The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear guests!

I must ask you to excuse me for speaking in German and not in Dutch; however, I will have to show you a number of photographs to illustrate today's lecture, and they will not be in German, but international.

The anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement from Dornach has been working on this for the last twenty years or so. In the early years, however, the Anthroposophical Society was a member of the general Theosophical Society, but I never put forward anything other than what I currently represent. And when, after this anthroposophy had been tolerated for a while within the Theosophical Society, it was then found to be too heretical and was to a certain extent expelled, the Anthroposophical Society was founded as an independent society.

The anthroposophical movement definitely wants to reckon with the scientific attitude of the contemporary civilized world, it does not want to be anything sectarian or the like, but it wants to have a serious stimulating effect on the various sciences of our time, on the religious consciousness and also on the artistic and social life of the present.

By around 1909, the anthroposophical movement had grown to such an extent within Central Europe that it was impossible for it to work without its own building, and so a number of long-standing members came up with the idea of erecting their own building for anthroposophy. And when I was approached with the intention of erecting such a building, a very specific impulse immediately arose from the nature of anthroposophical work. Otherwise, if one had been forced by some spiritual movement to construct a building of one's own, one would have gone to some master builder and had him construct a Renaissance building or a Gothic building or a Greek building or something similar.

It would have been impossible for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to proceed in such an outward manner. For this is not something that merely seeks to spread a theoretical culture, but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science emerges from the source of the full human being. I have taken the liberty of explaining how it emerges from this source of full humanity in the two previous lectures here in this hall. But because this is so, because anthroposophy is not merely a one-sided theoretical science, but because it is something for the whole of human life in all its forms of activity, this anthroposophical movement also had to create its own architectural style out of its sources at the moment when it was faced with the necessity of erecting its own building. And we have succeeded in creating such a building. It is not yet finished, but it is already finished to such an extent that courses were held in it last fall and will be held again at Easter. We have succeeded in erecting such a building on the Dornach Hill near Basel in Switzerland.

I said that the style of this Goetheanum, the attempt at a new style of building, was also formed from the same sources from which spiritual science was born, naturally with all the dangers, with all the shortcomings with which such a first attempt at a new style must be associated. Anthroposophy really emerges from the sources of being, not from thoughts or mere experimental and intellectually extended investigations, from the sources of existence itself. Therefore, in all its work, it must connect itself with the creative forces that are active in nature itself, for example, because the ultimate creative forces in nature are, as I have explained in the previous lectures, themselves of a spiritual nature.

I may perhaps use a comparison. Take a nut. It has a nut kernel; this nut kernel is formed in a lawful way. But there is also the nutshell; it could not be otherwise as it is, since the nut is as it is. The same force that shapes the nut kernel also shapes the nutshell in a unique way. Just as the nut kernel is shaped by natural law, so is the nutshell.

In Dornach, anthroposophical spiritual science is taught from the podium. The results of anthroposophical spiritual science are explored. Artistic representations are offered which are an outward expression - artistic, not symbolic or straw allegorical, but artistic - of that of which spiritual science itself is the expression. Therefore, around all this, around the kernel, so to speak, the shell must also be formed, which is [formed] precisely out of the same laws.

Therefore, an architecture has been cultivated in Dornach that is [designed] from the same sense, from the same spirit as anthroposophical spiritual science itself. Sculpture is done there out of exactly the same spirit, painting out of the same spirit. When someone stands on the podium and speaks in ideas, it is just another form of expression of what the pillars speak, what the paintings on the walls speak, what the sculptures speak. Everything is, if I may put it this way, cast from a single mold.

People are so afraid that nothing artistic would be created in this way, but only something symbolic or allegorical. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in Dornach there is not a single symbol, not a single allegory, but everything is attempted to be given in artistic form. The aim is not to somehow embody the ideas that are presented through images, that would be inartistic. Rather, the one spiritual life that underlies it can be shaped artistically at one time, and at another time it can be shaped ideally, in thought, scientifically. Art in Dornach is not a didactic expression of a science, for example, but it is one representation, and science is the other representation of the same great spiritual unknown from which anthroposophical spiritual science draws everything it wants to give humanity.

The entire external design of the Dornach building had to be accordingly. Anyone who looks at this Dornach building will see a double-domed structure, with two circular cylinders standing side by side, but interlocking, and two hemispherical domes above them, which are joined together in the circular segment by a somewhat difficult mechanical construction. Since in Dornach what can be researched through spiritual science is to be brought to the world, this must be reflected in the building itself. The small domed building is a kind of stage in which mystery plays and the like are performed. Eurythmy is also performed, but many other things are planned. The podium for the speaker is located between the small and large domed rooms. The large dome room is the auditorium or audience room for almost a thousand people. This double-domed building expresses the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science has something to say to the world of the present and the future in spiritual, general human and social terms, which I took the liberty of discussing in the two previous lectures.

If you approach the building from the west [and] come towards the main portal, which is oriented to the west, you will first see the following view (Fig. 5). The bottom of the building is made of concrete; at the top is a terrace that leads around the building in a stylized curve. This wooden structure stands on this concrete foundation. The domes are covered with that wonderful Nordic slate that is found in the slate quarries that can be seen on the journey from Kristiania to Bergen, from the Vossian slate quarries. This slate fits in wonderfully with the main idea of Dornach. Concrete and wood are both processed in such a way that an architectural style emerges which can be characterized as the transformation of the existing geometric, symmetrical, mechanical, static, dynamic architectural styles into an organic architectural style. Not as if any organic form had been imitated in the architectural forms of Dornach, that is not the case, but rather I tried, in the sense of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, to become completely integrated into the natural creation of organic forms and to obtain organic forms which, by metamorphosing them, could then form a whole in the Dornach building; organic forms which are such that each individual form must be in the place where it is.

Imagine the nature of organic forms. Think of something seemingly quite insignificant in the organic form of the human organism: an earlobe. You will have to say to yourself: This earlobe, in the place where it is, could not be otherwise, as it is, if the whole organism is as it has just revealed itself. The smallest and the largest thing in an organic context has its very specific form at its place in the organism. This has been carried over into the building concept of Dornach.

I know very well how much can be objected to this organic principle of building from the point of view of the old architectural styles. But this organic building style was once coined in the Dornach building concept. It may be rejected from the old point of view, but after all, everything new was rejected from the old point of view. In any case, however, if one can make friends with the transformation of static-dynamic, geometric building forms into organic ones, then one will find that all transitions from one organic form to another - not organic [natural] forms, for nothing is naturalistically imitated - [can be experienced] with the same inner regularity as, say, the plant leaf that is at the bottom of the stem, metamorphoses when it appears further up the stem, always [is] the same form, but alternating with the greatest variety.

So in Dornach you will find certain organic forms carried into the building concept everywhere, as they are carved out of the wood here, as they appear here on the entrance pillars as capitals. Here on the side windows (Fig. 4, 12) you can see the same motif, on the windows of the side wing (Fig. 13) too, apparently no longer similar, but nevertheless the same metamorphosed, just as the motif of the green leaf reappears in the flower petal.

If you look at the building from the inside and the outside, you can get the impression: If any motif is near the gate, it is worked differently, so that you can see that the motif has less to bear against the gate, while it has to brace itself against the whole weight of the building. All of this, as it is taken into account in nature in the formation of the bones and muscle shapes, is definitely carried out in Dornach's building concept. Take a look at the bone form within the formation of the knee, it is designed in a wonderfully natural and ingenious way so that certain bones, which form the foundation bones, carry what lies on them. They are expanded and retracted in the right place. Feeling one's way into the forms of organic formation, of carrying, of weight, that was necessary in order to build Dornach.

Here (Fig. 5) you enter. Here is a room to put down your clothes, here is a staircase inside, through which you walk up. You can walk around this terrace and at the same time have a distant view over the countryside, the Swiss Jura.

The same picture, slightly shifted and closer (Fig. 6).

Here (Fig. 7) you can see the building as it presents itself to you from the southwest. Here the gallery, below the concrete building.

The building as you see it when you approach it from the north (Fig. 1), so that you have the large dome in front of you, [here] the small dome. Here the two domes are joined together.

From a point in the north, the building (Fig. 2). Here you can see a strange structure. This is the one that is most criticized. It is the building that stands near the building. I started by looking at the lighting and heating machines as if they were the kernel of a nut, and constructing a shell over it out of concrete, which is extremely difficult to work with artistically. Those who still criticize this building today don't consider what would be standing there if no effort had been made to create something artistic out of the artistically brittle concrete material: there would be a red chimney. I would like to ask people whether that would be more beautiful than what is certainly a first attempt to stylize something out of concrete, which has some shortcomings, but is nevertheless a first attempt to create something artistic in these things.

Here (Fig. 3) the building seen from the northeast. Here is a house that was already standing when we were given the building plot. A house that we very much hope we will be able to buy one day. You can imagine for what purpose we would like to acquire it; of course it disturbs the whole aspect of the building.

Here is the interlocking of the domes (Fig. 17). Here the main wing, here the main entrance (Fig. 10).

Here is the studio where the stained glass windows were made (Fig. 103). It was listed as a studio for grinding the stained glass windows.

Behind it is the boiler house again (Figs. 106, 107). In a neighboring village, Arlesheim, there is a particularly tastelessly built church. I have nothing to say against it, but it is honestly tasteless. Nevertheless, the Swiss Association for the Beautification of Swiss Buildings has managed to say that this [our] building disfigures this part of Switzerland: just take a look at the beautiful church in Arlesheim.

The ground plan (Fig. 20). Main entrance, organ room, auditorium. Here is the lectern. The stage area. Here are the two side wings with the individual rooms for the performing actors and other artists. Here you can see seven columns on both sides. Here in the curve six columns. These seven pillars are not formed out of some mystical urge in the number seven, but purely out of artistic feeling. Just as the violin has four strings, so the artistic feeling here has resulted from inner reasons that a certain artistic development and in turn an artistic conclusion can be achieved by developing just seven motifs. With these pillars, the risk was taken not to design the capital and architrave motifs as repetitions, but in a lively development. When you enter from the west portal, you come across the first two columns. However, they are symmetrical. But if you move on from the first to the second column, the capital of the second column, the base, the architrave above the second column is designed in a way that must be organic. It is designed in such a way that one had to live into the creation and creation of the forces of nature if one wanted to artistically shape the second pillar motif out of the first, the third again out of the second and so on, until a certain conclusion was reached in the seventh pillar motif.

Many visitors come to Dornach and ask: What does the individual chapter mean? You can't ask that at all about art. The essential thing is that one pillar emerges artistically and formally from the other pillar. Whereas in the static architectural style we are actually only dealing with symmetry, with repetitions of the same motif, here we are dealing with a living evolution from the first to the seventh column. I will show the columns later, then you can see this.

Section through the building (Fig. 21).

Original model, cut vertically in the middle (Fig. 22). I originally had to work out the whole building as a model, so that even the building plan, ground plan and elevation, as they were based on, were formed according to this model. This whole model is precisely the embodiment of the Dornach building concept, is conceived in the same way as spiritual science itself is conceived, is to a certain extent another expression for that for which the one expression is spiritual science itself.

Right next to the main entrance, the main portal in the west (Fig. 15). The pictures were taken at a time when construction was still in full swing.

A little further on from the main entrance (Fig. 12). Here the part containing the stairs to go up. Here is a house nearby. This house was built in a very special way. After all, we built the entire structure through the understanding of our anthroposophical friends. The fact that the Dornach hill was used to build this house is explained by the fact that a friend in Basel, near Basel, bought this building plot a long time ago to build a summer house for himself; he then gave us this plot as a gift. We were then able to build there. The friend also wanted to have his house here. And that's when I was given the task - various conditions made it necessary - to stylize a house, a family home with fifteen rooms, out of concrete material. It was a bit of a gamble. There are certainly still flaws in this house, which is formed out of the artistic nature of the brittle concrete material. But such things have to be done for the first time.

A side wing (Fig. 17). These two side wings are inserted like a crossbeam. Here the main motif is again metamorphosed. Everywhere the same and yet again something different, one could say, is contained in the building forms.

Front façade of a side wing (Fig. 14). Here again the motif that is at the main entrance, very widened, designed with rich material, here once more sparingly designed in the same metamorphosis. A certain law of symmetry is observed everywhere, but this is combined with asymmetry. This asymmetry gives the building an artistically pleasing effect and great variety.

Taken somewhat larger, the motif of the façade of one such side wing (Fig. 11).

We enter through the concrete entrance in the west, imagine (Fig. 23). Then we first come to the stairs leading up here. This would be the room where you put your clothes. Then you go to the front, here you enter the auditorium. Here I have dared to make the column shape organic.

[Then] for example this shape here (Fig. 24): There are three motifs standing perpendicular to each other. How did this form come about? Not through any kind of philosophizing, but purely out of feeling. You can say to yourself: anyone who has first entered through the main portal and then wants to come into the auditorium must be able to move in a certain way towards the thought and feeling of what he wants to hear in Dornach from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual view: Here you may enter for the security of your soul, to gain a firm foothold within yourself. Here you may enter in such a way that no illusions of life shall beguile you; that no kind of wavering shall come over you. This has been sensitively expressed here in this motif.

Then you see here a pillar supporting the staircase (Fig. 25). The staircase motif itself is designed in such a way that it is organically braced against the building, in this case against the exit. Here it is carried by a column that does not imitate organic motifs in a naturalistic way, but is just as organically shaped as the forms of living creatures in nature are shaped by the creative forces of nature. How this pillar stands up, how it supports something on one side, where the load to be carried is lighter, how it braces itself against this side, where the main load of the building lies, is expressed in the smallest things in the same way as the earlobe shape expresses the affiliation to the whole human organism. Every form in Dornach must be perceived as a necessity in its place.

Here (Fig. 26) is a motif that I have executed in the various metamorphoses. Here it is made of concrete, in the upper section of wood. It's a front piece for a radiator. As I said, in Dornach the individual forms emerge from each other in a metamorphic way, and there are no abstract forms that are merely appropriate to the underground art, but everything is realized in a strictly organic artistic way.

Here (Fig. 27) you can see the room that you enter when you climb the staircase that has just been built. This is a wooden building. Here is a pillar supporting the ceiling. Everything that immediately follows in the interior is handcrafted by a large number of our friends. It must be emphasized again and again that a large number of friends have gathered in Dornach over many years, all of whom have worked out these individual sculptural forms, which were given to them in the model, by hand. In a sense, the entire wooden structure is the handiwork of the anthroposophical friends. And that is something that could have been exemplary at the same time for the loving cooperation of a group of people.

If you now enter and look backwards in the auditorium, you can see the organ loft here. This is the model (Fig. 30). The idea is not to place the organ in a cavity, but to take the organ and shape the architecture accordingly. Additional motifs were then added during the elaboration.

Here is the interior (Fig. 29). When you enter the interior, you can see the organ porch where the singers stand. Here are the first three columns. I will explain the picture of the column formation in a moment. Above the columns are the architraves, which also show progressive motifs.

Here is the organ loft (Fig. 28).

Here is the space above the organ, sculpted out of wood (Fig. 33). Please take a look at the chapter. It is composed of simple forms. We will make the transition to the next and next capital and architrave forms. You don't have to think about how one capital emerges from another, but it is simply perceived like a leaf on the stem of a plant from which others now emerge metamorphically. Thus the next motifs here are always formed quite sensitively from the previous ones.

Here you have the simple capital motif of the first column (fig. 34).

The first column and the second column (Fig. 35). If you think of the simple motif from top to bottom, from bottom to top, you can imagine how it grows. The drops from above grow into this form, and from below the forms grow to meet them in more complicated shapes. It is the same with the architrave motifs.

Second column motif (fig. 36): already more complicated.

Second and third columns together (fig. 37): Again organically metamorphosed, the third column is obtained from the second column.

The third column on its own (Fig. 38).

Third and fourth pillars together (Fig. 39). What is still simple here has become more complicated. You make very special discoveries in the process. I simply let one motif emerge from the other according to artistic feeling. In doing so, I realized that it is only through this artistic approach that one can really understand the essence of evolution in nature. One usually imagines that the first forms in a developmental process are the simpler ones, which then become more and more complicated. This is not the case. If you work artistically, allowing one to emerge from the other, then you end up shaping the simpler into the more complicated, but when the complication has reached a certain level, things become more harmonious, but simpler again. This is how evolution works: from the simple to the complicated and then back to simplification. This discovery is surprising at first. You create something like this from the purely artistic and then find that it actually corresponds fully to the artistic creation of nature.

Consider the human eye: it is the most perfect, but not the most complicated. Certain organs of lower beings, the fan in the eye, the xiphoid process, are absorbed by the human eye. You come to that by yourself if you shape purely artistically.

Something very strange also happened to me. I said I had to form seven pillars, really not out of any mystical inclination. The seventh pillar turned out to be the end; you couldn't go any further, the motifs had been fulfilled. But later I discovered that if I took the convex shape of the seventh pillar and reshaped it a little artistically, it went straight into the concave, hollowed-out shape of the first pillar. I wasn't looking for that. It was the same with the sixth and second pillars, and also with the third and fifth pillars. I discovered that the capitals and the pedestal figures were something that emerged naturally from the work in the sense of an evolution. This is not something I was looking for. Even in nature itself, such surprising formal relationships arise. When you create artistically, you get these things that confront you from the individual forms, and you come to a deep respect for the mysterious working and weaving firstly in nature, but secondly in the world of forms itself, which you can penetrate imaginatively and artistically and by looking at it.

A column on its own has become relatively complicated (fig. 42). But you will see that by thinking of this motif in such a way that it grows from top to bottom, from bottom to top, something emerges that I did not aim for; but when people look at it, they will say: He has formed the staff of Mercury. I didn't want to form that, but it came out like that.

It spreads out, grows, thus creating this complicated motif (fig. 41), then the motifs become simpler.

Here you can see this motif (Fig. 43). Now I couldn't go any further in the complication. By thinking of it as growing and perceiving it as growing, I created this simpler motif.

The last two columns with their architraves above them (fig. 45). The column directly in front of the stage entrance (fig. 46).

In this way, you can see how the individual capitals came about, how the entire column motifs developed artistically in their evolution.

Here we are in front of a plinth (Fig. 48). I wanted to show these pedestals in turn, one after the other, how they develop apart in the same way as the capitals.

All pedestals (figs. 48-54). First becoming more complicated, then simpler again.

Here you can see from the auditorium into the stage area (Fig. 57). Here you can see the painted interior of the stage dome. Here the architrave above the columns of the auditorium. Here the auditorium closes off the stage area. Still in progress is the gap that connects the auditorium with the stage area (Fig. 56).

Another view from the auditorium, whose last columns you can see, into the stage area (Fig. 55). Here the painted stage dome. With regard to the painting of the two domes, however, I cannot give you such pictures, or rather I cannot give you pictures that speak as clearly as I can about the other. For with regard to the painting of the Dornach building, what I once described as the essence of modern painting has been very seriously striven for and followed, at least in the small dome room. Everything that is created in painting must be extracted from color.

The world of color is a world unto itself. The person who immerses himself in the world of color learns to recognize the creativity of each individual color; he learns to recognize the creativity that lies in the harmony of colors. Those who know how red affects human perception, how red speaks from within, those who know that blue has a formative, creative effect, come to shape the painterly world out of the colors

This is roughly what they tried to create when painting the small domed room in Dornach. The essential thing is always, if I may put it this way, the spot of color in a certain place. Although the figurative is born out of color, everything is originally conceived out of color. Light, dark and colors are actually the only things that are justified when you depict something painterly with the help of the surface; drawing is actually a mendacity. Take the horizon line: the blue sky above, the greenish sea below. If you paint it like this, then the horizon emerges by itself as the creature of the color encounter. And so it is with all lines in real painting. In painting, form is the work of color. This is what was attempted in Dornach.

There (Fig. 64) you first see what is under the dome, the architrave motif, directly above the group that is to be placed in the east of the building as the sculptural center of this building, so to speak. A motif from the small domed room (Fig. 66). I ask that these motifs be judged in the same way as those of the large domed room, except that six columns are intended on both sides; thus the whole shapes and designs are “ben other.

A capital motif of the small domed room (fig. 58-63).

The first thing in the painting of the small domed room when you enter it (Fig. 73). Of course, you will only get a real sense of what I can show you now when you feel this [photographic] reproduction in its defects, when you say to yourself: What is this actually? There should be color! Of course it is also color, everything is taken out of the color.

Here is a child flying towards a kind of fist figure (fig. 69). The child is red-yellow, the fist figure in blue.

Here fist (fig. 70), [here] the child (fig. 69). This fist figure roughly represents the civilization of the fifteenth, sixteenth century, in which we are actually all still immersed. However, that which takes shape from that civilization in external theoretical science is basically only a surface. The person who lives into the world view that has emerged through the newer natural sciences with his whole human being feels death strongly on the one side and budding, germinating life on the other. These two polar opposites confront us precisely from the present-day view of nature. Just take the following: The way we describe nature, we use terms that are basically taken from the dead, the mineral. Our natural scientists see an ideal in thinking of plant and animal life along the lines of the mineral, perhaps even being able to work experimentally in this direction. The idea of death is very strong (Fig. 71). On the other hand, if we delve into our self-consciousness, there is that life which is polar opposite to death, which we feel in particular when we allow the life of a child to affect us uninfluenced by knowledge. It is entirely in keeping with the feeling that a fist figure appears here, painted out of the blue.

[Here] the only word you will find in the entire structure: ICH (Fig. 72).

It is at this time, when this fist figure enters modern civilization, that we first really get to know the ego as the abstract content of self-consciousness. As you know, older languages still have the I in the verb. In this age, the ego is peeled out, set apart, when at the same time this culture appears, the political contrasts of which I have just described. This is the first motif that confronts us in the painting of the small dome.

Here Faust (fig. 70), here Death (fig. 71) as the contrast to the child. It is precisely the most modern cognitive and spiritual life that is to emerge in this motif, but out of the color, out of the yellow-reddish tone of the child, the blue tone of Faust, the brownish-blackish tone of this skeleton.

An angel-like figure above Faust (fig. 74). In a sense, everywhere below is a figure representing the more human, above it a spirit figure, the inspirer, the inspiring figure.

Here (fig. 75) is an image born out of the sensibility of Greek culture, i.e. more in the past. The fist figure was conceived out of modern culture, which we are still part of. Here is a kind of Pallas Athena figure, perceived from Greek culture, with the inspiring figure above it (Fig. 76).

Also such an inspiring, spirit-like figure (fig. 77).

Here (fig. 78) going further back an initiate of the Egyptian culture, above him the inspiring figure, so that everything worked out of the color is really intended here as figurative, which even represents the successive cultures and their evolution.

Here again two figures (fig. 79), and below them the figure that I will show you in larger size later. This is a kind of man of more recent times, a man of the present Central European culture. That which is ambivalent in this man of the present is expressed in his inspiration, which is above him. Here is a Luciferian figure. In this Luciferic figure there is to live all that which lives in that human nature, that through which man wants to go beyond himself, through which he falls into the rapturous, mystical, theosophical. The other, the Ahrimanic, through which he falls into the philistine, the intellectual-materialistic. These two opposites are in every human being today. Man seeks a balance between this duality. Everything in him that leads pathologically to fever, to pleurisy, is in this Luciferic form; everything that leads to sclerosis, to calcification, is in this Ahrimanic form.

Here (Fig. 81) you see one thing, in a sense the human being with those forces that age him, drive him towards sclerosis, drive him mentally towards intellectuality, towards materialism. Man would be like this, despite the fact that no one desires it so much, so Mephistopheleanahrimanic, if he had no heart, if he were merely a man of intellect. He is in all of us, but we also have a heart.

