the help of Spiritual Science. The question can be asked, but strictly in accordance with Spiritual Science: “What forms of thought speak to us from the greater part of these self-vindicating books?” I have tried from every side to answer this question conscientiously. I have asked myself: “Of what kind are the thought-forms of these men on whom so much of the fate of Central Europe depends?” If we do not proceed in the abstract, but enter into things in the concrete, we compare one thing with another. In this way a comparison came to me when I asked myself the question: “About what period in the normal course of evolution in Europe were such thought-forms cultivated as those which we find in the leading personalities during the world war?” After conscientious scrutiny of the facts it was made plain to me that men thought in this manner about the time of the Roman, Julius Caesar. There is no difference between the soul- and thought-life of Julius Caesar at the time, let us say, of his Gallic wars, and the way in which such modern personalities form their thoughts. This means that these men have remained in a life of thought entirely unaffected by Christianity, for Caesar lived before the Mystery of Golgotha had broken into evolution. Even if the name of Christ Jesus is sometimes on their lips, the soul-life of these men has developed in such a way that it has nothing to do with concrete Christianity.

As the result of our many-sided studies we know that if anything develops in its own period, it is fundamentally good for humanity, but that it is otherwise when this thing remains stationary and comes to the front later. When this happens, when for instance that which was suited to the time of the Caesars continues to play a part in the twentieth century, that which was suitable to Caesar's day is transformed into something Luciferic. For that which ought to have worked properly in another period becomes, if it remains stationary, Luciferic. It is indeed essentially Luciferic.

We may now ask: “How is it that people whose fate has placed them in a leading position, have in their lives remained behind in this way?” If this question is to be answered we must turn our attention to those who claim to fill their spiritual life with the Christ-impulse, but who really work in an anti-Christian direction. Let us turn our attention to many official representatives of religious creeds, men who pretend to speak according to the Gospels, but who are opposed to everything that really tells of the living Christ in our day. The most anti-Christian persons are frequently found today among the clergy, among the preachers of the so-called Christian creeds.

If among other writings people would investigate a book—regarded by many as setting the fashion—a book entitled Das Wesen des Christentums (The Nature of Christianity), by Adolf Harnack, they would find an answer to this question. If the name of Christ were struck out of this book and replaced by the name of a God generally little known, a God who permeates and controls human life just as he permeates and controls Nature; if the name of Christ were struck out and replaced by the name of Jahve of the Old Testament, this book would be nearer the truth than it is, and would then have some meaning.

The fact is that Adolf Harnack knows nothing of the real Being of Christ, that he has not the vaguest idea of the real Being of Christ, that he worships a universal, indefinite God and then labels this universal, indefinite God with the name of Christ. And who is Adolf Harnack? Adolf Harnack has become the fashionable theologian of the circles which have provided the ground for the spiritual tendencies of those persons of whom I have been speaking. It is because no true revelation regarding the Christ comes any longer from the representatives of the creeds, that we no longer find in the events of the present day, among the men bound up with these events, any understanding for the true revelation of the Christ.

It hardly means anything to thousands, to millions of people at the present day, when they speak of the festival of Christmas; for they know nothing of the Being of Christ in the sense that is so necessary for our time. We must look into these things if in a deeper sense we will to understand the original causes of the downfall in contemporary events, and in the life of mankind within these events.

I have frequently spoken to you here of that important event which came to pass in the last third of the nineteenth century, the event through which a special relationship was established between the Archangelic Power, that Being whom we call the Archangel Michael, and the destiny of mankind. I have reminded you that since November, 1879, Michael has become the Regent, as it were, of all those who seek to bring to men the beneficial forces necessary to their healthy progress.

My dear friends, in our day we know that when such a matter is indicated, the indication refers to two different things: first, to the objective fact, and second, to the way this objective fact is connected with what men are willing to receive into their consciousness, into their Will. The objective fact is simply this, that in November, 1879, beyond the sphere of the Sense World, in the Supersensible World, that event took place which may be described as follows: Michael has gained for himself the power, when men come to meet him with all the living content of their souls, so to permeate them with his power, that they are able to transform their old materialistic intellectual power—which by that time had become strong in humanity—into spiritual intellectual power, into spiritual power of understanding. That is objective fact; it has taken place. We may say concerning it that since November, 1879, Michael has entered into another relationship with man than that in which he formerly stood. But it is required of men that they shall become the servants of Michael.

What I mean by this will become quite clear to you through the following explanation. You are aware that before the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished upon earth, the Jews of the Old Testament looked up to their Jahve (or Jehovah). Those who, among the Jewish priests, looked up in full consciousness to Jahve, were well aware that they could not reach him directly with human perception. The very name, Jahve, was held to be unspeakable, and if it had to be uttered, a sign only was made, a sign which resembles certain combinations of signs which we attempt in the art of Eurhythmy. The Jewish priesthood, however, was well aware that men could approach Jahve through Michael. They called Michael the countenance of Jahve. Just as we learn to know a man when we look into his face, just as we draw conclusions about the gentleness of his soul from the gentleness of his countenance, and about his character from the way he looks at us, so the priesthood of the Old Testament, through the atavistic clairvoyance which flowed into their souls in dreams, desired to gain from the countenance of Jahve, from Michael's connection with Jahve, that which it was not yet possible for mankind to gain.

The position of this priesthood towards Michael and Jahve was the right one. Their position towards Michael was right because they knew that if a man of that time turned to Michael, he could find through Michael the Jahve-power, which it was proper for the humanity of that time to seek.

Other Soul-Regents of humanity have appeared since then in the place of Michael; but in November, 1879, Michael once more took the lead, and can become active in the soul-life of those who seek the paths to him. These paths today are the paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge. We may speak of “the paths of Michael”, just as well as of the “paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge”.

But just at the time when Michael entered in this way into relationship with the souls of men, in order again to become their inspirer for three centuries, at this very time the demonic opposing force, having previously prepared itself, set up the very strongest opposition to him, so that a cry went through the world during our so-called war-years, in reality years of terror, a cry which has become the great World-misunderstanding which now fills the hearts and souls of men.

Let us consider what would have become of the Jewish people of the Old Testament, if instead of approaching Jahve through Michael they had sought to approach Him directly. They would have become an intolerant people, a national self-seeking people concerned with the aggrandizement of their own nation, a nation thinking only of itself. For Jahve is the God who is connected with all natural things, and in the external historical development of mankind, He manifests His Being through the connection of generations, as it expresses itself in the essential qualities of the people. It was only because the ancient Jewish people desired at that time to approach Jahve through Michael, that they saved themselves from becoming nationally so egoistic that Christ Jesus would not have been able to come forth from among them. Because they had permeated themselves with the Michael power, as this power was in their time, the Jewish people were not so strongly impregnated with forces given over to national egoism, as would have been the case had they turned directly to Jahve.

Today Michael is again the Regent of the World, but it is in a new way that mankind must become related to him. For now Michael is not the countenance of Jahve, but the countenance of Christ Jesus. Today we must approach the Christ-impulse through Michael. In many respects humanity has not yet struggled through to this. Humanity has retained atavistically the old qualities of perception by which Michael could be approached when he was still the intermediary to Jahve; and so today humanity has a false relationship to Michael. This false relationship to Michael is apparent in a very characteristic phenomenon.

During the years of the war we heard continually the universal lie: “Freedom for individual nations, even for the smallest nations.” This is an essentially false idea, because today, in the Michael period, the all-important matter is not groups of men, but human individuals, separate men. This lie is nothing else than the endeavour to permeate each individual nation not with the new force of Michael, but with the force of the old, the pre-Christian time, with the Michael-force of the Old Testament. However paradoxical it may sound, there is a tendency among so-called civilized nations at the present day to transform what was justifiable among the Jewish people of the Old Testament, into something Luciferic, and to make of this the most powerful impulse in every single nation.

People wish today to build up the republics of Poland, of France, of America, etc., upon methods of thought suited to Old Testament times. They strive to follow Michael as it was right to follow him before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men found through him the Folk-God Jahve. Today it is Christ Jesus whom we must strive to find through Michael, Christ Jesus the Divine Leader of the whole human race. This means that we must seek for feelings and ideas which have nothing to do with human distinctions of any kind on the Earth. Such feelings and ideas cannot be found on the surface. They must be sought where the spirit and soul-part of man pulsate i.e., along the path of Spiritual Science. The matter lies thus, that we must resolve to seek the real Christ upon the path of Spiritual Science i.e., upon the Michael-path. Only through this striving after spiritual truth is the real Christ to be sought and found; otherwise it would be better to extinguish the lights of Christmas, to destroy all Christmas trees, and to acknowledge at least with truth, that we want nothing that will recall what Christ Jesus has brought into human evolution.

Pre-Christian ways of thinking speak to us from the memoirs of our contemporaries i.e., ways of thinking which in our time are anti-Christian. When men, who are held to be representative, make pronouncements such as Wilson has done in the Fourteen Points, from such pronouncements there resounds nothing but pure Old Testament mentality, a mentality which in our time has become Luciferic.

Whence comes this, my dear friends? What really lies before us? When we travel back through the periods of human evolution prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we find, early in the course of Oriental civilization, within that civilization out of which the Chinese civilization of today has developed, a human personality who was the external incorporation of Lucifer. Lucifer really did walk the earth at that time, in a human body. He it was who brought that human light which we find at the foundation of the ancient pre-Christian wisdom, with the exception of Judaism. In the art, the philosophy, and the statesmanship of Greece, much was still active which had proceeded from this Luciferic incarnation thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must endeavour clearly to understand, that that which today we call human understanding is always, so long as we have not spiritualized it, a gift of that Lucifer. We must not hold merely, in a matter-of-fact, bourgeois way, the one-sided idea that anything Luciferic is dreadful, and we must get rid of it. The more we seek to get rid of Lucifer, the more we are dominated by him, for it was necessary during thousands of years of human evolution to enter into the inheritance of the incarnated Lucifer. Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. And a time will come in the future when, just as Lucifer was incorporated in the East in an earthly personality, to prepare for Christianity among the heathen, so in the West there will take place an earthly incarnation of Ahriman himself. This time is approaching. Ahriman will appear, objectively, on the earth. Just as truly as Lucifer has walked the Earth, and as Christ has walked the Earth, objectively, in human form, so will Ahriman walk the Earth, bringing with him an extraordinary increase of power to the earthly human understanding. We men have not the task of hindering in any way this incarnation of Ahriman, but it is our task so to prepare humanity beforehand, that Ahriman may be estimated in the right way. For Ahriman will have tasks, he will have to do this and that, and men must value rightly and make a right use of that which, through Ahriman, comes into the world. Men will only be able to do this if they are able to adjust themselves now in the right way to that which Ahriman is already sending to the Earth from the Worlds beyond in order that he may control the Economic life upon Earth without being noticed. This must not be. Ahriman must not control the Economic life on the Earth without his being noticed. We must thoroughly learn to know his particular qualities. We must be able to oppose him with full consciousness.

During the time I am lecturing here at Stuttgart I shall point out much that we must carefully note in human evolution up to the time of the Ahriman incarnation, so that when this comes to pass we may know how rightly to assess it. Today I shall only call your attention to one thing more. In this respect many of the modern interpretations of the Gospels are just as bad as the worst materialistic conceptions. When the representatives of so-called religious societies accept the Gospels today simply as they are written, and when every new revelation is rejected, such devotion to the Gospels, such a way of furthering Christianity, is really the best way to prepare for Ahriman's appearance on earth. A great many of the exponents of the so-called creeds of today are working intensively for Ahriman; they leave unnoticed the truth: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth-age,” when they declare heretical all that proceeds from the immediate vision of the Christ today. They leave this truth unnoticed because it is more comfortable to take the Gospels in a literal way only, that is, to hold to what they deem to be the literal interpretation of the Gospels.

Mankind must be protected by wisdom from regarding the Gospels in this way, for the four Gospels, as regards external physical understanding, do contradict one another. He who does not press forward today to a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels, spreads abroad an untruthful interpretation of these Gospels, for he deceives men as regards the external contradictions which are to be found in the four Gospels. He who deceives man regarding the things that concern him most vitally, best furthers the progress of Ahriman.

It is most important for man at the present time to place Christ in the centre between Ahriman and Lucifer. The Christ power must permeate us. But as men we must always seek the balance between the mystic enthusiasm which tends to lift us above ourselves, and the materialistic understanding which by its bourgeois heaviness drags us down to earth. At every moment we must seek the balance between the Luciferic impulses which lift us up, and the Ahrimanic which drag us down. In the effort to gain this balance we find the Christ. When we strive to gain this balance, then alone can we find the Christ.

By a strange coincidence, a remarkable thing happened in human evolution at the time when materialism entered into it. I shall mention (concerning it) only two documents: Milton's “Paradise Lost” and Klopstock's “Messiah”. In these poems the Spiritual Powers are described as if a Paradise had been lost, and man had been driven out of it. The work of both poets is based upon the idea of Duality in the Universe, upon the opposition of good and evil, of the Divine and the Diabolical. It is the great error of modern times that World-Evolution should be represented as a Duality, whereas it should be represented as a Trinity. One set of forces are the upward-striving Luciferic forces which approach man in mysticism, in sentimentalism, in fantasy—in what in fantasy is degenerate, fantastic; these forces dwell in man's blood. The second are the Ahrimanic forces which dwell in all that is dry, heavy, (speaking physiologically) in the bony system. The Christ stands in the middle between these two. His is the third group of forces. Lucifer's is the first, Ahriman's the second, and in the centre, between the two, is the Christ-force.

What then has happened in more recent days? Something has taken place to which men should look up with true spiritual-intellectual fervour, for unless they understand what it is that has happened they cannot enter in the right way into the Christmas festival. We read today Milton and Klopstock, we read their descriptions of the Supersensible World. What do we find? Everywhere we find Luciferic qualities ascribed to Beings who are called Divine. Writers such as Milton and Klopstock describe the fight between Luciferic qualities which appear to them Divine, and Ahrimanic qualities. And a great part of that which modern humanity describes as Godlike, is simply Luciferic. They do not recognize it for what it is; just as little as they recognize that which is Ahrimanic for what it is.

The same thing appears in Goethe's Faust, where we find Mephistopheles contrasted with “the Lord”. Goethe, too, was unable to distinguish between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. Consequently his Mephistopheles is a kind of mixture of the two. I have already pointed this out in my little book Goethe's Standard of the Soul (Geistesart).

True followers of Goethe do not merely quote literally from his works, as do so many academic persons and the like. If we faithfully travel the path that Goethe has taken, so that we are able to recognize the things wherein he must have changed, especially if we follow his Conception of the World beyond the year 1832, we are able to speak of a Goethe of the year 1919, now soon to be 1920.

The way must be found calmly to admit that in the materialistic centuries, much that is Luciferic is hidden behind what is called Divine. There is much by which men seek to spread religion at the present day that reaches humanity only as words born on the wings of Lucifer.

Only when men are once more able to recognize this Dualism—the Luciferic that would lead them above themselves, and the Ahrimanic that would lead them down below themselves—and turn from these to what is truly Christ-like, only then will they again celebrate in the right way the Christmas event, that event by which we should recall how that which gives its own particular meaning, its true meaning to the Earth, entered into human evolution.

Today we cannot help thinking sometimes of Leonardo da Vinci, of Leonardo, who once as you know, painted in Milan his great picture, the “Last Supper”—Christ with His Disciples around Him. Leonardo was a long time painting this picture—twenty years. He wanted to put a great deal into it, and could never finish it, because he was always making a fresh attempt to paint the figure of Judas in the right way. Now under the State organization of Milan, the abbot of the monastery for which the picture was being painted was his immediate employer. When later a new abbot came, a sharp resolute man, not so patient as his predecessor, he went to Leonardo and told him sternly that the picture must be finished forthwith. Leonardo replied that he could now finish the picture, for since the new abbot had come he had a model for Judas. In a short time he had painted the face of Judas as we see it in the picture.

Just as at the beginning of the new age the face of Judas appeared to Leonardo on the ground of a positive faith, so we in our day have frequent occasion to write on our hearts and souls the fact that He whose birth we commemorate at this holy season, is betrayed most of all by many of those who declare that it is in accordance with their creed that they prepare this festival. We know that the Christmas Festival itself is one of those that has been adopted in the course of Christian evolution, that it was not till the third or fourth century that people began in these December days, to commemorate the birth of Christ. The event of Golgotha had already taken place some centuries before, when those whose thoughts were centred upon that Event, adopted something so incisively new, at that time, as the institution of the Festival of Christmas. Much, much later it was still possible for new things to be implanted in Christianity. Many of those who called themselves true Christians, fought at the time against these innovations. Today there are very many such people at work, who will not advance in the way their own creed advanced when it accepted in the third and fourth centuries the institution of Christmas; people who hold rigidly to that of which they say, “it stands written”, people who turn away from every living revelation.

Terrible as is the state of sleep of people at the present day—of people who with their non-moral thoughts soil, too often, things which are seeking to enter the Spiritual life—the most terrible of all is the case of those who betray the true spirit of Christian evolution from out of the very faith itself.

It is in this earnest mood that I wished to present the lights of the Christmas tree to you today; next time I hope to speak of them in another connection.

From the views which have been presented here for some time, and more particularly from the considerations which have come before us these last few days, we see how essential it is for the further cultural evolution of mankind that what we may call the knowledge of Initiation should stream into it. We must say, absolutely without reserve: The deliverance of mankind from a downward evolutionary course depends entirely upon its turning to a revelation which can only come through Spiritual knowledge.

Although it might be said, with a certain amount of feeling or logic, that it would be difficult in our time for wider circles of people to accept such knowledge, which at first can only be given out by few who have reached the height of being able to see into the Spiritual World, all such objections, even when apparently justified, will not contradict the clamorous fact that without accepting that which is here called Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, civilization must sink into the abyss. The work of the Heavenly Powers upon the earth must cease if their further cosmic evolution is not united with mankind. The healing of mankind can only be brought about if a sufficiently large number of people permeate themselves with what we are trying to say here. For only he who will not, who absolutely will not look into what has happened in the whole world as the result of the last catastrophic years, only he can close his eyes to the fact that we are at the beginning of a process of destruction, and that nothing can bring us out of this process of destruction except something new. For what we seek within the destructive force itself can never be anything but a force of destruction. A power for building afresh can only be obtained from a source not belonging to earthly evolution up to the present time.

Now the results of the inflow from such sources are fraught with most significant difficulties. You have often been told that the Science of Initiation cannot be given to mankind haphazard, without preparation, because a certain receptivity is necessary. You have heard this continually; but it is exactly against this attitude of mind that man continually transgresses. Let us take a simple example. One of the first, most primitive demands relative to the acceptance of the Science of Initiation, is that every one should seek to strip off what we call Ambition, particularly when it expresses itself as a judging of others by one's self. Now, it is easy to see that this is exactly what takes place in the Anthroposophical Society. What would be the use of keeping silence about such matters? It is readily admitted that such is the case, but nevertheless the most fatal things in this direction exist within the Anthroposophical Movement, and mutual envy is on the increase. I shall merely indicate this aspect. Today I must speak of other great difficulties in the entrance of the Science of Initiation into our earthly civilization.

In the first place, that which belongs to the Mystery of the Will of Man must be pointed out to humanity in a comprehensive way. This Mystery of Man's Will has been veiled from modern culture especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, since the rise of the fifth post-Atlantean age. The modern theory of the universe knows the very least possible of the Will. We have often characterized this. A man when awake never experiences consciously the real nature of his Will. When awake he experiences consciously the nature of his Conceptions, when in a dreaming state he experiences the nature of his Feelings, but he is sleeping, even when he is awake, partially, with reference to his Will. We go through the world as so-called waking beings, but are only awake with regard to conceptions and ideas, we are only half awake in our life of feeling, and completely asleep in our Will. Let us not delude ourselves about this matter. We have ideas about what we will, but only when the Will becomes idea, when the Will is reflected by the intellect, can we experience it in our waking consciousness. What goes on in the depths of man's being, even if he only raises his hand, which means bringing his Will into operation, of this the ordinary man knows absolutely nothing. This means that the Mystery of Will is to the modern man entirely unknown, and with this is to be connected the fact that our entire modern civilization—especially that which has come about since the fifteenth century—is absolutely intellectual, a culture of the understanding; for the culture of Natural Science is an intellectual culture. The Will plays the least possible part in everything that we grasp with our intellect, our understanding. When we think, when we form ideas, the Will of course plays a certain part in the formation of the ideas, but only in a very fine state. Man does not notice how the Will pulsates in his perceptions and how in other ways the Will is working within him.

For man in this new age the Mystery of the Will is completely veiled by our exclusively intellectual culture. Only when we seek, through those means given by Spiritual Science of which I have often spoken to you, to investigate the Will, that is, when we try with the help of Imagination and inspiration to make those forces active which enable man to see into the workings, the machinery which is set going by Man's Will, then we notice that in our physical life between birth and death, the Will as a living entity is not bound up with constructive processes but only with destructive processes. I have often explained this. If constructive processes alone took place in our brain, if for instance, only that took place which results from the action of the life-forces upon our food, we should be unable to evolve a soul- and spirit-life by means of the apparatus of the nerves and the brain; only on account of the destructive process which is continually going on in our brain do the soul and spirit take root in what is being destroyed. It is just here that the Will works. Man's Will is essentially something which during our physical life works to a certain extent for the death of man. With reference to our head organization, we are continually dying; in every moment we die. We only live because the rest of our organization works against this continual dying in our heads, for which our Will is mainly responsible. Independently of us, there is continually taking place in our head, that which takes place objectively in the outer world when we pass through physical death.

Our corpse, in so far as we are human individuals and enter the world of soul and spirit through the gate of death, ceases to be a matter of importance to us, but it is of great importance to the Cosmos. This corpse in some way or other, it does not matter whether by cremation or burial, is given over to the elements of the Earth; there, in its own way it carries on what our human Will does partially to our nervous system, to our sense-organization in our life between birth and death. We have perception and thought because our Will destroys something in us. We give our corpse over to the Earth, and by the help of the disintegrating corpse, which only continues the same process which we partially carry on in life, the whole Earth thinks and has perception. I characterized this from another point of view a few months ago. That which continually takes place in the Earth through the interchange between the primal earth-substances, through the union (of these substances) with the dead human bodies, is an activity in all respects comparable with the activity of the Will which between birth and death is practised by us continually, unconsciously, while the working, the destroying like a corpse, goes on in our nerve and sense system. Between birth and death the Will, because it is united with our Ego, works through the destructive forces within the bounds of our skin. This same Will works cosmically through our corpse, in the thinking and forming of ideas by the whole Earth, after our death, when we have given our corpse over to the Earth. Thus, we are cosmically united with what we may call the Soul-spiritual process of the whole Earth existence. This conception is a very difficult one, for it places man concretely into that which is Cosmic in our Earth existence. It shows the relationship of man's Will to the manner of working of the universal Cosmic Will within the Earth existence, in the destruction, in the bringing about of death conditions.

But just as our further evolution in the Spiritual World after we have passed through the gates of death, is dependent upon our having left the corpse behind, upon the fact that we no longer work with these forces, but with others, so the healthy further evolution of the whole Earth depends on whether humanity on this Earth unites itself not now with forces of death, but with forces of life, forces which evolve in another direction than do the forces of death. To speak of this today when men are filled with personal ideas and feelings is indeed something fraught with bitterness, for the seriousness of such a truth is only experienced in the most limited degree. Man is unaccustomed to taking in these great truths with the deep earnestness with which they must be taken. Nevertheless, the further question must be asked: “How is that which lies in the Will of man as I have described it, related to the processes of destruction in outer nature? How is that in man's Will which I have described as its own particular characteristic, connected with these destructive forces in outer nature?” Here is something which stands before the man of today as the greatest illusion. What does the man of the present day really do when he looks at Nature? He says, “Here a natural process is taking place. It has arisen from another process which produced it and this again from another which caused it.” And so man finds a chain of causes and effects in the working of Nature and he is very proud when in this way he can grasp what he calls leading threads of casualty to be found in the outer world.

What is the result? If we ask some geologist, physicist, chemist or any right-thinking scientific investigator, his honest opinion, he will often be reluctant to give you the last consequence of his own World-Conception. But ask him if he does not think that the earth as we know it—stones, plants and many animals, too—would have evolved just in the way it has done, had Man not been present, he will reply: “Certainly. No houses would have been built, no machines, no flying machines would have been made by cows or buffaloes, and so on, but everything else which we can see is not the work of man, would be present from beginning to end just the same as if man had not been there, for a chain of causes and effects is found within external nature.” That which takes place later is the result of that which went before. According to present-day thought man has nothing to do with the formation of the chain. This view contains exactly the same mistake as the following. I write a word on the board. Every letter arises only because I have written it, and not because the previous letter has given birth to the next one. It would be utter nonsense to say: From the preceding letter there arises the following one. A thoroughly unprejudiced investigation of that which is essential in the processes of Nature convinces us of the mistake we make when we give ourselves up to the great illusion of modern science: Effects are the result of their causes. It is not so. We must look elsewhere for the true causes, just as we must seek in our intellect the reason of the letters following each other. Taken in the wide sense where do the primal causes for external happenings in Nature lie? That can only be determined by spiritual perception; these causes lie in Mankind. Do you know where you must look if you wish to gain an insight into the actual primal causes of the course of Nature on the Earth? You must investigate how the human Will, quite unknown to present-day consciousness, is to be found in the centre of gravity in man, that is, in the lower part of his body. Only a part of the Will is active in the human head; the chief part of the Will is centred in the rest of his organism. That which comes into existence in the course of external nature is dependent upon man's relation to his unconscious Will. So far we have only been able to cite one significant example as to the course of Nature, but it serves for the course of Nature as a whole. I have often pointed out that during the Atlantean epoch man gave himself up to a form of black magic. The consequence of this was the Glaciation of the civilized world. In a comprehensive sense, the whole course of Nature really is the result of the activity of Will, not in single individuals, but of the various forces of Will working together in humanity as a whole; forces which arise from—the human centre of gravity. If a being adequately developed, a being, let us say, from Mars or Mercury, wished to study the course of the Earth, i.e., wished to understand how the course of Nature went on there, this being would not describe Nature as one of our learned men would describe it, but looking down upon the world he would say: The Earth is there below me; I see there many points; in these points are centred the forces from which the course of Nature proceeds. But these points would not lie for him in outer Nature, but always within man. He, looking from without, would find that he must look upon the centre of man if he wished to find the cause of what takes place in the course of Nature. This insight into the connection of the human Will with the course of Nature as a whole must become an integral part of the Natural Science of the future, for Mankind. With such a Natural Science man will feel his responsibility in quite a different way from what he does at the present day. Man will rise from being a citizen of the Earth to being a citizen of the Cosmos. He will learn to look upon the Cosmos as a part of himself.

Directly our attention is called to such things, knowledge of them takes possession of us. This knowledge does not work in such a shadowy way as our intellectual knowledge does. It is taken far more from realities, and therefore it works in a much more living way. And because the way in which it works is so much more real than the shadowy knowledge of modern man, it is all the more necessary that man should take seriously what is revealed to him through this knowledge. One cannot be a citizen of the Cosmos on one side in the sense described above, and on the other side remain the old Philistine whom the last few hundred years, i.e., the period since the middle of the fifteenth century, has produced in the man of today. We cannot on the one hand consciously want to take a part in the processes of the Cosmos, and on the other hand wish to gossip with our fellow beings as is done so much in restaurants and clubs in this bourgeois age since the fifteenth century. At the same time another Ethics, another moral impulse must surge through mankind if the Science of Initiation is to enter in real earnest. For all that prepares in the wrong way, for the appearance of Ahriman on our earth, as I have told you, works especially strongly as a force hindering the entrance of the Science of Initiation. I have spoken recently about these facts, in order to give some indication of the spirit which should pervade our Christmas Festival this year. I will now only briefly recapitulate.

Looking back over the evolution of our earth we find, preceding our modern materialistic civilization, the Greco-Latin, which goes back to the eighth pre-Christian century. We see, about two hundred years after the beginning of this Greco-Latin time, something rising up, which we might describe as the old Life of Wisdom of earlier times percolating through the land of Greece. Nietzsche felt this to a remarkable degree, even if pathologically. From the beginning of his spiritual activity he felt himself an opponent of Socrates, and he was never tired of speaking of the greater value of pre-Socratic Greek culture than of the post-Socratic. It is certainly true that with Socrates a great age came in for Mankind, an age which reached its climax in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But this age of Socrates has now run its course, has rightly come to an end. The Socratic age is that in which pure logic and pure dialectic arose from the earlier instinctive Wisdom. The rising of pure logic, of pure dialectic, out of the ancient clairvoyant Wisdom is the chief characteristic of our Western culture. This logic, this dialectic, has also impressed its stamp upon Christianity, for the theology of the West is a dialectic theology. But what rises in Greece as dialectics, as thought reduced to abstraction, goes back to the Mysteries of the East. Among these Mysteries were those which founded that civilization which later became the Chinese. Within the early Chinese civilization Lucifer was incarnated in human form. We must not conceal the fact from ourselves that Lucifer once lived in a physical body, as Christ during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha walked on earth in a physical body. But it is only a narrow-minded misunderstanding of the Luciferic incarnation if we look upon everything that has come through Lucifer as “Touch-me-not”. From Lucifer, for instance, has arisen the greatness of Greek culture itself, that unique ancient art, the artistic impulse of mankind, as we ourselves still look upon it. But in Europe all this has hardened into mere words, empty of content. It was through Luciferic wisdom that Christianity was first grasped in Europe. The important point is that in the Greek wisdom which developed as Gnosis in order to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, the old Luciferic Wisdom had cooperated, had given the old Gnosis its form. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha had clothed itself in what Lucifer had given to the evolution of the earth, was the greatest victory for Christianity at that time. But when this Luciferic culture, to which, through the incarnation of Lucifer man was given over, was ebbing away, there flowed in gradually, that which was preparing for the coming incarnation of Ahriman in the Western World. When the time is ripe—and it is preparing itself—Ahriman will incarnate in a human body in the Western World. This fact must take place just as the others have taken place—viz. that Lucifer has incarnated and that Christ has incarnated. This fact is predetermined in the evolution of the earth. The all-important fact is simply this: to keep the fact in mind, that we shall rightly prepare ourselves for it, for Ahriman will not begin to work only when he has incarnated in a human body; he is now preparing his appearance from the super-sensible world. He is already working from thence into the evolution of mankind. From that side he is seeking his tools through which he prepares for what must come.

Now, it is essential for the favourable working of that which Ahriman will bring to humanity—he will bring advantageous gifts just as Lucifer did—that man shall take the right attitude. The all-important thing is that man shall not through sleeping miss the coming of Ahriman. When the incarnation of Ahriman takes place in the Western World we shall simply see inscribed in the local Register, the birth of John William Smith (of course, this will not be the name) and people will look upon the child as a citizen in comfortable circumstances like any other, and they will sleep through what has in reality taken place. Our University professors will certainly not trouble whether man sleeps through it or not. For them what has taken place will be merely the birth of J. W. Smith. But in the Ahrimanic age it is all-important that men should knower that they have here to do only externally with J. W. Smith, that inwardly Ahriman is present, and that they must not deceive themselves through sleepy illusion about what has happened. Even now we may not yield to any deception. These things are in preparation. Among the most important means which Ahriman has to work with from the other side, is the furthering of abstract thinking in Man. And because men cling so firmly today to this abstract thinking, they are working in the way most favourable for the coming of Ahriman. You must realize that there is no better way to prepare for the fact that Ahriman is endeavouring cunningly to capture the whole Earth for his evolution, than that man should continue to live an abstract life, steeping himself in abstractions, as he does in the social life of today. This is one of the ruses, one of the clever tricks, by which Ahriman prepares in his own way for his lordship over the earth. Instead of showing men today out of conclusive experience, what has to happen, leaders offer them theories on every subject, including the social question. To those who give out these theories, knowledge gained by means of experience is abstract, because they have no inkling of what real Life is. All this is preparation from the Ahrimanic point of view.

But there is also another form of preparation for Ahriman which can happen through an erroneous view of the Gospels. This, too, is something that must be made known at the present day. You know quite well that today there are very many men, especially among the official representatives of this or that form of religious confession, who are fighting to the uttermost against that new Christ knowledge which is arising among us out of the Science of Initiation. Such men, if they do not swear allegiance to mere Rationalism, accept the Gospels; but what do these men really know of the true nature of the Gospels? These are the men who, during the nineteenth century, have applied to the Gospels the historical-scientific method of the outer world. What has come from the Gospels through the scientific method of last century? Nothing else, except that the conception of the Gospels has gradually become completely materialized. Our attention was first drawn to the contradictions in the four Gospels. Then from the recognition of these contradictions came the slide downwards. Finally, what is the outcome of this Gospel investigation? What else is it but, I might say, lifting the Gospels off their hinges? What does such an investigator as the theologian, Professor Schmiedel of Basle, seek in the Gospels? He seeks to prove that they are not simply products of fantasy brought forward only to glorify Christ Jesus. And so there follow a limited number of now-famous points unfavourable to the Christ. These, he maintains, would have been omitted if the Gospels had only been written for the glorification of Jesus. We are, therefore, left with the feeling that he admits all the objections that are brought against Christ Jesus, so as finally to save for the Gospels a little label of this world's Science. Even this little label will give way. Man will gain nothing from this worldly Science. He will gain nothing as regards the genuineness of the Gospels from the way these people point it out. To have the right relation towards these Gospels we must know why they came into being, that is, we must know their real purpose. This knowledge can only be obtained through an understanding fructified by Spiritual Science.

If we sink ourselves in the Gospels, if we absorb their content and force, then we gain from them a soul-content. No outer historical science will explain the riddle of the Gospels; but we can sink ourselves in the Gospels, and then we receive a soul-content. This soul-content, however, is a great hallucination—certainly a most spiritualized hallucination, the hallucination of the Mystery of Golgotha. The highest that is to be gained from the Gospels is the hallucination of the Mystery of Golgotha, neither more nor less. Now, it is just this secret which is known to the more modern Catholic Church. For this reason the Gospels are not allowed to be studied by the laity, for it is feared that men will discover that they cannot have through the Gospels historical knowledge of the Christ Mystery, but only a hallucination of this Mystery of Golgotha. I might also say, an Imagination; for the hallucination is so spiritualized that it is an actual Imagination. But more than an Imagination is not to be gained from the content of the Gospels in themselves.

What is the path from Imagination to Reality? The path will be opened up through Spiritual Science, not through that which is outside Spiritual Science, but through Spiritual Science alone. That means that the Imagination of the Gospels shall be raised to Reality through Spiritual Science. It is of the most extreme importance to Ahriman so to prepare his incarnation that through Spiritual Science man shall not follow this path of Imagination in the Gospels on to the Reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as it is in the greatest interest of Ahriman that man should keep up the love of abstraction, so it is in his greatest interest that man should cherish more and more a form of piety built upon the mere Gospels. When you think over this, you will realize that a great part of the creeds existing today is the preparatory work of Ahriman for his purposes in this earth existence. In what way could one serve Ahriman better than by resolving to make use of an external power commanding those who believe in, and submit themselves to this power, not to read any anthroposophical literature? No greater service could be done to Ahriman than to make sure that a great number of people do not read anthroposophical literature. I have already mentioned in these lectures who the people are that have resolved upon this course. The only way to present certain facts today is to place them unreservedly in the light of truth. It must be realized today that the progress of the World has a certain relationship to cosmic periods, limited through the Luciferic incarnation, which in time and space, lies before the Mystery of Golgotha. But in the way of this progress the incarnation of Ahriman in the West places itself, so that the forces in opposition are strengthened. The incarnation of Ahriman, in a future not very far distant, can be helped on its way just as well by an obscured worship of the Gospels as by abstract thinking.

Many people today experience an inner sense of comfort in shutting themselves off from these serious facts. Anthroposophists should not feel in this way; on the contrary, they should develop a definite impetus to do as much as possible to spread Spiritual Science among mankind. It is quite wrong to think as is so often done that we should come to an understanding with such people as those of whom I have spoken. It is foolish to believe we can come to an understanding with such people for they do not desire it. The point is to make clear to the rest of humanity what sort of people these are. We must speak out about such people. All that is possible has been done so that they can come to an understanding with us. They only need to read without prejudice what is there, to give it their serious attention. We must strictly discriminate between those persons who do harm to the progress of human evolution and other people to whom we must go and tell how such harm is brought about. The attempt to come to an understanding with the former has absolutely no sense and no meaning; for these men would outwardly incline to an agreement if they no longer had followers to support them. Then they would be ready of themselves to come to an understanding. The urgent need before us is exactly this, to open people's eyes. Only, unfortunately, too often within our own circle, the endeavour is made to come to a compromise in this respect, and the courage needed for unconditional acknowledgment of the truth is lacking. We must not ever be under the illusion that we can come to an understanding with this one or that one, who does not wish in any way to come to an understanding with us. What is required of us is courageously to stand up for the truth as far as we are able. This seems to me especially the outcome of an understanding of what is bound up with the evolution of Mankind.

On New Year's Eve it is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year.

The thoughts which, almost in answer to an inward need, we call up before our souls in reviewing what we have done during the past year, and what we intend to do next year, should be pervaded with adequate earnestness and dignity, in accordance with the spirit of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, so that we may illumine these thoughts with the Higher Light which we can receive from Spiritual Science, through contemplation of the great Cosmic events. How does this human life of ours stand with regard to past and future? It is like a mirror. Indeed, comparison with a mirror approaches reality far more than it may seem to do at first. Striving a little to attain self-knowledge is indeed like standing before a mirror. We stand, looking into a mirror and there in that mirror lies the past, of which we know its reflection is in the mirror. Behind the mirror lies that into which at first we cannot look, just as it is not possible to see in space, what lies behind a mirror. Perhaps the question should be raised here: What is it that corresponds in our world-mirror to the silver covering at the back which turns the transparent glass into a mirror? In the ordinary mirror the glass is coated behind so that we cannot see through it. What constitutes the coating of the world-mirror that reflects the past for us, and at first keeps the future hidden from our gaze? The world-mirror is coated with our own being, with our own human being. We have only to bear in mind that with the usual means of knowledge we are really unable to see ourselves, to see what we ourselves are. We cannot see through ourselves, we see through ourselves just as little as we see through a mirror. When we look into ourselves, many things are mirrored back to us, things which we have experienced, things which we have learnt; but our own being remains hidden from us, because we can see through ourselves at first just as little as we can see through an ordinary mirror. Looking at the matter generally, or I might say, in the abstract, we may consider this comparison with a mirror as I have just described it. But when we come to details modifications are needed. Trying to look back on our life through this mirroring process (for looking back on our life, on what our inner soul reflects, is a mirroring process), we must confess: What we see mirrored there, is only a part of our experiences. When you try to look back on your experiences, you will find that these experiences are continually subject to interruptions. You look back on what the day has brought you; but you do not look back on what the preceding night has brought you. The experiences of the night are an interruption. You look back on yesterday, you do not look back on the night before yesterday, and so on. Stretches of nighttime, not filled in by thoughts upon our experiences, are continually inserting themselves. It is an illusion to think that we survey our entire life when looking back upon it; we only piece together to some extent, what the days contain. In reality, the course of our life comes before us with continual interruptions.