This (Fig. 80) is the one who represents us if we only had a heart and no mind. The Luciferic figure: rapturous, mystical, theosophical, everything that wants to go beyond the human being. Here is the human being who, with the help of these two again polar, contour-like opposing effects, really feels duality and can only bear it if the child is placed by his side. The man of the present in his ambivalent nature. Here (fig. 82) still somewhat larger, the same man who feels conflict within himself.

Here (figs. 83, 84) we come somewhat closer to the center. Here two figures, one painted more light, the other more dark. I have always taken the view that the Russian people's soul contains the man of the future. Today, only in the East is everything distorted. Today, through Lenin and Trotsky, the East is working towards the death of culture, towards the most terrible destruction. For all that which is at work in the East as forces of decline in the most terrible way can only lead to the destruction of all culture. But that is not what corresponds to the Russian national soul. And if nothing else would bring down Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian people's soul would one day bring them down. But the Russian people's soul is such that every Russian has his own shadow next to him. There is not only the ambivalent man as in Central Europe, who carries Lucifer and Ahriman within him, the enthusiastic and the materialistic, there is a man who has a second man beside him. This shadow must first be absorbed by the man of the future, but then he will also become the man of the future.

Here (Fig. 83) the inspiring angel, above it a centaur figure. When the man of the future will have attained his maturity, this figure will be that which may be put forward as the actual inspirer next to the angelic figure; today he is still centaur-like.

Here (Fig. 84) this centaur figure, the starry sky in between, so rightly sensing that evolution in the spirit which hovers between the angelic and the animal. Man stands, as it were, between the animal, which has assumed a human form in its passions and instincts, and the angelic, in which the ahrimanic is transformed into the spiritual and thereby receives its cosmic justification.

Here (fig. 85) from the other side, symmetrically situated, the angel, the centaur figure, carved out of the yellow.

Here you can see what is painted in the middle: a kind of representative of humanity (fig. 86). Anyone who sees this representative of humanity may feel as if it were an embodiment of the figure of Christ. This Christ figure in the middle is shaped as I had to place it according to my supersensible view of the Christ figure, which I believed, as this being really lived in Palestine at the beginning of our era. The traditional figure of Christ with the beard was only invented in the fifth or sixth century. Today we have to go back through spiritual scientific research to the time when Christ lived in Palestine in order to be able to discover his form through extrasensory vision. I make no claim to be believed authoritatively that this is the true figure of Christ, but I see it this way and I hold from the depths of my being that this is the figure of Christ. Below it, carved into a rock, is the figure of Ahriman. From the right arm of the

The figure of Christ emanates lightning bolts that snake around the ahrimanic figure. The Ahrimanic figure is everything that man would be if he had only reason, only intellect, only a materialistic attitude, not a heart. Above it is the figure of Lucifer, carved out of the red, all that which in man tends to rapture, to fantasy, to one-sided theosophy, to mysticism.

Here (Fig. 87) you see this figure of Lucifer, the face painted entirely out of the red, above the figure of Christ.

The Ahrimanic figure (fig. 88), the countenance - the wings are bat-like in the Ahrimanic figure - bound by the lightning bolts emanating from the hand of Christ. Of course, it all depends on how you perceive it from the color.

Here is the head of the Christ figure (fig. 90). This is what is painted into the dome at the very east end of the small dome room. Below this painting - Christ, Lucifer, Ahriman - is a nine and a half meter high wooden group (Fig. 93); again in the middle is the representative of humanity, who can be perceived as Christ. Twice above it is the Lucifer motif, twice below it the Ahriman motif. And then out of the rock an elemental being, which looks at the Christ in the midst of Lucifer and Ahriman like a natural being.

Here (fig. 91) the first model of the Christ figure in profile, as I made it in order to base the wooden group, the sculpture on it.

En face the first model; it is somewhat defective (fig. 92). A model of the Ahriman figure (Fig. 99). A Lucifer figure (Fig. 101), at the side of the wooden figure in the middle.

Another Lucifer (Fig. 98). Above it, carved out of the rock, an elemental being bending its head, as it were, and looking at Christ in union with Lucifer and Ahriman. I have dared to form a face quite asymmetrically, so that it is carved out of the composition. This is usually done in such a way that the composition is made up of the individual figures. Here in the wooden group, the individual figure is always created from the meaning and spirit of the whole composition, hence this asymmetry. It is a completely asymmetrical face, but it has to be like this at the point in the composition where it is in the group.

Here you have the heating and lighting house (Fig. 106) standing on its own, the rear front completely adapted to the machines that are inside. The whole thing is only finished when the smoke comes out of the top. Then these extensions will also be perceived as justified. Artistically, one creates from the form and cannot give an abstract explanation as to why it is this way or that. Some people think they are leaves, others think they are ears. That's not the point, it's the form that matters, which adapts on the one hand to growing out of the boiler house and on the other hand to what happens in the boiler house.

The glass house in which the glass windows have been cut (Fig. 103). These windows are located in the auditorium. They are cut out of monochrome glass panes, i.e. glass panes tinted with a single color. They have a certain history: We had first ordered glass panes from a factory near Paris in the spring of 1914, but the shipment was so delayed that it simply disappeared on the battlefield; we never saw anything of it. We had to buy the panes a second time.

The idea is that the motif is now cut out of the single-colored glass pane using special machines. The pane is then inserted and the work of art is created in the sunlight that passes through. This is connected with the whole idea of building in Dornach. In buildings everywhere else, you have to deal with walls that close off the room. In Dornach you have walls that don't evoke the idea at all: You are closed off. Everything I have now shown you is actually designed to make the walls artistically transparent. The viewer or listener has the feeling in the building that the wall is transparent, artistically transparent through its form, and that he is in contact with the whole wide universe. This is expressed artistically and physically through these glass windows, which are actually only a kind of score, as they are worked out as glass etchings. They become works of art when the sunlight shines through them. In other words, what is inside the building expands into the outer, sunlit nature. The glass cutting had to be done in this studio, which now serves as the building office.

The door to the glass house (Fig. 104). Not even philistine door handles, but completely new door handles (Fig. 105).

[Now] a small sample of the stained glass windows. All kinds of motifs cut out of the single-colored glass pane, but they only make sense to enjoy when you are standing in front of them.

Here (Fig. 112) a pair of people, the feelings of this pair of people carried out in what is around them.

Another window motif, scratched out of the glass (fig. 110). The glasses are not all of the same color, but one color is always followed by another. So that when you enter the building, you can see the different colors from the various windows. The whole room is then illuminated with a symphony of colors, which is artistically perceived as being composed of the most diverse colors. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have taken the liberty of presenting to you the architectural concept of Dornach in the eighty pictures I have shown you. I have also taken the liberty of explaining to you how this Dornach building concept aims to replace merely static, geometric, symmetrical building with organic building. This had to happen because this spiritual science, as I have represented it here in my lectures, is not merely a one-sided science, but full of life; because it wants to draw fully from the source of world and human life. Therefore, it is not merely a phrase when it is said that religion, art and science and social life should be united with one another, but that the building in its new architectural style simply had to express the same thing out of the whole essence of this spiritual science that is expressed in the spiritual science itself through thoughts or laws.

My esteemed audience, through the willingness of a large number of understanding friends to make sacrifices, we have brought the building so far that last fall we were able to have about thirty experts, people of practice, hold courses in this building, and shorter courses are to be held again at Easter. However, the building is not yet finished. We can only express the hope that we will be able to complete this building, from which a spiritual-scientific movement, which will also bring the social liberation that is necessary for the people of the present and the near future, will emanate. For this, however, it will be particularly necessary to have the international understanding that I described yesterday as the basis for a world school association that works towards the liberation of spiritual life as one member of the tripartite social organism. It will be necessary for this spiritual life to be promoted and supported by the World School Association in an international way.

With regard to the building of Dornach, I know very well what can be objected to from older points of view, from old architectural styles. But if we never dared to do anything new, the development of humanity could not progress. And the impulse to move forward has to do above all with that which wants to emanate from Dornach as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Forward in the development of humanity, according to the goals that I indicated yesterday at the end of the lecture.

We know, in that we have also formed this outer shell of anthroposophical spiritual science in the building of Dornach, the Goetheanum, what all can be criticized about this building, what all can be objected to it. We have only one justification for ourselves, which is ultimately decisive for everything new: we must dare to try this new thing. And we always remember what is true: that what is justified will work its way through against all resistance if it is justified. If it is not justified, it will be eliminated and will do little harm to humanity. In the face of all opposition, it will become clear whether the building idea of Dornach is justified as an outer shell for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can only say: we think it is justified, and that is why we dared to do it!

We have often emphasized that the worldview based on the Science of the Spirit must not remain just something abstract or conceptual, or something that we present as our worldview only in solemn moments of our lives to satisfy our inner spiritual needs. Rather, our worldview must be something that deeply intervenes in our life and being, in our work from morning to night. This will become very clear to us if we focus our attention on what is always around us, namely the relationships and connections that spiritual beings and the spiritual world in general have with us and our lives.

The physiognomy of the external life will only become clear to a human being, after he looked into that which out of the spiritual world brings about this physiognomy of existence. Not until we know a human being’s soul, will we begin to understand him fully by his physiognomy. We will then know how to interpret his gaze and explain his facial expressions. Likewise, the external world in its large and small manifestations will become understandable once we get to know its spiritual foundations. We are already able to make a lot clear to ourselves when we follow life at every turn and observe it with an eye sharpened by the Science of the Spirit.

Recently, an aperçu came to my mind that I would like to use as an introduction simply to get us in the mood for today’s contemplation. I have often drawn your attention to¹ how strangely in the destiny of the world, in its historical karma, things are interconnected in European culture. I have pointed out to you how in the Nordic mystery world, the mystery world of Druids and of the Trots, a certain tragic streak prevailed during teaching. In the old pre-Christian mystery world, the disciples who were initiated into high spiritual wisdom, high spiritual science, were also always made aware of something. It was pointed out to them that the view of the spiritual world conveyed to them, namely in Northern and North-western Europe, would receive a special illumination through a future event. Prophetically, the later appearance of Christ was alluded to. The whole of European culture becomes understandable to us when we follow the strange threads of how Christianity entwined and interwove itself into the remnants of the ancient Nordic beliefs about the spirit world. And sometimes small external facts really seem to be symptoms even though they are more than symptoms. They are real evidence of what is happening inside. Thus, one following these fine threads unravels for himself the physiognomy of external events.

During one of my last lecture journeys,² it stood quite vividly before my soul, how in the areas of the North, in Sweden and Norway, the after-effects of the ancient Nordic spirit world can still be perceived in detail. It seems one can perceive how these effects are playing into a spiritual view of all that we encountered. And then one feels something very special, when right in the middle of these echoes of the ancient world of the Nordic gods, something manifests itself that points to strange karmic historical connections. Right in the midst of the echoes of this ancient Nordic spirit world, an impressive picture presents itself.

On reaching Uppsala, one is, so to speak, right in the middle of the things that further remind one of the ancient Nordic mystery world. Right there you come across the first Germanic translation of the bible of Ulfilas,³ that wonderful document about the penetration of Christianity into the European world. Even if we do not go into specific karmic connections, we will feel something of karmic relations when we remember that this document was first in Prague, then was captured during the Swedish war and brought to this place by strange circumstances. It seems to us as if this first translation of the Bible into Germanic is a living monument to the penetration of Christianity into the ancient Nordic spirit world.

When one truly perceives the things that one encounters also as an outer expression of inner spiritual facts then all becomes explainable from the inner perspective and everything comes to life. Thus, today we want to place before our soul and examine some of the many things that show us external events and external facts as a consequence, a physiognomic expression, of inner spiritual natures and occurrences of such spiritual beings and events.

When we survey the life of man, it becomes obvious right away that in today’s world, where materialistic thinking is prevalent, only connections that are well visible from the outside are studied and noted. One will call something harmful when the harm it causes is clearly visible to the eyes. Something is called useful when its utility is obvious.

It will become especially clear to us that spiritual facts play out in between the sensual events of life, so to speak, in between our sensual bodies that are connected with human life, if we first consider certain deeds of beings who exert influence on our world. Of course, these beings cannot be naturally perceived by man’s physical senses but are deeply significant for the entire human life.

We can take a closer look at only one kind of such beings, although there are many. The space that surrounds us is not only filled with air, but with a great variety of spiritual beings. There are those that we call elemental beings. The majority of them can be characterised by something that they do not possess, but rather by what actually makes a human being a human being, namely a feeling of moral responsibility. They cannot have this. They are organised in such a way that they cannot be held responsible in a moral sense. Don’t think that at least some of those beings who go and in out of our bodies, at least a certain kind of them, have no intellect, are not intelligent. Many of them are very smart beings—beings which are hardly inferior to man in terms of cleverness and intellect. Let us first take a look at such beings who are found in the higher worlds, but who have a certain relationship with man himself, which has its effects in life. This is what we want to examine.

We begin with the assumption that a person really lives in two distinct states. Within the duration of twenty-four hours, a typical modern man transitions from the awake state of day to the state of sleep at night. We know from earlier observations that during the day a human being is in a regular way composed of four bodily members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. During the night, when someone falls asleep, the physical and the etheric body remain lying in bed, whilst the astral body and the I lift themselves out. We have also learnt, that these four members of the human body find their expression in the physical body. We know that the I finds expression in the blood. The blood in its movements is nothing but the material revelation of the I. Likewise, the nervous system is the material revelation of the astral body, and the glands are those of the etheric body. The physical body has its own revelation, so to speak. If you keep that in mind, then you can understand that this human nervous system in the physical body is designed just so that it can only exist when it is permeated by the astral body. This is so because the astral body is its creator and maintainer. It is organising the nervous system that is dependent on it. The nervous system can only live under the influence of the astral body. Similarly, closely connected are the blood and the I. Just imagine what happens when you, disdainfully, leave your physical body each night. You leave the nervous system behind in the physical body but take with you the astral body, that is its nurturer. You leave behind to its own devices, what the astral body should take care of. Likewise, your I steps out and leaves the blood to its own devices. That is what the human being does each night. He leaves his physical body, or rather the nervous- and blood-systems, to their own devices. However, these could not survive, if they had to depend solely on themselves. Because of the way they are, they must in the human form be permeated by an astral body, just as the blood must be permeated by something that is equivalent to the I.

What you do not do yourself, namely, to supply your nervous system, other beings have to do. Therefore, you will see that in the same moment in which the astral body and the I are pulling themselves out of the physical and etheric bodies, higher beings from higher realms are moving in. They sink their astrality into the nervous system and supply the nerves and the blood. Those that descend from the higher realms each night take possession of the physical body when the human being disdainfully leaves it behind. So, we can say that astral substantialities that create the physical and etheric bodies, who are participants in their creation, take care of these bodies again when the human being leaves them. Hereby they find the bodies different from the way they were originally delivered to the human beings. Man lived in it with his astral body and his I and has worked in it. Now the spiritual beings from higher cosmic regions find effects in it that do not correspond to their higher spirituality at all. Effects that are the aftermath of what the human being did during the day in his physical body, instigated by his astrality and his I.

Of course, the materialistic approach knows only roughly the basics. But when we consider the mysterious facts of the spiritual world, we will find that there exist also quite different effects that influence the physical body. One cannot have a single thought, feeling, or emotion without it affecting the physical body.

Although an anatomist cannot prove this, every feeling and every emotional state causes a certain change in the structure of the physical body, and this is what is then discovered by those beings who descend into the human being.

Of special relevance are the effects on the physical body caused by all those things a human being has within his soul of lies, slander, and hypocrisy. The materialistic view is that lies, slander, and hypocrisy are only as harmful as can be observed from the outside. But this is not correct. In reality, very delicate effects are exerted on the physical body, however, these effects cannot even be perceived microscopically. Later, when the soul leaves the body during sleep, the effects remain in the physical body and are found by the higher beings. These consider not only those soul experiences that are, in the gross sense, called lies, slander, and hypocrisy, but also, for example, the subtle, conventional lies that are required by today’s social order. Lies spoken out of politeness or custom, and the whole gamut that can be listed starting with insincerity, hypocrisy, and petty slander even if only in thought, all this expresses itself in effects on the physical body and is found by those descending beings. And as all of this is at night within the physical body something special is brought about.

Through this, pieces are always torn off from the substance of those beings that are descending into the body. Through this, certain pieces of the higher beings must excise themselves. The consequence of lies, hypocrisy, and slander during the day is the excision of certain beings during the night, that are through this somehow related to the physical human body. These beings thus acquire an independent existence in the spiritual world that surrounds us; they are beings that we class as phantoms. Phantoms are spiritual entities that look like physiognomic expressions, in a certain way they are replicas of human limbs and form. They are of such subtle materiality that the physical eye cannot see them, yet they have, so to say, a physical form. The clairvoyant sees parts of human heads, human hands, whole figures flying through the air. Yes, he sees the entrails of human bodies buzzing around, the stomach, the heart, all the phantoms that were set free by excision because of what humans have done to their physical bodies, as the result of lies, hypocrisy, and slander.

Such phantoms that consistently buzz through our spiritual space are proof to you that human life itself is the cause of beings that now, in a not at all particularly advantageous way, influence human beings. Although in some ways they possess certain intelligent characteristics, they do not have any moral accountability. They eke out their existence by placing obstacles in the way of man, obstacles that are much bigger than those we call bacteria. Something else is also happening. Important pathogenic agents can be found in such beings because phantoms, who have been created through people, will find in bacilli and bacteria a very good opportunity in support of their existence—a source of food. They would more or less dry up in their spiritual existence, if this nourishment wasn’t there. But in a sense, these bacteria are in turn created by them. Because the phantoms exist in the physical world, they can be serving a purpose. Through mysterious causes, that which is in some way needed is also available.

Thus, through lies, slander, and hypocrisy man creates an army of spiritual entities of the category of phantoms.

Something similar happens to the etheric body that man leaves behind at night. This has also been organised for life so that it can only exist as a human etheric body when it is permeated by higher beings. When its own astrality is outside, the higher beings dive into the etheric body also. This has to be remembered! Then it becomes comprehensible that effects in the etheric body, caused by certain processes of our soul-life, remain during the night and bring about the excision of beings, according to the etheric body pattern, from what sinks into the etheric body. The soul processes that lead to such entities, are processes caused in human society through what we call “bad laws” or “wrong rules.” Much of the lawful effect of injustice that a man’s soul experiences in dealing with others, impacts the soul in such a way that the after-effects remain in the etheric body at night and lead to the excision of beings that we call ghosts. This is the second kind of beings that man creates.

Then we have to consider that this issue also exists vice versa.

What stepped out of the body at night, the astral body, is organised in such a way that it depends on being present within the nervous system. When it is not within it, then it is not in its proper place. Then he astral body also must be supported from the higher worlds. Higher protective spirits must unite with it. From these higher spirits as well, something can be excised through human soul activity and peculiar soul processes. This occurs through the effect on human nature of what we could call “giving incorrect advice.” For example, this effect happens when someone forces wrong advice on another, or forms insufficiently justified prejudices, or persuades someone and treats his soul in such a way that does not allow him to agree freely, by pushing him, so to say, forcibly to a conviction that one is fanatically devoted to oneself.

When such influences are exerted from one person to another, an effect remains in the astral body during the night, which leads to the higher beings excising certain entities that belong to the category of demons. t. These will be created, in the way described above, because the people do not meet with an attitude that could be expressed as follows, “I want to tell the other person what I think. If he agrees, that is his business!”

Hundreds of demons are created at the gaming table at gatherings, in Germany called Herrenabende (Gentlemen’s evenings), and at afternoon tea, where really rarely an attitude can be found that is based on inner tolerance. Instead, an attitude prevails where an individual thinks, “If you do not want to share my opinion, then you are stupid.” This type of communication from soul to soul is demon-generating to the highest degree.

Thus spiritual beings really spring from human life. They animate the spiritual world, and all these beings, phantoms, ghosts, and demons in turn affect man. If in our surroundings one or another prejudice spreads epidemically or this or that silly fashion spreads, then this is the work of the demons that were created by human beings and are now obstructing the straight line of progress. Man is always encircled and swarmed by the beings he has created.

Thus, we see how man impedes his own progress due to his ability to create in the spiritual world. We must become conscious of the fact that everything we think, feel, or perceive emotionally has a more significant effect in the wider context than what would happen if we shot a bullet. The latter might be bad, but it is only assumed to be more dangerous than the former because man can see it with his gross senses, while he does not observe the other effects.

This is a part of the spiritual life that the human being unfolds himself, as it were. Another part, how someone participates in the interactions with the spiritual world, might become clear to us from certain human cultural activities that, however, are also not merely as they appear to the external senses. To understand this, you have to keep in mind that there are still other beings besides humans.

We can say that the human being presents himself like this. He has a physical body as the lowest member of his being. There are beings who really exist, who in their present stage of development do not possess such gross physical bodies, but for whom the lowest member of their being is an etheric body. Man can draw such beings to his sphere on the basis of his activity, more than would happen if he wasn’t active. Indeed, part of the development of culture consists of attempting to establish contact with these beings, whose lowest member is an etheric body. Such contact is facilitated by man creating, in a particular way, physical corporealities that can be used by those beings to literally latch on to them, to extend themselves through them. In this way, connecting bridges to those beings are built. Imagine that the flower basket on this lectern was a corporeality shaped just like certain forms of the etheric body of those just mentioned higher beings. They would then have a tendency to settle there, play around the flower basket, and connect themselves with it.

We would see how this basket is an incentive for spiritual beings to lower themselves down into it, hug it lovingly, and feel good about being able to descend in this way into the community of human beings. We only need to create suitable forms and then we are able to create bridges between ourselves and these beings. People have always done this at certain times in this or in another way. In the Greek cultural period, human beings actually had to a high degree the ability to establish communication with those spiritual entities they called their gods. These Greek gods are not a fiction of folk fantasy, but these Greek gods are true beings, they exist and have to be regarded as such beings—this Zeus, this Pallas Athene, and so on, whose lowest bodily member is the etheric body.

And how did the Greeks draw the gods into their sphere? The Greeks achieved this by acquiring to a high degree what could be called an architectonic spatial awareness. A person who studies space from the perspective of Spiritual Science knows that space is not the abstract emptiness our modern mathematicians, our physicists, and mechanics dream about, but something very distinct. Space is something that has in itself lines to here and there, lines in all directions. There are strength lines from top to bottom, right to left, front to back, straight and round, and in all directions. There are pressure and pull effects of a spiritual nature in a room. In short, one can feel the space and can permeate it instinctively. I have often used the example that someone who has spatial awareness knows why certain old masters could paint three angels floating in space so wonderfully lifelike; he perceived that these three angels, like three globes, support each other in space by their gravitational pull.

If this is told to an untrained man, he will conclude that they would have to fall down. He cannot comprehend that they are supporting and holding each other up. Such mutually supportive dynamic measurements are those of which the ancient people became aware of, who still had a living feeling of the ancient clairvoyance that was present. For example, it is completely different when looking in this context,at a picture by Boecklin.⁴ In contrast to his usual excellence, against which there is nothing to be said, you will find there, if you have retained the living sense of space, this strange figure of an angel of which you have the feeling that it must fall down at any moment.

In more recent times, the living sense of space has been lost.

The Greeks possessed this sense of space as an architectonical thought associated with the art of building. A Greek temple is a crystallised spatial thought in the truest sense of the word. The column that carries what is horizontally or obliquely lying on it is not something invented but something that, for someone who possesses a spatial feeling, already lies within the room and must not be any different at all. The whole temple is born from the concrete space. This is what someone who can see the lines of the room perceives. He doesn’t need to do anything more than to fit the stone material where he sees the lines, and simply fill with physical material what is already perfectly outlined. In a Greek temple, the spirituality of the room is completely transformed into a visible form. By creating the crystallised spatial thought in this way, forms were made so that spiritual beings whose etheric body is their lowest member could descend into the closed room thus created and find in its forms an opportunity to dwell there.

Therefore, it is not a mere fantasy but the full truth, the real truth, that the Greek temple was the home of the god. Yes, the god dwelled in it. Through the forms of the room, he dwelled in it. It is the peculiarity of the Greek temple that the invisible god descends and takes possession of the forms. You can imagine a Greek temple without people. Far and wide, no people can be seen. Completely abandoned by people could this site be and yet the temple would not be deserted! The god dwells in it! This is what is characteristic about the Greek temple, but it does not apply to the Gothic dome. It is something completely different, if you imagine a Gothic dome without people and that the dome was empty. Then it is not a whole. The Greek temple is complete without people. The Gothic dome is only complete when it holds the community within and when to the pointed arch the folded hands are added, when thoughts and feelings are uniting with the architectonic forms. If you imagine these away, then the Gothic dome is incomplete. This is how it is different from a Greek temple. It is a different architectonic thought, born out of the spiritual space in a magnificent way, but without people it is incomplete. And then again, when it is spiritually populated, when it is filled with the faithful community, then spiritual beings of the kind described are able to descend into it. Thus, each architectonic thought is quite concretely designed for something specific.

Also, the Egyptian pyramid is constructed in such a way that the soul that leaves the body can take the path that is mapped out within the inner passages of the pyramid. The passage of the soul out of the body into the spiritual world is expressed there. The thought expressed in a Romanesque building is one of a grave. A Romanesque church without a crypt, if it cannot be imagined as a vault that curves above corpses, is incomplete. This is part of it. Through this the church is born out of the thought of the resurrected Saviour. It is the worshipful building for the grave of Jesus Christ.

So you can see that the human being builds a bridge from the physical to the spiritual world through the forms he creates. It may be hardly comforting to learn that humans create an army of spiritual beings that impede their development. But to learn that they are also able to pave a way for themselves that leads upwards to higher spiritual beings, by placing such architectonic forms into the world, might be somewhat consolatory.

This is no less the case with other works of the fine arts. It is the same with works of sculpture or painting. Through their forms they offer an opportunity to those beings who are able to adapt their etheric shapes to what is being fashioned and wrap these forms around themselves. They tend to lean more on the outside of the works of sculptors. They surround these sculptural artworks, while architectural works are more filled in. With paintings we reach another kind of beings, beings whose lowest bodily member consists of very fine etheric material. Someone who understands this knows that the astral-etheric beings feel at home where a painter with his colour harmony, gives them, in his line-forms, an opportunity to enter from the spiritual world into ours.

Then there are spiritual beings whose astral body is their lowest bodily member and who consist of even subtler substances.

These beings find in music an opportunity to share the company of people who express themselves in the arts of moving forms. A room filled with the sounds of music is an opportunity for those spiritual beings who have an astral body as their lowest member to descend. Thus, the filling of a room with musical sounds is definitely something by which man can establish interactions between himself and other spiritual beings. Just as the human being attracts through high, remarkable music, so to speak, good beings into his circle, it is also true that repulsive music attracts bad astral beings into man’s sphere of influence. You would not be very edified if I were to describe to you the horrible astral beings that dance around when the orchestra plays at some modern musical performances. These things need to be taken seriously.

We have now seen how our visible world and an invisible world of spiritual beings behind it are interacting.

In addition, the spiritual worlds express themselves in many other species of living entities. For example, where the different realms of nature touch each other, we find there is an inducement for spiritual beings to appear. We can point to elemental beings, which make life even more understandable to us.

An inducement for the manifestation of certain beings is given where metal lies and overlaps next to the ordinary realm of the Earth. Wherever this realm of the Earth is penetrated by metal veins, there can be found very smart elemental beings who use their cleverness to play pranks on humans. Sometimes, however, they are acting in a beneficial way. We call them gnomes. Beings of the gnome species can be found in the interior of the Earth. They huddle in certain places provided the ground is firm. There might be hundreds of them together. But if a vein is exposed, they scatter apart. Then everything lives and teems with those figures who before were crouching together.

As said, this is the case where earth touches metal. At a spring—where the plant kingdom touches the mineral realm, where something mossy entwines the stones fraternally, where things come together in a peculiar way that normally do not belong together—there you find beings that we call undines and nymphs who also are real beings.

And finally, we find elemental beings where the spiritual and the physical interact. When the animal kingdom and the plant realm meet in such a way that initially the beings are distant from each other and later touch, for example when a bee sucks at a flower, an unfolding of taste is happening in the space where the bee and flower are together. A taste effect exists when the bee absorbs the juice of a flower. This effect is perceptible to a spiritual researcher in that he sees something like an aura manifesting around the crown of the flower which is the expression of the savouring process. All of this is an inducement for the beings we call sylphs to manifest. They have a special task in the life of bees, as they do not only appear when a bee sucks on a flower, but also the sylphs show the way when bees are swarming. They are the leaders of the bees.

The following illustrates how the Science of the Spirit will one day become useful. The beekeepers’ wisdom emerged from clairvoyance. What is done in beekeeping,⁵ such as instinctive grips of the hand, has been inherited from ancient times. In the old days, there would still have existed a dim clairvoyance that allowed the beekeepers to use the astuteness of the sylphs for the organisation of the bees’ lives. Modern beekeeping doesn’t know anything about this anymore. That’s why it does many things wrong with its innovations. Modern science lacks the necessary insights. Human beings will be able to shape the nature processes in which they themselves participate much more productively when they are conscious of and knowledgeable about the workings of spiritual beings. One who looks at life in this area will see that, in relation to beekeeping science, what is good stems from the old times, while modern natural scientists partly produce ghastly stuff that is not applicable at all and leads people astray. Most beekeepers are led by sure instincts and luckily do not follow modern science. For example, even what exists as a theory about the fertilisation process, which plays an important role, is wrong and cannot persist in the face of the insights that penetrate reality.

Another inducement for the emergence of such species of elemental beings is created by man, for example, by living together with the animal kingdom like an Arab with his horse or like a shepherd with his herd of sheep, and not like someone in a sports club.

The soul effect between a shepherd and his flock is similar to the interactions between bee and flower, and therefore the feelings between the shepherd and the flock are an inducement for quite special beings, namely salamanders, to emerge. They are beings of a fine substantiality. They are very smart and very wise, even if they do not possess moral accountability. Their wisdom finds expression in what they whisper to one another of the shepherd’s wisdom. It is not stupidity that is attributed to the shepherds. They are not impostors. But it contains much of what is whispered to the shepherds by those who have come into being as a result of the shepherds living together with their flocks.

For those who want to study this, the opportunity will not be available for much longer as such things are dying out. But until recently such studies could still be done quite properly, if one found selfless people⁶ in the countryside who still knew a lot about the principles of health and healing. They knew very important things. Paracelsus⁷ was able to say that he had learnt more by keeping company with such people than he had learnt at all universities. This was not without a reason. Thus, we can see that there is still such an area in our surroundings where spiritual beings exist who enter into our sphere in a peculiar way. One must not ask where these beings come from. The world has in its shoals all sorts of spiritual beings. It is only a matter of an opportunity to bring them somehow to the right place. Although the following comparison is not beautiful, it is correct: In a clean room there are no flies. But if the house is badly managed, if all sorts of leftovers are lying around, flies will soon appear. It is the same in the invisible world that surrounds us—as long as a human being does not create the opportunity, spiritual beings are not there at all. But if we provide an opportunity, they will always be there. Then they step into our sphere. Then they begin to interact with us.

This is something that shows us how the outlook of a person can broaden beyond the physiognomy of the outer world.

The spiritual beings work into our world in the same way as the soul creates its countenance. A period of time will come for human beings when people by necessity will depend on their knowledge of the spiritual world to shape their lives. Nowadays, man can only tackle the world roughly through his senses. But we will see how we will again advance to a time where the human being will act out of the spirit. We will advance to a time where our whole environment is seen as an expression of the spirit, even if this era will at first not be like those ancient eras of the Gothic domes or the Greek temples.

However, in our time of technology and utility it already is possible for more to happen than does happen today. Human beings have lost the ability to feel, perceive, and experience spirits, and thus have also lost the yearning to express spiritual forms externally. But if people again felt the spiritual, then this could be expressed anew even in our utility buildings. Hereby it steps in front of my soul what I have once experienced as a young man. The builder of the Vienna Votive Church, Prof Ferstel,⁸ gave an inaugural address about building styles and said, “Building styles are not invented. Building styles are born out of the whole culture of the times.” This can be proven by studying the building style of the Egyptian pyramids in the context of the whole spiritual life of that former time. In our time, the only thought that is expressed is the materialistic utility thought. Our time cannot have a building style similar to the Gothic or Greek one. This is something that Anthroposophists should pay attention to.

Out of the spiritual life of the Anthroposophical movement,⁹ a cultural ocean must be created out of which forms will crystallise again into a new building style.¹⁰ An expression of humanity is only possible where a common spiritual culture exists. The one really new style of our time is the building style of the warehouse. It is possible that people who later look back at an earlier time will characterise eras by their building styles. The medieval time can be characterised solely on the basis of the Gothic domes. One could leave all other documents out of consideration but would still be able to extrapolate the nature of the mid-Middle Ages just from the Gothic domes. Likewise, this is so with the time between the 19^th and 20^th century. This can now later be sketched from the style of the warehouse. The warehouse corresponds completely to the materialistic utility thought. This thought shows itself in the warehouse exactly in the same way as the spirit that lived in Tauler¹¹ or Eckhart¹² found expression in the Gothic dome.

Even in our time, it is possible to work stylistically in a different way. Our cultural resources are such capable formative forces, that they could have a much greater educational effect on the soul life of man than they do today. For example, today we have the era of the railways, but there is not yet a building style for railway stations. This is because man does not feel what happens when the train arrives and departs. He does not feel that what happens when the train tracks can be expressed externally. The arriving and departing locomotives which must drive into the buildings can find their expression in their hollow forms.

Hopefully, once mankind masters air travel, it will be ready to connect the thought of the departure with the departure place, so that one feels that only an airplane can take off from a place shaped that way. In everything, the spiritual life can find expression in form. Only when we feel that we are surrounded everywhere by expressions of the soul, like it used to be in the Middle Ages, then the right thing is achieved. This can only happen when culture permeates human life that proceeds from the perspective of the Science of the Spirit. Spiritual Science is not impractical. It is precisely something that must permeate the culture of the world and capture it. It does not consist of abstract thoughts, but it must flow into all cultural streams according to the intention of those who have brought it to life. It must reveal itself in everything. We should permeate everything with the thoughts that the Science of the Spirit offers us.

There is one other thought that we should place in front of our soul, namely the thought that can give us a certain awareness of how the impulses of Spiritual Science must work to become what they are destined to be.

It is good, especially when we are concluding a winter season and depart from each other, that we take along such refreshment of feelings and mind, and let some of this stream into our hearts and carry this out into the world and always feel like members of the global stream of Spiritual Science. It may be that today still many outside cannot know anything about the Science of the Spirit. Just look at our small meetings, and then look at everything that is done outside—nothing is known; nothing is felt of the essence of Spiritual Science.

When something like this is placed in front of our souls, then only one other picture may emerge, a picture to strengthen soul and heart. It is the picture that appears when we look at the very earliest Christian times and see what was setting the tone then, what existed as culture in the time of the old imperial Rome.

Let us visualise what life was like in that ancient imperial Rome. Picture how the ruling circles set up floor after floor for themselves, while at the same time a small heap of people were banished to live down below in the vaulted cellars. How barrels with incense had to be placed so that the stench which oozed from the corpses, from the decaying corpses of those pursued and killed from the ranks of this small heap, would not be noticed so much. Let us follow how the wild beasts jumped out of the kennels and tore apart those who were thrown to them from the rank of this small heap. Let us descend from the palaces of the rulers of imperial Rome into the passages where the first Christians lived, to where just this small heap dwelled. Where they erected their first altars over the bones of their dead ones. Where invisible to the leading imperial Rome, they unfolded their culture. They did this invisibly like the today’s followers of a new spiritual realisation who meet invisibly, spiritually invisible to the official leading culture! Let us follow those down below, who were not even allowed to show themselves to the light of day. How thousands of them were buried there. Hidden were those who were implanting underneath the surface of the Earth a new spiritual culture into humanity. While up above, imperial Rome acted as is well known. Then let us look at the situation a few centuries later. What the then ruling imperial Rome has brought forth has been blown away, has been swept away. And what remained is that which had to eke out its existence in the lower vaults, hidden from the eyes of the rulers. That is what has remained.

This is how cultures originate in the darkness of concealment. Thus, they form and then step out of the darkness. We can take this consciousness into our feeling, that the movement of the Science of the Spirit is really called to be something similar to the first Christian movement. May it lead an underground existence at first, and may those in the worlds above ground have quite different thoughts. No matter how much they still think of themselves as the authorities, in a few centuries things will be different.

Then the Anthroposophist will have the feeling that he will carry upwards into the light that which today works underground; that he will carry the Spiritual Science thinking like the first Christians carried their culture out of the catacombs. Such a consciousness gives us the power and the possibility to absorb spiritual knowledge into our soul life. We want to depart in such a mood, to once again come together in such feelings. We do not want to deal with abstractions, but with something that can become the “nerve” of our life. Thus, we want to pour into our souls what we hear from the higher worlds. We want to arm ourselves with strength and remember a little that the Spiritual Science thinking must have grown so close to our hearts that, even if we are separated for a while, we are together in spirit. And this feeling shall lead us together again.

• 1. GA 103, Lecture 8, The Gospel of John, 27 May 1908
• 2. In March and April 1908 with lectures in Lund, Malmoe, Stockholm, Uppsala, Kristiana (Oslo), Göteborg and Copenhagen. No transcripts are available of these lectures.
• 3. Ulfilas, 331-383, Gothic bishop, translated the bible into Gothic. The translation is partly preserved in the Argent Codex in Uppsala, the largest fragment, and in further parts in Wolfenbüttel, Milano, Rome and Torino, in total 117 of the original 333 sheets. The scripture is the oldest known Germanic book, written on purple coloured vellum in gold and silver lettering. It was discovered in the 16th Century in the Abbey Werden/Ruhr. From there it got to Prague and became the property of Emperor Rudolf II. In 1648 it was carried off to Sweden, then to the Netherlands, where it was purchased by the Swedish Chancellor Graf de la Gardie and gifted to the University of Uppsala
• 4. Arnold Böcklin, Swiss painter, 1827-1901. Until 1945 his painting Pietà was in the National Museum of Berlin and has since gone missing.
• 5. Compare; Rudolf Steiner, GA 351, Cosmic Workings in Earth and Man, On Beekeeping
• 6. Refer to GA 28 The Story of my Life, Chapter 3, about becoming acquainted with a simple man from among the people.
• 7. The quotation reads; “At the higher schools the Medicus does not learn and gain knowledge of all that he should be able to do and know, but from time to time he has to go to school to old women, gypsies, black artists, country travellers, old farmers and the like more unremarkable people and learn from them.” in “Philos, occulta II” after R Julius Hartmann “Theophrast von Hohenheim”, Stuttgart and Berlin 1904, page 30.
• 8. Heinrich von Ferstel, 1828-1883, Professor for Building Art in Vienna. The quoted sentence “Building styles are not being invented” is part of the following speech excerpt;
  
  “The greatest error of our century lay in the belief that it was possible, through personal willpower, intense effort of individuals, or even through administrative regulations, to reshape or establish the artistic expression of a people, that can only be the result of all external circumstances and influences. Architecture fell under the spell of an oppressive load of aberrations through which the conviction finally came to the fore that building styles cannot be invented at all...., thus likewise art can be developed only following the natural processes of all becoming and emerging. ... Architects are only the priests of that heavenly daughter, who embeds her ideas in stone with immortal script.” (Quoted from, “Speeches held at the occasion of the solemn inauguration of the elected Rector for the study year 1880/81, of the k.k. Technical University in Vienna, Heinrich Freiherr von Ferstel, o. oe. Professor of Building Art, on 9 October 1880.” Vienna, o.J. Speech of the newly starting Rector Heinrich, Freiherr v. Ferstel, page 39 f.)
• 9. In the postscript it says; “...out of the spiritual life of the Theosophical Society.” In the first publication of the lecture, in the News Bulletin No. 30-35/1936, this was changed to read “Anthroposophical Society”. This wording was likewise used for the first book edition. As in the year 1908 an Anthroposophical Society did not yet exist, the editors of the current (1996) edition have changed the respective wording to read “Anthroposophical movement”.
• 10. On 20 September 1913, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) laid the foundation stone for the building of the Goetheanum in Dornach/Solothurn. The Goetheanum was then erected as an artistic wooden building based on Steiner’s new, spiritually appropriate forms. In the New Year’s night 1922/23 the Goetheanum fell victim to the flames due to arson. By now a new building in concrete, and in forms that correspond to this material, has been erected as a second Goetheanum on the same spot, based on a sculptured model by Rudolf Steiner. Refer “Ways to a new building style”, GA 286.
• 11. Johann Tauler, around 1300-1361, Dominican and German mystic.
• 12. Meister Eckhart, around 1260-1327, Dominican and German mystic.

I have always had respect for the historically given. In it lives the spirit that develops in the becoming of humanity. And so I was in favor of, if at all possible, the new arising being linked to the historically existing. («My Life's Journey,» Chapter 36)

Those who, like me, go their own way, must endure many a misunderstanding.

(Preface to the first edition of 1901 of the writing “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to the Modern Worldview”, CW 7.

On the History of the Esoteric Section

Just as the volume “On the History and Content of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914” documents that and why Rudolf Steiner initially connected the first section of his Esoteric School to the existing School of the Theosophical Society for reasons of historical continuity, the present volume also documents why and in what way historical continuity with an already existing context working with cult symbolism was also maintained for the second and third sections of the School – the working group cultic of knowledge.

After it became known that this was the so-called Egyptian Freemasonry ^1a he was branded as a “Freemason” by certain quarters in a derogatory sense. He himself commented on this accusation twice. Once in a letter written shortly after the formal affiliation to the theosophist and freemason A.W. Sellin ^1b dated 15 August 1906 and then the section of his autobiography 'Mein Lebensgang' (My Life) (chapter 36) written a week before his death. Marie Steiner-von Sivers, co-founder and co-leader of the working group, responded to the attacks by National Socialist publicists that took place after his death with an essay entitled “Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?” All these and other documents are summarized in the first part of the present volume and in chronological order, except for the letter to Sellin, which was placed at the beginning because of its fundamentally enlightening content.

The question form that Marie Steiner-von Sivers chose for the title of her essay already indicates that there is indeed a problem here. This question can be answered both in the affirmative and in the negative. It can be answered affirmatively if one looks only at the external fact of the affiliation and not also at the reasons that led Rudolf Steiner to do so. The answer is negative because, despite the formal affiliation, he never saw himself as a “Freemason” in the usual sense, had no connections whatsoever with regular Freemasonry and was never regarded by the latter as belonging to it, since Egyptian Masonry is considered irregular.

To clarify this apparent contradiction and to make the fact of the connection understandable, the question of why Egyptian Freemasonry was chosen should be addressed first.

Why Egyptian Freemasonry was Chosen

We can take the whole of modern culture: it appears to us as a memory of ancient Egypt. ... We see this even in the initiation principle.²

According to its origin legend, Egyptian masonry traces its roots to the legendary first Egyptian king Menes – Misraim in Hebrew – who is said to have been a son of the biblical Noah, son of Ham. He is said to have taken possession of the country, given it his name (Misraim = ancient name of Egypt) and established the Isis-Osiris mysteries. At the beginning of the Christian era, Ormus, an Egyptian priest-sage who had been converted to Christianity by St. Mark, is said to have combined the Egyptian mysteries with those of the new law. Since then, they have been preserved as ancient Egyptian Masonic wisdom. In this sense, it was declared by those who brought the Misraim rite from Italy to France at the beginning of the 19th century to be the “root and origin of all Masonic rites”. ³ According to Rudolf Steiner, King Misraim, after conquering Egypt, was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries of that time, the secrets of which originated in ancient Atlantis. From that time on, there has been an unbroken tradition. The new Freemasonry is only a continuation of what was founded in Egypt at that time (Berlin, December 16, 1904).

The secrets of the ancient mysteries include the experience of the immortality of the human spirit. ⁴ And occult Freemasonry also wanted to convey this experience. The deeper reason for Rudolf Steiner's words (p. 67) may well lie in this direction, according to which he linked to the Memphis-Misraim order because it “pretended” to move in the direction of occult Freemasonry. In its “manifesto” of 1904, it was stated that he was in possession of practical means handed down from ancient mysteries, by which one would be able, already in this earthly life, to procure “proofs of pure immortality”. ⁵

When Rudolf Steiner, in keeping with the esoteric obligation of continuity, took up this tradition, he did not for a moment think that he was working in its spirit. From the very beginning, he insisted that modern times must seek a new wisdom that is appropriate for them, one that flows from the realization of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, and that real knowledge of immortality today can only be acquired through a deeper understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (Berlin, May 6, 1909).

He once characterized the necessity of a new wisdom in one of his presentations of ancient Egyptian wisdom as follows:

”...Our time must give birth not to an ancient wisdom, but to a new wisdom that can not only point to the past, but must work prophetically, apocalyptically, into the future. We see an ancient wisdom preserved in the mysteries of past cultural epochs; an apocalyptic wisdom, for which we must lay the seed, must be our wisdom. We need a principle of initiation again, so that the original connection with the spiritual world can be restored. That is the task of the anthroposophical world movement.

Another revealing spiritual-scientific research result is that from the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean, mysterious channels lead to the fifth, the present post-Atlantean cultural period.

"We can take the whole of modern culture: it appears to us as a memory of ancient Egypt.... We see this even in the initiation principle. For when modern life was to receive an initiation principle in Rosicrucianism, what was it?.... That harmonious concord of Egyptian memory in wisdom with the Christian impulse of power.” (Stuttgart, August 16, 1908)

Elsewhere, Anthroposophy is spoken of directly as the new Isis wisdom of the new age. A new Isis legend is even developed and hinted at in connection with the wooden sculpture “The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman”, which was placed in a central position in the first Goetheanum building and was intended to make the basic impulse of anthroposophy visible to visitors in an artistic form. Another, “invisible” statue: the new Isis, the Isis of a new age (Dornach, January 6, 1918). Reference is also made to a deep relationship between the Isis mystery and the Grail mystery, which includes the Christianized re-emergence of the Egyptian mystery being, as well as to the figure of Parzival as a “model for our spiritual movement” (Dornach, January 6, 1918; Berlin, February 6, 1913; Berlin, January 6, 1914).

A further reason for linking to Egyptian masonry in particular is illuminated by the research result that today's humanity is in the opposite situation to that of ancient Egypt. Just as the spiritually oriented ancient Egyptians, by mummifying the human form, prepared world history for intellectuality, for thinking bound to the physical brain, so today's humanity must again acquire spirituality for intellectuality, and this must be done by way of an analogous phenomenon to the Egyptian mummy, namely the old cult forms. These are therefore analogous to the Egyptian mummies because, in contrast to ancient times, when it was possible to perceive how spiritual entities were attracted through ritual acts, this is no longer the case today, neither in lodges nor in churches. There is just as little spiritual life in their actions today as there was life in the Egyptian mummy of the person who had been mummified. Nevertheless, something is preserved in these mummified rites that can and will be resurrected once we have found a way to bring the power of the mystery of Golgotha into all human activity (Dornach, September 29, 1922).