We might now ask: Are these interruptions in the course of our life necessary? Yes, they are necessary. Were there no such interruptions in the course of our life, or, to speak more correctly, in the retrospection upon our life's course, then, as human beings, we should be quite unable to perceive our Ego. We should see the course of our life filled merely by the world outside, and in our life there would be no ego-consciousness at all. That we are able to experience, to feel our Ego, depends on the fact that our life's course is continually being broken up piece-wise. It is precisely with respect to this ego-perception, brought about by interruptions in the course of life, that present-day humanity faces a critical period. When a human being of today looks back on life and, as has just been explained, attains his Ego through this looking back, this Ego of present-day man is, in a certain respect, empty, we only know that we have an Ego. In earlier periods of earth evolution men knew more. Just as in ordinary daily life, the dreams of an individual dimly emerge out of his nightly experiences, so the clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions of the human beings of earlier periods emerged out of the Ego. These clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions were dreams only in their form; what they contained was reality. We may say: The Ego of present-day man has been emptied of the clairvoyant-atavistic content which was the support of men of past ages, permeating them with the conviction that they had something in common with a divine element, that they were connected with something divine. Out of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, there arose in man's sentient life that which condensed into religious feeling and religious veneration towards those beings to whom religious cult and religious sacrifice were dedicated. How does the case stand today? Today the Ego is empty of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, and when we look back on the Ego it is more or less only a point in our soul-life. The content of this Ego is a firm point of support, but it is nevertheless only a point. Now, however, we are living in an age in which the point must again become a circle, an age in which the Ego must again receive a content. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has made a mighty inroad into our Sense-world, in order that the Ego may again receive a content. This is why, ever since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has willed to re-enter our physical existence through revelations in a new way. What we are striving for in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this: To receive with goodwill all that is seeking to enter through spiritual revelation from another world—from a world, however, which bears within it this world of ours—and to clothe these revelations in terms by which they can be communicated to man. These revelations are nothing less than that which definitely (in a certain respect) guarantees the future of mankind. It is not, indeed, a direct glance behind the mirror, but it is a guarantee for this, viz., that when we as human beings, hasten to meet the future i.e., hasten to step behind the mirror—which means facing the future—then that which we have to do in the future will be able to come to pass in full power, if we have first tested our forces, if we have first strengthened them through that, which, by means of Spiritual Science, reveals itself to us out of the Spiritual World.

Just as in the past, man's Ego was filled with an atavistic clairvoyant content, which guaranteed his connection with the divine, so today our Ego must be filled with a new spiritual content, received in full consciousness, a content which gives us again the link uniting our soul with the divine Soul-being. The men of the past possessed an atavistic clairvoyance. The last inheritance of this atavistic clairvoyance is abstract reflection, the abstract power of cognition possessed by modern men. It is a much diluted remnant of the early clairvoyance. The man of today can feel that this dilution, this logical dialectic dilution of a former atavistic clairvoyance, is no longer able to support his soul. Then the longing will arise within him to receive something new into his Ego. But that which has formed the end in the evolution of mankind from primeval times up to the present, must now be made the beginning. In olden times, man had clairvoyant revelations and did not understand them. Today man must first understand, must exert to the utmost his intellectual power, must exert to the utmost his reason. If he so exerts it through that which lies before him in Spiritual Science, then mankind will again develop the power of receiving the Spiritual clairvoyantly. This is certainly something that most people today wish to avoid, viz., to make use of their healthy human reason in order to understand Spiritual Science. Were it possible to avoid the use of man's reason, it would also be possible to avoid altogether the entrance of spiritual revelations into our earthly world.

Thus past and future are linked together on this New Year's Eve, this Cosmic New Year's Day. For today, what is impending is indeed a kind of Cosmic New Year's Day. The future stands before us as a formidable question, not an indefinite abstract question, but as a concrete question. How can we approach that which, as a question put to mankind, in the form of a spiritual revelation, is striving more and more since the last third of the nineteenth century, to enter our earthly world? And how are we to place it in relation to revelations of the past? These questions should be livingly experienced. Then we should feel how important it is to direct our longings towards that which is presented here as Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Then we should realize the earnestness and the dignity of the striving for Spiritual Science. It is especially needful to have this feeling at the present time. For we are not dealing with any kind of arbitrary human will (“Willkur”); we are dealing with something that as Cosmic knowledge wills to reveal itself to us from out of the world's evolution; we are dealing in very truth with what the gods will to make of man. But here we are faced with the fact that when we on the one hand turn towards the spirit, on the other hand those who wish only to worship the past, are drawn away by the Spirit of contradiction, by the Spirit of opposition. And the more we try with all our might to grasp the spirit of the future state of man, the more surely will the people of the past be possessed by the spirit of opposition. It is to be noticed among people of today that religious feeling is seeking to assume new life. Groping attempts are numerous. The attempts of Spiritual Science must not be groping. Through such attempts the real, concrete world of the Spirit ought to be grasped. Almost like a premonition of what it ought to be, we are faced by those who say: “Mere religious tradition is not enough for us; we want to have an inner religious experience, we do not only want to hear the message that, according to tradition, Christ lived and died in Palestine so many, or so many years ago—we want to experience in our souls the Christ-experience.” In many quarters we find such ideas arising among men, among people who believe that something of the Christ-experience has arisen in the depths of their souls.

These are groping attempts, often even questionable attempts, because at the same time people are content in the egoism of their soul, and then turn away from all inclination to the Spirit. These longings after inner spiritual experience are there nevertheless, and even groping attempts towards such inner spiritual experience, towards a new interest in the spiritual world, should be recognized. But the spirit of opposition will surely arise.

To judge by what he himself has printed, such a representative of the spirit of the past has recently uttered quite remarkable words at Stuttgart, contrasting attempts, groping attempts, to rouse a new religious interest, a new religious experience, with attempts to reach a really new concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, as in the case of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In the Shepherd-Play, performed at the Waldorf School, one of the shepherds, who has had a spiritual vision, says that he very nearly lost his power of speech. When I read the last page of Gogarten's Spiritual Science and Christianity, I must say that I very nearly lost my power of speech, for it is indeed surprising that anyone should say such things in the present age. It is things such as this that, on the Cosmic New Year's Eve, should stimulate contemplation of the comparison of the past with the inevitable future. What does this representative of religion really say? I do not know if the full import has been realized. He says: “Today—I ought to say at all times—the chief task is to safeguard the elementary feeling of piety of which I have spoken. It is almost wholly lacking today. We are occupied with religious ‘interests’ with religious ‘experiences’. Since Anthroposophy provides such good material for ‘interest’, and is such a good medium for ‘experiences’, people are helpless and without power of resistance when they meet it. People know even less of that fundamental, elementary bond, the bond brought into life by piety, which drives away every religious ‘interest’, and scatters every religious ‘experience’, the bond between God and creature. And because man knows little of this bond, he knows still less of that other bond, the unconditioned direct union between God and man.”

Here in the name of religion we see every religious interest repudiated, every religious experience scattered. A wholly undefined “bond” which cannot of course be differentiated, and which the speaker does not wish to differentiate, takes the place of religious interest, and of religious experience. We do indeed lose our power of speech when a teacher of religion says: “True piety must drive away every religious interest and scatter every religious experience.” We have gone so far that we are unable to realize what it means when an official representative of religion says: “Away with religious interest! Away with religious experience!” You see, apart from the fact that Gogarten does not know that he himself would be quite unable to speak of religion at all, if in the past there had never been atavistic religious interests and religious experience; apart from the fact that he as official representative of religion, could never have stood before an audience had not religion entered into the evolution of mankind, through religious interest and religious experience; apart from all this, everything I have told you just now proves what I told you before, that in the present day the very people who consider themselves the true representatives of religious life, work for the destruction of all that is essential in religion. Have these men lost every possibility of understanding what pertains to the human soul? Can these men no longer understand that when man turns his attention to anything, attention is guided by interest, and that everything entering the consciousness of man is based on experience? It seems as if human beings no longer speak from such consciousness at all, but only from a spirit of opposition. We should bear this in mind in all seriousness when we look into the mirror which so mysteriously unveils the past and conceals the future—though in a certain way the mirror unveils the future, too, in the way I have described.

It is the aim of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science to serve religious interest, and to give a content to religious experience. With what result? In the course of this year (1919) the question was brought forward before the Holy Roman Congregation whether the teaching that is termed theosophical is in keeping with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and whether it is permissible to belong to theosophical societies, to attend theosophical meetings, and to read theosophical papers and periodicals. The answer was: “No”, in every case, No, “in omnibus”. This is the spirit of opposition, of contradiction, and the Jesuit Zimmermann interprets it more particularly by applying this veto of the Holy Roman Congregation to Anthroposophy also. I need not set Zimmermann's writings before you in detail. You all know the wind that blows from a certain quarter against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and that it is the breath of the Spirit of contradiction. The Spirit carried in this wind can be felt in the following words, penned by that same Zimmermann, who for years spread abroad the lie that I was a renegade priest: “Through the defection of their General Secretary, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who took along with him most of the members, the Theosophical Society picked up again to some extent in the course of years, and now owns about twenty-five lodges, one-fifth of which are certainly somewhat dormant, and publishes at Dusseldorf, as its official organ, Das Theosophische Streben (The Theosophic Endeavour). The followers of Steiner, who named his theosophy ‘Anthroposophy’ after his exit, complained recently that he was becoming unproductive, that he had no new ‘visions’, that he always lectures upon the same things, that he would soon have to throw himself into something new, etc.” This paves the way for another article dealing in the same intelligent fashion with the “Threefold Social Organism”. You see what Spirit of truth backs up this Jesuit? A Jesuit does not merely represent his personal opinion, but the opinion of the Catholic Church. He speaks only as a member of the Catholic Church. What he says represents the opinion of the Catholic Church. We must judge such things from a moral point of view. We must ask whether anyone who deals with truth as this man does—a man, moreover, held in high esteem by a particular religious community, can be held in high esteem by the true spirit of humanity.

As long as questions of this kind are not considered with due earnestness, we have not arrived at the right understanding of the Cosmic New Year's Eve. At the present moment, it is essential to reach this right understanding. It is essential for us to extend our sympathies—alas, our sympathies often arise from egoistic sources—to the great human relations, and to feel for the whole of mankind that human sympathy which impels us to make a spiritual movement like this effectively fruitful for the evolution of mankind. May you experience, my dear friends, at this very time, that it is the Spirit of the Cosmos itself, which for decades has been seeking entrance. May you experience during the coming night, that this Spirit which seeks to enter humanity, shall here so be served that the souls of those, who will to feel with and who will to think with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, may feel their union with this new Spirit which wills to enter the world—the Spirit which alone can bring to the earthly world, the world that is destroying itself—the new upbuilding impulse out of Heaven. In this hour, a symbolic hour every year, demanding that we experience it as the decisive hour between past and future—in this hour may you unite your souls with the new Spirit; may you so experience in your souls the contact of the past year with the coming year, that the Cosmic Year which is passing away, may contact itself with the dawning Cosmic Year.

But the passing Cosmic Year will still send many an after-effect into the future; destructive forces into the spheres of Spirit, of Equity, of Economics. Therefore it is all the more needful, that as many men as possible shall be seized in the innermost depths of their souls by the New Year of the Spiritual Future, and shall develop a Will which may be the foundation of a new spiritual world, a world to be built into the future evolution of mankind. Those who care for the future of mankind are not those who would kill religious interest, who would do away with religious experience, but those only, those alone who can see how, through the intellectuality of our age, the old religious interest has faded away, the old religious life has been crippled. Those only care for the future, who see how a new interest must seize mankind, how new religious experience must spring up in mankind, so that man may bring into the Cosmos new germs for a future existence.

Meeting you today with New Year Greetings, I should like to express the wish that each one of you may realize in the depth of his soul how great and insistent are the demands of the present moment as regards the evolution of mankind, and that, as a result of this realization, each one in his own place may co-operate as far as he can, in bringing to fulfilment that of which mankind stands in such need. At this time of year, expressing as it does symbolically the meeting of past and future, I should like, by way of introduction to our New Year contemplation, which rightly is also a contemplation of the whole course of time, to recall some passages from essays which I wrote more than thirty years ago and which are shortly to be published. Although connected with personal experiences, these essays have a definite significance if we want to look into the whole spiritual condition of the present day. My purpose in writing them was, as you will notice, to rouse the conscience of the German people, to give expression to that which could be perceived even then, as fundamentally lacking in the spiritual life of the German nation. I will read to you some passages from one of these essays entitled “The Spiritual Mark of the Present Day”. These passages refer to what was taking place more than thirty years ago, to a past which was then the present. I wrote in the very midst of the spiritual life prevailing at that time, amid symptoms which showed themselves most markedly in the life of thought of the German nation. I wrote: “It is with a shrug of the shoulders that our generation recalls the period when a philosophic current ran through the whole spiritual life of the German people. The mighty impulse of the times, seizing men's minds at the end of last century (i.e., the eighteenth century) and the beginning of this one, and boldly facing the highest imaginable tasks, is now looked upon as a regrettable aberration. If anyone dares to raise an objection when the conversation turns upon Fichte's fantasies, or Hegel's insubstantial play of thoughts and words, he is regarded by his listeners as a mere amateur, who has as slight an idea of the spirit of modern scientific investigation, as he has of the thoroughness and seriousness of philosophic methods. Kant and Schopenhauer at best are tolerated by our contemporaries. It is apparently possible to trace back to Kant the somewhat scanty philosophic crumbs used by modern science as foundational; and Schopenhauer, besides his strictly scientific works, also wrote a few things in a light style, on subjects accessible to people with a limited spiritual horizon. An open mind for that striving towards the loftiest heights of the world of thought, an understanding for that soaring of the spirit which in the realms of science went parallel with our classic period of culture—this is lacking now. The serious side of this phenomenon only appears when we take into consideration that a persistent turning away from that spiritual goal implies for the German people the loss of their own Self, a breaking away from the Spirit of the Nation. For that striving sprang from a deep need in the German nature. It does not enter our mind to wish to deny the manifold mistakes and one-sided fallacies which Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken, and others, committed in their bold inroads into the kingdom of idealism. But the impulse which in all its grandeur inspired them should not be misunderstood. It is the impulse most fitting for a nation of thinkers. The German nation is not characterized by that living sense for immediate reality, or the outward aspect of Nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their wonderful and imperishable works of art. Among the Germans there is instead, an unceasing urge of the spirit toward the cause of things, toward the apparently hidden, deeper origins of the Nature which surrounds us. Just as the Greek spirit found expression in its wonderful world of plastic forms, so the German, more concentrated within himself, less open to Nature but on that account more with his own heart, cherishing intercourse with his own inner world, sought his conquests in the world of pure thought. The way, therefore, in which Fichte and his successors looked upon the world and life was truly German. This is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received; this is why, for a time, they held the whole life of the nation enthralled. This is why we must not break with their spiritual leading. Our solution of the difficulty should be to overcome mistakes, while continuing the natural course of development on the lines laid down at that time. Not what these spirits found or thought to find, is of lasting value, but how they faced the problems.”

At the time when this essay was written the German nation had to be shown these truths, which were threatening to disappear from their field of vision. We were living then in another age than the present, an age in which, had we willed it, it might still have been possible for certain circles to unite with the spirit, then at the beginning of its decline, and thus to prepare the way for an all-pervading and lasting development of the human impulse. Indeed, at that time it ought to have been possible to find such people, amongst those who called themselves leaders of the nation, amongst those who prepared the younger generation for later life. There were no experiments, then, of the kind now coming to the fore in Russia. At that time (in Germany) those who educated the young, still had the chance of turning back to the aims and intentions of the old spiritual life, causing it to rise again in the new form. But no one was willing to listen in the least to any voice urging that a real, spiritual striving should rise to life again amongst men. Every opinion that had taken firm hold amongst the lower or higher ranks of the nation's teachers during the preceding thirty years, was an attack directed against the aims and intentions of a spiritual world-conception.

I should recall that when I wrote this essay, I had already published my views on Goethe's World Conception, on Goethe's scientific ideas. I had pointed out two great dangers in the domain of thought, in the field of active scientific investigation. I coined at that time two expressions defining the two great foes of human spiritual progress. On the one hand I spoke of the “Dogma of Revelation”, and on the other hand of the “Dogma of mere Experience”. I wished to show that the one-sided cultivation of the dogma of revelation, as it had developed in the religious confessions, was just as pernicious as the continual hammering upon the so-called dogmas of experience, i.e., continually insisting only upon all that the external sense-world, the world of material facts, offers to scientists and sociologists. In the course of time the task arose of rendering these thoughts more concrete, of pointing out the real forces behind this or that phenomenon.

What, then, lies behind in everything brought to our notice when the dogma of revelation is mentioned? Today, in an all-embracing sense, all that lies behind what we term Luciferic influences in the course of mankind's evolution. And behind the dogma of experience, lies everything that we term, again in an all-embracing sense, the Ahrimanic influences in human evolution. In the present age, he who wishes to lead men only under the influence of the dogma of revelation, leads them in the Luciferic direction; he who wishes instead to lead men, as scientists would do, only according to the dogma of external sense-experience, leads them in the Ahrimanic direction. Is it not a fitting New Year's contemplation in these serious times of ours, to review the last thirty or forty years, and to point out how necessary it still is today to repeat the call of that time, to raise it anew, but far more strongly? The outward course of events during these last thirty or forty years has shown clearly the justification of that call; for he who without prejudice looks at what has happened, must say to himself: “There would not be today's misery and want, had that call become a reality in the hearts of the people of Central Europe at that time.” At that time it sounded in vain. Today the Holy Roman Congregation meets it with the Decree of the 18th July, 1919, and the chief clergy announce from their pulpits that Anthroposophy is not to be read in my books because the Pope forbids it. Information concerning it can be obtained from the writings of my opponents. This pronouncement takes place simultaneously with negotiations for the establishment of a Roman Catholic Nuntiate in Berlin under the auspices of a Berlin Government with socialistic leanings! Here, again, is something that shows the spiritual mark of the age. Would that today one could really appeal to the innermost heart-forces of those who are still capable of feeling something of the spiritual impulses in human evolution, so that they may wake up, so that they may see how things really stand. The all-important thing today is that man should be able to find himself. But to find our own Self requires confidence in our own strength of soul. Little is attained amongst men today, by appealing to this confidence in their own strength of soul. People want, on the one hand, the support of something which constrains them from within to think and to will what is right, or, on the other hand, the support of something which constrains them from without to think and to will what is right. In some way we always find these two extremes in men; they never wish to pull themselves together, to strive with active forces towards the balance between these two extremes.