These few examples of spiritual scientific research results should make it sufficiently clear why Rudolf Steiner linked his work to Egyptian Freemasonry.

Regarding the External Prehistory

I merely want my step to be viewed from the standpoint of occult loyalty.⁶

For the Theosophical context, the year 1902 was marked by three events. Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers took over the leadership of the German section of the Theosophical Society, which was founded in 1875 by H.P.Blavatsky and others. Annie Besant, Blavatsky's successor in the leadership of the Esoteric School of Theosophy - but not yet president of the Theosophical Society - was admitted to the so-called mixed Freemasonry. ⁷ John Yarker, honorary member of the Theosophical Society and Grand Commander of Egyptian Freemasonry, of the Order of the Ancient Freemasons of the Memphis and Misraim Rite for Great Britain and Ireland, granted Theodor Reuß, Heinrich Klein and Franz Hartmann, who belonged to both Freemasonry and the Theosophical Society in England, a foundation charter for this school of thought in Germany. ⁸

When Rudolf Steiner's autobiography states that some time after the founding of the German Section in 1902, he and Marie von Sivers were offered the leadership of a society working with the cultic symbolism of the ancient wisdom, this suggestion did not come, as might be assumed, from the main representative of the German MemphisMisraim Society, Theodor Reuss, but, as Marie Steiner reports in her essay “Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?” , from a person who had gained the impression that Rudolf Steiner understood spiritual matters better than any mason. In private, she added that it was a Czech. That this person must have been connected with the Memphis-Misraim Freemasonry is clear from the remark in the “Life Course”: “If the offer had not been made on the part of the indicated society, I would have established a symbolic-cultic activity without historical connection.”

The offer must have been made around 1903/04. For since May 1904 a series of lectures had been preparing the way for a symbolic-cultic approach. On September 15, 1904, Rudolf Steiner met the freemason A. W. Sellin in Hamburg, where he was to give a lecture. He must have asked him about the German Memphis-Misraim Order, as can be seen from his report of December 12, 1904. But even before this first report from Sellin arrived, Rudolf Steiner had sought out Reuß on his own initiative. In his lecture in Berlin on December 9, 1904, in which he spoke about high-degree Freemasonry and the Memphis-Misraim Order, he had already quoted from the latter's organ Oriflamme, while Sellin was still trying to get it. Rudolf Steiner's first conversation with Reuß must therefore have taken place between September 15 and December 9, 1904. The further conversations cannot be dated. On November 24, 1905, Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers joined the Memphis-Misraim Order. However, the negotiations regarding the modalities for the charter to independently lead a working group dragged on until the beginning of 1906. The contract was concluded on January 3, 1906.

The fact that Rudolf Steiner did not mention the name Reuß in his autobiography, only Yarker, is often interpreted by opponents as if he wanted to conceal his relationship with Reuß, because Reuß had soon fallen into disrepute in Masonic circles as an occultist. This cannot have been the real reason, however, because by the time the autobiography was written, it had long been public knowledge that the document had been issued by Reuss. Rather, the motive of historical continuity may have been decisive here as well. For Yarker, already referred to in the lecture of December 16, 1904, as a “significant character” and “distinguished mason” - was at that time the representative of Egyptian masonry who was decisive for Europe and also a central figure in relation to the Theosophical Society. He was an honorary member of the Society, apparently because he had played a decisive role in its founding in 1875, as stated in the work by the Italian Vincenzo Soro, “La Chiesa del Paracleto” (Todi 1922, p. 334), which is in Rudolf Steiner's library: “The most select heads of international Freemasonry had cooperated in the founding of the Theosophical Society, among them John [H.] Reussner, a member of the high degrees of the Freemasons of the Orient, who had been initiated by the Great Orient [the French Grand Orient] in 1858.” (Todi 1922, p. 334): “The most exquisite heads of international freemasonry had cooperated in the founding of the Theosophical Society, among them John Yarker, the closest friend of Garibaldi and Mazzini.” ⁹

The Theosophical Society, originally with a distinctly Western character, was to become the pioneer for the popularization of supersensible truths necessary in modern times. Through the first great work of its founder, H.P. Blavatsky, “Isis Unveiled” (1877), a wealth of knowledge of ancient Western occultism had become public. For this, she received the highest degree of adoption of Egyptian Freemasonry from Yarker.¹⁰ They also discussed setting up a ritual for the Theosophical Society.¹¹ However, this plan was not realized at the time. When Blavatsky's successor, Annie Besant, later became active in the area of symbolic cults, she did so within a different masonic current.¹²

Rudolf Steiner therefore had good reason to mention only Yarker's name in his autobiography, because only he – not Reuß, who merely represented the order in Germany in a position that could not be avoided given Rudolf Steiner's intentions – represented everything that was crucial in terms of the necessary historical continuity.

Regarding the inner prehistory

One does not receive a reward, but a difficult task.¹³

A particularly telling testimony to this, and to how crucial Rudolf Steiner's own inner situation was for him, is the letter of November 30, 1905, addressed to Marie von Sivers a few days after entering the Memphis-Misraim Freemasonry. It shows that he did not

on his own personal initiative, but in agreement with the “occult powers,” that is, with the spiritual world, and that since “for the time being it seems worthless to all occult powers,” he cannot yet say whether the matter can be done at all for his planned working group to be linked to this order. This question seems to have been resolved only in the last few weeks of the year. On January 2, 1906, the first lecture on the royal art held jointly for men and women in a new form rounded off the inner constitution of the circle. If it says in this lecture: “[...] and even today, Freemasonry can only be described as a caricature of the great royal art, we must not despair in our efforts to awaken the forces slumbering in it; a work that falls to us in a field that runs parallel to the theosophical work,” This statement is further substantiated by a word from a lecture on Freemasonry given shortly afterwards in Bremen on April 9, 1906. According to this, there is an inner relationship between Theosophy and Freemasonry in that Theosophy represents more the ideational, the studying, and the Masonic cult more the practical side of esoteric work. But while the Masonic world no longer understands the ceremonies and the effectiveness of the ritual forms, Theosophy can speak again of the inner truth of these ceremonies, of the spirit that underlies the ceremonies and symbols.¹⁴

A further testimony to the fact that he did not act arbitrarily is his oral statement that the task of saving the Misraim Service for the future had come to him as a result of his occult research at the time on the rainbow; one does not receive a reward, but a difficult task.

What the difficulty of this task might have been, he apparently did not explain directly. However, it may well be seen in connection with that weighty statement in the preparatory lectures: “I have reserved for myself the task of achieving an agreement between those from Abel's and those from Cain's family.” (Berlin, October 23, 1905, lecture for men). This intention - to overcome the polarization that occurred at the origin of humanity into two opposing main currents through the Christ impulse - was not only the basis of the Erkenntniskultic work, but of his entire work.

The statement that the task had come to him as a result of his rainbow research is in some ways justified by the fact that it was mentioned in lectures given during the period in which the Erkenntnis cultic working group was being prepared. It says:

"The rainbow has a special significance in occult wisdom. You know the rainbow that appears after the flood. Now we find this symbol repeated in Norse myths.” (A rainbow leads from Valhalla to Earth.)

It signifies the transition from the Atlantean to the post-Atlantean era. In the Atlantean era, the air was much denser and the water much thinner than it is today; a rainbow was not possible in those times. It was in truth a realm of mist, a Niflheim. In the north, the human race emerges from masses of mist. The water masses that flooded the continent of Atlantis were to form from this realm of mist. So there was no rainbow in the Atlantean age. Occult research has explored what this explanation means.” (Berlin, May 5, 1905)

And in an answer to a question given in a lecture half a year later, the question as to whether anything more could be said about Noah and the Flood is answered as follows:

"The question regarding Noah is connected with my very latest occult research. No one will find anything in Lucifer ¹⁵ find something that I did not know at the time I wrote the articles. But now I know a little more. Now the climatic conditions have become clear and vivid to me. I have learned to understand something that I would have mentioned at the time if I had understood it at the time. At the time, I took the part of Noah allegorically. It was a picture for the deep spiritual meaning. But now I know that this rainbow in the Bible corresponds to a real fact.

On the old Atlantis, the climatic conditions were different. The distribution of air and water was different ..., so that one finds that on the old Atlantis the formation of a rainbow was not yet possible. Such conditions only became possible when Atlantis was flooded and the new continents rose. Now it is hinted [in the Bible] how the rainbow emerges from the flood.” (Berlin, October 22, 1905, question and answer session)

If you ask yourself what the task of saving the Misraim service has to do with rainbow research, the answer becomes clear when the characterization of the Misraim service as “effecting the union of the earthly with the heavenly, the visible with the invisible” (Berlin, December 16, 1911) ¹⁶ is translated into the image of a bridge. Then the connection between rainbow research and the Misraim service becomes immediately apparent. On the one hand, the rainbow has always been a symbol of this bridge from the invisible to the visible, and on the other hand, from the very beginning, Rudolf Steiner's basic intention was to build such bridges for all fields.

How the building of bridges in the field of art was to be tackled in connection with the new Misraim service can be seen from the letter to Marie von Sivers of November 25, 1905, in which it says about the day before the connection to the old Misraim current was completed: “It would now be the task to catch the masonic life from the externalized forms and give it birth again (...), to shape religious spirit in a sensually beautiful form.“ ¹⁷

The first opportunity for this arose soon after, when the German Section was responsible for organizing the annual congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society at Whitsun 1907. The Section shaped the congress according to Rudolf Steiner's models, sketches and indications in such a way that a harmonious scientific-artistic-religious experience could be conveyed. The rainbow also appeared in the seal pictures of the Apocalypse of John, painted according to Rudolf Steiner's sketches, as a new element in contrast to their traditional depictions. And with the performance of the “Sacred Drama of Eleusis”, which, in terms of cultural history, signifies the birth of the dramatic arts in Europe, there should be, even if only in the weakest form, a “link to the ancient mystery tradition”.¹⁸

This latter reference is given a special nuance by the tradition that the Eleusinian mysteries were to be renewed through the Misraim rite.¹⁹ The founder of these most famous mysteries of antiquity, the goddess Demeter, personified for the Greeks the same as Isis for the Egyptians.

A few years after the Munich Whitsun Congress of 1907, Rudolf Steiner's first mystery drama was created and work began on building a structure for it. After a wealth of new art forms had been created for it in a short time, these too, like the spiritual science itself, were characterized as a “synthesis between the understanding of heaven and earth”.²⁰ So again - figuratively speaking as a bridge. Later, he himself would use the word 'bridge-building'. In describing how art is an outstanding representative of the bridging between the invisible and the visible because it makes visible and outwardly embodies that which otherwise remains inwardly in the soul, he said, looking back on his twenty-year effort, together with Marie Steiner-von Sivers, “to let the occult current flow into art,” literally: “Everything that has emerged in the anthroposophical movement has arisen from the impulse to build a bridge between the spiritual and the physical.” ²¹

If the intention to build a bridge from the invisible to the visible was behind both anthroposophy as a science of the spirit and the artistic language of forms developed from it, then it was also behind the efforts to build social life on new insights. This can be seen precisely from the facts about the establishment of the new Misraim service.

Regarding the establishment of the new Misraim service

So what I have established has nothing to do with what used to be called the “Memphis-Misraim Grade” in Germany.²²

The constitution took place completely independently of the negotiations with Reuss about the legal authorization to lead an independent and completely independent working group. If the negotiations had not led to a result, Rudolf Steiner would have set up his working group regardless of historical continuity. He had already begun the preparations some time before the negotiations began, namely immediately after he had settled the external matters regarding the first section of his Esoteric School with Annie Besant in London in mid-May 1904: through a series of lectures that extended from May 23, 1904 to January 2, 1906 (“The Legend of the Temple and the Golden Legend,” CW 93), and an esoteric course of 31 lectures (“Fundamentals of Esotericism,” CW 93a) held from September to November 1905.

There are no records of when and how Rudolf Steiner informed the members of the German Section of his intention to establish a knowledge-cultic approach. Only from the letter of a Leipzig member ²³ dated February 17, 1905, that he had told him that he would soon try to introduce the occult teachings of Theosophy into Freemasonry, by which, of course, he meant Freemasonry as an entity and not as an organization. In his Berlin lecture of December 16, 1904, he had already said: “If you hear something about the German Memphis-Misraim direction, you must not believe that this already has a significance for the future today. It is only the frame into which a good picture can be placed one day.” It is also recorded that at the end of his Berlin branch lecture on October 16, 1905, he announced that he wanted to speak at the general assembly of the German section on October 22 about issues related to Freemasonry and that, therefore, as many external members as possible should be invited. At the General Assembly, he then announced that the next day, “according to ancient custom”, which was only overcome in the theosophical world view, he would speak separately for men and women about occult questions in connection with Freemasonry. Thereupon he spoke, in preparation for the next day's topic, about the fundamental relationship of the Theosophical Society to occultism. The next morning (October 23rd) there followed a lecture, first for men and then for women, on Freemasonry and human development.

Two days later, on October 26, 1905, the main social law of the future was developed for the first time in a public lecture, not in an external but all the more in an internal connection with the intentions of the work of the School of Knowledge: that work must, on the one hand, be freed from its character as a commodity by being separated from its remuneration, and, on the other hand, can be sanctified as a sacrifice of the individual to the community. In the future, we will work for the sake of our fellow human beings because they need the product of our labor.²⁴

The connection between the public presentation of this social main law of the future and the beginning of the knowledge-cultic work arises, on the one hand, from the importance of pictorial thinking for social life and, on the other hand, from the underlying motif of the knowledge-cultic work, to impulsing to selfless social action from moral self-responsibility, just as the instructions for moral life were once given from the mysteries. Thus, in the sense of Goethe's saying “Nothing is inside, nothing is outside, because what is inside is outside”, the constitution of the new Misraim service and the simultaneous publication of the social main law of the future can be seen as two poles of one and the same impulse. The intention to build a bridge can be clearly perceived here.

The inner constitution was rounded off with the lecture on the royal art in a new form, held jointly for men and women on 2 January 1906. The following day, the written agreement with Reuß was concluded, according to which Rudolf Steiner was entitled to set up an independent symbolic-cultic working group. Marie von Sivers was authorized to admit women, but from the very beginning, women and men had always had equal rights in Rudolf Steiner's working group. The following revealing note can be found in Marie von Sivers's notes from the lecture on Freemasonry in Bremen on April 9, 1906: “Because the Freemason wanted to keep the woman in the family, he excluded her from the lodge. On higher planes, something happened that makes it a necessity for women to be drawn into all cultural work. The occult cooperation of man and woman is the future significance of Freemasonry. The excesses of male culture must be held back by the occult powers of woman.“ ²⁵

From the beginning of 1906, wherever there were esoteric students of Rudolf Steiner, work was also being done on the Knowledge cult. The first lodges to be set up were in Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Munich and Stuttgart. After the hundredth member was admitted at the end of May 1907, the leadership of the Misraim Rite in Germany passed to Rudolf Steiner, as agreed. From that point on, he was the sole spiritual and historical legal representative of the Misraim service until he declared it dissolved after the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. By then, around 600 members had been admitted.

“Falling asleep” of the working group due to the outbreak of the First World War and the war-related statement against Freemasonry

A cause that should serve all of humanity without distinction of race or interest turns from a good one into a bad one when it becomes the basis of power for individual groups of people. ²⁶

In his autobiography, My Life, Rudolf Steiner describes how the Erkenniskult organization fell asleep with the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 because, although there was nothing of a secret society, it would have been taken for one. Marie Steiner reports in her essay 'Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?' that he declared the institution to be dissolved at that time and, as a sign of this, tore up the document referring to it.²⁷ The latter obviously because it had become clear to him through the outbreak of war that through certain Western secret societies, Freemasonry, as an “originally good and necessary thing” that should serve all of humanity without distinction, had been placed in the service of “national egoism and the selfish interests of individual groups of people”.

It was this abuse for particular political ends that he held responsible for the disastrous developments that were ushered in by the 1914 World War, and he condemned it in the strongest terms. This is explained in detail in lectures from the war years 1914 to 1918.²⁸ At that time it was extremely important to him to contribute as much as possible to forming a judgment about the occult background that led to the outbreak of the war and, above all, to openly clarifying the question of war guilt. That is why he also wrote a foreword to the essay “Entente Freemasonry and the World War” by Karl Heise when he was asked to do so by the latter. However good or bad this essay may be, it was in any case the first attempt to substantiate the tendencies pointed out by Rudolf Steiner with external documents.

The harsh condemnation at the time of the special political tendencies of certain Western secret societies did not, of course, apply to Freemasonry as such. This is confirmed, for example, by the fact that shortly after the end of the war, he advised a member of his “dormant” symbolic-cultic institution to seek admission to Freemasonry. This is clear from his letter to Rudolf Steiner dated February 25, 1919, which states, among other things: “On February 13, I now, also following your advice, let myself be admitted to the Freemasons. And in fact I joined the association of the Great National Mother Lodge in the Prussian States, called “To the Three Globes” St. John's Lodge ‘From Rock to Sea,’ the same lodge to which our friends A. W. Sellin and Kurt Walther, as well as Hackländer in Wandsbeck, belong. I hope that in the course of time I will be able to awaken and maintain an interest in anthroposophically oriented occultism in this circle. It is with this in mind that I have taken this step. I hope that it will soon be possible to resume our occult community meetings too!“ ²⁹

Tolerance towards the masonic cause was expressed again a few years later, when in 1923, when the English national society was being formed, the question arose as to whether the man designated as Secretary General could really be considered for the post because he was a mason. Rudolf Steiner replied as follows:

"[...] I have always said, when the question has arisen as to whether someone should enter the anthroposophical movement from some other movement (in this case, freemasonry was meant): It is really not a matter of what someone is in another movement, but rather that when he enters this anthroposophical movement, he is a good anthroposophist. So it is really not a matter of whether someone also belongs, say, to a shoemakers' guild or a locksmiths' guild. I am not making any comparisons, I am just stating the principle: the fact that someone belongs to a shoemakers' or locksmiths' guild, etc., does not in any way affect what is anthroposophical in them. If he is a good anthroposophist, that is what matters for the anthroposophical movement. Whether he is a good, bad or mediocre freemason is none of the Anthroposophical Society's business. (...) It would be an unwise judgment to make the value of a member as an anthroposophist dependent on whether he is a freemason or not.

I have said [before] that a number of the oldest and most valuable members are Freemasons. I cannot imagine how an obstacle could arise from some form of Freemasonry for belonging to the Anthroposophical Society. I cannot imagine it. I think the Anthroposophical movement wants to be something in itself. It would not be able to bear fruit in the world if it did not let out of itself — let me use the expression — out of its own seed in a positive way. What matters is what it has a positive effect on. How it turns out when compared to one thing or another is not what matters. When I buy a suit, it is important that it suits my taste and arises out of my intentions. What does that have to do with someone coming along and saying: That suit doesn't look like the one the other person is wearing. It is really not at all about putting on the other person's suit, but one's own. You don't put on freemasonry when you become an anthroposophist. So it is actually quite impossible to make this judgment.

But of course there is something else behind such a thing. You will forgive me for saying so, but in my opinion anthroposophy is not always appreciated highly enough by its members. There is a tendency in present-day humanity to always value more highly that which is older, which has more fuss about it, which acts more mysteriously, and so on, and to disparage that which appears openly and honestly simple, judging it by the standard of the fuss and the like, which presents itself in an indefinite way. It is a kind of disparagement of the anthroposophical movement when it is judged in such a way that one says it can be harmed by the fact that this or that member comes from this or that other movement. It would have to be terribly weak if it could be harmed by such things!“ ³⁰

Why Rudolf Steiner did not want his circle to be understood as a ‘secret society’

“A secret society was not created by this.” ³¹

For Steiner, it was not primarily a matter of the principle of secrecy, but rather of the fundamental difference between his kind of symbolic-cultic work and that of the so-called “secret societies”. He saw it as a primary requirement that what is expressed by symbols, signs, gestures and words, etc., can also be understood through corresponding explanations derived from a real spiritual view. However, “explaining” should not be understood to mean that one says this symbol means this and that symbol means that, “because then you can tell anyone anything”, but rather that the teaching must be designed in such a way “first reveal the secrets of the course of evolution of the earth and of humanity and then allow the symbolism to arise from them”. This means that one must first have grasped what can be grasped by the intellect: the content of spiritual science.

In contrast to this, working with mere contemplation of symbolism, as is usually the case in occult societies today, is no longer a legitimate continuation of what was legitimate in earlier times. This is because in those times, people had a stronger sensitivity of their etheric body, which enabled them to have a corresponding inner experience. For the person of the modern age of consciousness, for whom the mind, bound to the physical brain, has become decisive instead of the sensitive etheric body, symbols, signs, gestures and words must remain something external; he cannot connect them with his consciousness soul. Nevertheless, they had an effect on the etheric body, i.e., on the unconscious. But in our time it is not allowed to act on the unconscious without first going through the conscious. For the consequence of this is that one

"if you want, you can make people docile tools for all kinds of plans, quite naturally. Because if you work on the etheric body without the person knowing it, you switch off the same powers that he would otherwise have in his mind if you do not then give the mind something that must be spiritual science today. You switch them off, and then you turn such brotherhoods into a tool for those who want to pursue their plans, their goals. You can then somehow use such brotherhoods to pursue any political goals, or you can establish the dogma that 'Alcyone is the external physical carrier of Christ Jesus'. ³² And so those who are prepared will make themselves instruments to carry this out into the world. Then one need only be dishonest and unrighteous in the appropriate way, and one can achieve anything in this way by first creating instruments.

And now – isn't it true that all things follow from real knowledge? – anyone who knows how the fifth post-Atlantic period differs from the fourth post-Atlantic period – and this is said again and again in our group – knows why it has to be so: first there must be an acquaintance with spiritual science and only then can an introduction to symbolism be given. Wherever the intention is truly to establish a spiritual movement, this process is naturally adhered to. For anyone who has only become acquainted with what is contained, for example, in my Theosophy or in the Secret Science and has tried to understand it, will never be harmed by any transmission of symbols.

Behind the modern-day aversion to so-called “secret societies” there may thus instinctively lie the justified feeling that it is not right to exploit ceremonial effects for special purposes. Rudolf Steiner always condemned this in the strongest terms, but he always emphasized that this by no means applied to all, but only to certain occult associations.

On the basis of the above and the fact that in his symbolic-cultic activity everything was geared to the general human and the fully conscious penetration of cult symbolism - hence the term “cult of knowledge” - it can be understood why he did not want his circle to be understood as a “secret society”, despite the obligation of secrecy.