Let us reconsider this spiritual mark of the present day, about to become the social and material mark. Let us reconsider it to some extent. We hear the old Marxist call rising in the East of Europe: “A social order must be established among men, where everyone can live according to his individual capacities and needs; a social order must be evolved where the individual capacities of each man can be taken into full consideration and where the justifiable needs of every single person can be satisfied.” Taken in the abstract, no objection whatever can be raised against this saying. But on the other hand, we hear a personality like Lenin saying: “Among people of today such a social order cannot be founded; it is only possible to establish a transitory social order; it is only possible to establish something which is injustice”—of course in the widest sense of the word. Injustice is indeed present to an absurd extent in everything that Lenin and his followers establish. For Lenin and his followers believe that only by passing through a transitory social order, can a new human race be produced, a race not yet in existence; only when the race is there, will it be possible to introduce the social order where everyone will be able to employ his capacities, where everyone will be able to live according to his needs. This, then, is what they are aiming at: the formation of a race of men not yet in existence, in order to realize an ideal which, as I have said, can be justified in the abstract.

Ought not enough people, when they hear of such a thing as this, be able to find themselves, and to grasp the whole seriousness of the present world-situation? Is it not time for this drowsiness to cease, when something of this kind appears before us pointing most significantly to the mark of the present day—this drowsiness which causes us to close our eyes a little, so that we do not grasp the whole significance of such a matter? Nothing will help us to reach a concrete insight into these things, except to abandon the paths of abstraction in the Spiritual life. And for this we must first really acquire the feeling that where there is only a flow of words and phrases about spirit and soul, there the talk is mere abstraction. We must be able to feel when spirit and soul are spoken of as reality. For example, speaking of human capacities: These arise as manifestations from out of man's inner being as the individual grows up. Through some of its leaders, mankind feels itself induced to develop accordingly these capacities and forces, which come to light in the growing human being. But in this domain our feelings are to be trusted only if we definitely perceive in the manifestation of these forces and capacities, a manifestation of the Divine; if we can say to ourselves: Man has come into this World of sense-realities out of a spirit-soul World of Being, and that which externalizes as human forces and capacities, and which we develop in ourselves and in others, comes from a spiritual world and is now placed in a physical human body. Now, consider the spiritual meaning of that which has been explained in this place for decades; it will show you that with the incorporation of human capacities and forces in the physical human body, Luciferic beings were given the possibility of approaching these human capacities and forces. No work whatsoever can be done in the sphere of human capacities and forces, be it in the form of self-activity or in the teaching of others, or in the furtherance of general culture, without coming into contact with the Luciferic forces. In that region which man has to go through before he enters physical existence through birth or conception, the Luciferic Power cannot directly approach the human capacities and forces. Embodiment in a physical human frame, is the means by which the Luciferic Powers are able to reach human capacities and forces. It is only if, without prejudice we look this fact in the face, that we assume a right attitude in life towards everything that surges up from human nature as individual capacities and forces. If we close our eyes to what is Luciferic, if we deny that it exists, then we succumb to it. Then the soul falls into that mood which desires above all to deliver itself up to some coercion from within, so that through all kinds of mystic or religious forces it can unburden itself of the necessity of calling upon its own free Self, or of seeking for the Divine in the world, within the development of its own free Self. Men do not want to think for themselves, they want some indefinite force from within to manifest itself, according to which they can argue logically. They do not want to experience truth; they only want to experience that inner force compelling them from within, manifesting itself in proof which does not appeal to experience, but appeals instead to a Spiritual Power which over-rules man, which compels him to think in this or in that way about Nature or about mankind himself. Men deliver themselves over to the Luciferic Powers, by calling up within themselves this inner compulsion, this inner power.

The means which can be used so that man shall appeal to this inner compulsion, so that he shall not rise to the free, upright position in the spiritual world, is to force him to think that there are no such three members of human nature as Body, Soul and Spirit; to forbid him, as actually happened in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, to think that man consists of Body, Soul and Spirit, and bid him to put away all thoughts concerning the Spirit. These are inner connections which may not be overlooked any longer. We must face them today clearly and without prejudice. In the year 869 A.D., it was decided to forbid the belief in the Spirit in man. It was in that year that the downward slope towards Lucifer began in European civilization. And today we have the full result. Long enough has mankind yielded to the inclination not to experience truth, but to allow the compulsion of argument, of impersonal argument, to work upon him. As a result, mankind has fallen into the other extreme. There has been no real comprehension of human capacities and forces, no one wanted to own that, as I have just explained, Luciferic forces live in human capacities and forces, when these are embodied in a physical human frame. That false point of view—the ruling one in humanity today, concerning individual capacities and forces in human nature—has been the outcome.

Human needs, needs arising first out of his purely physical nature, constitute the other pole of man. In his Letters on aesthetics, Schiller has characterized these needs very finely, contrasting them with man's abstract logical power. He calls them the basic needs (“Notdurft”), whereas he characterizes logical compulsion as the other power, a power straying into spiritual regions. During that great period of German evolution, a personality such as Schiller, was on the point of grasping rightly the polaric contrasts in man. The time was not yet ripe for saying more than what Schiller, Goethe, and others like-minded had said. The necessity of building further upon this beginning has been laid upon our present age. If we continue to build, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will arise. He who is only acquainted with the one-sided power of proof in the spiritual sphere, only learns to know in life the one-sided power of natural instincts in human needs. It is easy to imagine that when man with his capacities and powers enters the physical sense-world through conception or birth, and Lucifer hovers over him and from that which man himself ought to possess takes something on one side, the head-side of the man's being, there remains in man an inferior kind of power for the exercise of his independence in the sphere of his needs. Through that which Lucifer on the one hand takes for his own, Ahriman on the other hand attains the possibility of making his own that which works in the needs of human nature. The dogma of mere external sense-experience has paved the way for the complete Ahrimanization of mankind's sense-life of instinct during the last third of the nineteenth century. Modern man stands before a terrible fact today because he does not recognize that salvation lies in the state of balance between the two extremes, between capacities on the one side, and needs on the other side. The materialistic spirit in man makes him look on the body alone as that which produces capacities i.e., man looks merely on the Luciferic primal force of capacities. The capacities become Luciferic owing to their entrance into a human body. If man believes that capacities spring from the body, then man believes in Lucifer, and if man believes that needs spring from the human body, then man believes only in the Ahrimanic side of such needs.

And what experiment is being made in the East of Europe today under the guidance of the West? (This guidance is not only evident through the fact that Lenin and Trotsky are the spiritual disciples of the West, but also through the fact that Lenin was dispatched into Russia in a sealed railway carriage by Dr. Helphand, the German official who accompanied him. So that what is termed Bolshevism, is an article transported into Russia by a German Administration and the German military command.) What are they trying to attain in the civilization of Eastern Europe? An attempt is being made to do away with everything human, with everything embodied in a human body as human, and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman, with the civilization they represent. Were this to be realized in the East, then the Manufacturing Company of Lucifer and Ahriman would create a world excluding everything beneficial to the individual human being, and man himself would be dovetailed into this Luciferic-Ahrimanic civilization as part of a machine in the complete working of the machine. But the parts of a machine are lifeless and allow themselves to be fitted in, whereas human nature is inwardly alive, permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. It cannot fit into a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic organization, but will perish in it. Only an understanding of Spiritual Science can grasp what is really taking place today in this materialistic world which has but the haziest notions of spirit. It is only the insight of Spiritual Science and its living earnestness which can explain what the fact implies that, during the last thirty to forty years, the essential nature of the German people would not turn back to that German spirituality pointed out in my essay, but that in this German world of culture, we have at last come to this, that men of authority have felt it to be the right thing to send to Russia (in a sealed railway carriage), through a man who stood in their service, the inaugurators of Lucifer and Ahriman. In our days, it will not do simply to look around and then go to sleep peacefully, in the presence of what is actually taking place in the depths of the spirit of the present time. We ought to feel that we must say: “We have forsaken and trodden under foot that which in the age of Schiller and of Goethe was created within the Spiritual life of Germany. And we have the task of beginning where they left off and of building on further.” No better New Year's thought can enter our souls than the resolution to make this our starting point.

I told you the following some years ago: In the sixties and seventies of last century an educationist, Heinrich Deinhardt, lived in Vienna, the place where my essays were put together. This man's spirit led him from the standpoint of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics to take an active part in pedagogics, a science that was then under full sail, following the materialistic lead of his day. In some fine letters, printed at the time, explanatory of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics, Deinhardt wrote that man should be educated to recognize the compelling necessity of logic, and of the basic needs (“Notdurft”), which only live in instinct. Deinhardt was one of those who raised the warning cry: “We must prevent by means of education what is bound to happen otherwise.” He could not yet speak with the concepts of Spiritual Science, but he did point out in his own words the inevitable coming of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic culture if the Science of Education, the Art of Education were not determined by this balance. Heinrich Deinhardt had the misfortune to be knocked down in the street and to break his leg. Quite a simple operation might have put it right again, but the doctors found he was so undernourished that the injured parts would not heal. So this man, who could look so deeply into the events of his day, died owing to a slight accident. Yes, in Central Europe, men whose will was directed to bring forth something out of the spiritual, were left to starve! This example could be multiplied many times. Those who write like the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, whom I mentioned yesterday, will probably not die of hunger. Those will not die of hunger who wrote the following: “In No. 6 of the weekly paper, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Orgaeismus (The Threefold Social Organism) it is boasted that the ‘new impulse’ (a pet phrase of the Anthroposophists and of the Dreigliederung people) rests upon the fullness of Steiner's spiritual knowledge. The head of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart founded the ‘Free Waldorf School’ for the children of employees and managers, a school founded on the impulses of all the thoughts that had come from Dr. Steiner's Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In that school ‘Anthroposophy is to be the artistic method of education’.” Those who mock and tread into the dust what is being willed out of the spirit will surely not die of hunger, even in these hard days.

But it is indeed necessary to receive into our souls New Year impulses that prevent us from passing by sleepily and heedlessly, what is actually going on, impulses that make us accept sternly the stern intention of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In our own ranks, too, I see many who would like to doze over things that reveal themselves out of full compassion, out of compassion for that which is happening in our times and which, left to itself, must lead to downfall! There are persons lacking courage who join the Anthroposophical Society and then say: “Yes, Spiritual Science is something I like, but I do not want to have anything to do with social activity; it has no place in it.” Such members might take an example from our adversaries. The Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, follows everything we do. He concludes the article mentioned above, with the sentence, “The weekly paper, The Threefold Social Organism—e.g., No. 8, of course holds the opinion that the ‘Church is conspiring’ against the historical task of the self-determination of the individual.” In other articles, too, the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, shows how seriously he takes all we do.

It would be well if those who are in our Society would also take things seriously, in the right way. The spies who are on the outlook for any weak spot which they can expose in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and in all that proceeds from it, are not few in number. I think you know that I am not so foolish as to tell you what follows, out of mere vanity, and so I venture to refer to it. On the side of our adversaries the wish naturally arises to find a point of attack here or there. It is well, therefore, to read the following passage in Dr. Rittelmeyer's essay: ‘Steiner, War and Revolution’: “I happened to have a talk recently with a young Swedish scientist in economics, who had had the strict schooling of the economists of Cassel. He told me that he had read Steiner's book very carefully, from end to end, with the expectation of unmasking him as an amateur; but he had been unable to find any mistake.” In our circles we ought to consider such matters more seriously. The foundation on which we ought to build is the knowledge: Here something is willed, something that has nothing to do with the rambling talk of Theosophy, current elsewhere. Here we build upon the same strict insight into things as is demanded from any other accepted science. Were this really felt, then we should understand why the event took place which Father Zimmermann terms a defection. You know that it was no defection, but that we were thrown out because it was impossible to bring any earnestness into that society of mystic wishy-washy talk, no real earnestness was wanted there. They only wished to go on chattering in the same way they had chattered for years, particularly in connection with subjects about which all possible things can be said with no knowledge of the spiritual world. What our age most sorely needs is the greatest earnestness in the sphere of Spiritual life.

Today, New Year's day, with my visit drawing to an end, I wished to speak to you again of this deep earnestness. My most heartfelt desire is that into our ranks may come the New Year wish—it is a wish each one can shape for himself—that through the souls and hearts of our friends, eyes may in some degree be opened to that which is needed so sorely, to that which, out of the Spirit alone, is able to help humanity. No salvation is to be found in any external organization. Something new must be stamped upon human evolution. These facts must become known, and to feel that these facts must become known is indeed the most worthy New Year's thought that could rise in your hearts. This year, 1920, will hold in store many an important decision, if enough people can be found who are able to recognize the needs of mankind, as I have pointed them out today. 1920 will bring misery and suffering if such men cannot be found, if those only take the lead who wish to work on in the old way.

First of all I want to say a few words of greeting to express the feelings which your gathering have aroused in me. Your speaker described in a pleasing way the impulses that have brought you together here. Much of what I shall have to say in the coming days will inevitably be a kind of interpretation of what is present within you, more or less strongly as inner experiences which you wish to be brought to clarity of soul. I say clarity of soul rather than merely of an intellectual nature.

You have been brought together by that which lives in the depths of your souls. These depths are taken hold of by forces which, in the specific way in which they are working at the present time, are of recent date. These forces—in the way they are working in you—are scarcely older than this century. They are forces which even today reveal themselves very clearly to him who can see them, but in the near future they will become ever more apparent. In the next few days we shall describe these forces in their most intimate nature, as well as the opposite tendencies which preceded and had become “out of date” by the last third of the nineteenth century. But today, I shall speak about these forces in their more external aspect.

I think, my dear friends, that you feel you can no longer find yourselves in accord with what an older generation has to say to the world today. You see, as early as the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century, people were stressing, both in art and in philosophy, the deep gulf between the older and younger generations. But all that was said then by poets and others about this gulf, this abyss, is pale in comparison with what has to be considered today. Today the younger and the older generation speak entirely different languages of the soul. This is so to a far greater extent than is realized. It attaches no blame to an older generation as regards the younger. To speak of blame would be to use a form of thought belonging to the older generation—one of their philistine forms of thought. We shall not speak of blame, neither shall we accuse. But we shall consider how fundamentally souls belonging to evolution in the West have changed since the last two to three decades. In our present time, many things clash.

A little while ago I gave a series of lectures in England, at Oxford. As a university town, Oxford occupies a unique position in the cultural life of the West. One feels that in Oxford—a town very closely connected with spiritual evolution in the West—a relic of the Middle Ages is surviving on into the present time. It is by no means an unpleasing relic, quite the contrary, and in many respects worthy of admiration. We were taken round by a friend who is a graduate of Oxford University, and it is the custom there, when in their capacity as graduates, always to wear cap and gown. After we had gone round with him, I met him again in the street. The next morning I could not help describing to the English audience the impression I had when this friend appeared in cap and gown. It seemed to me thoroughly symptomatic. This, together with other experiences, induced me to form a picture and to say why a new social structure, reaching to the depths of modern spiritual life, is necessary. When this friend met me in the street, I said to myself that if I had to write a letter now, under the immediate impression of this meeting, I should not know what date to put on the letter. I should have been tempted to date it about the twelfth or thirteenth century, in order to adhere to the style where such a thing was possible.

Something that is not of the present has been preserved there. We find nothing like it in Middle Europe. But what we find in Middle Europe, in influential centers of culture, is nevertheless an evolutionary product of what I have just described.

Here, in Middle Europe, the gown has practically been discarded, except on festive occasions, when Directors and other officials are expected to wear it, often to their great annoyance.

Our friend, who was also a barrister, said to me: “If I were taking you round the Law Courts in London, I should, as a barrister, have to put on a wig, not a cap.” There you see a survival of something that has become out of date, and yet was still alive in the last century. So there we have the Middle Ages in the present. In Middle Europe people have, after all, outgrown a custom which belonged to the former generation and had become old. First they discarded the costume; then, with a sudden jump, they adopted a kind of thinking, rather different in character, which headed straight into materialism. These contrasts between Western and Middle Europe are extraordinarily great. And now there is a very symptomatic phenomenon which I prefer to describe through facts rather than by abstract words.

In Middle Europe we have forgotten Goethe and accepted Darwin, although Goethe grasped at its roots the knowledge which Darwin only indicates superficially. Many similar things might be quoted. Perhaps you will say that Goethe has not been forgotten, for there exists a Goethe Society, for example. I don't believe you will say it, so I will not pursue it further. Goethe himself and what he brought to light—the Middle European spiritual impulse—were, in fact, forgotten in the second half of the nineteenth century. But these things are mere symptoms. The point is, that along the path taken by Middle Europe and its cultural life, the leading centers of culture emancipated themselves in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the spirit which still remained in the West. Since that time, Middle Europe lost the spiritual, lost the element that storms and pulsates through the soul, from consciousness. That is why it was possible, too, for Goethe to be forgotten.

In the West this element has been preserved in traditions and in external life. In Middle Europe, especially in the German-speaking regions, it has been pushed down, as it were, into the depths of the life of soul, and consciousness has not been filled with it. This was particularly marked in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Close historical study will reveal something strange in the last third of the nineteenth century. If we study the literature and the writings which were read by those who played a part in shaping the cultural life, we find during the last third of the nineteenth century, up to the middle of the eighties and nineties, in German-speaking districts, quite a different style in the journals and even in the newspapers from the style that is current today. Thoughts were finely chiseled and elaborated; importance was attached to sequence in the thoughts, and to beauty as well. In comparison with the style current in the last third of the nineteenth century, our modern style is raw and crude. We need only pick up writings—no matter what they may be—of men in the sixties and seventies, not deeply learned or scholarly but possessing an average degree of culture, and we shall find this great difference. The forms of the thoughts have changed. But what is raw and crude today has proceeded from what, even in scholarly literature during the last third of the nineteenth century, was finely chiseled and full of spirituality. But those who lived through it, who, without necessarily growing old, have reached more advanced years in the present-day world of thought—we notice what has insinuated itself in a dreadful way into every domain of thought and spiritual life: symbolically, I will call it the “empty phrase,” the “cliché.”

With the vogue of the “cliché” there began to develop lack of thought, lack of sound sentiments, lack of will, which are now on the upgrade. These characteristics were the immediate outcome of the “empty phrase,” the “cliché.” The outstanding development of the “empty phrase” took place in the last third of the nineteenth century. You can follow this externally, my dear friends. Things that crop up in a certain epoch need not necessarily appeal to you. And although in one form or another they may definitely not appeal, you can still study them from the point of view of their significance for the whole of mankind.

Think of the rich tones of inner beauty which are to be found in the German romantic poets in the first third of the nineteenth century. Think of the words of a man like Jacob Grimm when he touches on things spiritual, how these words seem to be full of the fresh, health-giving air of the woods, and you will say: “In those days the ‘cliché’ did not yet dominate Middle Europe.” It did not make its way into Middle Europe until the last third of the nineteenth century. Those who are sensitive to such matters are aware of the gradual entrance of what inevitably accompanies the “empty phrase.” When the empty phrase begins to dominate, truth, as experienced inwardly by the soul, dies away. And something else goes hand in hand with the empty phrase: in social life man cannot really find his fellow-men any longer.

My dear friends, when words sound forth without soul from the mouth—as they do in the empty phrase, the cliché—then we pass by other human beings and cannot understand them. This too reached its culmination in the last third of the nineteenth century, not in the soul's depths but in the field of consciousness. Men became more and more alienated from one another. The louder the call for social reforms, the more is it a symptom of the fact that men have become unsocial. Because they no longer have any feeling for what is truly social, they cry out for social reform. A hungry animal does not howl for food because it has food in its stomach, but because it has none. Similarly, the soul that cries out for social life, cries, not because it is permeated with social feeling, but because this feeling is lacking. And so man was gradually turned into a being whose nature is not understood today, and yet it is clear enough that everywhere in the relations between man and man no need is felt to grow near, in soul, to other human beings. Everyone passes the other by. The individual's greatest interest is only in himself.

What then has come into the twentieth century from the last third of the nineteenth as the customary social feeling between man and man? Nowadays you continually hear: “That is my standpoint.” This is how people talk: “That is my standpoint.” Everyone has a standpoint.—as if the standpoint matters! The standpoint in spiritual life is just as fleeting as it is in the physical. Yesterday I stood in Dornach, today I am standing here. These are two different standpoints in physical life. What matters is that a man should have a sound will and a sound heart so that he can look at the world from every standpoint. But people today do not want what they can glean from different standpoints; the egoistic assertion of their own particular standpoint is more important to them. But thus a man shuts himself off in the most rigorous way from his fellow-men. If somebody says something, the other person does not really enter into it, for he has his own standpoint. But people do not get any nearer to each other by such means. We can only come nearer to each other when we know how to place our different standpoints in a world that is common to us all. But this world is simply not there today. Only in the spirit is there a world that is common to all—and the spirit is lacking. That is the second point.

And the third is this. In the course of the nineteenth century the humanity of Middle Europe has really become very weak-willed—weak-willed in the sense that thought no longer unfolds the power to steel the will in such a way as to make man, who is a thought-being, capable of shaping the world out of his thoughts.

And now, my dear friends, when it is said that thoughts have become “pale” this must not be twisted into the assertion that no thoughts are needed in order to live as men. Thoughts, however, must not be so feeble that they stick up there in the head. They must be so strong that they stream down through the heart and through the whole being of man, right down to the feet. For really it is better if, besides red and white blood corpuscles, thoughts, too, pulse through our blood. It is a good thing, certainly, when a man has a heart too, and not merely thoughts. Best of all is for thoughts to have a heart. And that has been lost altogether. We cannot cast off the thoughts that have followed in the wake of the last four or five centuries. But these thoughts must get a heart as well!

And now I will tell you, from an external point of view, what is living in your souls. You have grown up and have come to know the older generation. This older generation expressed itself in words; you could only hear clichés. An unsocial element presented itself to you in this older generation. Men passed each other by. And in this older generation there also presented itself the impotence of thought to pulse through the will and the heart.

You see, people could live with the “cliché,” with antisocial conventionality, with mere routine instead of warm community of life, so long as the heritage from earlier generations was still there. But this heritage was exhausted by the close of the nineteenth century. And so what presented itself could not speak to your own souls. And now, precisely in Middle Europe, you felt that in the depths below there is something that stands in the direst need of rediscovering what once lived beyond the empty phrase, beyond convention, beyond routine. You wanted again to have a living experience of truth, a living experience of human community, of stout-heartedness in cultural life. Where is it then?—so asks a voice within you.

And often, at the dawn of the twentieth century—even if not clearly expressed, it could be seen—on the one side there were the young, and on the other, the old. The old man said: “That is my standpoint.” Ah! as the nineteenth century drew to its close, everyone began to have his own particular standpoint. One was a materialist, the second an idealist, the third a realist, the fourth a sensualist, and so on. They all had their standpoints. But gradually under the domination of empty phrase, convention, and routine, the standpoint had become a crust of ice. The spiritual Ice-Age had dawned. The ice-crust was thin, but as men's “standpoints” had lost the sense of their own weight, they did not break through it. Besides, being cold in heart they did not thaw the ice. The younger people stood side by side with the old, the young with their warm hearts not articulate yet, but warm. This warmth broke through the ice-crust. The younger man did not feel: “That is my standpoint,” but he felt: “I am losing the ground from under my feet. The warmth of my heart is breaking this ice that has congealed out of empty phrase, convention, and routine.” Although not clearly expressed—for today nothing is clearly expressed—this state of thing[s] had existed for a long time and still exists at the present day.

It is hardest of all for those who with a scholarly education try to fit in with the times. They are confronted by thoughts that are void of heart-quality and are quite consciously striven for just because of this. Now in speaking out of the spirit it is often necessary to shape words differently from what is customary when telling people something highly logical, philosophical or scientific. This approach is quite out of place in face of the spiritual, and altogether out of place in face of the spiritual is the following, which we will take as an example.

People say today: He is not a true scientist who does not interpret observation and experiment quite logically; who does not pass from thought to thought in strict conformity with the correct methods that have been evolved. If he does not do this he is no genuine thinker. But, my dear friends, what if reality happens to be an artist and scorns our elaborate dialectical and experimental methods? What if Nature herself works according to artistic impulses? If it were so, human science, according to Nature, would have to become an artist, for otherwise there would be no possibility of understanding Nature. That, however, is certainly not the standpoint of the modern scientist. His standpoint is: Nature may be an artist or a dreamer; it makes no difference to us, for we decree how we propose to cultivate science. What does it matter to us if Nature is an artist? It matters not at all, for that is not our standpoint

At the outset I can only describe a few impressions to illustrate what was working together in chaotic interplay with the approach of the twentieth century—the century that has placed you before such hard trials of the soul. We have had to face outer events, including the grim and terrible world-war; these are only the outward expression of what is reigning in the innermost soul of the modern civilized world. It is simply so, and we must be conscious of it. Primarily we have to seek for something which the deepest soul of Germany is yearning for—as your speaker truly said—but which precisely within Germany was denied by men's consciousness the nearer the modern age approached. We lost not only Goethe but also a great deal of what was there in the Middle Ages and out of which Goethe grew, and we must find it again. And if it is asked today quite from the external aspect: Why have you come here today?—I shall answer: In order to find this. For you are really seeking for something that is there. Goethe answered the question: Which secret is of the highest value?—The revealed secret. (From the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.) But it has to be revealed through eyes being opened to perceive it. What concerns you are mainly longings of the inner life—if you understand yourselves aright. Whether one has to become a teacher or adopt some other profession—that is not the point. Everything which those who want again to become whole men are seeking today shall be found out of the common center of true manhood. That is why we find ourselves together here.

After all, it is quite a different matter if in earlier centuries—to take a radical example—people burnt a Giordano Bruno. In those times this was the customary way of refuting truths. But now—to compare this with the following symptom drawn from the realm of science—when the Swabian doctor Julius Robert Maier was making a voyage round the world, the peculiar constitution of the blood in Southern Asia brought him to the conception of what is known as the heat equivalent, the conservation of energy. In 1844 he wrote a treatise on this subject which was rejected as amateurish and unsuitable by the most famous scientific periodical of the time, the Poggendorf Annals. Julius Robert Maier was so enthusiastic about his discovery that whenever anyone met him in the street he began at once to talk about it, until finally contemporary experts decided that as he was always talking about the same thing, he was suffering from fixed ideas. As you know, he was declared insane and put into an asylum. Today you can go to Heilbronn and see the Robert Maier Memorial. It is said that the law of the conservation of energy is the most important law of physics that has been discovered in the modern age. Well, of course, such things happen! Mankind may, naturally, lapse into error, but the point I want to make is that this can be judged out of mere phrases, mere convention, mere routine.

Think of the way such a terrible tragedy, such a terrible mockery, was described in the nineteenth century, and compare it with the account given today of the same case. What has actually happened cannot be undone by abstract writings. Anyone who has a heart within him and reads the descriptions that are given of such a case, feels as if robbed of all inner support and a terrible turmoil is set going in his soul. Human beings must again be capable of feeling, not weakly, but strongly: beautiful—ugly, good—evil, true—false. They must be capable of feeling things not weakly but strongly, so that they live in them with their whole being, that their very heart's blood flows into their words. Then the empty phrase will dissipate and they will feel not only themselves but other men within their own being; convention will dissipate, and the heart's blood will pulse through what they have in their heads; then sheer routine will dissipate and life will become human once again.

Young people in the twentieth century feel these things; they have been seeking but found only chaos. These things cannot be portrayed by writing up external history. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a crucial point in the inner development of mankind. Souls who were born shortly before or shortly after the turn of the century are of quite a different inner make-up from those who were born even during the last third of the nineteenth century. One can speak about this if, in spite of the years piling up, one has not allowed oneself to get old.

So we shall see tomorrow, my dear friends, how the new generation has not linked up with the old but is divided from it by an abyss. It is not a question of finding fault but only of trying to understand. I am not finding fault when I speak of the tragedy which befell Julius Robert Maier. The same kind of thing happened to many people. It is not a matter of finding fault, but of the need for understanding. For the most important thing is to understand what is experienced deeply and inwardly; an unclear seeking cannot be allowed to continue. A light must come that will flood this unclear seeking without making it dry or cold. We must find this light, while preserving the heart's blood.

I do not wish to impose upon you anything that savors of the mystical, but to point to the truth, the truth in the spirit. You know that among the many clichés which became current in the nineteenth century, it was said that the great pioneer of the nineteenth century closed his life by calling out to posterity: “More light!” As a matter of fact Goethe did not say “More light!” He lay on his couch breathing with difficulty and said: “Open the shutters!” That is the truth. The other is the cliché that has connected itself with it. The words Goethe really spoke are perhaps far more apt than the mere phrase “More light”. The state of things at the end of the nineteenth century does indeed arouse the feeling that our predecessors have closed the shutters. Then came the younger generation; they felt cramped; they felt that the shutters which the older generation had closed so tightly must be opened. Yes, my dear friends, I assure you that although I am old, I shall tell you more of how we can now attempt to open the shutters again.

In speaking of a movement among the youth, a clear distinction can be made between the youth movement in the wider sense and those young people who are particularly concerned with schools, with the sphere of education in general. I do not wish to accentuate either the one or the other, but our aim will be most readily attained if we consider the main difficulties of the inner life among the youth at Universities and Colleges.

We shall often have to start from details and then quickly soar to a wider outlook. Allow me to say a few words about the inner experiences undergone by young people at Universities. As a matter of fact, this situation has been preparing for many decades, but recently it has reached a climax making it more clearly perceptible.

Young people at the Universities are seeking for something. This is not surprising, for their purpose in going to college is to seek for something. They have been looking in those who taught them, for real leaders, for those who were both teachers and leaders or—as would be equally correct—teachers endowed with leadership, and they did not find them. And this was the really terrible thing clothed in all kinds of different words—one man speaking conservatively, the other radically, one saying something very wise and another something very stupid. What was said amounted to this: We can no longer find any teachers.

What, then, did youth find when they came to the Universities? Well, they met men in whom they did not find what they were looking for. These men prided themselves on not being teachers any longer, but investigators, researchers. The Universities established themselves as institutes for research. They were no longer there for human beings, but only for science. And science led an existence among men which it defined as “objective.” It drummed into people, in every possible key, that it was to be respected as “objective” science. It is sometimes necessary to express such things pictorially. And so this objective science was now going about among human beings but it most certainly was not a human being! Something non-human was going about among men, calling itself “Objective Science.”

This could be perceived in detail, over and over again. How often is it not said: This or that has been discovered; it already belongs to science. And then other things are added to science and these so-called treasures of science become an accumulation, something which has acquired, step by step, this dreadful objective existence among mankind. But human beings do not really fit in with this objective creature who is strutting around in their midst, for true and genuine manhood has no kinship with this cold, objective, bolstered-up creature. True, as time has gone on, libraries and research institutes have been established. But the young, especially, are not looking for libraries or research institutes. They are looking in libraries for—it is almost beyond one to say the word—they are looking for human beings—and they find, well, they find librarians! They are looking in the scientific institutes for men filled with enthusiasm for wisdom, for real knowledge, and they find, well, those who are usually to be found in laboratories, scientific institutes, hospitals and the like. The old have accustomed themselves to being so easy-going and phlegmatic that they really do not want to be there at all in person—only their institutes and libraries must be there. But the human being cannot bring this about. Even if he tries not to be there, he is there nevertheless, working not through the reality that lives in him as a human being, but through a leaden heaviness in him.

One could express this in other ways too: Human beings strive toward Nature. But—to take a significant point—you cannot help saying: Nature is round the young child too, for example. But in its life of soul-and-spirit the little child derives nothing from Nature. The little child has to get something from Nature by coming into relation with human beings with whom it can experience Nature in common. In a certain respect this holds good right up to very late years of youth. We must come together with human beings with whom we can experience Nature in common. This was not possible during the last decades because there was no language in which people, both young and old, could come to an understanding with one another about Nature. When the old speak of Nature it is as though they were darkening her, as though the names they give to the plants no longer fit them. Nothing fits! On the one side there is the riddle “plant” and we hear the names from the old, but they do not tally because the human reality is expelled; “objective” science is wandering about on the earth. This state of things came gradually but it reached a climax during recent decades.

In the nineteenth century it showed itself through a particular phenomenon in a significant way. When anyone with a little imagination cast an eye over the higher forms of culture in recent centuries, he made acquaintance at every turn with this objective creature “Science,” which came upon the scene in many different guises but claimed always to be the one and only genuine, objective science. And having made its acquaintance, having this objective science continually introduced to one, one perceived that another being had stolen away bashfully, because she felt that she was no longer tolerated. And if one were spurred on to speak with this being, secretly in the corner, she said: “I have a name which may not be uttered in the presence of objective science. I am called Philosophy, Sophia—Wisdom. But having the ignominious prefix ‘love’ I have attached to me something that through its very name is connected with human inwardness, with love. I no longer dare to show myself. I have to go about bashfully. Objective science prides itself on having nothing of the ‘philo’ in its makeup. It has also lost, as a token, the real Sophia. But I go about nevertheless, for I still bear something of the sublime within me, connected with feeling and with a genuinely human quality.”

This is a picture that often came before the soul, and it expressed an undefined feeling in countless young people during the last twenty or thirty years.

People have been trying to find forms of expression—for as there are forms of expression for the life of thought, so too for the life of feeling—they have always been trying to find expressions for what they were seeking. Possibly the most zealous, who felt the greatest warmth of youth, broke out into the vaguest expressions because all they really knew was: We are seeking for something. But when they came to express what it was that they were seeking, it was nothing, a Nothingness. In reality, the Nothingness was, as in the words of Faust, the “All,” but it presented itself as a Nothingness. It was a question of crossing an abyss. Such was the feeling, and it still is the feeling today. It can only be understood as part of history, but history in a new, not old sense.

And now I want to speak of something quite different, but gradually things will link themselves together. Human beings who lived at the beginning of our era were able to feel quite differently from the human being of today. This was so because in the life of feeling and human perception there still lived a great deal of what was old. Human beings had a heritage in their souls. Heritage was not there only at the beginning of our era; it continued far into the Middle Ages. But nowadays souls are placed into the world without it. The fact that souls come into the world without this heritage is very noticeable in the new century. That is one aspect. The other—well, my dear friends, suppose you were to ask anybody who lived at the beginning of our era if they spoke much about “education”. The farther back we go, the less we find that education is spoken about. Education, of course, may be spoken about in different ways, for instance: Through education the young should gradually be brought up to be what they want to be when they are old. For after all we must grow old in earthly life—however young we may still be.

In olden times human beings were young and grew old in a more natural way. Today people cannot be old and young in a way that is true to nature. People do not know any longer what it means to be young and what it means to be old. Nothing is known about it and that is why there is such endless talk about education, because there is a longing to know how to teach young people to be young in order that they may grow old respectably. But nobody knows how to direct things so that human beings should be truly young and how, in youth, they can decently assimilate what will enable them to become old in a worthy manner.

Centuries ago all this was quite a matter of course. Today a great deal is said about education. Mostly we do not realize the absurdity of what is said on this subject. Nowadays almost everyone is talking about education. And why? Usually he has but the vaguest realization of having been badly educated and yet difficulties in life are attributed to this cause. People talk about it because they find that they are uneducated. This they admit. But they do not experience anything real in this domain. Nonetheless conclusions are formed. The usual cry is: “We should have this program in education”—merely because people feel so insecure in themselves. One could also show that a strong will is present on all sides, but without any real content. And that is exactly what the young are feeling, that there is no content in this will. Why is there no content? Because only lately something genuinely new has arisen in earth-evolution.

The following can only be indicated in broad outline, but if you care to look at my book, Occult Science, it will be brought home to you. There you will find that the earth is shown as a heritage of other world-existences. The names are immaterial. I have called them the Saturn, Sun and Moon existences. But the first earth-epoch was only the repetition of earlier world-existences. On the earth there have been three periods of repetition: a Saturn, a Sun, and a Moon period. Then came the earth period proper. But this earth period proper, this Atlantean epoch, was again only a repetition at a higher level of earlier conditions.

And then came the post-Atlantean epoch—a still higher stage. But this again was a repetition. The post-Atlantean epoch was a repetition of a repetition. Until the fifteenth century A.D. mankind actually lived on nothing but repetitions, on nothing but a heritage. Up to the fifteenth century the human being, in his soul, was by no means an unwritten page. Before then, many things rose up of themselves in the soul. But from the fifteenth century onwards souls were really unwritten pages. Now the earth was new—new for the first time. Since the fifteenth century the earth has been new. Before then human beings lived on the earth with much they inherited. As a rule no heed is paid to the fact that since the fifteenth century the earth has become new for the first time. Before then human beings were fed on the past. Since the fifteenth century they have been standing face to face with Nothingness. The soul is an unwritten page. And how have human beings been living since the fifteenth century? Since then, the son has inherited from the father rough tradition what had once been inherited in a different way, so that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century tradition was still always there. But as you can see, tradition has fared worse and worse.

Think for example of the Sphere of Rights. It would never have occurred to a man like Scotus Erigena to speak of Rights as modern people speak, because at that time there was still something in the souls which led human beings to speak as man to man. This is no longer so, because there is nothing in the soul that leads to the human reality; man has found nothing yet that leads out of the Nothingness. At one time the father could at least speak to the son. But at the end of the eighteenth century things had gone so far that the father had really nothing to say to his son any more. Then people began to seek, convulsively to begin with, for the so-called “Rights of Reason.” Ideas and feelings on the subject of Rights were supposed to be pressed out of reason. Then Savigny and others discovered that nothing more could be pressed out of reason. People began to establish Rights according to history, where it was a question of studying earlier conditions and cramming themselves with the feelings of men long since dead, because there was nothing left in themselves. Rights of reason were a convulsive clinging to what had already been lost. Rights according to history were a confession that nothing more was to be got out of the men of the day. Such was the situation at the onset of the nineteenth century: The feeling grew keener and keener that mankind was facing a Nothingness and that something must be got out of the human being himself.

In ancient Greece nobody would have known how to speak about objective science. How did man express his relation to the world? By reference to spiritual vision he spoke of Melpomene, of Urania, and so on; of the “Liberal Arts”. These Liberal Arts were not beings who went about on the earth, but for all that they were real. Even in the age of philosophy, the Greek's experience of his connection with the spiritual world was concrete. The Muses were genuinely loved; they were real beings with whom man was related and had intercourse. Homer's words: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Peleus' son, Achilles” were not the mere phraseology they are thought to be by modern scholars. Homer felt himself a kind of chalice and the Muse spoke out of him as a higher manhood enfilled him.

Klopstock was unwilling to speak in the phrases which were already prevalent in the world into which he was born; he said: “Sing, immortal Soul, of sinful man's redemption.” But this “immortal soul” too has disappeared little by little. It was a slow and gradual process. In the first centuries of Christendom we find that the once concrete Muses had become dreadfully withered ladies! Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astrology, Music—they had lost all concrete reality. Boethius makes them appear almost without distinct features. It is impossible to love them any longer. But even so they are buxom figures in comparison with the objective science that goes about as a being among men today. Little by little the human being has lost the connection he had in olden times with the spiritual world. This was inevitable because he had to develop to full freedom in order to shape all that is human out of himself. This has been the challenge since the fifteenth century, but it was not really felt until the end of the nineteenth and particularly in the twentieth century. For now, not only was the inheritance lost but the traditions too. Fathers had nothing to tell their sons. And now the feeling was: We are facing a Nothingness. People began to sense: The earth has in fact become new.