• 1a. A documented history of this direction, which is not recognized by regular Freemasonry, does not exist. Based on various literary traditions, the following picture emerges.
  Egyptian Freemasonry is primarily understood to mean the Misraim Rite, while the Memphis Rite is considered to be its imitation, created in the 19th century. Both rites were combined, but are said to have always been practiced separately, so that the term “Memphis-Misraim” refers not to one rite but to two different rites.
  The Misraim Rite became widespread in France in the first half of the 19th century, was banned on various occasions, and then more or less disappeared in the second half of the century. It had somehow found its way to America, and it was from there that Yarker got his charter for these two rites for Great Britain and Ireland. He combined the Memphis and Misraim Rites and the Scottish 33° Cerneau Rite in a single organization. In 1902, Yarker gave Reuß, Hartmann and Klein a charter to introduce this “United Scottish, Memphis and Misraim Masonry” in Germany. The man who had suggested and arranged this was the Austrian industrial magnate and inventor Carl Kellner (1850-1905), according to Möller/Howe (op. cit. $84 in the note about Reuß) one of “the most remarkable occultists of that time in the German-speaking area”. He had the idea of a Masonic academy and believed that he could best realize it through the system of Egyptian Freemasonry. The name “Oriental Templar Order” (O.T.O.) is attributed to him. However, these designations actually mean nothing. They were constantly being changed. Compare how differently they appear even on Reuss's documents. For Rudolf Steiner, all this was of no importance. He merely allowed himself to be nominally authorized by this current, out of an occult obligation to maintain historical continuity, in order to establish and lead his own symbolic-cultic work independently. It is clear to any expert that the ritual texts he used are his original creations. Anyone who wants documentary proof of this is referred to the published German translation of the “Rituals of the Misraim Rite (Rite Egyptien dit de Misraim)” by Bernh. Beyer, printed in “Das Freimaurer-Museum. Archive for Masonic Rituals and Historical Research. In zwangloser Folge herausgegeben vom Geschichtlichen Engbund des Bayreuther Freimaurer-Museums». Schriftleiter: Dr. Bernh. Beyer. Band 7, Bernhard Sporn Verlag, Zeulenroda/Leipzig 1932.
• 1b. Sellin, Albrecht Wilhelm (Berlin-Ludwigslust 1841-1933 Munich)
  Colonizer in Brazil, later a merchant in Hamburg. Played a role as a co-founder and pioneer of the Berlin Society for Experimental Psychology. In this context, he experimented with Max Dessoir, Albert Moll and others in 1888-92 to answer the question of the difference between animal magnetism and hypnotism. At that time, he also became acquainted with Blavatsky's Theosophy, which, however, did not satisfy him. From 1902, editor of the Masonic journal Bundesblatt, the organ of the Grand National Mother Lodge of the Three Globes, and later Grand Archivist of this grand lodge. When he heard Rudolf Steiner lecture in Hamburg in 1904, he immediately became a member of the German Section and an esoteric disciple of Rudolf Steiner. Since he was retired soon after, he devoted himself entirely to the study of anthroposophical spiritual science and worked as already 70-year-old still in the performances of mystery plays by Rudolf Steiner in Munich in the years 1910-1913 in supporting roles. W. Sellin, 'Erinnerungen aus dem Berufs- und Seelenleben eines alten Mannes', Konstanz 1920. See page 45ff.
• 2. Stuttgart, August 16, 1908. In this sense, Rudolf Steiner's four mystery dramas, in the two scenes of initiation in an Egyptian temple (the seventh and eighth scenes of “The Awakening of the Soul”), the initial motifs for the destiny-linked bond between the personalities who are portrayed as modern spiritual seekers in the mystery dramas are to be found in the Egyptian period. See also lecture Dornach, December 27, 1918.
• 3. Lennhoff/Posner, Internationales Freimaurer-Lexikon, article “Misraim-Rituss”; cf. also Rudolf Steiner's remarks Berlin, December 16, 1911 on page 94 of this volume. In his major work “Comparative Handbook of the Symbolism of Freemasonry with Special Consideration of the Mythologies and Mysteries of Antiquity”, Schaffhausen 1861, the Freemason Joseph Schauberg also proves the cultural-historical accuracy of the Egyptian origin of Masonic symbolism in volume II.
• 4. In this context, it is interesting that according to Rudolf Steiner, the “Egyptian Book of the Dead” is the only document of the ancient mystery wisdom that has been almost completely preserved. This is how it was handed down orally by the Egyptologist Gregoire Kolpaktchy, who translated the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the suggestion of Rudolf Steiner, because, as Steiner said, this could only be done by someone who had not only the hieroglyphic but also the occult key. See “The Egyptian Book of the Dead”, translated and commented on by Kolpaktchy, Otto Wilhelm Barth Verlag, 1970.
• 5. See the lecture in Berlin on December 9, 1904, in which the manifesto of the Grand Orient of the “United Scottish, Memphis-Misraim Freemasonry” was discussed in connection with the question of immortality.
• 6. )

• 7. Yarker, John (1833-1913)
  Originally high-ranking within regular Freemasonry. Due to his experience that, because of the way Freemasonry was governed, it had become “the workshop, almost the paradise of the bon vivants, the amiable hypocrites”, the “paradise of the sellers of useless masonic baubles... the paradise of the masonic “emperors” or charlatans who beat power and money out of the aristocratic pretensions,” he left regular Freemasonry and founded various high-grade systems on a mystical basis. Since 1872 he had been the representative of the Egyptian rites for Great Britain and Ireland. According to H.P. Blavatsky (H.P.Blavatsky, “Isis Unveiled”, 2nd volume, 8th chapter), he was one of the highest masonic authorities of his time, of great erudition and genuine knowledge. He played a decisive role in the founding of the Theosophical Society (see page 51 of this volume) and was an honorary member. After the publication of H.P. Blavatsky's first major work “Isis Unveiled” (1877), he conferred on her the highest degree of adoption of Egyptian Freemasonry on November 24, 1877. In 1902, he issued a charter for the introduction of the same in Germany (see the note “Egyptian Freemasonry”).
• 8. Reuß, Theodor (Augsburg 1855-1923 Munich)
  It is almost impossible to get a clear picture of this enigmatic personality, although a biography has recently been published in which a great deal of material has been compiled. See Helmut Möller/Ellic Howe, Merlin Peregrinus: From the Occult Underground of the West (Würzburg, 1986). Reuss's life was essentially shaped by politics, writing and freemasonry. Occasional writings of a political and Masonic nature are insignificant, the testimonies about him are contradictory and uncertain. What is certain, however, is that he was always short of money and that his Masonic activities also served as a means of making a living. In his later years, Masonic interests took precedence over everything else. He was involved in numerous groups, some of which, however, existed only on paper. In 1902, Yarker, together with Franz Hartmann and Heinrich Klein, received a charter to introduce the “United Scottish, Memphis and Misraim Freemasonry” in Germany (see the reference to “Egyptian Freemasonry”). Rudolf Steiner, who for reasons of historical continuity wanted to link his own working group on symbolism and cults to the ancient Egyptian mystery tradition, negotiated with Reuss from the end of 1904 until the turn of the year 1905/06 regarding the conditions under which to be able to establish his circle nominally independently and secured in the process by contract (see document on page 82f.) that the leadership of the Misraim Rite, as soon as he has admitted the 100th member to his circle, will pass over to him alone. This was the main reason why he had entered into contact with the German representative office of the Egyptian Freemasonry. In his 'Autobiography', Rudolf Steiner responded as follows to the accusation of having associated with a man like Reuss:
  It is of course easy in retrospect to consider how much 'wiser' it would have been not to tie in with institutions that could later be used by detractors. But I would like to remark, in all modesty, that at the age in question here, I was still one of those people who assumed that others with whom they had dealings would be straightforward in their ways and not devious. This belief in human nature was not altered by spiritual vision. The latter should not be misused to probe the inner intentions of fellow human beings if this research is not desired by the people concerned. In other cases, the investigation of the inner soul of another remains something forbidden to the spiritual seer, just as the unauthorized opening of a letter remains something forbidden. And so one stands vis-a-vis people with whom one has to do, as does anyone else who has no spiritual insight. But there is the difference between taking the other person at face value until you have experienced the opposite, or having a hostile attitude towards the whole world. Social interaction between people is impossible in the latter case, because it can only be built on trust, not on mistrust.
• 9. According to Robert Ambeain, “Cérémonies et rituels de la maçonnerie symbolique”, Paris 1978, the Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi (1802-1882) is said to have become Grand Master of Memphis-Misraim Freemasonry in Italy in 1881. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872). For more on both of them, see Rudolf Steiner's lecture Stuttgart, 9 April 1924.
• 10. On November 24, 1877. Perhaps it was a mere coincidence, but Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers actually made their personal connection to the Misraim current on November 24 as well (1905).
• 11. Josephine Ransom, A short History of the Theosophical Society, Adyar 1938, pp. 99f.
• 12. Cf. on this under “Individual References”.
• 13. Personal statement by Rudolf Steiner, as reported by Marie Steiner-von Sivers and Klara Walther.
• 14. According to notes by Marie Steiner-von Sivers, cf. p. 137.
• 15. The magazine “Luzifer”, later “Lucifer-Gnosis” and the essays “From the Akasha Chronicle” (GA no. 11), see the article “Our Atlantean Ancestors”, is meant.
• 16. Cf. on page 94.
• 17. See the letter on page 80.
• 18. See “Bilder okkulter Siegel und Säulen. The Munich Congress at Whitsun 1907 and its Effects», GA 284.
• 19. Cf. Karl Heise in “Entente-Freimaurerei und Weltkrieg”, Basel 1919, p. 115.
• 20. Lecture Dornach, September 20, 1916.
• 21. Lecture Torquay, August 20, 1924.
• 22. Letter to Sellin.
• 23. Rudolf Jahn, from 1905 to 1908 chairman of the Leipzig branch.
• 24. Lecture in Berlin, October 26, 1905 on “The Social Question and Theosophy,” reprinted in “Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Works” No. 88. In the essay “Theosophy and the Social Question” (today “Spiritual Science and the Social Question”), which began in the October 1905 issue of the journal “Lucifer-Gnosis”, the main social law is not discussed until the third part, which was not published until a year later, in September 1906.
• 25. In an undated letter from Paula Moudrä, a writer from Bohemia who had spoken to Rudolf Steiner in Prague in November 1907 about her admission and had been asked by him to send him a written request, it says: “You pointed to an important event in the astral world in November 1879, after which the woman is now admitted to the initiation. I think it is most important that my approach to you and my request for acceptance happened in November 1907."
• 26. From Rudolf Steiner's preface to Karl Heise's “Entente Freemasonry and the World War,” Basel 1919, reprinted in “Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition” No. 24/25 Easter 1969.
• 27. Not to be confused with the 'Treaty and Brotherly Agreement' on $. 82 in the present volume.
• 28. See the seven-volume series “Cosmic and Human History”, in particular “Contemporary Historical Reflections. The Karma of Untruthfulness”. Part One and Two, 'Central Europe between East and West' and 'The Spiritual Background to the First World War', CW 170ff.
• 29. Johannes Geyer, at that time pastor in Hamburg, from the autumn of 1919 teacher at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. From 1912 a member of Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School. According to the biography in “Der Lehrerkreis um Rudolf Steiner in der ersten Waldorfschule”, Stuttgart 1977, he is said to have given numerous lectures in a Masonic context on the spiritual origins of Masonic symbolism from the point of view of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, and thereby gained high recognition.
• 30. London, September 2, 1923.
• 31. “My Life”, see page 95 of this volume.
• 32. Alcyone = name of the order for Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), for whom the order “Star of the East” was founded by Annie Besant and C.W.Leadbeater in 1911. The then very young Krishnamurti was proclaimed as the bearer of the expected rebirth of Christ as the coming World Teacher. The order quickly spread throughout the entire Theosophical world. Only Rudolf Steiner vigorously rejected this as occult nonsense. That is why the German section led by him was officially excluded from the Theosophical Society in 1913. Krishnamurti then dissolved the order himself in 1929 and publicly distanced himself from the role intended for him. He also severed his connection with the Theosophical Society, since in his opinion any organization can only hinder spiritual development. 32

Before beginning this lecture, Dr. Steiner spoke words of greeting to the audience which consisted of Members of the Anthroposophical Society only—and referred briefly to the importance and consequences of the Christmas Foundation Meeting held at Dornach in December, 1923.

In these three lectures I want to speak of how Anthroposophy can live as knowledge of the spiritual in the world and in man—knowledge that is able to kindle inner forces and impulses in the moral and religious life of soul. Because this will always be possible, Anthroposophy can bring to mankind something altogether different from anything produced by the civilisation of the last few centuries. This civilisation has actually suffered from the diffusion of brilliant forms of knowledge: natural science, economics, philosophy. But all this knowledge is a concern of the head alone, whereas moral religious impulses must spring from the heart. True, these impulses have existed as ideals; but whether these ideals and the feelings associated with them are also powerful enough to create worlds of the future when the present physical world has passed away, is a question unanswerable by modern science. What has sprung from modern science is the widespread doubt that is characteristic of the present age and the age just past.

To begin with I want to consider three aspects of man's life. We ourselves, our destiny, are inextricably connected with this life from birth to death. Birth, or rather conception, is the boundary in one direction; death is the boundary in the other. Birth and death are not life; they are merely the beginning and the end of physical life. And the question is this: Can birth and death in themselves be approached with the same mental attitude with which we contemplate our own life, or the life of others, between birth and death, or must our approach to the actual boundaries of birth and death be from a different vantage point? Therefore the aspect of death, which so significantly sets a boundary to human life, shall be the first object of our study to-day.

At the end of a man's earthly life he is divested by death of the physical body we see before us. The Earth takes possession of it, either through its own elements as in burial, or through fire as in cremation. What can the Earth do with the part of man we perceive with physical senses? The Earth can do no other than subject it to destruction. Think of the forces in nature around us. They build up nothing when the human corpse is given over to them; they simply destroy it. The nature forces around us are not there for the purpose of upbuilding, for the human body disintegrates when it passes into their grasp. Hence there must be something different which builds up the human body, something different from earthly forces, for they bring about its disintegration.

If, however, human death is studied with forces of cognition activated in the soul through the appropriate exercises, everything presents a different aspect. With ordinary faculties of cognition we see the corpse and nothing else. But when, by means of these exercises, we develop Imagination the first stage of higher knowledge described in my books then death is completely transformed. In death man tears himself from the grasp of the Earth; and if we cultivate Imagination, we see in direct vision, in living pictures, that in death man rises from his corpse; he does not die. At the stage of Imaginative Knowledge, physical death is transformed into spiritual birth. Before death, man stands there as earthly man. He can say: “I am here, at this place; the world is outside me.”—But the moment death occurs the man himself is not where his corpse lies. He is beginning his existence in the wide spaces of the Universe; he is becoming one with the world at which he has hitherto only gazed. The world outside his body now becomes his field of experience and therewith what hitherto was inner world becomes outer world, what hitherto was outer world becomes inner world. We pass out of our personal existence into world-existence. The Earth—so it appears to Imaginative cognition—makes it possible for us to undergo death. The Earth is revealed to Imaginative cognition as the bearer of death in the Universe. Nowhere except on Earth is death to be found in any sphere frequented by man, whether in physical or spiritual life. For the moment man passes through death and becomes one with the Universe, the second aspect presents itself—the aspect in which the widths of space appear to be everywhere filled with cosmic thoughts. For Imaginative vision and for the man himself who has passed through death, the whole Cosmos now teems with cosmic thoughts, living and weaving in the expanse of space. The space aspect becomes the great revealer. Having passed through death man enters a world of cosmic thoughts; everything works and weaves in cosmic thoughts. This is the second aspect.

When we confront a man in earthly life, he is there before us in the first place as a personality. He must speak if we are to know his thoughts. So we say: “The thoughts are within him; they are conveyed to us through his speech.” But nowhere within the perimeter of earthly life do we discover thoughts which stand alone. They are present only in men, and they come out of men. When we pass from the earthly sphere of death to the space sphere of thoughts, to begin with we encounter no beings in the widths of space—neither gods nor men—but everywhere we encounter cosmic thoughts. Having undergone death and passed into the expanse of universal space it is as though in the physical world we were to meet a man and perceive only his thoughts without seeing the man himself. We should see a cloud of thoughts. After death we do not at first encounter beings; we encounter thoughts, the universal World Intelligence.

In this sphere of cosmic Intelligence man lives for a few days after his death. And in the weaving cosmic thoughts there appears as it were a single cloud in which he sees the record of his last earthly life. This record is inscribed into the cosmic Intelligence. For a few days he beholds his whole life in one great, simultaneous tableau. During these few days what is inscribed into the cosmic Intelligence becomes steadily fainter and fainter. The record expands into cosmic space and vanishes. Whereas at the end of earthly life the aspect of death appears, a few days after the end of this experience there comes the vanishing into cosmic space. Thus, after the first aspect, which we may call the aspect of death, we have the second aspect, which may be called the aspect of the vanishing of earthly life. After death there is actually for every human being a moment of terrible fear that he may lose himself, together with all his earthly life, in cosmic space.

If we wish for more understanding of man's experiences after death, Imaginative Knowledge will be found to be inadequate; we must pass on to the second stage of higher knowledge, to Inspiration. Imaginative Knowledge has pictures before it—pictures that are in the main like dream pictures, except that we can never feel convinced of any reality behind the latter, whereas the pictures of Imagination, through their own inherent quality, always express reality. Through Imagination we live in a picture world that is nevertheless reality. This picture world must be transcended if we are to see what a man experiences after death when the few days during which he reviewed his life, have passed.

Inspiration, which must be acquired after or during the stage of Imagination, presents no pictures; instead of pictures there is spiritual hearing. Knowledge through Inspiration absorbs cosmic Intelligence, cosmic thoughts, in such a way that they seem to be spiritually heard. From all sides the cosmic word resounds, indicating distinctly that there is reality behind it. First comes the proclamation; then, when a man can give himself up to this Inspiration, he begins, in Intuition, to perceive behind the cosmic thoughts, the Beings of the Universe themselves. Pictures of the spiritual are perceived in Imagination; in Inspiration the spiritual speaks; Intuition perceives the Beings themselves. I said that the world is filled with cosmic thoughts. These in themselves do not at once point to beings; but we eventually become aware of words behind the thoughts and then of beholding through Intuition, the Beings of the Universe.

The first aspect of man's existence is the aspect of death it is the earthly aspect; the second aspect leads us out into cosmic space, into which, as earthly men, we otherwise gaze without any understanding; this is the aspect of the vanishing of man's life. The third aspect presents the boundary of visible space: this is the aspect of the stars. But the stars do not appear as they do to physical sight. For physical sight the stars are points of radiance at the boundaries of the space in the direction towards which we are looking. If we have acquired the faculty of Intuitive Knowledge, the stars are the revealers of cosmic Beings, spiritual Beings. And with Intuition we behold in the spiritual Universe, instead of the physical stars, colonies of spiritual Beings at the places where we conceive the physical stars to be situated. The third aspect is the aspect of the stars. After we have learnt to know death, after we have recognised cosmic Intelligence through the widths of space, this third aspect leads us into the spheres of cosmic spiritual Beings and thereby into the sphere of the stars. And just as the Earth has received man between birth and death, so, when he has crossed the abyss to cosmic Intelligence a few days after his death, he is received into the world of stars. On Earth he was a man of Earth among Earth beings; after death he becomes a being of Heaven among heavenly Beings.

The first sphere into which man enters is the Moon-sphere; later on he passes into the other cosmic spheres. At the moment of death he still belongs to the Earth-sphere. But at that moment, everything within the range of earthly knowledge loses its significance. On the Earth there are different substances, different metals, and so on. At the moment of death all this differentiation ceases. All external solid substances are earthy; at the moment of death man is living in earth, water, air and warmth. In the sphere of cosmic Intelligence he sees his own life; he is between the region of Earth and the region of Heaven. A few days after death he enters the region of Heaven: first, the Moon-sphere.

In this Moon-sphere we meet cosmic Beings for the first time. But these cosmic Beings are still rather like human beings for at one time they were together with us on the Earth. In my books you can read how the physical Moon was once united with the Earth and then separated from it to form an independent cosmic body. It was, however, not the physical Moon alone that separated from the Earth. At one time there were among men on Earth great, primeval Teachers; it was they who brought the primordial wisdom to mankind. These great Teachers were not present on Earth in physical human bodies, but only in etheric bodies. When a man received instruction from them, he absorbed it inwardly. After a time, when the Moon separated from the Earth, these ancient Teachers went with it and formed a colony of Moon Beings. These primeval Teachers of mankind, long since separated from the Earth, are the first cosmic Beings to be encountered a few days after death.

The life spent with the Moon Beings during this period after death is related in a remarkable way to earthly existence. It might be imagined that man's life after death is more fleeting, less concrete, than earthly life. In a certain respect, however, this is not the case. If we are able to follow a man's experiences after death with super-sensible vision we find that for a long time they have a much stronger effect upon him than anything in the earthly life which, in comparison, is like a dream. This period after death lasts for about a third of the time of life on Earth. What is now experienced differs with different individuals. When a man looks back over his earthly life he succumbs to illusion. He sees only the days and pays no heed to what he has experienced spiritually in sleep. Unless he is particularly addicted to sleep a man will, as a general rule, spend about a third part of his life in that state. After death he goes through it all in conscious connection with the Moon Beings. We live through these experiences because the great primeval Teachers of mankind pour the essence of their being into us, live in and with us; we live through the unconscious experiences of the nights on Earth as reality far greater than that of the earthly life.

Let me illustrate this by an example. Perhaps some of you know my Mystery Plays and will remember among the characters a certain Strader. Strader is a figure based upon a personality who is now dead but was alive when the first three Plays were written. It was not a matter of portraying his earthly life but the character was founded on the life of a man who was exceptionally interesting to me. Coming from comparatively simple circumstances, he first became a priest, then abandoned the Church and became a secular scholar with a certain rationalistic trend. The whole of this man's inner struggle interested me. I tried to understand it spiritually and wrote the Mystery Plays while watching his earthly life. After his death the interest I had taken in him enabled me to follow him during the period of existence he spent in the Moon-sphere. To-day (1924) he is still in that sphere. From the moment this individuality broke through to me with all the intense reality of the life after death, whatever interest I once had in his earthly life was completely extinguished. I was now living with this individuality after his death, and the effect upon me was that I could do no other than allow the character in the fourth Mystery Play to die, because he was no longer before me as an earthly man.—This is quoted merely in corroboration of the statement that experience of the life after death has far greater intensity, greater inner reality, than the earthly life; the latter is like a dream in comparison.

We must remember that after death man passes into the great Universe, into the Cosmos. He himself now becomes the Cosmos. He feels the Cosmos as his body, but he also feels that what was outside him during his earthly life is now within him. Take a simple example. Suppose you were once carried away by emotion during your earthly life and had struck someone a blow which caused him not only physical pain but also moral suffering. Under the influence of the Moon Beings after death you experience this incident differently. When you struck an angry blow, perhaps with a certain inner satisfaction, you did not feel the suffering of the man you struck. Now, in the Moon-sphere, you experience the physical pain and the suffering he had to endure. In the Moon-sphere you experience what you did or thought during your earthly life, not as you felt it, but as it affected the other person. After death, for a period corresponding to a third part of his lifetime, a man lives through, in backward order, everything that he thought and whatever wrong he did during his earthly life. It is revealed to him by the Moon Beings as intense reality. When I was inwardly accompanying Strader, for instance, in his life after death—he died in 1912 and is called Strader in the Mystery Plays although that was not his real name—he was experiencing first what he had experienced last in his earthly life, then the earlier happenings, and so on, in backward order. When he now comes before my soul he is living through in the Moon-sphere what he had experienced in the year 1875. Up to now he has been experiencing backwards the time between 1912 and 1875 and will continue in this way until the date of his birth.

This life after death in the sphere of the Moon Beings—who were once Earth Beings—is lived through for a third of the time of a man's life. The first seed of what is fulfilled as karma in the following earthly lives, arises here. In this life, which corresponds to a third part of his earthly lifetime, a man becomes inwardly aware, through his own feeling and perception, of how his deeds have affected others. And then a strong desire arises within him as spirit man that what he is now experiencing in the Moon-sphere as the result of his dealings with other men on Earth may again be laid upon him, in order that compensation may be made. The resolve to fulfil his destiny in accordance with his earthly deeds and earthly thoughts comes as a wish at the end of the Moon period. And if this wish—which arises from experience of the whole of the earthly life back to birth—is devoid of fear, the man is ready to be received into the next sphere, the Mercury-sphere, into which he then passes. In the Mercury-sphere he is instructed by the Beings whose realm he has entered—Beings who have never been on Earth, who were always super-sensible Beings; in their realm he learns how to shape his further destiny. Thus, to learn what a man goes through between death and a new birth, corresponding in his spiritual existence to what he experienced among earthly beings between birth and death, we must follow him through the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere and the Sun-sphere. For the totality of man's life consists in the earthly existence between birth and death and the heavenly existence between death and a new birth. This constitutes his life in its totality, and of this we will speak in the next lectures.

by Marie Steiner

Rudolf Steiner's work ¹ points out that in ancient times there were mysteries, initiations through which human souls were elevated to participate in spiritual life. The impulses that originated there led to the great ancient cultures that are known to us today. There, secret knowledge was cultivated, the science of the spirit, which was in full bloom in those times and had the polytheistic religions as its outer expression. The advisors of the kings and the great leaders destined to form new cultures emerged from them. Within the becoming and passing away and clashing of peoples, their wisdom treasures formed the unifying bond. The results of each culture were guarded and preserved for the progress of humanity and passed on from generation to generation. They formed a second current alongside that which flowed directly from spiritual sources, but which faded from the consciousness of the majority of people to the same extent that knowledge of physical things gained in scope and precision. The soul lost the memory of its origin. There came a time when not only a single nation, but all of humanity would have fallen into decadence if the Christ event had not taken place.

Presenting the significance of the Christ event for the revival of humanity in its entirety is the task to which Rudolf Steiner dedicated his life. To do this, he had to draw on all the knowledge that human beings have acquired to date, and shine a light into all areas of this knowledge, the revealed and also the secret ones. The secret included the forgotten old mysteries: here, in a figurative sense, the debris under which they lay had to be cleared away, just as archaeologists do at the ancient buried temple sites. Above all, however, it was important to salvage the living substance that still permeated the mystery knowledge, which was based on ancient tradition but was increasingly ossifying or decaying in its human representatives. Ancient wisdom, without revival through the impact of Christianity, without an understanding of this greatest of mysteries, could only lead to aberrations over time.

Rudolf Steiner had a comprehensive insight into these interrelationships through the spiritual science he philosophically founded and organically developed. That is why he considered it his task in our time to make his knowledge accessible to them when he was approached by such circles, whether they are traditionally or newly inspired, who cultivate ancient secret science. He never sought out such circles, but where they asked for enlightenment and instruction, he did not refuse to give it to them. This was his service to humanity.

He initially rejected the efforts of representatives of the Theosophical Society, who would have liked to see him in their ranks, because the Theosophical Society worked in a one-sided orientalizing direction and in many cases in a scientifically dilettantish or psychically phenomenalist direction. In particular, however, it lacked the foundations for the knowledge of true Christian esotericism. It was only when the German Theosophists wanted to found an independent section under his leadership and thus also on the basis of Western Christian esotericism that he felt obliged not to withdraw this request.

When, after a number of years, Annie Besant, who later became president of the Theosophical Society, tried to prevent this work for a living Christianity, the Anthroposophical Society was founded and separated from the Theosophical Society. Rudolf Steiner describes the details of this process in his autobiography, “My Life Course”.

The other proposal came from the side that traditionally cultivates medieval Christian esotericism based on the ancient wisdom of the mysteries. It emphasizes the fact that its historical continuity goes back to the times when occult knowledge was cultivated in the ancient Egyptian temples. In the course of the centuries, these circles, with their many ramifications, took up whatever seemed spiritually appropriate and beneficial to them from the most diverse mystical currents, especially through the impulses of the Crusades, the masons' guilds, etc. They preserved themselves under various names as freemason federations, orders of illuminati, etc. But in the course of time the majority of them increasingly distanced themselves from their original knowledge and goals, then fell prey to rationalism and often to atheism, and gradually became associations that were partly political, partly commercial, and partly charitable. The disappointment grew ever greater for those who allowed themselves to be admitted to these associations in order to gain knowledge from the spirit there. Again and again, such disappointed people approached Rudolf Steiner to tell him that only now, through his publicly advocated spiritual science, had they found access to what was behind the symbols that no one understood. Many complained that they were serving falsehood by reciting traditional formulas that professed belief in a divine spirit, but were completely skeptical about their content. And one could encounter a great longing to experience something of the seriousness that must once have been associated with the old cultic customs. Freemasonry revealed itself as a declining tradition of the past, whose outer organism could be seized by opposing forces, and indeed had already been to a large extent.

But that which had remained true in these millennia-old endeavors, their spiritual content, which could not be killed, could and had to continue to serve the renewal of humanity in a transformed form. This was the task that Rudolf Steiner saw himself confronted with when a proposal was made to him from within those circles to found an independent organization by means of a historically and legally documented link. This proposal was made by a spiritually striving person who had come to believe that Rudolf Steiner knew more about spiritual matters than all of them put together. The proposal was then formalized by a party that was certainly more concerned with practical benefits and had a highly indifferent attitude towards spiritual matters. It was not Rudolf Steiner's task to snoop into this man's past, as it was not his intention to maintain relations with him. Not only the titled representatives of secret societies, but also those of ecclesiastical and other institutions often prove to be unworthy of their office. The fact that, as can now be seen from their writings, the various Masonic orders do not recognize each other is something that they probably have in common with other human institutions, and which requires a great deal of time and effort and also legal sophistry to investigate. Rudolf Steiner, however, had to take into account what is of decisive importance for every representative of spiritual truths: historical ties to an ancient and venerable spiritual current, even if its forms change over time, in order to protect it from decadence as far as possible. Its truth content could, if he agreed, be awakened to new life and, corresponding to the cognitive powers of the time, made subservient to the progress of humanity. In the language of the consciousness soul, the old symbols could revive and take hold of all of humanity in the possibilities of revelation through art.

Rudolf Steiner set one condition. He would carry out the historical-legal connection within the degree offered to him, through which he was allowed to continue the work independently, but that should exhaust the relationship. Not a single further claim could be made, neither in terms of collaboration nor in terms of human, social or organizational relationships. Nothing but an external, in no way binding formality should be carried out, not a single joint activity should take place! The newly founded and completely independent group, which was made up of those Theosophists who longed to approach this kind of Western esotericism, was introduced to the old symbols, first in their pictorial meaning, then more and more in their inner essence, until they had been digested in consciousness. In this way they were rescued from the mystical twilight and made accessible to artistic and scientific life. When war broke out in August 1914, Steiner dissolved the working group that had come together under the name Mystica Aeterna, and tore up the document that had been drawn up for it. ² They never met again in this way.

This is a precise explanation of the apparent contradiction that some people claim that Rudolf Steiner was a high-ranking Freemason, while others claim that he never belonged to the Freemasons at all. Rudolf Steiner never had any connection with the Freemasons. He is completely foreign to these communities and is even strongly opposed by them, because from the beginning of his theosophical-anthroposophical work, he had revealed in his teachings what they regard as their secrets, which give them weight and prestige. He reveals esoteric knowledge because humanity needs it, because it is a need of the time. But at the same time, he unlocks the understanding for it. In order to legitimately fill the old symbols with new life in a formally constituted working group that ties in with the historical current, he carried out an external contract and stood completely apart from any contact with Freemason brothers. Thus the term 'high-grade brother', which the enemies like to throw around, has been de facto misleading ever since it was no longer possible for them to make him a Jew. Since Rudolf Steiner had no connection whatsoever with any Masonic order, but this term is intended to create the impression that he belonged to these organizations, the aim is to create a misleading impression. The aim of this deception is to prevent people from engaging with the spiritual science founded and developed by Rudolf Steiner. If they were to do so, the contrast to Freemasonry would soon become apparent. Rudolf Steiner, realizing that the spiritual nature of today's human beings can no longer inwardly affirm the mystery and that the mystery must be revealed, set forth his spiritual science in full public view.

In it, he has made possible a true understanding of Christianity and provided the way and the method by which the human being of today can fulfill his life's duties through an understanding of spiritual facts. How this spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, which is not cultivated in secret circles and from a power-political point of view, but in full public view, is received in the consciousness of the present, will be of decisive importance for the destiny of the next era.

Marie Steiner,
née v. Sivers

Three Additional Versions of the essay “Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?”

I

It is very difficult to assert that Dr. Steiner had nothing to do with the Masonic movement. Dr. Steiner himself says that on page... of his “Life Course”.

The Masonic movement itself is a movement that has splintered into many organizations and fallen into decadence. It originally emerged from those currents that were still connected to the ancient wisdom of the mysteries. The original stream has been diverted into many tributaries and canals. They have all undergone their various fates and have partly strayed quite far from their original goal, the pursuit of knowledge.

Dr. Steiner's endeavor has now been to uncover the pure sources of the esoteric teachings again, to let them flood before our soul's gaze in their historical course, to free them from the debris that has gradually settled in them, to show how, despite debris and periodic cloudiness, the pure original forces have again and again sought new paths to give their invigorating, progress-inducing effect to humanity. Rudolf Steiner places the Mystery of Golgotha at the center of humanity's spiritual-historical development, with the power that we know from his writings and lectures. All ancient mystery wisdom tended towards this climax; all subsequent mystery wisdom, revived and reborn through this power current, wrestled for the means, prepared the paths by which not only the yearning of the heart of humanity could be satisfied in a religious way, but also the understanding of the Christ impulse within humanity could gradually be developed.

Rudolf Steiner devoted his life to this task to the highest degree. He worked creatively and impulsively in all three areas, which used to be a unity in the time of the cultures inaugurated by the mysteries: the religious, the artistic, and the scientific. He gave advice and support to all people who sought it in these areas, without distinction of the social context from which they might have come. Many earnestly striving Freemasons were delighted to recognize that in the Anthroposophy represented by Rudolf Steiner a light was given that opened up an understanding for much of what was offered to them in their lodges in the form of images and signs as a traditionally adopted ritual. They began to understand better what might be meant by this. There were also those who suffered greatly from the temptations that some organizations had fallen into, to which their destiny had led them. They looked around for help. Out of such an impulse, a request was made to Rudolf Steiner to attempt to found an organization that could work out the pure basic principles of esoteric striving, free of all the accumulated confusion of the centuries. The way in which this came about resulted from the existing conditions, which were so very unsatisfactory. When organizations go to rack and ruin, the fault lies with the inadequacy of the people working in them, especially those placed at their head. This was the case here in a rather alarming way, and Rudolf Steiner wanted nothing to do with associations that were under such leadership.

That was the condition he set when he agreed to make a historically documented connection, by which he undertook to make financial contributions in return for absolute freedom and independence in the organization of a work that aimed to gradually lift the obscuring veils from the symbolic customs, which were now to be grasped by the forces of clear consciousness. Thus he did what he was constantly doing through his Anthroposophy: in the gradual removal of mystical veils and in the solid building up of the powers of the mind, which, through reason, increase to wisdom, he carried out the duty of the present-day human being to gain knowledge.

In doing so, he did something that he considered his duty to humanity. For him, it was a new burden, an offering. But every sacrifice also has its positive effect in the spiritual sense, in that new sources of knowledge open up to those who willingly take on the burden. And perhaps Rudolf Steiner would not have been able to utter many a word of warning, deeply rooted in truth, about the dangers of today's secret organizations if he had not included this, albeit from afar, in his general study of contemporary social phenomena. It led him to emphasize even more sharply and clearly than before that secret societies could no longer exist today, that the present state of development of humanity could no longer tolerate them.

Like every science, spiritual science also requires a gradual build-up, a step-by-step development of the powers of reason in order to lead to spiritual knowledge. In this sense, one cannot expect the beginner and the novice to have an understanding of the higher levels of knowledge. They must gradually open up to his consciousness, like the higher areas of mathematics, which are also still a secret to the beginner.

Rudolf Steiner's work is a public offering to humanity that leads step by step to higher knowledge. It lies spread out before us in his writings, lectures and artistic creations and has nothing to do with secret organizations, not even with masonic ones. The explanations he gave of time-honored signs and symbols have long since been superseded by the spiritual research results that he left behind in countless works for the human mind and for the human ego, which is called upon to be alert and wants to be alert.

II

Anyone who would take the trouble to study Rudolf Steiner's works without prejudice will soon see that here knowledge of spiritual things is being revealed that truly needs seek no other sources than those that open up to the inner self. He had assimilated school and university knowledge in a comprehensive way. Knowledge about the manifold conditions of life and its social interrelationships was brought by the alert eye for the things of life and the many relationships in which life placed him. They approached him, he did not seek them, did not need to seek them, because they were sought after him, because he had more to give than others, and because he gave with love, never with arrogance or reserve. He did not reject anything that approached him; even if it was inferior, “he alone weighed the good in souls and let evil find its atonement in the course of world justice”.¹ But he drew a sharp line at the effectiveness of evil and did not allow it to undermine the circles he was responsible for.

This attitude of mind explains, on the one hand, his tremendous forbearance and mildness, his willingness to help and his unconditional compassion, and, on the other hand, his ironclad rejection of all persistently harmful elements.

This is my attempt to explain why he did not immediately turn out anyone who was morally displeasing to him and did not allow any leeway for his influence. On the contrary, he tried to lead astray the erring and keep the right path by positive action. That was why he took upon himself the life of the Theosophical Society and why he did not reject the offer, made to him on the basis of his higher knowledge, to found an independent branch of high-grade Freemasonry. The Grand Master of that order made a thoroughly fatal impression; with him one could have nothing to do other than pay the usual fees in those circles. It was a short ceremony, after which the certificate was issued, which Rudolf Steiner tore up at the beginning of the war.

Perhaps this only paper connection gave him the opportunity to better understand many things inwardly, which he then repeatedly expressed in his lectures as a warning and to steer the formation of judgment in the right direction. Outwardly, he never had any connection with any order; there was never a joint meeting, never a joint discussion. Therefore, it is an objective untruth when, in a book such as... by Huber ², and in inflammatory writings of a lower caliber, the connection between Rudolf Steiner and Freemasonry is pointed out in a tendentious way. All the grand titles are listed. Well, he did not strive for them; it is the custom of masons to bestow the most supreme, most sovereign, most illustrious, etc. titles upon themselves; this is part of the tradition, the convention, and is in itself comical today, especially since for most only this empty shell remains. But that is precisely why a serious person and a person who knows is concerned about saving the core, which is being crushed and petrified by this shell. For Rudolf Steiner, only the core matter was important. That is why he was also completely indifferent to the extent to which the various orders recognized each other or not; whether the one offering him the certificate was a so-called secondary organization, a lodge in the shadows, or not. He wanted nothing to do with any organization. This was the strict condition to which Mr. Reuss, adorned with many titles, submitted. Rudolf Steiner knew before anyone else that the time of medieval and modern masonry had passed. He came before the world with the unveiling of occult truths because man needs them and because working in secret has led to abuses. But there is a power in the time-honored symbols, and they need not be abandoned because of outward decadent phenomena. They can be saved and preserved for humanity through art, for example. This is what Rudolf Steiner did. In his mystery poems, in his building, in some of the works of his students, this metamorphosis has become life and thus been made fruitful for humanity. This is the eternal value of the truths that must be saved from the decay of the outer form. Continuity in change. This is the justification for Rudolf Steiner's approach, which he faced as a duty.

The tendentious nature of the lies associated with this smear campaign is obvious. The Masons may have a legitimate reason from their point of view to fight against Dr. Steiner and have done so with all their might. The turning of the tables, perhaps also due to their hand, is a clever maneuver that may serve a variety of dark purposes. We do not need to shy away from the full light in this matter.

III

If anyone has recognized and stated at the right time that the time for Freemasonry is over, it is Rudolf Steiner. Not only does his life's work, Anthroposophy, bear witness to this, not only does he express it artistically in his drama (the representatives of the occult society hand over their symbols and step down),³ But in the first days after the outbreak of the world war, he tore up the preserved document as a sign and confirmation of his opinion that the days were over when Freemasonry could still be recognized. In order to be right in his conscience about such a rejection, he had a duty not to avoid contact with it. And how brief was this contact – soon dismissed when it revealed itself in all its hollowness. Such statements are not intended to affect the estimable members in the ranks, who – – – [the text breaks off here].

• 1. Published in “Anthroposophie. Zeitschrift für freies Geistesleben», 16th year, book 3, April-June 1934, Stuttgart, edited by C.S.Picht.
• 2. Anyone who delves into Masonic literature and is concerned with the truth should notice that Rudolf Steiner is never consulted at all (not to mention direct rejections), just as his writings are only represented by three random examples in Wolfstieg's large “Bibliography of Masonic Literature” 1911-1926, which, with 54,320 numbers, covers the entire holdings of the Masonic lodge libraries, only three random copies are represented (out of over 200 of his book-shaped publications!) - Likewise, an “expert” should be aware of how much such designations as Misraim, Memphis, O.T. O (Oriental Order of Templars) [see “Some Notes” under “Egyptian Masonry”] and the like, which the document mentioned and which were for Rudolf Steiner shells robbed of their essence, have long since become mere names.
• 1. Words of the Grand Master in Rudolf Steiner's second mystery drama “The Testing of the Soul” (1911).
• 2. Engelbert Huber, “Freimaurerei. Weltmacht hinter den Kulissen” (“Freemasonry. World Power Behind the Scenes”), Stuttgart 1934.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's third mystery drama “The Guardian of the Threshold”, 10th scene (1912).

My dear friends! With this lesson, I wish to restore the School of Spiritual Science as an esoteric institution to the real task from which it has been threatening to become estranged during recent years. Today in this introductory and foundational lesson, there will be no further elaborations on the sentence just spoken, but by stating this sentence I merely want to indicate the significance of this hour, and I want to point specifically to the serious nature of our whole movement, which day by day is increasingly being jeopardized and undermined. I want to point specifically to the serious nature that must be present in our whole movement, and especially to the serious nature which must come to expression in our school. And it is this observation, by no means superfluous, because overall it has not been attended to, which will allow this serious nature to really be borne in mind from now on.

A kind of preparatory introduction will be given here today, my dear friends. And here I would like to emphasize above all, that within this school the life of the spirit should be taken up in all of its true significance, so that really, in full depth, you should consider that an institution has been constituted with the founding of this school, coming forth out of the spirit, out of the spirit of our time, which can become dedicated to what the life of the spirit can reveal. In every sphere, this life of the spirit can be deepened. But there must be a center from which this deepening occurs, and for those who wish to belong to this school as members, it should be seen now to be at the Goetheanum, in Dornach.

Therefore, I would like today to begin the school, beginning initially with this, that you should know, that every word that is spoken inside this school will be so spoken that fundamentally, the whole responsibility for each word is given over to the revealed spirit of our time, the spirit through whom for hundreds and thousands of years mankind has received revelations, although in each period of time in a particular manner. And this spirit will give to a person, just that which the person can find only through the spirit.

We must be clear from the beginning, that what one meets in the sensory world should not be considered with hostility when reviewing spiritual revelations in a school of spiritual science. We must also be clear in acknowledging, and acknowledging profoundly, that the world of the senses, as a great and essential manifestation of life itself, gives essential yet practical hints to each of us, and we must not at all be disposed to feel that what one comes upon in the world of the senses is in any way too low to be noticed.

But here it becomes important to accept the offerings of the spirit as such. Many preconceptions, much stubbornness, and much self-willing that still resides today in the members of the school must fall away. And a way must be sought for each, a way to allow one's own stubbornness and self-willing to subside, in order to reflect properly on what the school may be. For many today do not think seriously enough about this school, and this they must gradually do. And it will certainly not otherwise be possible to gradually engage in what will be revealed in the school, except really to take it seriously in all details.

This is necessary at first by the very nature of the subject matter, and on the other hand by the difficulty of the path to be traversed, in regard to the hindrances and undercurrents of resistance we will have to deal with, which from all sides are put in place every day. Even the students well along the path must continue to pay attention to such things. This all, my dear friends, must be duly considered.

What appears first before the eyes of our soul in this school will of course be part of the main substance of what can be given and received out of the spirit. The members of the school must absolutely, in the imparted presentations, in walking along the difficult paths, be expected to overcome hindrances and undermining tendencies.

I have previously dealt with what has just been discussed in the member's newsletter, What is Happening in the Anthroposophical Society, in which I specifically undertook to distinguish between the General Anthroposophical Society and this school. And it is necessary that this difference should be explicitly felt, and in a sense lived by the members of the school, so that the school can thereby really come to have, as its members, only those personalities who will really make themselves into representatives of anthroposophical endeavors in life in all particulars. I am presenting these words to you today as a paradigm, in order to point out the seriousness of the matter.

What in a manner of speaking should stand as a plaque cast in bronze over our school, I now, without further ado, would like to bring before your hearts and minds. As it develops, we will really be identified, within this school, with what is fathomed out of spiritual life and approaches the ears and perceptions of our souls. And so we begin with the words:

Where on grounds of earth,¹ color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff² of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures,³ strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man,⁴ derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light,

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness.
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,⁵
Unto the light, that from darknesses⁶ strengthens,

I will read it once more:

Where on grounds of earth , color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures , strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man , derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light,

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness.
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

These lines should say to us how beautiful and magnificent and immense and grandiose the world is, an unending radiance of miracles bestowed upon all of us, that wells up alive in bloom and blade and in what our eyes envelop in color upon color in the visible world around us all; it should remind us of all of these heavenly offerings, revealed in lifeless un-living earthly matter under our feet in thousands and ever more thousands of crystalline and non-crystalline forms, and in water and air, in clouds and stars; it should bring us close to all the spiritual offerings of the heavens, frolicking even as animals in the wild do, enjoying and warming themselves in their own existence. And it should call out to us in memory, how we have taken into our own bodies all that forms up there, all that color upon color grows and wanders about. But it should also bring us to the realization, how in all that is beautiful and grandiose and immense and heavenly for the senses, it is asked in vain, what we ourselves as human beings are.

The natural world may be immense and powerful in regard to whatever is revealed in lights, sounds, movements, and warmth. But in spite of giving us so much information, even about immensities and godly profundities, the natural world nevertheless gives us no information about ourselves. So, we must immediately say to ourselves, that the very thing that we feel to be our self in our inner life, is not present at all in what comes to us as beauty and dominion and greatness and power in external nature and in our own external aspects. And the question stands before our souls, why the domain of being from which we ourselves come remains dark and silent.

And it is necessary that we become ready, and not in a lighthearted way, to come to the boundary of the sensory world, to where the offerings of the spirit can be revealed. In this regard, it is necessary that we say to ourselves, that if we were to approach this boundary unprepared, at once being confronted by the full light of the spirit that we should come upon there, then, if we have not yet called up the strength of spirit and warmth of soul for the reception of the spirit, then the spirit would shatter us, and we would be thrown back into our nothingness.

For this reason, at the boundary between the sensory world and the spirit world stands he who bodes the gods, who brings spirit-premonitions, the spirit-boder,⁷ about whom we will hear more and more in the next few lessons, and whom we will become acquainted with more and more closely. There stands the bringer of spirit-premonitions, who admonishes us,⁸ speaking of what we should be and of what we should cast away, so that we may approach the revelations of the spirit world in the proper manner.

And as we have just begun to grasp, my dear friends, the ever-present beauty and grandeur of nature in contradistinction with the initial spiritual darkness of human awareness, out of which the light must initially be born which speaks to us of what we are and were and will be, then we must also be clear that the first thing that must be fathomed out of this darkness is specifically the bringer of spirit-premonitions, who confronts us with the corresponding admonitions. And we allow the words of this bringer of spirit-premonitions to reverberate within our souls, and we allow the characteristics of this bringer of spirit-premonitions to flash up before our inner eye.