What I have said here can be put in another way, by considering what would have become of the earth without the Christ Event.—Suppose there had been no Christ Event. The earth as it lives in man's life of soul and spirit would gradually have withered. The Christ Event could not have been delayed until the modern age. It had to occur somewhat earlier than the time when the old inheritance had gone, in order that the Christ Event could at least be experienced through the old inherited qualities of soul. Just imagine what it would have been like if the Christ Event at the beginning of our era had come about at the end of the nineteenth or in the twentieth century. How our contemporaries would laugh to scorn the pretension that an event could be of such significance! Quite a different kind of feeling was necessary. The feeling of standing before a Nothingness could not, at the time of that Event, have been there. The Christ Event came during the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilization. And in the same epoch, in the first third of which there fell the Christ Event, the old era came to an end.

A new era begins in the fifteenth century, with the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilization in which we are now living. In this epoch there were only traditions. They have gradually faded out. In this epoch, as regards the Christ Event, as regards the deeper, more intimate religious questions, men are clearly facing a Nothingness. It has even become impossible for theologians to understand the Christ Event. Try to get from contemporary theology an intelligible conception of the Christ Event. Those who argue the Christ away from Jesus pass as the greatest theologians today. Quite obviously, people are facing the Abyss.

I am only describing symptoms. For these things take place in the deeper layers of man's life of soul. These layers of soul conjure into those who were born on earth to become the young of recent decades, something that makes them feel cut off from the stream of world happenings. It is as though a terrible jerk had been given to the evolution of the soul.

Suppose my hand were capable of feeling and were chopped off. What would it feel? It would feel cut off, dried up; it would no longer feel itself to be what it actually is. This is what the human soul has been feeling since the last third of the nineteenth century in regard to the stream of world happenings. The soul feels cut off, chopped off, and the anxious question is: How can I once again become alive in my soul?

But then, when one strives to speak out of what can bring this life back again, those who want to muddle along on the lines of the old spiritual life simply show no understanding. Just think how little is understood about the essence of the founding of the Waldorf School, for example. For the most part people hear about the Waldorf School something quite different from what they ought to hear. They hear things that were also said decades ago. The mere words that are spoken today about the Waldorf School can be found by them in books. They find every single word in earlier books. But when one wants to use different words, or perhaps only different ways of putting the sentences together, then people say: That is bad style. They have not the remotest notion of what must be done now, when human beings who still have a soul in their bodies must inevitably face the Nothingness.

Waldorf School education must be listened to with other ears than those with which one hears about other kinds of education or educational reform. For the Waldorf School gives no answer to the questions people want to have answered today and which are ostensibly answered by other systems of education. What is the aim of such questions? Their usual aim is intelligence, much intelligence—and of intelligence the present time has an incalculable amount. Intelligence, intellect, cleverness—these are widespread commodities at the present time. One can give terribly intelligent answers to questions like: What should we make out of the child? How should we inculcate this or that into him? The ultimate result is that people answer for themselves the question: What pleases me in the child, and how can I get the child to be what I like? But such questions have no significance in the deeper evolutionary course of humanity. And to such questions Waldorf pedagogy gives no reply at all.

To give a picture of what Waldorf Education is, we must say that it speaks quite differently from the way in which people speak elsewhere in the sphere of education: Waldorf School Education is not a pedagogical system but an Art—the Art of awakening what is actually there within the human being. Fundamentally, the Waldorf School does not want to educate, but to awaken. For an awakening is needed today. First of all, the teachers must be awakened, and then the teachers must awaken the children and the young people.

An awakening is needed, now that mankind has been cut off from the stream of world-evolution in general. In this moment humanity fell asleep—you will not be surprised that I use this expression. They fell asleep, just as a hand goes to sleep when it is cut off from the circulation of the body. But you might say: But human beings have made such progress since the fifteenth century, they have developed such colossal cleverness, and, moreover, are aware of the colossal cleverness they have developed If the War had not come—which, by the way, was not the experience that it might have been, although people did realize to a slight extent that they were not so very clever after all—heaven knows to what point the phrase, “We have made such splendid progress” would have got. It would have been unendurable! Certainly in the sphere of the intellect tremendous progress has been made since the fifteenth century. But this intellect has something dreadfully deceptive about it.

You see, people think that in their intellects they are awake. But the intellect tells us nothing about the world. It is really nothing but a dream of the world. In the intellect, more emphatically than anywhere else, man dreams and because objective science works mostly with the intellect that is applied to observation and experiment, it too dreams about the world. It all remains a dreaming. Through the intellect man no longer has an objective relation with the world. The intellect is the automatic momentum of thinking which continues long after man has been cut off from the world. That is why human beings of the present day, when they feel a soul within them, are seeking again for a real link with the world, a re-entrance into the world. If up till the fifteenth century men had positive inheritances, so now they are confronting a “reversed” inheritance, a negative inheritance. And here a strange discovery can be made.

Up to the fifteenth century, men could welcome with joy what they had inherited from the evolution of the world. The world had not been unrolled and human beings were not altogether cut off from it. Today, after the switching off has occurred, one can again ponder what is to be got from the world without personal activity. But then a strange discovery is made, like a man who is left a legacy and forgets to inform himself about it accurately. A calculation is made and it is discovered that the debits exceed the assets. The opportunity of refusing the legacy has been missed. But this means a definite amount of debts which have to be paid. It is a negative inheritance. There are such cases. And so a negative inheritance comes to the soul, even concerning the greatest Event that has ever happened in evolution.

Before the time of Golgotha it was not necessary for human beings to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, because it had not taken place. Then it happened, and with the remains of ancient inheritance it could still be dimly understood in the age that followed. Then came the fifteenth century when these inherited remains were no longer there, although it was still possible for father to pass on to son the story of what took place in the Mystery of Golgotha.

None of this helps any longer. People are dreadfully clever. But even in the seventh and eighth centuries they would have been clever enough to perceive the contradictions in the four Gospels. The contradictions were, after all, very easy to discover. They began to be investigated for the first time in the nineteenth century. And so it is in every domain of life. The value of the intellect was too highly assessed and a consciousness, a feeling, for the Event of Golgotha was lost. Religious consciousness was lost in the deepest sense. But in its innermost essence the soul has not lost this consciousness, and the young are asking: “What was the Mystery of Golgotha in reality?” The elders were unable to say anything about it. I am not implying that the young are capable of this either, or that anything is known at the Universities. What I am saying is that something ought to be known about it.

To sum up, what is taking place chaotically in the depths of human souls: a striving to understand once again the Mystery of Golgotha. What must be sought for is a new experience of Christ. We are standing inevitably before a new experience of the Christ Event. In its first form it was experienced with the remains of old inherited qualities of soul; they have vanished since the fifteenth century, and the experiences have been carried on simply by tradition. For the first time, in the last third of the nineteenth century it became evident that the darkness was now complete. There was no heritage any longer. Out of the darkness in the human soul, a light must be found once again. The spiritual world must be experienced in a new way.

This is the significant experience that is living in the souls of profounder natures in the modern youth movement. By no means superficially but in a deeper sense, it is clear that for the first time in the historical evolution of mankind there must be an experience which comes wholly from out of the human being himself. As long as this is not realized it is impossible to speak of education. The fundamental question is: How can original, firsthand experience, spiritual experience, be generated in the soul?

Original spiritual experience in man's soul is something that is standing before the awakening of human beings in the new century as the all-embracing, unexpressed riddle of man and of the world. The real question is: How is man to awaken the deepest nature within him, how can he awaken himself? Zealous spirits among growing humanity—I can only express it in a picture—are like one who only half wakes in the morning with his limbs heavy, unable to come fully out of sleep. That is how the human being feels today—as if he cannot completely emerge from the state of sleep.

This lies at the root of a striving in many different forms during the last twenty or thirty years and is still shining with a positive light today into the souls of the young. It expresses itself in the striving for community among young people. People are looking for something. I said yesterday: Man has lost man, and is seeking him again. Until the fifteenth century, human beings had not lost one another. Naturally evolution cannot be turned back to an earlier condition and it would be dreadful to attempt it. We do not wish to become reactionaries. Nevertheless it is a fact that up to the fifteenth century man could still find man. Since that century dim thought-pictures were to be found in tradition and in what the father was still able to hand on, saying: “The other person over there is really a human being.” Dimly it was realized that this form going about was also a human being. In the twentieth century this has altogether vanished. Even tradition has gone, and yet the quest is still for the human being. Man is really seeking for man. And why? Because in reality he is seeking for something quite different.

If things continue as they were at the turn of the century, then no one will wake up. For the others too are in the state where they are incapable of awakening anybody. In short, human beings, in community life, must mean something to one another. It is this that has from the beginning radiated through Waldorf School Education, which does not aim at being a system of principles but an impulse to awaken. It aims at being life, not science, not cleverness but art, vital action, awakening deed. That is, what matters is a question of awakening, for evolution has made human beings fall into a sleep that is filled with intellectualistic dreams. Even in the ordinary dream—which is nothing compared with the intellectual dreaming that goes on—man is often a megalomaniac. But, ordinary dreaming is a mere nothing compared with intellectualistic dreaming.

An awakening is at stake and it will simply not do to go any further with intellectualism. This objective science which goes about and has discarded all its old clothes because it fears that something genuinely human might be found in them, has surrounded itself with a thick fog, with the mantle of objectivity, and so nobody notices what is going about in this objectivity of science. People need something human again: human beings must be awakened.

Yes, my dear friends, if an awakening is to take place, the Mystery of Golgotha must become a living experience again. In the Mystery of Golgotha a Spirit-Being came into the earth from realms beyond the earth. In earlier times this was grasped with ancient powers of the soul. The twentieth century is challenged to understand it with new powers. Modern youth, when it understands itself, is demanding to be awakened in its consciousness, not in the ancient and slumbering powers of the soul. And this can only happen through the Spirit, can only happen if the Spirit actually sends its sparks into the communities people are seeking for today. The Spirit must be the Awakener. We can only make progress by realizing the tragic state of world-happenings in our day, namely, that we are facing the Nothingness we necessarily had to face in order to establish human freedom in earth-evolution. And in face of the Nothingness we need an awakening in the Spirit.

Only the Spirit can open the shutters, for otherwise they will remain tightly shut. Objective science—I cast no reproaches, for I am not overlooking its great merits—will, in spite of everything, leave these shutters tightly closed. Science is only willing to concern itself with the earthly. But since the fifteenth century the forces which can awaken human beings have disappeared. The awakening must be sought within the human being himself, in the super-earthly. This is indeed the deepest quest, in whatever forms it may appear. Those who speak of something new and are inwardly earnest and sincere should ask themselves: “How can we find the unearthly, the super-sensible, the spiritual, within our own beings?” This need not again be clothed in intellectualistic forms. Truly it can be sought in concrete forms, indeed it must be sought in such forms. Most certainly it cannot be sought in intellectualistic forms. For if you ask me why you have come here, it is because there is living within you this question: How can we find the Spirit? If you see what has impelled you to come in the right light, you will find that it is simply this question: “How can we find the Spirit which, out of the forces of the present time, is working in us? How can we find this Spirit?”

In the next few days, my dear friends, we will try to find this Spirit.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

It has been said on a number of occasions, and also two days ago when I presented the subject from a slightly different point of view, that it is important for us to consider the evolution of the human race in the light of spiritual science and grow aware of the gravity of the present moment. We shall then have to act out of our realization of the gravity of the situation, irrespective of our position in life.

Today I should like to add some further building stones to an edifice that seen in its entirety can show us the present-day tenor of the human mind and spirit and how we shall have to work for the further progress of humankind by taking this state of mind and spirit as our basis. To begin with let us refer to things which in the main are already known to us.

We know that the human race in its present state of civilization has by and large descended from the human race that evolved before disaster befell the continent of Atlantis. It has been said on a number of occasions that Atlantis occupied an area between present-day Europe, Africa and America that is today covered by the Atlantic Ocean. We know that under the influence of that disaster—in the course of its preparation and later as it proceeded—the peoples of that time migrated first in an eastward direction, populating Europe and then Asia as they moved on, and that the European and Asian peoples of the present day are in fact the descendants of the peoples of Atlantis. We also know that civilization then took the opposite route and people coming to colonize Europe brought civilization with them, as it were: cultural contents that had first been achieved in Asia. These then spread further from a number of centres in Europe. Thus I would say that the physical basis for modern civilization is provided by the peoples of Europe and Asia, descendants of the ancient Atlantean race that moved from the west to the east. Civilization itself however moved from east to west. These two movements can only be properly distinguished on the basis of spiritual-scientific investigation. The two are confused in conventional anthropology and it is not realized that only the culture, the civilization, has been transplanted from east to west, whilst the physical basis comes from migrations that proceeded from west to east.

People always have some relationship to the locality where they live. We relate in some way to the soil under our feet, to everything this soil produces, to the way the soil comes to expression in climatic conditions and provides a habitat. You can conclude from this—and spiritual science fully confirms it—that the peoples who went further into Asia in the course of those post-Atlantean migrations inevitably had to develop in a different way from those who had remained in Europe. In ordinary terms this means that the soil of Europe had a different effect on the descendants of the Atlanteans than the soil of Asia. In a way, we can define the difference between the populations of Asia and of Europe. The difference is that particularly during the earliest periods of post-Atlantean civilization, during the 9th, 8th, 7th and 6th millennium BC and the millennia that followed, the people of Asia adopted intellectual thinking, thinking as we know it, in a different way. This type of thinking did not fully emerge until the 15th century, as I said on the last occasion, but it was in preparation for centuries and indeed millennia before that.

This form of thinking as we know it today only developed in very recent times, assuming its true character in intellectual thinking as the soul itself became inwardly active. But the whole of our evolution, particularly in post-Atlantean times, has been tending towards this intellectual approach. It is significant that the post-Atlantean population of Asia accepted all that we may call intellectual more into its soul elements. We can say that due to local conditions the peoples of Asia were specifically predestined for the early stages of intelligence to enter into their souls. The most remarkable aspect of Asian civilization is that the soul element as such became the instrument for adopting the intellectual principle.

It was different with the people who had remained in Europe. Quite specifically the situation was that physical development, the physical organization that later on was to become the real instrument of intellectual development, evolved in such a way that even at an earlier stage it became the essential characteristic of these peoples, constituting itself in a way that was particularly suited to be the vehicle for the intellectual principle. If we therefore wish to characterize the descendants of the Atlanteans' earliest descendants, that is ourselves, we have to say that the Asian peoples got more into the habit of thinking with their souls; the Europeans got into the habit of thinking more with their bodies. That is in fact the major difference between the civilizations of Asian and Europe. If you want to show up the clear difference which exists between the kind of intelligence apparent in the Vedic writings or Vedantic philosophy and other cultural streams in Asia compared to European culture you have to say to yourselves: Asians are thinking more with their souls, Europeans more with their bodies.

The people of Asia may thus be said to have taken the intellectual element into a higher aspect of their human nature, with the result that an advanced civilization developed much earlier. This however was a civilization of the soul that had fewer abstract concepts, a culture that found its own ways to higher things, using the human soul and spirit to reach the soul and spirit of the world without resorting to abstract concepts. That is where the spiritual nature of Asian civilization lies—inasmuch as it is essentially a civilization based on soul qualities. The peoples of Asia largely left their bodies unused when it came to thinking; they merely carried their bodies with them through life on earth. The life of the mind was nurtured entirely at soul level. You cannot understand the peculiar nature of Asian culture unless you look at it from this point of view.

Europeans were basing their thinking more and more on the physical body. That is also why the foundations were more strongly laid among them than in Asia for a culture in which freedom can be the central principle. The people of Asia, endowed with intelligence at soul level, still were more part of the whole cosmic organism. The human body specifically isolates itself from the rest of the cosmic organism. Using it as the instrument for our intellectual life we become more independent, though this independence is more bound up with the body than is the case with the people of Asia who have developed intelligence within the soul principle and are consequently less independent.

As the time approached in the history of humankind that was to bring the Mystery of Golgotha, an advanced culture of soul and spirit had evolved in Asia. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had already reached its culmination and was in the early stages of decline. Do not let us deceive ourselves: European ideas do not make it easy to grasp the great culture which had grown out of the soul and spirit of the Asian peoples. When people who are thoroughly European in their way of thinking, people for whom the physical body is the instrument of thinking, want to get Europeans to appreciate Asian ideas, as Deussen⁴ has done, for example, the outcome in no way represents the contents of Asian civilization of soul and spirit, for everything alive in it has been translated into European thought. It has even happened that interpretations of certain spiritual streams in India caused a sensation in Europe—those published by von Garbe⁵ for instance, yet it was nothing more than European materialism producing a garbled translation of Asian soul and spirit culture. Publications of this kind contain a trace of the real spirit of ancient Asia. It is necessary to point this out very firmly because, as I have said before, belief in authority has reached an extreme degree and people really have nothing in them that permits them to acknowledge the validity of something, except the fact that it has been written by university professors. There is of course no real inner reason why Deussen's or Garbe's botchwork should be considered important in any way, except that there is this belief in authority in Europe which is going sadly astray. People are no longer in a position even to find any kind of inner reason; they merely believe one thing or another to be right because some outer authority says so. It does not help to avoid saying the truth about these things—even if it means making more enemies—for the gravity of the present situation absolutely demands that there shall be no compromise where certain things are concerned and that the truth must be clearly stated.

The advanced culture of the spirit in Asia was already to some extent in decline when the event of Golgotha occurred. This event of Golgotha—it cannot be sufficiently stressed—was first of all taken in and understood by minds that were the product of Asian culture. It is important to distinguish between the Mystery of Golgotha as a historical event that happened in the Near East at the beginning of Christian era and the notions people have of this Mystery of Golgotha. At the time when the event occurred, Europe did not have the capacity to grasp it fully, for it was an event that could only be grasped in soul and spirit. European civilization, however, had spread by using physical matter as its instrument. The event which occurred at the beginning of our Christian era could not be directly grasped in a civilization based on physical and material things. Asian civilization on the other hand had an intellectual life based on soul and spirit and out of this was able to find concepts with which to grasp the event of Golgotha. The event that happened in Palestine was thus poured into the conceptual world of the Orient. In that form it travelled westward through Greece and Italy and came to Europe as a tradition.

People can be given something in an external way that they cannot yet grasp in their hearts and minds. Things may come to them in the form of a tradition or through the written word. Europe initially was given the explanation, its understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, out of the oriental tradition. Christianity was understood in the light of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit that was truly great at a time when the Mystery of Golgotha, and the way Christ related to the whole of Earth evolution, were still perceived gnostically. It dwindled more and more as Europeans were increasingly blending their own unique characteristic into this tradition. They had to bring their particular characteristic of an intellectual life bound to the physical body into the way they saw these things. The following happened, particularly in Europe: In early times the human bodies of Europeans were very much the instrument of their kind of elementary intellectual thinking, but then this body gradually began to die. Physical evolution of European humanity until the 15th century and even to this day consisted in the physical body growing more and more dead. Our physical bodies are growing denser and denser and more and more bony. We cannot demonstrate this with the methods of ordinary anatomy and physiology, but it is true. We no longer have bodies as inwardly alive as those of people living in the 1st, 3rd and even the 10th and 11th centuries. Our European bodies of today have grown bony, paralyzed, compared to those ancient bodies that were inwardly alive. Thus you have on the one hand a tradition designed for the soul and spirit of Asian people who preserved the ecclesiastical creeds, and on the other hand a more and more European body that increasingly felt those Asian traditions to be alien and in the end no longer found itself able to take in the ideas coming from Asia.