And from darknesses clarifies itself⁹
(Revealing you

Each person who comes to this situation is referred to here.

in counterpart,

Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),¹⁰
The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,¹¹
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.

And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word;
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.¹²

We must be fully clear with ourselves, we must acknowledge that from all that can come before our souls from this bringer of spirit-premonitions, from all this, and as said, we will get to know him better and better in lessons to come, that from all this we must acknowledge, before we attempt to fathom it as it broadens out in spirit, not on this side in the sensory fields but rather on the other side of the yawning abyss, initially for human awareness in deep darkness, out of which simply appears the face of the bringer of spirit-premonitions, which initially appears quite similar to the person himself, for it is very much like the person but forms up in daunting vastness, forming ethereally as a sheer parable of the person, from all this we must first acknowledge his warning to us, that none may seek entry into what is on the other side of the yawning abyss without corresponding seriousness. Be in earnest warns the earnest bringer of spirit-premonitions.

And then, as we hold fast in soul to this appropriately earnest demeanor, then we should become aware of the initially gentle, very gentle and abstract terms of reference we are provided in orientation from the spiritual world beyond the abyss, which looms before us and which we come up against, in order that we not take any careless steps. The bringer of spirit-premonitions sounds forth there the following:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating¹³ finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:¹⁴
O Man,¹⁵ know yourself!

I will say it once again:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man , know yourself!

With these words it can become clear to us how the secrets of existence must be fathomed out of all that weaves and works in and manifests out of the wide expanse of space, how completed works revealed in the onward march of time must be fathomed through real insight, and how all the revelations of the world of human hearts, how this world must open up for honest seeking of the soul. For all of this can alone build the foundation that a person needs, for insight into, for a thorough understanding of one's own true self, in which the world has laid the whole sum of her secrets, so that what can be found emerging from this self, as human self-insight, out of this can be found all that a person needs in days of health and in days of sickness on his path of existence between birth and death, and also what he must encounter on the other path of existence between death and a new birth.

All those, however, who feel themselves to be members of this school, should have become clear, quite clear, that all else that is not acquired in this spirit, is not real insight but rather the mere external semblance of insight, passing as science. It must be acknowledged as passing for science, prior to a person’s acquiring an awareness of spiritual insight for himself out of the admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold;¹⁶ all that must be acknowledged as being merely a semblance of knowledge. It does not need to remain a semblance of knowledge, though. We do not disdain an external semblance of knowledge. But we must be clear about it, that it first emerges on the stage as semblance of knowledge, and then becomes transformed, by means of all that a person can know, specifically what a person can know about the purification of his being, about the metamorphosis of his being, which he achieves for himself when he understands what in warning the guardian spirit messenger at the yawning abyss of insight, what in warning the guardian spirit messenger, emerging from the darkness glimmering in spirit, has called out to the person, has called out in the service of the prime spirit, the prime spiritual holder of the spiritual world.

Whoever does not develop an awareness of the abyss, that between our sojourning within the fields of sensory experience, in which we must live during our time on earth, between birth and death, that between our sojourn in the fields of sensory experience and the sojourn in the fields of the spirit, that a yawning abyss prevails, whoever does not develop a proper awareness of this cannot develop genuinely effective insight. Only with this awareness can a person develop genuinely effective insight. It is not necessary to become clairvoyant, even though insights into the spiritual world come from true clairvoyance, but an awareness must be developed of those things that are at hand as guidance from the yawning abyss concerning the secrets of space, the secrets of time, and the secrets of one's own heart. For as we go out into the roomy depths the abyss looms. Also, as we go into the depths of our hearts, the abyss looms.

And these three are not three abysses. They are a single abyss. For in wandering in the wide expanses of space coming to the border at the end of all wide-open spaces, there we find the spirit, and just so in wandering the byways of time till we find the very commencement of the beginning of this cycle of time, and just so in wandering the depths of human hearts, as deep as we ourselves can fathom. These three ways lead to a single destination, to a single ultimate place, not to three different places. All three lead to the same divine-spiritual, pouring forth as if from the fountainhead of the world, pouring forth, fertilizing, nourishing all existence-awareness, but also fostering existence-awareness for humankind, giving instruction on its recognition.

Dwelling within this earnest state of mind, at this time we should place our thoughts there, where the earnest spiritual messenger speaks, and we should take note that directly due to the special nature of our time and situation, namely what is present for us just now, he portrays hindrances which we must clear away, in order to come to true spiritual insight.

Hindrances, my dear friends, hindrances to spiritual awareness have been there in every age. In every age people have had to overcome this and that, have had to lay aside this and that under the guidance of the earnest Guardian of the Threshold of the Spiritual World. But every era has its particular hindrances. And most of what comes from human earth-civilization does not give us the means to advance, but rather acts to hinder entry into the spiritual world. And in what comes from a person's normal civilization of the day, just there must be found the particular hindrances of that era, hindrances planted in his nature, in his time, which he must lay aside before he may cross over what has been spoken of, the yawning abyss. Now hear him speaking directly about this, the earnest guardian who bodes for the gods:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold¹⁷ the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing¹⁸ must weaken¹⁹ it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,²⁰
Healing-seeking,²¹ would hallow itself.²²

I will read it once more. The guardian speaks:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

These, my dear friends, are the three great enemies of insight present for mankind today.

A person of the present day is afraid of the spirit-creator-being. The fear sits deep within one's soul existence. And a person may wish to leave this fear behind. Therefore, he clothes this fear in all sorts of seemingly logical reasons, through which the offerings of the spirit may be laid aside and disregarded.

You will hear from all sides, my dear friends, all sorts of objections against spiritual insight. They are clothed at times in wise, at times in clever, and at times in foolish logical lines of thought. The logical lines of thought, however, are certainly never the reason that this or that spiritual experience is rejected. In truth it is the spirit of fear, which rests and works and forms a force deep below in a person's inward life, and then, emerging from one's head, is metamorphosed into a logical argument. Fear it is.

Let us be clear, however, that it is not enough to say, “I have no fear.” Of course, each of us can say it. We must first get to the bottom and the real being of this fear. We must say to ourselves that, yes, we have sprung out, have risen out of the forces of opposition, the spirits of fear, which in the manner of Ahriman have been placed within, the spirits of fear which have imprisoned us. We may seem to have overcome and forced them out, but they really have not departed. And we must find the means and ways (and this school will give instructions about this) to find courage in knowing how to deal with these spirits of fear, which as monsters reside within our will. For the very thing that drives many people today toward insight, or rather about which they say drives them toward insight, cannot really bring insight, but rather it is courage alone, inner courage of soul, that allows a person to grasp the strengths and capabilities needed to walk the paths, the paths leading to genuine, authentic, light-filled spirit-insight.

And the second beast, emerging from the spirit of the times and creeping around today within the soul of human beings, as an enemy to insight, this second beast lurks wherever one goes, in most works of literature of the present day, in most galleries, in most sculptures, in the most part in sundry works of art, and in all manner of music of the day. It has ensconced its lifeless demeanor within schools, it has ensconced its lifeless demeanor within the business world, and this second animal in all the vicissitudes of man has no need to remain in spiritual fear, but inwardly engenders the mocking of spiritual lore.

The mocker does not always make itself apparent, for a person does not always rise to a conscious perception of what is within. It is as though the conscious mind were cut off by a thin cobweb, a thin film, cut off from what, in one's heart, mocks effective spiritual awareness. And if the mocker comes to light, it is only then that a person of the present day may somewhat repress this impudence, this more or less known or unknown fear. However, being spurred on by exceptional inner strength, in reaching the revelations of the spirit, this certainly lies within each of us today. And by an extremely exceptional inner exertion this mocker may be revealed.

And the third beast, it is the drooping flaccidity of thinking, it is the passivity of thinking, it is that sort of thinking that makes the whole world into a cinema, a cinema purposely made, so that a person has no real need to think, because everything just rolls on and on, so that thoughts are just not needed to follow the action. Science would like to deal with the external aspect of existence-awareness in just this way today, with passive thoughts. The person is too peaceful, too lackadaisical and limp, to bring activity into his thinking. It is just so with the thinking of mankind today, as it would be with a person, who in wishing to pick up something lying on the floor, steps back, puts his hands in his pockets, and believes he can pick up what lies on the floor even with his hands still in his pockets. He cannot. Just so existence cannot be grasped by this sort of thinking, with one’s hands at rest. We must become active, must activate our arms and hands, if we wish to grasp something. We must bring our thinking into activity, into practice, if we wish to grasp the spiritual.

Characteristically the Guardian of the Threshold speaks of the first beast, lurking in our willing as fear, as a beast with a twisted back, distorted bony fixed countenance, and withered body. This beast, covered entirely in dull blunt blue, is actually the one for the human being of today that comes forth out of the abyss right beside the Guardian of the Threshold. And the Guardian of the Threshold makes clear to the person of today that it is there, this beast in dull blunt blue and twisted back, scrawny right up to the bony mold of its distorted face. This beast is certainly within you. And out of the yawning abyss, lying before the fields of knowledge, out of the abyss this beast steps forth, built up as if in a mirror of what is in yourself, as one of the enemies of knowing, the very enemy of knowing that lingers in your willing.

And the second beast, associated today with sarcasm about the spiritual world, is characterized by the Guardian of the Threshold similarly. It emerges next to the other monster, although its whole manner points to weakness. Limp is its bearing. Even though its manner is limp and its body ghoulish-yellow, it nevertheless snarls and contorts its face. And out of this snarling comes laughter, lying laughter, for the mocker is a liar, smirking at us as a mirror image of that contrary animal that lives in our feelings, hinders our insight, and is an enemy of knowing.

And the third beast, which refuses to even approach the content of the world of spirit, is also characterized by the Guardian of the Threshold, this third to emerge from the abyss, with mouth split open wide asunder and eye glazed-over. Its vision is blunted, for its thinking is passive and will not be active, its manner is slouching, and its entire form is dirty red. It is an inwardly lying skeptic, speaking from its split-open mouth, and decked out entirely in dirty red, the skeptic of the dominion of spirit. It is the third of our enemies of inner knowing that lingers within. They make us heavy and hard as earth.

And if we go with them to confront spirit-insight, without taking into account the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, the yawning abyss is there. A person with the heaviness of earth may not cross over, not with fear, not with mockery, and not with doubt. A person may only cross over if the person holds fast in thinking to the spiritual reality of existence, if in feeling one experiences the soulfulness of existence, and if in willing one enthrones the powerful action of existence. Then will the spiritual, the soulful, the working actuality of existence move us to flying, to lifting ourselves out of the heaviness of earth. Then may we cross over the abyss.

Three-sided is the measure of conceit, as we are thrown into the abyss, if we do not acquire courage in knowing, fire in knowing, and work in knowing. But then, if we inwardly grasp the experience of forming our thinking, if we actually activate thinking, if we actually confront the spirit not in sleepy lassitude but rather actually welcome the spirit with hearts blazing, and if we have the courage to inwardly accept the spiritual, specifically as the spiritual, as it really is, not letting it come to us merely as a material image, then we will grow wings to carry us over the abyss, which frankly is the yearning in the hearts of each and every one of us today.

And that, my dear friends, is what is brought before our souls today, in these preliminaries in the first lesson, with which this school of spiritual science should begin. Allow us in closing to bring once again before our souls the beginning, the middle, and the end of our meeting with the Guardian:

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness.
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

And from darknesses clarifies itself
(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),
The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.

And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word:
See, I am inner knowing’s only door.

The Guardian speaks:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

And the Guardian speaks further:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

In inwardly walking the path laid down by the Guardian of the Threshold, what is noteworthy in experiencing feeling, willing, and thinking, in attaining the clarity of the Guardian, in treading within the darkness from which the light emerges, the very light in which we again get to know our true selves, and in arriving at the "O Man, know yourself!" that sounds forth, revealed in darkness, illuminated by spirit, what is noteworthy in all this will be dealt with further, my dear friends, next Friday in the next lesson of the First Class.

• 1. Erdengründe is the inner experience of being on the grounds of the estate of earth. Gründe is cognate with grounds. In his lectures on the Genius of Language (GA299) Steiner emphasizes that he tries to choose words of German rather than Latin etymology, so it is grounds rather than foundations.
• 2. Stoff is cognate with stuff in English.
• 3. erfühlende Wesen clearly refers to animals, and so is translated directly as feeling creatures.
• 4. Mensch is traditionally translated as Man, although Mann is a perfectly good German word not used here. A Mensch is an adult individual responsible human being.
• 5. sellensorgend
• 6. Finsternissen
• 7. Gesistesbote: der Bote in colloquial German is a messenger, but Geistesbote is one who bodes the spirit, who brings spirit premonitions, rather than spirit messages. Only later is he also referred to as der Hüter, who heeds, herds, guides, shepherds, and guards us from entering before we are prepared
• 8. mahnend sprechen is to admonish, to speak to someone as an earnest advisor or mentor. It is a very ancient word seen in muse, mind, remind, mention, mantra, and the ancient Sanskrit manas. Negative aspects are seen in mania, automatic, dementia, and amnesia. It is urging someone to focus their mind on something, often as a sort of warning, for personal development may veer off into the slough of despond or into the heights of losing oneself, and so must be done with caution.
• 9. hellet sich is an astral activity of brightly gathering oneself up into a gestalt, and is what sheep do in forming a herd, or fish a school, or birds a flock. It is not merely an etheric strengthening activity, but an astral activity; it clarifies itself.
• 10. The lines in parentheses were clarified later as a Zwischensatz.
• 11. dir der Geistesbote
• 12. Erkenntnis is the same as the English word to ken, to know, but with the er- prefix meaning inner knowing, and with the -nis suffix at the end turning it a second-level-conceptual word, meaning the actuality of inner knowing. Knowledge (Kenntnis) is clearly different than knowing (Erkenntnis). Just compare “I have some knowledge about what happened” to “I know what happened.”
• 13. Das Schaffen is creating, producing, legislating.
• 14. Dasein was used by Steiner 51 times in his 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom and 61 times in his 1904 Theosophy. It had been defined previously by Hegel (1770–1831) and Brentano (1838–1917), Steiner’s philosophy professor in Vienna. In Hegel's Science of Logic (§ 191) Dasein is a determinate individual being who uplifts himself in an Aufhebung of becoming, and for Brentano it is a being that contemplates its own future. Heidegger wrote about it extensively in 1927 in his opus Being and Time. “An entity which enquires about the possibilities of its own being we shall denote by the term "Dasein". In this sense we should translate Daseinswort not just as “word of existence,” but rather, “word of existence-awareness”. Otherwise, it loses all its meaning.
• 15. O Mensch
• 16. der Hüter die Schwelle: der Hüter is someone who heeds, herds, and guides you, and so is a guardian. die Schwelle is the swelling at the top of a mountain pass that you can’t quite see beyond, or a ford or swelling of a stream-bottom, which you cannot see but which allows you to cross over. In English a threshold is the same, you enter a building over the threshold or you enter new inner territory when you cross a certain threshold of understanding.
• 17. schau is a combination of behold and show (with which it is cognate) and is active and willful.
• 18. For Erkenntnisschaffen, the second part of the word is not schöpfen, to create, but schaffen, to work on something, so Erkenntnisschaffen is the work of knowing.
• 19. Weichen is cognate with to weaken, and in German also alludes to giving way, but should not be translated as to yield, as this also connotes in English to produce or to gain.
• 20. Sehnsuchen is more than just longing, it is yearning.
• 21. Heilersterbend is a simple German gerund meaning healing-seeking, and if translated with the Latin-derived word salvation, it becomes complex, convoluted, and intellectualized.
• 22. weihen is cognate with hallow, which we all know well from the Lord’s Prayer and Halloween. Weihen might be translated as sanctify or consecrate or devote, but these are Latin-derived words carrying a great deal of conceptuality. It is better to use the native English word hallow. We wish to hallow ourselves, so that we can proceed properly across the Threshold.

DR STEINER:

My dear friends!

The first point on the agenda today is the pleasure of a lecture by Dr Schubert on Christ and the spiritual world: ‘Anthroposophy, a Leader to Christ.’

Dr Schubert gives his lecture. After an interval of fifteen minutes, Dr Steiner speaks:

My dear friends! Let us begin again today with the words of the self-knowledge of man coming from the spirit of our time:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

Today, my dear friends, let us bring together what can speak in man in three ways:

[Rudolf Steiner writes on the blackboard as he speaks. See Facsimile 4, Page XVI top.]

This will properly be brought together in the heart of man only by that which actually made its appearance at the turning of the time and in whose spirit we now work here and intend to work on in the future.

At the turning of the time
The Spirit-Light of the world
Entered the stream of earthly being.
Darkness of night
Had held its sway,
Day-radiant light
Streamed into souls of men.
Light that gives warmth
To simple shepherds' hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise heads of kings.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun
Warm thou our hearts,
Enlighten thou our heads,
That good may become
What we from our hearts would found
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

[Rudolf Steiner writes on the blackboard as he speaks]

That good may become
What we from our hearts would found,
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

[As shown on the blackboard]

DR STEINER: My dear friends! Yesterday's speaker, Herr Hans Ludwig Pusch, does not wish to continue. Instead, Dr Lehrs will say a few words on the theme. Please may I now ask him to speak.

Dr Lehrs completes what Herr Pusch had wanted to say the day before on the question of the Youth Movement.

DR STEINER: May I now ask Mrs Merry to speak.

Mrs Merry speaks about the work in England and brings the apologies of Mr Dunlop who has been unable to attend.

DR STEINER: My dear friends! I have spoken often and in different places about the extraordinarily satisfactory summer school in Penmaenmawr. [Note 63] Perhaps I may be permitted to add to what I have said so often. I truly believe that an exceedingly significant step forward will have come about for the Anthroposophical Movement if everything Mrs Merry has just sketched can come into being over the next few years as fruits of the seeds of Penmaenmawr. We may believe that the very best forces are at work promoting the endeavours of the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction, for Mr Dunlop took this summer school at Penmaenmawr in hand in an extremely active manner, an inward, sensitive and indeed esoteric manner. In Penmaenmawr conditions were fulfilled from the start which we have never found to be fulfilled anywhere else, conditions that were necessary for the success of Penmaenmawr.

You see, my dear friends, we expected Mr Dunlop in Stratford, in Oxford, and even once in London, and now here in Dornach. So my picture of Mr Dunlop is that of the man about whom it is always said that he is coming and then he doesn't come. But he did come to Penmaenmawr! And it went so exceptionally well, so well that I only wish he were here today so that we might once more thank him most heartily. I really did believe that Mr Dunlop would be here. In London he said to me that he would do it differently next time; he would not say he was coming but instead he would simply come. So in London he did not say he was coming. And yet he still has not come! So after all I shall have to ask Mrs Merry most warmly to take our thanks back to him, the cordial thanks of this whole gathering for that extremely significant inauguration of a movement within the Anthroposophical Movement which has such good prospects because of the summer school at Penmaenmawr. Out of the spirit of the descriptions I have given of Penmaenmawr I am sure that you will agree to my asking Mrs Merry in your name to take to Mr Dunlop out hearty thanks for the inauguration of the summer school at Penmaenmawr, and also to my requesting him to continue to take such work firmly in hand, for in his hands it will succeed well.

May I now ask Herr van Bemmelen, the representative of the Dutch school, to speak.

Herr van Bemmelen reports on the work of the school in The Hague.

DR STEINER: Now may I ask Dr Unger to speak. He wishes to refer to the problems of the Society.

Dr Unger gives his lecture about the problems of the Society and concludes with the following:

Dear friends. The way in which responsibility devolves for instance on the individual Societies and the larger groups, as a result of the new Statutes, means that it will be necessary to pass this trust and this responsibility on further. Ways and means will have to come about which must not be allowed to remain fixed in the old structure that has come to be adopted. Instead situations must be livingly transformed so that people can be found who are capable through their very nature of carrying the central impulses further. Thus a matter that appears to be merely organizational immediately leads to a further question: How shall we be able to bring this impulse into the public eye? Once again we shall have to let experience play its part. The other day I ventured to make some suggestions about working in public. What Herr van Bemmelen has just said shows us that Holland is no exception to the way in which everywhere people are waiting to hear about Anthroposophy in a suitable form and in the right way. People are asking about the soul of man and about cultivating the soul in its true nature. Beyond this it will fall to us to find people among the general public who want to work further in this realm. Everywhere it must be made possible to open our doors and welcome people to the Society. Necessary for this above all is an understanding of the human being which can arise out of the warmth of love for our fellows combined with serious work in the anthroposophical sense. So the question of the next generation coming to the Society will be a far-reaching one. It has always been difficult to find people who want to continue with the work because for this it is necessary to create a situation within the Society which enables younger people to make a connection in the first place.

Today, especially, if I may say so, in Germany, many of the supports and conditions of the past, and of life as it has been for so long, are in general breaking down. In this situation younger people in particular—perhaps students who are finishing their university courses or maybe people who would like to work out of the artistic impulses of Anthroposophy—are forced instead to creep into some corner of ordinary economic life, collapsing as it is, in order merely to make a living. It ought to be a task of the Society, and especially the individual groups, to find ways of creating a foundation within Anthroposophy on which young people can live out what they have learnt in their studies. And out of this arises the most important question of all: How can that which is coming towards us by way of young, striving, life-filled strength be taken up into the School of Spiritual Science? What form will make it possible, whether here in Dornach or elsewhere, to make studies possible that can lead to the future collaboration of these people? It is a problem which is already coming to the fore here and there but especially in Germany where there is a strong need for new colleagues but where those who ought to be working in the Society are often in such dire straits. We must find these people amongst the general public through our public work.

So the establishment of the School on the generous scale described to us so far can give us the hope that we need so badly. In the School as well as in the Society and in the groups there is a platform for tackling the problems which are arising.

The same applies to the scientific work in the institutions. Herr van Bemmelen has touched on the field of education, but similar questions could be asked with regard to scientific work. The influence of this Conference will lead to a flaring up of the will to work and to find ways. Other friends are sure to have questions about this too. Let us hope, when we return home and are asked about everything, that out of the experience of these discussions we shall be capable of giving genuinely concrete answers. So that we can come to this, problems that have arisen really must be brought forward, just as I have presumed to suggest certain things now. If other friends from the various countries bring forward these problems from different angles, let us hope that the new impulse in the General Society will be able to penetrate to every furthest corner, to all the groups and to all the individuals who are and who want to be members of this Society.

DR STEINER: May I now ask Herr van Leer to speak.

Herr van Leer speaks about the intention of sending in reports to Herr Steffen. He makes suggestions about how to divide up what is sent into different categories.

DR STEINER: I rather think that the purpose of this correspondence will best be served by taking the following into account. Without having discussed this with Herr Steffen I believe I can say more or less what he thinks, though perhaps he will have to correct me afterwards. The best reports will be those that come out of the individuality of the different correspondents. I think that all those friends I mentioned the other day, and also a number of others, are interested in what I meant by the life of the Society and cultural life in general. And I believe that most of these friends think about what comes to their attention with regard to either one or the other at least once a week, or even every day. Things go through one's mind; so one day they sit down and simply write down what has gone through their mind. As a result fifteen, or perhaps twenty, four-page letters will arrive here. It will be quite a task to read them all. Well, if twenty letters arrive, Herr Steffen will be kind enough to keep ten of them and give me the other ten. We shall manage. But we shall manage best of all if you spare us any categories. We need to hear how each individual feels in his heart of hearts, for we want to deal with human beings and not with schedules. Let everything remain a motley mixture; this will bring us the individuality of the writer in question and that is what interests us. We hope in this way to obtain the material we need, human material with which to fill our Supplements so that they in turn give a human impression with their all too human weaknesses.