From the middle of the 15th century onwards the influence of the bony European body has been such that in the end that old tradition only survived in empty outer phrases among religious communities. For many centuries the tradition had been so much alive that little regard was paid to the Gospels and people took their cue from life itself. As the European body came to die off people felt impelled to say: Let us cast off the old tradition; we want to put our faith only in the Word, the Word as it is written. People believe they have the Word when in fact they only have a poor translation of it. It gradually came about—though no one is willing to admit it—that really all one had was the outer shell of the Word of old that once held within it the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha in the garb of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit.

This oriental wisdom is little understood by the people who generally interpret or translate the Gospels; they understand little, if any of it. The point is that it is necessary to see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light. However, unless we Europeans get beyond what a dying physical body is able to give we will be unable to do so. We must develop through spiritual science and come to grasp the spiritual world in a way where we are independent of this body. Our future salvation entirely depends on our ability to grasp the spiritual world in this way, independently of our physical bodies, going straight for the spirit. It will have to be different in essence from the oriental culture of soul and spirit, which came as though of its own accord as human beings evolved. Europeans of the present time will need to achieve it by their own efforts. They will have to nurture spiritual science. They will have to create an educational system where from the bottom rung upwards spiritual science is not presented as a theory but flows into everything we do as we teach and train the children. Spiritual science should also flow into higher education and should be alive in everything connected with art, literature and so on, everything that is our common cultural life. This European culture must provide for the nuturing of spiritual science itself. On the basis of such a spiritual science the Mystery of Golgotha will then be seen in a new light. We shall have to say that those were the old times when the Mystery of Golgotha was only interpreted in the light of the wisdom of spirit and soul that belonged to the Orient. A new wisdom will have to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in a new and living way.

We have spoken about these things quite often and in many respects. It is necessary, however, that they take hold of our soul from all sides. It is necessary that we come to experience a seriousness that absolutely fills our hearts and minds with the realization that new insight has to be gained into the Mystery of Golgotha. This is something that makes the seriousness that is required particularly in Central Europe even more austere.

Looking with more profound insight at what has become cultural life in the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th century particularly in Central Europe you really have to say this: The bodies of people in Central Europe were already dying, but they still were so much alive that the people were able to rise to a world of ideas more alive than ever seen before in the evolution of humankind. Nowhere else did human minds rise to abstract ideas in such a way that whilst living in these abstract ideas one was not in the sphere of death but in the sphere of life. That was achieved in Goetheanism, for instance, and by German idealist philosophers. It is not something to be found anywhere else in human evolution. It was also in a way a culmination, one merely has to get this quite clear in one's mind. People today no longer want to know how Schelling, for instance, to take just one of the Goetheanists, moved in a sphere of abstract thoughts and yet, whilst speaking in quite abstract terms, was alive in the way he moved in the sphere of abstract thoughts: as alive as people usually are when they speak of food and drink. The same applies to Fichte. This was an area of human evolution where we are especially aware of an ability to descend into the sphere of concepts and ideas in a way that was very much alive. Something quite special exists therefore for this Central European population, special in the whole context of human evolution in more recent times. They have their own characteristics that enable them in particular to take up the vocation of humankind for the present day: namely, to enter into spirituality again. These characteristics only came to be submerged beneath other things in the second half of the 19th century.

It is terribly painful to be aware of a very sleepy human being in Central Europe today walking over the graves of Lessing and Goethe and Herder and Schelling. This human being considers its role to be that of a soul asleep. If we were to pick up the thread of the writings and thoughts of those great minds, not in an external way but entering into the spirit in which they wrote, we would find the element that can raise Europe to the heights. Europe cannot be made to rise to the heights by Gospel words repeated parrot-fashion in the churches that no one understands. Europe can only be made to rise if people seek to grasp the spiritual worlds by developing further what Herder, Goethe and others have been working towards. There is however hardly any awareness of this at the present time. It is a sad sign of the times for example that in a cultural community which possesses treasures like Fichte's ‘Goal and Purpose of the Human Being’, Schelling's Bruno and Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education⁶ and there are many more I could mention; that in such a cultural community people could follow a trend that led to the inane and superficial Americanisms of Ralph Waldo Trine⁷ and the like. We have things that are much more sublime but we let them sleep and turn to other things.

The further we penetrate into the actual life of the mind and spirit the more it becomes apparent that something new is emerging in the life of humankind today. Central Europeans are far from understood by Western Europeans; Western Europeans are far from understood by Central Europeans, even in ordinary life. People are not aware of this, however. They think they understand each other. They do not realize that they are not communicating their thoughts. I am not referring to the way Americans and Europeans fail to communicate, but Central and Western Europeans. You come across some odd things in this respect.

The last time I was here I told you that vilification is rife not only within Germany but also outside its borders.⁸ I told you about this man Ferriére,⁹ for instance, who spread one of the strangest tales in a Swiss-Belgian journal, saying that it was of course generally known that I was ‘Rasputin’ to William II¹⁰ and had a major share in all the bad advice William II was given in those terrible days. This slanderous story came to be widely known particularly in French-speaking Switzerland and I therefore defended myself by writing down the truth of the matter, stating the bare facts. I said that I had only ever seen the former emperor briefly and from a distance, had never spoken with him at all and never sought to contact him even through others. These are the bare facts I stated in a letter to Dr Boos¹¹ who then gave Mr Ferriére the necessary set-down. The matter was published in the journal in question together with Ferriére's reply. This went more or less as follows: Once again the great difference between the Latin and the Germanic mind is demonstrated. The Germanic mind takes everything so seriously. ‘My readers’, Ferriére wrote, ‘will of course not have been deceived; they will have realized that what I wrote was intended to be plaisanterie and not méchanceté.¹² Apart from that let me state that it is possible to learn that something we may have heard from people whom we think we can believe need nevertheless not be true, even if it is a widely believed rumour. I am taking note of this.’ And so on.

That was the elegant reply the ‘Latin mind’ was able to give, with a plaisanterie concerning the Germanic mind. At least one has the satisfaction that these things have come to the fore; very often they are not even noticed.

They assume even greater significance where a more profound view is taken of the world, at the point where they relate to initiation knowledge and everything connected with this. This is a sphere where it is indeed necessary to mention these things just for once, though some people consider it highly dangerous to touch on them even today. I want to talk to you today about a matter that in the opinion of representatives of initiation knowledge, Western representatives in particular, should not be discussed.

Western representatives of initiation knowledge will tell you again and again that it simply will not do for anyone to spread initiation knowledge they have gained for themselves. You will find that when genuine initiates in the West present initiation knowledge in books available to the public they always deny having personal experience of the things of which they are writing. You will find that it is quite typical—such things have appeared particularly in America—to have a preface, that is part of the whole technique, which says the following: ‘None of these things are my own, of course, for if they were just my own I would not mention them’. Take a look, you will find this kind of thing in many documents published particularly by Western initiates. If you ask why it is done like this you will be given an answer that within certain limits is certainly true for Western initiation science. You will be told that anyone learning something directly from the spiritual world, who knows the secrets of the spiritual world, cannot tell another person that he has it from personal experience—these will be the words used to answer the question—for if he betrays the fact that he has initiation knowledge from personal experience he becomes dependent for life on the person to whom he betrayed his secret.

This attitude has its roots in the essential nature of Western initiation science. The effect is that anything to do with initiation is discussed in a very superficial way among Western initiates in their societies, and that there are indeed initiates moving around among Western humanity of whom nobody knows that they are initiates. This is an attitude that has to be overcome in the new age; it cannot hold true in Central Europe, and the spirit which must arise in Central Europe will have to fight this attitude. It will have to fight it by coming to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in the new and spiritual way I have talked about. It will have to come to understand the presence of the Christ in huMan life.

Here lies a major secret. The usual initiation knowledge in Western countries is far removed from Christianity; otherwise the Theosophical Society would not have excluded or caricatured the Christian faith and presented a purely oriental, pre-Christian Indian wisdom as something new. It is a peculiar characteristic of this Western initiation knowledge that its initiates only have something of their initiation if they have at least one pupil who reiterates their ideas. There is no point whatsoever in having initiation knowledge just for oneself. If your eyes look straight ahead you will not see a single object. In the same way you will not encounter your own ideas of the spirit as a Western initiate unless you can see your own ideas repeated by someone else. There are all kinds of indications of this, but it is not properly realized.

Indeed, if this is the case then it is true that someone who betrays to another person the fact that he is an initiate will be in the power of that other person for the rest of his life. The other could then refuse to serve him and say: I am not going to repeat your ideas. That implies some degree of dependence. That essentially is a characteristic of the initiation knowledge I have frequently referred to in other respects, referring to it as the dominant initiation science in the West.

There is only one way out of this dependence on one's followers and that is to be in communion with Christ, who can truly be found on earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. We are not then in communion with a human being who is not perceptible to the senses but with the first among brothers who has come among men, with the living Christ walking among us. If we are in a communion with Christ the way we had to be in communion with other persons in pre-Christian initiation, we need not be afraid to share our own wisdom with our fellow human beings. There is no other way in the present time in which original initiation wisdom can be directly communicated than by being in communion with Christ. There is no other way. A genuine initiation wisdom of the present age will have to look for such communion with Christ.

If this initiation wisdom were not there to be found we could make no progress in social understanding. It is no longer possible to evolve social ideas nowadays unless we base ourselves on initiation. Yet we have need of social ideas. A social system born wholly out of Western initiation wisdom would depend on that initiation wisdom being kept secret even at its lowest levels—certain higher levels cannot be made known today because people must have the necessary preparation. Keeping things secret in this way is not compatible however with the principle of people being equal, a principle modern Europeans and indeed the whole civilized world consider important today. So you see that exactly when it comes to initiation wisdom a colossal difference shows itself between the Central European and the Western mind. The difference becomes even more apparent in the case of initiation wisdom than in the situation where people talk above each others heads in the present time and believe humankind can be brought to an abstract uniformity. That cannot be done. Human beings are differentiated and this differentiation shows itself particularly if one takes a more profound look at initiation knowledge. This is an important subject and it will no doubt be necessary for me to explain it in more detail during the time I am here. When it comes to genuine spiritual insight one simply cannot be slipshod about things, and a lack of seriousness concerning the truth is unacceptable. It simply will not do. Truthfulness is of the essence.

• 4 . Paul Deussen, philosopher and Sanscrit scholar.
• 5 . Richard von Garbe, Sancrit scholar.
• 6 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte, German philosopher. Die Bestimtnung des Menschen 1800.
  
  Friedrich Wilhem Joseph von Schelling German philosopher. Bruno, oder über das göttliche and natürliche Prinzip der Dinge. Ein Gespräch (Bruno, or concerning the divine and natural principle of things. A dialogue).
  
  Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, German dramatist, poet and historian. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (letters on aesthetic education) 1795.
• 7 . Ralph Waldo Trine, American writer.
• 8 . Stuttgart, 21 December 1919. In Weltsilvester and Neujahrsgedanken GA 195. English in The Cosmic New Year. London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1938.
• 9 . A. Ferrière. La loi du progres economique et la justice sociale. Suisse-Belgique Outremer juillet-aout 1919; 1:no.3-4
• 10. Grigoriy Efimovich Rasputin, reputed ‘holy man’ who influenced the Tsarina and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
  
  TN. William II (1859–1941), third German emperor and ninth king of Prussia.
• 11. Dr Roman Boos. anthroposophical lecturer, writer in the field of social sciences. Pioneer of the Threefold Movement.
• 12. TN. plaisamerie—joke; méchanceté—spitefulness, malice.

There are a few things I want to add to the points we have been considering. They may help to make some of the ideas on which we must base our actions more real. I am looking for ideas that are less abstract than the vast majority of ideas by which people allow themselves to be governed today. We really need such concrete ideas, for they are the only ones that enter into the realm of feeling for human beings, and therefore into real life. They are the only ideas to fire the human will and human actions.

Looking at the world today we should really consider the most striking characteristic of social life in the civilized world to be that the smaller communities of past times have given way to quite large human communities. We need not go far back in human evolution to find that social communities extended only over limited territories. The civic communities of towns formed a relative whole, and fundamentally speaking it is only now, in quite recent times, that large empires have arisen, that the empire of English-speaking peoples has come about—I have characterized this a number of times. None of us should have any illusions concerning the consequences, particularly in Central Europe. It needs the point of view of spiritual science, however, to get the right ideas about these things, ideas that fully relate to reality. The spiritual-scientific point of view makes us go back to earlier stages of human development to see that then, too, people formed certain kinds of communities, though these should not be called ‘states’—as I have said on a number of occasions—for that would cause tremendous confusion. Instead, let us find some other, more neutral term. Let us say that ‘realms’ arose. Such realms were ruled by individuals, or by particular groups. Subsequently states developed out of this, and today states are taken so much for granted that no one would think of going against them—at least in certain areas no one would go against them.

What is worse, they are so much taken for granted that people are not even inclined to think about them.

Behind this, however, lies something that unites human beings in their inner soul life with the spiritual, the divine principle, as it came to be called during different stages of earth evolution.

If we go back to prehistoric times, times that only partly extend into historical times, we find that in those prehistoric times the idea of a ruler of the realm, as we may call it—whatever words we use do not really fit those earlier ideas—was quite different from what we take it to mean today. The idea of the ruler of an earthly realm came very close to what people knew to be their idea of a god. These things inevitably must seem highly paradoxical to modern minds, though that is only because modern minds are little inclined to take serious consideration of things that existed during the past in human evolution and do not fit in with the way of thinking that has become customary in Western Europe and in its appendage, America, over the last three or four hundred years.

Of course the way a ruler of the realm was introduced to his office, at least in many empires, was very different in those early partly prehistoric times. We need only go back as far as ancient Egypt, meaning the earlier, partly prehistoric times of ancient Egypt, or as far as Chaldea, and we shall find that it was considered a matter of course that regents were prepared for their office by the forerunners of our present-day priests. People had quite concrete ideas as to how a ruler should be prepared for office by the priesthood and its institutions. They felt that with this kind of preparation the person called to be regent truly became what the Chinese, still having a faint notion of this, called the Son of Heaven. There was an awareness that someone called to rule over some region had to be made a kind of Son of Heaven. What was in people's minds was however something quite different from the one and only idea we have today when we speak of training a person or preparing them for something. You can go to great lengths to explain that one should not train people for some office or other in this world by merely implanting intellectual knowledge into their souls, but that the whole person needs to be developed; practically all our ideas today on development, education and so on tend to be abstract to an extreme degree. People have the idea that only some aspect or other of the human being should be changed or transformed to advance him in his training, his preparation for some office. No one thinks that development should be such that the individual undergoes a complete change. Above all no one thinks that something objective should enter into the soul of that individual, something that was not there before. No one has that idea. I could characterize this more or less as follows: I am talking to someone who is the product of the natural and social life of the present day. He tells me this and that, I tell him this or that. The person who speaks to me bears a name: he is the product of the usual natural and social background that people have today. The same applies to me. That is really almost the only way in which we behave towards each other nowadays, the way in which we look at each other.

In the times of which I have been speaking that would have been a very alien notion. It was above all alien to people called to hold important offices, to be leaders within the human community. The external natural background—family origins, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on—was of no real concern if the people concerned had been properly prepared for their office. The things we look for and find in present-day individuals who have been raised to the highest spheres were then of no account. People felt that if they spoke to someone who had been properly trained in this respect it was not the ordinary ego that spoke to them: i.e. an ego born in some place or another, bearing the imprint of some social background or other. Instead they felt that something was speaking to them that had been made to come down from spiritual heights to take up its abode in a human individual thanks to the preparation and training given in the mystery cult. This must of course sound incredibly strange to present-day people. It is however necessary to stop harbouring confused notions about these things and to form ideas that have their basis in truth.

The idea was that education—not all training but the training of people called to high office—should enable spirits from the higher hierarchies to speak through these individuals, using them as their instruments. Those instruments were prepared by training, so that spirits of the higher hierarchies would be able to speak through them. There was general awareness of this, particularly when the population at large came to form an opinion about the identity of their ruler. Remnants of this still survive, for instance in the title Son of Heaven for the ruler of China. That was the level of human awareness in earliest Egyptian and Chaldean times. Spiritual science has established this. To the people at large their ruler was God. Basically they had no other concept of divinity. The preparation of the ruler had been such that the outer physical form was nothing, it merely made it possible for a god to move among human beings. The earliest inhabitants of what was later to become the kingdom of Egypt quite naturally accepted the fact that they were ruled by gods who walked on earth in human form. In this respect the earliest social awareness of human beings was entirely realistic. There was no recognition of a separate world beyond, of a separate spiritual world. The spiritual world existed in the same place as the world within which people moved on earth. In this world, where human beings walked the earth, not only ordinary human individuals were walking about in physical form but also gods. The divine world was right among them, made absolute and visible under the conditions regularly created through the mystery cult. When such a ruler wanted something, decreed something, it was a god who wanted it. To the minds of earliest humankind during that partly prehistoric period it would have been pointless to question whether something decreed by their ruler should or should not happen; it was after all a ‘god’ who wanted it.

Earliest humanity thus connected the spiritual hierarchies with everything that happened on earth. Those hierarchies were there in their midst; they were not something to which one first has to ascend by some kind of spiritual, inner means. No, they were present in the mysteries as the training given to physical bodies found suitable for preparation as dwelling places for spirits of the higher hierarchies, so that these might walk among human beings and be their rulers.

This may seem strange to modern minds, but modern minds will finally have to leave behind the narrow-minded views they hold today, ideas only three or four hundred years old as we know them today, and take a wider view. We cannot develop and think ahead to the future unless we broaden the tunnel vision which has evolved in almost every sphere of life. We must expand the time horizons we survey and consider larger evolutionary time spans than present-day history normally covers.

The things of the past, things that existed in historical and prehistoric evolution, do of course give way to other things as time progresses, but in certain areas they are retained. They are often retained by becoming external, continuing in an outer form and losing their inner meaning. The awareness of the godlike nature of the ruler that was a feature of earliest imperialism still comes up here or there in the present age, except that it no longer has any meaning, since mankind progresses and does not stand still.

Not long ago a Roman Catholic bishop addressed a pastoral to his diocese¹³ in which he stated nothing more and nothing less than that a Roman Catholic priest conducting an act of worship was more powerful than Christ Jesus himself. Acting as the celebrant, the priest coerced Christ Jesus, the god of Christianity, to enter into the physical world as the priest performed the act of transubstantiation. The god might be willing or not, the act of transubstantiation forced him to take the route prescribed by the priest. It is really true that very recently a pastoral referred to the sublime power of the earth-born ‘priest god’ over the ‘inferior god’ who descended from cosmic heights and walked on the earth in the flesh of Jesus. Things like this have their origin in older times and have lost their meaning in the present age. Some people representing certain confessions know very well, of course, why they keep throwing such things into human minds. They have become just as meaningless as the words modern rulers write in albums: The king's wishes are the supreme law.¹⁴ These things have happened in our times. Humanity, fast asleep, has said nothing at all about it and still says nothing now to things going on that bode ill for humankind, things one gets used to, things one does not want to see. Today we are altogether little prepared to take note of major events in human evolution.

That was a first stage in the evolution of human empires: when the ruler was the god. This way of looking at it was still very much alive in Roman times. Whichever way you may look at Nero, as a fool or a bloodhound, for the large majority of the Roman people Nero's dreadful tyranny merely made them marvel that a god could walk on earth in such a guise. Many of the citizens of imperial Rome never doubted that the figure of Nero was that of a god.

A second stage in the evolution of empires came with the transition from a ruler who was a god to one who ruled by the grace of God. During the earliest times of human evolution on the civilized earth the ruler was God. At the second stage the ruler stood for God; he was not indwelt by the god himself but inspired by God, given special grace. Everything he did would succeed because divine power—now no longer within him but in a realm close to the earthly realm—flowed into him, inspired him, filled him, and guided him in all he did.

To describe the essential nature of such a second stage ruler we have to say that the ruler was a symbol. At the first stage the ruler was a divine spirit walking on earth. At the second stage he represented what that spirit signified; he was the sign, the symbol in which the spirit came to expression. The ruler became the image of God.

The principles governing those external social relationships also came to expression in the institutions which became established. In earliest times empires were so constituted that a number of people were governed by a divine spirit. This god would be similar to them in external appearance but utterly different inside. At the second stage we find empires where the leader or leaders represent the god or gods and are symbols for them.

At the early stage of human empires discussion as the whether the ruler, the god, was acting rightly or wrongly was beside the point. At the second stage it began to be possible to think whether something he had done was right or wrong. At the early stage everything the ruler did, thought or said was right, for he was the god. Then, at the second stage, some other spiritual sphere was felt to exist side be side with the earthly realm, one that has the god, the ruler given the grace of God, within it. The power streaming into the earthly realm, giving direction and orientation, was felt to come from that other realm. The institutions and human individuals in the earthly realm were the reflection of something streaming in from the realm of the higher hierarchies.

It is interesting to find out, for example, that Dionysius the Areopagite,¹⁵ also called the pseudo-Dionysius, who was much more genuine than orthodox science imagines, presented the right theory concerning the way human empires were ruled by divine empires so that the conditions and institutions created among humans were a symbol of what existed in the divine realm. Dionysius the Areopagite wrote that there were heavenly hierarchies behind the human hierarchies on this earth. He stated very clearly that the social structure of the priestly hierarchy here on earth, from deacons and archdeacons all the way up to bishops, ought to show that the relationship of deacon to archdeacon is the same as that of angel to archangel, and so on. The earthly hierarchy should truly reflect the heavenly hierarchy. This refers to the second stage of empires. Something was able to evolve that was to govern human ideas until quite recent times. After all there existed in Central Europe until 1806 an institution that in its title gave expression to the way the heavenly and the earthly principle were seen to be one: the Holy Roman Empire, an empire seen to be based on the power of heaven. The words ‘of German nationality’ were added [to the German title] to show that the empire was also of earthly origin. The way the title evolved it is evident that a whole empire was formed in such a way that it should be seen to be the image of a heavenly institution.

Such were also the ideas behind St Augustine's City of God and Dante's work On the Monarchy.¹⁶ If only people were not so limited in their ideas they could take a wider view when reading something like Dante's work and realize that Dante, who after all must be considered a great thinker, still had ideas in the 13th and 14th centuries that are radically different from our modern ideas. If we were to take such things in historical evolution seriously we would give up those narrow ideas that do not even go back as far as Dante but are just a few hundred years old. The ideas used by people nowadays to fill their heads with illusions, wanting to understand history by merely going back as far as ancient Greece, are limited ideas. Yet it is only possible to understand the whole structure of ancient Egypt, for instance, if we know that the ancient gods still walked on earth. In the times that followed gods no longer walked on the earth, but the institutions created on earth had to be an image, a symbol, of the divine world order.

Then something arose for example like the possibility to reflect on the lawfulness of things, to reflect on such things as the fact that the human intellect can arrive at a judgement as to what is lawful and what is not—all this only became possible during the second stage of imperial development. During the earliest stage it was pointless to reflect on what was lawful and what was not. People had to look to what the ruler said, for the god lived in him, he was the god. In the second stage, human judgement could be used to determine that there is something in a spiritual realm next to our own realm that we cannot reach as physical human beings but only as human beings of soul and spirit. Then people no longer believed, as they had believed in earlier times, that the divine could unite with the whole physical human being, that a human being could indeed become a god. At most—using mystical language to define the living truth about public institutions—people believed that the human soul element could unite with the god.

Basically it is true to say that no one nowadays is able to understand the way things were said in works written and published as late as the 13th and 14th centuries unless one knows that the people of that time had quite a different awareness, a feeling that some degree of divine inspiration was alive in those who were called and trained to hold special office. Oddly enough things referring to something rather serious will often become derisory expressions at a later point in time when the evolution of humankind has progressed. Someone saying ‘God shapes the back for the burthen’ nowadays would say this more or less as a joke. Yet though it may be said today partly as a joke, in the times when empires were at their second stage of development it certainly held true and was to the forefront of people's minds. It applied not only to people but within certain limits also to what was being done. Rituals were made to be such that the actions performed in them reflected what went on in the spiritual realms. The rituals performed were spiritual events reaching across into what went on in the physical world. People very much believed the spiritual realm to be adjoining the physical realm, but they also thought that it extended across into the earthly realm and that the symbol or sign of the spiritual realm was to be found in the earthly realm.

Very gradually people ceased to believe in the validity of this. An age was to follow where this awareness of the connection between earthly and spiritual things was to fade. In the days of Wycliffe, of Huss,¹⁷ people began to dispute things which it would have been unthinkable to dispute before. They were in disagreement on the significance of transubstantiation: whether this ritual act had anything to do with what went on in spiritual worlds. When people begin to disagree about such things, old ideas are coming to an end. People no longer know what to think; yet for centuries, indeed millennia, they had known exactly what to think. It always happens that certain things normal to a particular age continue to play a role in later ages. They are then out of place, anachronistic, luciferic. That is what has happened to the great, far-reaching symbols relating to a particular age when they showed how ritual acts and the like performed on earth Were connected with divine and spiritual happenings in the world. Those symbols persisted during later ages and certain secret societies preserved them in a luciferic way. Western secret societies in particular have been preserving such ancient symbols. They are traditional in those societies, though they have lost their real content. On the one hand, then, we see certain secret societies—Freemasons, Jesuit organizations and denominational groups have arisen from these—preserving, in a way, those symbols which only had meaning in an earlier age. On the other hand we see how words preserve ideas that belonged to an earlier age in a basically luciferic way. Words used In everyday life have also lost their original substance, lost the context of a way of thinking when those words were symbols of spiritual things. For the spiritual content is gradually lost and words become empty symbols, signs without meaning.

During a third period, at a third level of empire development, there was no longer any awareness of individuals being given the grace of God, of divine elements entering into earthly events, earthly speech. The spiritual realm was now entirely in the beyond. The opposite of what had existed at the first stage of empire development now held true. During the first stage the god lived on earth, went about in human form. During the third stage one can only think of the god being present in an invisible world that is not perceptible to the senses. Everything people were able to use to express their relationship with the realm of divine spirits lost its meaning. The word ‘god’ continues to be used. When the word ‘god’ was spoken in the distant past people were looking for something that appeared in human form, walking among human beings. It is not that human beings in those very early times were materialists. Materialists only became possible once the spiritual realm had been banished beyond the sense-perceptible world. During the earliest period of human evolution the spiritual world was right there among human beings. There would have been no need for someone living in ancient Egypt during its earliest times to say: The kingdom of the divine is at hand. He would take that to be self-evident. At the time when Christ Jesus appeared among men people first had to be told: ‘The Kingdom of the gods cometh not with observation… for, behold, it is within you.¹⁸

We are now living in an age when it would be a nonsense to look to a person for anything but a straightforward development of what he was as a child, a development based on cause and effect. We live in an age when it would be sheer madness for someone to consider himself more than the straightforward further development of what was also there in his childhood. Eight thousand years ago, let us say, something was taken as a matter of course, was the general way of thinking; yet if anyone were to say the same thing today this would merely indicate that they are mad. The realities of those distant times have been reinterpreted in the modern way of thinking into that fictitious tale we call ‘history’. This spreads a veil over the radical metamorphosis we are able to discover when we consider human evolution in the light of truth. The things we often say today, things we reveal in our external life, exist because they once had relevance and were considered to be the truth. We still say things like ‘by the grace of God’—people have more or less tried to get out of the habit in recent years, but they have not succeeded very well with this—but we do not know, or pay no attention to the fact, that there was a time when this was a reality to human minds, when it was taken as a matter of course.

Here I am drawing your attention to things that give our public life its meaningless, conventional character. Things we put forward in the words we use, in our customs and indeed the way we judge issues in public life, relate to times when those words, even if they only became part of the vocabulary at a later date—they were modelled on the original language—were formed and used on quite a different basis. The words we use in public life today have been squeezed dry. With some it is immediately apparent, with others it was not apparent for a long time. In the distant past a token was hung upon a human body in magical body in magical rites, transforming it into an important magical aspect of the god walking on earth. This has become something trivial in the decorations given to people today. That is the kind of history humankind is unlikely to pursue. Not only words can become empty phrases and lose all meaning, as is the case with the most important words used in public life today; the objects hung around people's necks or pinned to their chests can show similar character in their relation to reality, like a word that is meaningless today but once had sacred meaning and substance to it.

We must realize that initially our evolution was such that an older awareness lost its substance and became empty and conventional. There can be no real new growth in our devastated public life of today unless we do so. We must look for new well-springs that will give real substance again to public life. We have no awareness of gods walking the earth in human form. We must therefore acquire the ability to recognise the spirit not in human form but in the form it has when we rise to spiritual vision. For us the gods no longer descend to sit on physical thrones. We must acquire the spiritual faculties that enable us to ascend in our vision to the thrones where gods are to be found who can only be alive to us in the spirit. We must learn to fill the abstract formulas we use with spiritual contents of our own experience. We must become able to face truths that are deeply disturbing to those who grasp them rightly. We must become able to see things as they are. Sometimes we fail to do so for periods extending over decades.

As Central Europeans we believe ourselves to be part of European civilization. What we should ask ourselves is what it is that has made our inner life, the life of our soul, so full of discord over the last fifty years or even longer. Let me say just one thing. When you look to the West you see in the first instance—we'll leave aside the rest—a nation falling into decadence, the French nation. One thing is important, however, among the French. When a member of this nation said: I am a Frenchman—this is what they have said to themselves for centuries—he said something that was in accord with the external facts; a permissible, truthful declaration made with reference to external life. Any of us who have ever talked to people who were young and German in the first half of the 19th century will be able to confirm the following. Herman Grimm¹⁹ for instance has repeatedly described what it meant, to people who were young when he was young in Germany, for someone to profess himself to be German in public life, not as an empty phrase but in reality. It would have been treason. People were Bavarians, Wurttembergians, Prussians, but to say ‘I am German’ would make them criminals. In the West there was a point to saying ‘I am a Frenchman’, people were permitted to be that in external life. It would have meant going to prison or being put beyond the pale in some other way if one had taken it into one's mind to say one was German, i.e. belonged to a united nation. People have forgotten about this now, but those are facts. And it is important to face up to these things. We shall not develop the right enthusiasm for such things, however, unless we fertilize our inner life by considering the great events of world history, seeing them in the right light—not that fabricated tale written in our handbooks and taught in our schools today, but the true history of the world that can be found by looking at things in the light of the spirit.

It is quite unthinkable for a present-day protestant Christian to consider that people once felt it to be true to say ‘the god walked on the earth and the ruler was the god’ and ‘there is no kingdom on this earth where gods are still to be found, for the ways in which one is made a god are in the realm where the supersensible dwells, within the Mystery’. In the early times of Egyptian history, which in part was still prehistoric, the Mystery was indeed something supersensible. It was only when the mysteries were made into churches that the church became the symbol for the supersensible.

Present-day humanity has no wish to look to the points of origin of its historical development. It lives like someone who has reached the age of forty-five and has forgotten what life was like as a boy or a girl, at most remembering back as far as his or her twenty-fifth year. Try and visualize what it would mean for the inner soul life of someone of forty-five to remember nothing that happened before the age of twenty-five. Yet that is the state of mind humankind is in now, it is the state of mind in which the people arise who are to be the leaders of humanity. Out of this state of mind something is attempted that is to give the orientation for a social system. The most important thing is that human beings come to see humanity as a living organism with a memory that should not be trodden to death, a memory reaching back to things that still have their effect in the present day, and because of the way they do take effect, literally ask for something new to be poured into them.

We merely need to strike this note a few times and we shall see that there is need for something in the present time that makes all the empty words that are flashing up all around come to nothing. It would be good if a sufficiently large number of of people were to realize how serious the present situation is, and out of this realization were to arrive at something that is really new. The sad thing is that People today have been given great tasks and yet would most of all like to sleep through those tasks. The particular task given to the anthroposophical movement for decades now has basically been to shake humanity out of its sleep, to point out that humanity needs to be given something today that truly changes the present state of soul to the same extent as the dreamer's state of soul changes to being fully awake and alive for the day, when he wakes in the morning.

This I intend to be the conclusion to the two aspects of history seen in the light of spiritual science I discussed during my present stay in this city. If only something could emerge from our anthroposophical movement that would truly fire our social ideas, filling them with warmth and energy. Social impulses are needed in the present age, that is so obvious when we look at events that we really should not fail to see it. These social impulses can only come to fruition if a new spirit is poured into human evolution. This should be realized particularly by the people who from one side or another come to join the anthroposophical movement. On the soil of this anthroposophical movement truthfulness and alertness are necessary, real alertness. Modern civilized society has got into the habit of being asleep in public life. Today people are so much asleep one might fall into severe doubt on seeing the external course followed by people in the pursuit of their affairs—were it not for the fact that one stands within spiritual life and perceives the course taken by spiritual affairs behind the Physical world. The external course people pursue in their events clearly spells it out that people fight shy of having any part in the search for truth in the phenomenal world. They are so glad they do not have to look at the events that are happening. You can see that when people are told of something happening somewhere today, they stand there on their two feet and give no indication of having heard something that is of profound significance for the way events will go. People hear of deeply significant things that must inevitably lead to ruin, to decline and fall, and they do not even feel indignation. Things are going on in the world, intentions are alive in German lands that should horrify people—yet they do not. Anyone incapable of being horrified at these things also lacks the power to develop a sense of truth.

It has to be pointed out that healthy indignation over things that are not healthy should be the source and origin of enthusiasm, of the new truths that are needed. It is actually less important to convey truths to people than it is to bring fiery energy into their lethargic nervous systems. Fiery energy is needed today, not mystical sleep. Longing for mystical peace and quiet is not of the essence today but rather dedication to the spirit. Union with the divine has to be actively sought today and not in mystical indolence and comfort.

This has to be pointed out. We must find a way of making it possible again for our minds to connect a divine principle with our outer reality. We shall only be able to do this if we consider without bias how people found their gods walking the earth in the earliest empires. We must find a way in which our human souls can walk in the spirit in spiritual worlds, that we may find gods again.

• 13. Prince-Archbishop Johann Baptist Katschthaler, Salzburg, Austria. Pastoral of 2 February 1905 entitled 'Die dem katholischen Priester gebiihrende Ehre' (The honour due to Catholic priests), reprinted in Carl Mirbt Quellen zur Geschichte des Pabst-rums and des rdmischen Katholizismus (Sources relating to the history of the papacy and of Roman Catholicism) 5. Aufl. Tubingen 1934, S. 497 ff. The passage relating to the powers of consecration is given below.
  
  ‘Honour your priests, for they have the power of consecration. Catholic priests have this wonderful power of consecration, Protestant pastors do not. This power of consecration, to make the Body of the Lord be present, with the precious Blood, with the whole of His sacred humanity and His divine nature in the Bread and the Wine—that is a great and sublime power, a truly extraordinary power! Where in heaven is a power like that of the Catholic priest to be found? Among the angels? Or does the Mother of God have it? Mary conceived Christ, the Son of God, in her womb and gave birth to Him in the stable in Bethlehem. Yes. But consider what happens during Holy Mass! Does not the same thing happen, as it were, when the priest raises his hands in blessing during the consecration? Christ is really and truly made to be present, to be reborn, as it were, in the Bread and the Wine. Mary bore her child in Bethlehem, wrapping it in swaddling clothes; a priest does the same, as it were, placing the wafer on the corporal cloth. Mary brought her child into the world just once. But see, a priest does this not once, but many hundreds and thousands of times, each time he celebrates the Mass. There, in the stable, the child which Mary gave to the world was small, capable of suffering and mortal. Here, on the altar, in the hands of the priest, we have Christ in His glory, not capable of suffering and also immortal, sitting in heaven to the right of the Father, glorious and triumphant, perfect in every regard. Do priests merely make the Body and Blood be present? No. They sacrifice, offering sacrifice to the Heavenly Father. This is the same sacrifice that Christ brought by shedding His blood on Calvary and bloodlessly at the Last Supper. There the eternal High Priest Jesus Christ sacrificed His Flesh, His Blood and His very Life to the Heavenly Father; here, at the Mass, He does the same through his representative, the Catholic priest. He ordained priests to take His place so that they might continue the same sacrifice that He had brought. He has transferred to them the authority over His sacred humanity, giving them power over His body, as it were. A Catholic priest is able not only to make Him be present on the altar, lock Him up in the tabernacle, take Him out again and give Him to the faithful to eat, he is actually able to offer Him, the Son of God become Man, as a bloodless sacrifice for the living and the dead. Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father by whom heaven and earth were created and who sustains the whole world, submits to the Catholic priests in this respect.'=’ (Italics as in the original text given by Mirbt.)
• 14. ‘Suprema lex regis voluntas’. William II (see note 10) wrote this in the Golden Book of the City of Munich. See also J. von Kiirenberg War alles falsch? Das Leben Kaiser Wi/helms II. (Was it all wrong? A life of the emperor William II. Translated into English and published in 1954, but exact English title not known), Basle-Olten 1940; German edition S. 190.
• 15. Dionysius the Areopagite (an Athenian converted by St Paul): ‘ the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies' and The hierarchy of the church,’ in Die angeblichen Schriften des Areopagiten Dionysius, übersetzt and mit Abhandlungen begleitet von J.G. V. Engelhardt (Writings ascribed to Dionyius the Areopagite, translated and provided with commentaries by J.G.V. Engelhardt), part 2, Sulzbach 1823.
• 16. Aurelius Augustinus, De Civitate Dei. libri XII.
  
  Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia.
• 17. Wycliffe, John, English reformer.
  
  Hus, or Huss, John, Bohemian reformer, burned when the Council of Constance condemned his and Wycliffe's writings.
• 18. TN. Luke 17:20-21. Rudolf Steiner was quoting from the Luther Bible, but saying 'gods' instead of 'God'.
• 19. Grim, Herman, Fragtmente (vol. 1), Berlin & Stuttgart, S. 212: ‘For the people of today [1891], it is no longer the Wars of Liberation fought against Napoleon I that are the last important historical event in their lifetime, but the Wars of Liberation fought against Austria and France in the 1860s and 1870s. We have been a nation where children had to be taught that they would never be permitted to act freely in influencing the destinies of their country. Today, however, Germans are compelled to act in this way. Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable to make it part of education to tell children that they would one day be citizens of a great united German Empire and that their duties towards God, the Emperor and their country would one day also consist in having to elect someone to represent them in a German Parliament, basing their choice on their personal judgement of the country's needs. Just to utter such things would have sounded like high treason and might have ruined the life of the person who uttered them.’