Just write down on four pages, or sometimes even eight pages, what is in your heart of hearts. For us here the most interesting thing will always be the people themselves. We want to cultivate a human relationship with human beings and out of these human relationships we want to create something that will shine out even after it has gone through the process of being dipped in dreadful printer's ink. This is what I am talking about. It will be best of all if everyone can present himself in a human way to other human beings. Now, Herr Steffen, please correct me.

HERR STEFFEN: Certainly not. You have expressed exactly what is in my soul too. I only want to say that there is no question of this becoming too much work for me; it is part and parcel of my gifts as a writer that I enjoy reading reports of this kind. I always have to strive to see what is going on inside people's souls, so truly no letter can be too long. I don't believe it will be too much for me. I anyway enjoy reading several newspapers every day, but if interesting things come from our friends, then I greatly prefer to read them. As regards categories, an editor or a writer has only one, or rather two: the first is what he can use and the second is what he cannot use. That is all I wanted to say.

DR STEINER: Just imagine, after these discussions, what it would mean if these reports were to inspire Herr Steffen to write a novel or even a play! That would be the most wonderful thing I could think of.

MR COLLISON: I would like to know whether we might ‘sometimes’ receive a reply.

DR STEINER: I hope that the reply will be there every week in the Supplement. But if a special reply were to be necessary, then I would hope that one would be sent.

Now may I ask Herr Stibbe to speak.

Herr Stibbe reports on the opposition experienced in Holland, [Note 64] referring particularly to Professor de Jong.

DR STEINER (referring to Herr Stibbe's report with regard to Professor de Jong): Yes indeed. He has tried to form a methodical concept of mystery wisdom by bringing it down to all kinds of spiritualist phenomena, as he describes in his book.

Now, dear friends. It will still be possible in the next day or two to speak further on the questions that have arisen out of this discussion. So far as I can see, the questions that have arisen are: reporting, and then the opposition. These are the tangible questions that have arisen so far. I cannot see any others taking shape yet.

Tomorrow we shall start our meeting at 10 o'clock and I shall begin by asking those friends to speak who have reports to give about the results of their research. Frau Dr Kolisko and Dr Maier, Stuttgart. Now may I ask Dr Schwebsch to speak. When he has finished I shall ask for a report on eurythmy in America to be read out.

Dr Schwebsch expresses the gratitude of the Waldorf School for the manifold assistance it has received.

DR STEINER: Following on from this, please allow me to touch on a few things. The first is that once the grave financial position of the Waldorf School had become known, interest in it was awakened really everywhere. We have seen particularly in Switzerland how the efforts of the members of the school associations led to the creation of numerous sponsorships. Mrs Mackenzie has endeavoured to form a committee in England to carry out collections in aid of the Waldorf School. The first donation has already been sent to me and I shall ask the leaders of the Waldorf School to accept this small beginning.

Now I have something else to say: So many thanks are owed to the world on behalf of the Waldorf School—Dr Schwebsch has already mentioned a number of things—that it is impossible to encompass everything in a moment. We ought to make a long list of all those to whom we owe thanks in one way or another on behalf of the Waldorf School. The interest in it is indeed great. Yet we shall ever and again have to continue to ask for an even greater interest. The support given so far has in the main been for the school itself. Less thought has hitherto been given to the pupils or those who might become pupils of the Waldorf School. There is one case, or rather two, which really touch us deeply. At a time when those living in Switzerland were in a position to purchase a great deal in Germany with very few Swiss Francs, two workers here at the Goetheanum felt they could put into practice a very praiseworthy idea, namely to send their sons to the Waldorf School. Considerable sacrifices were made by our friend, Pastor Geyer, when he undertook to care for these two schoolboys. We at the Goetheanum take the view that we should finance the actual school fees and whatever is needed for the school in the same way as other firms such as Der Kommende Tag and Waldorf Astoria pay for the children of their workers. But now that life for the children has suddenly become so expensive in Germany, more expensive than it would be here in Switzerland, it is no longer possible for the families of the boys to pay for their keep. Now both families and boys are faced with the sad prospect of their being unable to return to the Waldorf School after the Christmas holidays. So I should like to ask whether it would be possible to make a collection here in order, at least for the near future, to pay for the keep of the two boys in Stuttgart so that they can continue to go to the Waldorf School. What we need is 140 Francs a month for both boys together. We shall try to set up a money box for this. Perhaps Mr Pyle will be prepared to lend us one for donations specifically for this purpose. Maybe this is how we can do it.

Now would Dr Wachsmuth please read the resume of the report on eurythmy in America.

Dr Wachsmuth reads a report from Frau Neuscheller on the progress made by eurythmy in North America.

DR STEINER: Dear friends, first I would like to ask those from further afield who wish to attend tomorrow's performance of the Three Kings Play to get their tickets today so that what remains can be available for Dornach friends tomorrow.

Secondly would you please note that my three last evening lectures will lead in various ways to a discussion of medical matters for the general audience. Then after the lectures there will be discussions about medical matters with the doctors who are here. Would therefore any practising doctors please come to the Glass House tomorrow morning at 8.30 for an initial meeting. [Note 65] I am referring only to practising doctors. After 1 January there will be opportunity for others interested in medical questions to participate in other sessions.

Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock we shall start with the continuation of today's meeting. I would ask you to let us begin with the two reports already mentioned. Then, both tomorrow and the next day, I shall take the liberty of speaking briefly on the idea of the future building in Dornach and I shall ask you to let me bring up for discussion some points on how this idea of the building in Dornach might be carried into reality. It would not be right to recommend that this meeting should be allowed to pass without any reference at all to the financial side of the idea of the building in Dornach. I shall leave it to you to say something after what I shall be obliged to bring forward very briefly tomorrow and the next day about the artistic aspect of the idea of the building in Dornach.

Then I would ask for time to be set aside in the afternoon at 2.30 for a meeting of Swiss members or their delegates. Herr Aeppli has asked for this meeting and has requested that I attend, or indeed take the chair. So I would ask the Swiss members to hold this meeting tomorrow afternoon at 2.30. This refers only to Swiss members since the matters to be discussed apply solely to the Swiss Anthroposophical Society.

This afternoon at 4.30 we shall see a performance of eurythmy, and my lecture will take place this evening at 8.30.

Friends have expressed the wish that I should speak today on the subject of the lecture here a year ago,⁵⁹ when it was said that the initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz took place in very special circumstances in the thirteenth century, and that since then this individuality has worked unceasingly throughout the centuries. Today we shall hear more about the character and the person of Christian Rosenkreutz as we study the great task which devolved upon him at the dawn of the intellectual age in order that provision might be made for the future of humanity.

Anyone who makes his mark in the world as a leading occultist, like Christian Rosenkreutz, has to reckon with the conditions peculiar to his epoch. The intrinsic nature of spiritual life as it is in the present age, developed for the first time when modern natural science came upon the scene with men like Copernicus,⁶⁰ Giordano Bruno,⁶¹ Galileo⁶² and others. Nowadays people are taught about Copernicus in their early schooldays, and the impressions thus received remain with them their whole life long. In earlier times the soul experienced something different. Try to picture to yourselves what a contrast there is between a man of the modern age and one who lived centuries ago. Before the days of Copernicus everyone believed that the earth remains at rest in cosmic space with the sun and the stars revolving around it. The very ground slipped from under men's feet when Copernicus came forward with the doctrine that the earth is moving with tremendous speed through the universe. We should not underestimate the effects of such a revolution in thinking, accompanied as it was by a corresponding change in the life of feeling. All the thoughts and ideas of men were suddenly different from what they had been before the days of Copernicus. And now let us ask: What has occultism to say about this revolution in thinking?

Anyone who asks from the standpoint of occultism what kind of world conception can be derived from the Copernican tenets will have to admit that although these ideas can lead to great achievements in the realm of natural science and in external life, they are incapable of promoting any understanding of the spiritual foundations of the world and the things of the world, for there has never been a worse instrument for understanding the spiritual foundations of the world than the ideas of Copernicus—never in the whole of human evolution. The reason for this is that all these Copernican concepts are inspired by Lucifer. Copernicanism is one of the last attacks, one of the last great attacks made by Lucifer upon the evolution of man. In earlier, pre-Copernican thought, the external world was indeed maya, but much traditional wisdom, much truth concerning the world and the things of the world still survived. Since Copernicus, however, man has maya around him not only in his material perceptions but his concepts and ideas are themselves maya. Men take it for granted nowadays that the sun is firmly fixed in the middle and the planets revolve around it in ellipses. In the near future, however, it will be realised that the view of the world of the stars held by Copernicus is much less correct than the earlier Ptolemaic view.⁶³ The view of the world held by the school of Copernicus and Kepler is very convenient, but as an explanation of the macrocosm it is not the truth.

And so Christian Rosenkreutz, confronted by a world conception which is itself a maya, an illusion, had to come to grips with it. Christian Rosenkreutz had to save occultism in an age when all the concepts of science were themselves maya. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Copernicus' Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres⁶⁴ appeared. At the end of the sixteenth century the rosicrucians were faced with the necessity of comprehending the world system by means of occultism, for with its materially-conceived globes in space the Copernican world-system was maya, even as concept. Thus towards the end of the sixteenth century one of those conferences took place of which we heard here a year ago in connection with the initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz himself in the thirteenth century. This occult conference of leading individualities [See ‘East in the Light of the West’, Chapter IX, etc. Rudolf Steiner Publication Co. and Anthroposophic Press, N.Y., 1940.] united Christian Rosenkreutz with those twelve individualities of that earlier time and certain other great individualities concerned with the leadership of humanity. There were present not only personalities in incarnation on the physical plane but also some who were in the spiritual worlds; and the individuality who in the sixth century before Christ had been incarnated as Gautama Buddha also participated.

The occultists of the East rightly believe—for they know it to be the truth—that the Buddha who in his twenty-ninth year rose from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha, had incarnated then for the last time in a physical body. It is absolutely true that when the individuality of a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha he no longer appears on the earth in physical incarnation. But this does not mean that he ceases to be active in the affairs of the earth. The Buddha continues to work for the earth, although he is never again present in a physical body but sends down his influence from the spiritual world. The Gloria heard by the shepherds in the fields intimated from the spiritual world that the forces of Buddha were streaming into the astral body of the child Jesus described in the St. Luke Gospel. The words of the Gloria came from Buddha who was working in the astral body of the child Jesus. This wonderful message of peace and love is an integral part of Buddha's contribution to Christianity. But later on too, Buddha influences the deeds of men—not physically but from the spiritual world—and he has co-operated in measures that have been necessary for the sake of progress in the evolution of humanity.

In the seventh and eighth centuries, for example, there was a very important centre of initiation in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, in which the Buddha taught, in his spirit body. In such schools there are those who teach in the physical body; but it is also possible for the more advanced pupils to receive instruction from one who teaches in an ether-body only. And so the Buddha taught those pupils there who were capable of receiving higher knowledge. Among the pupils of the Buddha at that time was one who incarnated again a few centuries later. We are speaking, therefore, of a physical personality who centuries later lived again in a physical body, in Italy, and is known to us as St. Francis of Assisi. The characteristic quality of Francis of Assisi and of the life of his monks—which has so much similarity with that of the disciples of Buddha—is due to the fact that Francis of Assisi himself was a pupil of Buddha.

It is easy to perceive the contrast between the qualities characteristic of men who like Francis of Assisi were striving fervently for the spirit and those engrossed in the world of industry, technical life and the discoveries of modern civilisation. There were many people, including occultists, who suffered deeply at the thought that in the future two separate classes of human beings would inevitably arise. They foresaw the one class wholly given up to the affairs of practical life, convinced that security depends entirely upon the production of foodstuffs, the construction of machines, and so forth; whereas the other class would be composed of men like Francis of Assisi who withdraw altogether from the practical affairs of the world for the sake of spiritual life.

It was a significant moment, therefore, when Christian Rosenkreutz, in the sixteenth century, called together a large group of occultists in preparation for the aforesaid conference, and described to them the two types of human beings that would inevitably arise in the future. First he gathered a large circle of people, later on a smaller one, to present them with this weighty fact. Christian Rosenkreutz held this preparatory meeting a few years beforehand, not because he was in doubt about what would happen, but because he wanted to get the people to contemplate the perspectives of the future. In order to stimulate their thinking he spoke roughly as follows: Let us look at the future of the world. The world is moving fast in the direction of practical activities, industry, railways, and so on. Human beings will become like beasts of burden. And those who do not want this will be, like Francis of Assisi, impractical with regard to life, and they will develop an inner life only. Christian Rosenkreutz made it clear to his listeners that there was no way on earth of preventing the formation of these two classes of men. Despite all that might be done for them between birth and death, nothing could hinder mankind being divided into these two classes. As far as conditions on the earth were concerned it is impossible to find a remedy for the division into classes. Help can only come if a kind of education could be brought about that did not take place between birth and death but between death and a new birth.

Thus the rosicrucians were faced with the task of working from out of the super-sensible world to influence individual human beings. In order to understand what had to take place, we must consider from a particular aspect the life between death and a new birth.

Between birth and death we live on the earth. Between death and a new birth man has a certain connection with the other planets. In my Theosophy you will find Kamaloka described. This sojourn of man in the soul world is a time during which he becomes an inhabitant of the Moon. Then one after the other, he becomes an inhabitant of Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and then an inhabitant of the further expanses of heaven or the cosmos. One is not speaking incorrectly when one says that between two incarnations on the earth lie incarnations on other planets, spiritual incarnations. Man at present is not yet sufficiently developed to remember, whilst in incarnation, his experiences between death and a new birth, but this will become possible in the future. Even though he cannot now remember what he experienced on Mars, for example, he still has Mars forces within him, although he knows nothing about them. One is justified in saying: I am not an earth inhabitant, but the forces within me include something that I acquired on Mars. Let me consider a man who lived on earth after the Copernican world outlook had become common knowledge. Whence did Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others acquire their abilities in this incarnation? Bear in mind that shortly before that, from 1401–1464, the individuality of Copernicus was incarnated as Nicholas of Cusa,⁶⁵ a profound mystic. Think of the completely different mood of his docta ignorantia. How did the forces that made Copernicus so very different from Nicholas of Cusa enter this individuality?

The forces that made him the astronomer he was, came to him from Mars! Similarly, Galileo also received forces from Mars that invested him with the special configuration of a modern natural scientist. Giordano Bruno too, brought his powers with him from Mars, and so it is with the whole of mankind. That people think like Copernicus or Giordano Bruno is due to the Mars forces they acquire between death and a new birth.

But the acquisition of the kind of powers which lead from one triumph to another is due to the fact that Mars had a different influence in those times from what it exercised previously. Mars used to radiate different forces. The Mars culture that human beings experience between death and a new birth went through a great crisis in the earth's fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was as decisive and catastrophic a time on Mars in the fifteenth and sixteenth century as it was on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the actual ego of man was born, there was born on Mars that particular tendency which, in man, comes to expression in Copernicanism. When these conditions came into force on Mars, the natural consequence would have been for Mars to continue sending down to earth human beings who only brought Copernican ideas with them, which are really only maya. What we are seeing, then, is the decline of the Mars culture. Previously, Mars had sent forth good forces. But now Mars sent forth more and more forces that would have led men deeper and deeper into maya. The achievements that were inspired by Mars at that time were ingenious and clever, but they were maya all the same.

So you see that in the fifteenth century you could have said Mars' salvation, and the earth's too, depended on the declining culture of Mars receiving a fresh impulse to raise it up again. It was somewhat similar on Mars to what it had been like on the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha, when humanity had fallen from spiritual heights into the depths of materialism, and the Christ Impulse had signified an ascent. In the fifteenth century the necessity had arisen on Mars for the Mars culture to receive an upward impulse. That was the significant question facing Christian Rosenkreutz and his pupils; how this upward impulse could be given to the Mars culture, for the salvation of the earth was also at stake. Rosicrucianism was faced with the mighty task of solving the problem of what had to happen so that, for the earth's sake, the Mars culture should be brought once more onto an ascending path. The beings on Mars were not in a position to know what would bring about their salvation, for the earth was the only place where one could know what the situation on Mars was like. On Mars itself they were unaware of the decline. Therefore it was in order to find a practical solution to this problem that the aforesaid conference met at the end of the sixteenth century. This conference was well prepared by Christian Rosenkreutz in that the closest friend and pupil of Christian Rosenkreutz was Gautama Buddha, living in a spirit body. And it was announced at this conference that the being who incarnated as Gautama Buddha, in the spiritual form he now had since becoming Buddha, would transfer the scene of his activities to Mars. The individuality of Gautama Buddha was as it were sent by Christian Rosenkreutz from the earth to Mars. So Gautama Buddha leaves the scene of his activity and goes to Mars, and in the year 1604 the individuality of Gautama Buddha accomplished for Mars a deed similar to what the Mystery of Golgotha was for the earth. Christian Rosenkreutz had known what the effect of Buddha on Mars would signify for the whole cosmos, what his teachings of Nirvana, of liberation from the earth, would signify on Mars. The teaching of Nirvana was unsuited to a form of culture directed primarily to practical life. Buddha's pupil, Francis of Assisi, was an example of the fact that this teaching produces in its adepts complete remoteness from the world and its affairs. But the content of Buddhism, which was not adapted to the practical life of man between birth and death, was of great importance for the soul between death and a new birth. Christian Rosenkreutz realised that for a certain purification needed on Mars the teachings of Buddha were pre-eminently suitable. The Christ Being, the essence of divine love, had once come down to the earth to a people in many respects alien, and in the seventeenth century Buddha, the prince of peace, went to Mars—the planet of war and conflict—to execute his mission there. The souls on Mars were warlike, torn with strife. Thus Buddha performed a deed of sacrifice similar to the deed performed in the Mystery of Golgotha by the bearer of the essence of divine love. To dwell on Mars as Buddha was a deed of sacrifice offered to the cosmos. He was as it were the lamb offered up in sacrifice on Mars, and to accept this environment of strife was for him a kind of crucifixion. Buddha performed this deed on Mars in the service of Christian Rosenkreutz. Thus do the great beings who guide the world work together not only on the earth but from one planet to another.

Since the mystery of Mars was consummated by Gautama Buddha, human beings have been able, during the period between death and a new birth, to receive from Mars different forces from those emanating during Mars' cultural decline. Not only does a man bring with him into a new birth quite different forces from Mars, but because of the influence exercised by the spiritual deed of Buddha, forces also stream from Mars into men who practise meditation as a means of reaching the spiritual world. When the modern pupil of Spiritual Science meditates in the sense indicated by Christian Rosenkreutz, forces sent to the earth by Buddha as the redeemer of Mars stream to him.

Christian Rosenkreutz is thus revealed to us as the great servant of Christ Jesus; but what Buddha, as the emissary of Christian Rosenkreutz, was destined to contribute to the work of Christ Jesus—this had also to come to the help of the work performed by Christian Rosenkreutz in the service of Christ Jesus. The soul of Gautama Buddha has not again been in physical incarnation on the earth but is utterly dedicated to the work of the Christ impulse. What was the word of peace sent forth from the Buddha to the child Jesus described in the Gospel of St. Luke? ‘Glory in the heights and on the earth—peace!’ And this word of peace, issuing mysteriously from Buddha, resounds from the planet of war and conflict to the soul of men on earth.

Because all these things had transpired it was possible to avert the division of human beings into the two distinct classes, consisting on the one hand of men of the type of Francis of Assisi, and on the other of men who live wholly as materialists. If Buddha had remained in direct and immediate connection with the earth, he would not have been able to concern himself with the ‘practical’ people, and his influence would have made the others into monks like Francis of Assisi. Through the deed of redemption performed by Gautama Buddha on Mars, it is possible for us, when we are passing through the Mars period of existence between death and a new birth, to become followers of Francis of Assisi without causing subsequent deprivation to the earth. Grotesque as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that since the seventeenth century every human being is a buddhist, a franciscan, an immediate follower of Francis of Assisi for a time, whilst he is on Mars. Francis of Assisi has subsequently only had one brief incarnation on earth as a child; and he died in childhood and has not incarnated since. From then onwards he has been connected with the work of Buddha on Mars and is one of his most eminent followers.

We have thus placed before our souls a picture of what came to pass through that great conference at the end of the sixteenth century, which resembles what happened on earth in the thirteenth century when Christian Rosenkreutz gathered his faithful around him. Nothing less was accomplished than that the possibility was given of averting from humanity the threatened separation into two classes, so that men might remain inwardly united. And those who want to develop esoterically despite their absorption in practical life can achieve their goal because the Buddha is working from the sphere of Mars and not from the sphere of the earth. Those forces which help to promote a healthy esoteric life can therefore also be attributed to the work and influence of Buddha.

In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have dealt with the methods that are appropriate for meditation today. The essential point is that in rosicrucian training, development is such that the human being is not torn away from the earthly activities demanded of him by his karma. Rosicrucian esoteric development can proceed without causing the slightest disturbance in any situation or occupation in life. Because Christian Rosenkreutz was capable of transferring the work of Buddha from the earth to Mars it has become possible for Buddha also to send his influences into men from outside the earth.

Again, then, we have heard of one of the spiritual deeds of Christian Rosenkreutz; but to understand these deeds of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries we must find our way to their esoteric meaning and significance. It would be good if it were generally realised how entirely consistent the progress of theosophy in the West has been since the founding of the Middle European section of the Theosophical Society.⁶⁶ Here in Switzerland we have given lecture cycles on the four Gospels.⁶⁷ The substance of all these Gospel cycles is potentially contained in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, written twelve years ago. The book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment describes the Western path of development that is compatible with practical activities of every kind. Today I have indicated that a basic factor in these matters is the mission assigned to Gautama Buddha by Christian Rosenkreutz, for I have spoken of the significant influence which the transference of Buddha to Mars made possible in our solar system. And so stone after stone fits into its proper place in our Western philosophy, for it has been built up consistently and in obedience to principle, and everything that comes later harmonises with what went before. Inner consistency is essential in any world conception if it is to stand upon the ground of truth. And those who are able to draw near to Christian Rosenkreutz see with reverent wonder in what a consistent way he has carried out the great mission entrusted to him, which in our time is the rosicrucian-christian path of development. That the great teacher of Nirvana is now fulfilling a mission outside the earth, on Mars—this too is one of the wise and consistent deeds of Christian Rosenkreutz.

A Concluding Indication

In conclusion, the following brief practical indication will be added for those who aspire to become pupils of Christian Rosenkreutz.

A year ago we heard how the knowledge of having a certain relationship to Christian Rosenkreutz may come to a man involuntarily. It is also possible, however, to put a kind of question to one's own destiny: ‘Can I make myself worthy to become a pupil of Christian Rosenkreutz?’ It can come about in the following way: Try to place before your soul a picture of Christian Rosenkreutz, the great teacher of the modern age, in the midst of the twelve, sending forth Gautama Buddha into the cosmos as his emissary at the beginning of the seventeenth century, thus bringing about a consummation of what came to pass in the sixth century before Christ in the sermon of Benares.⁶⁸

If this picture, with its whole import, stands vividly before the soul, if a man feels that something streaming from this great and impressive picture wrings from his soul the words: O man, thou art not merely an earthly being; thou art in truth a cosmic being!—then he may believe with quiet confidence: ‘I can aspire to become a pupil of Christian Rosenkreutz.’ This picture of the relationship of Christian Rosenkreutz to Gautama Buddha is a potent and effective meditation.

And I wanted to awaken this aspiration in you as a result of these considerations. For our ideal should always be to take an interest in world happenings and then to find the way, by means of these studies, to carry out our own development into higher worlds.

• 59. a year ago, when it was said: see pages 36 et seq. [27 Sep 1911]
• 60. Nicholas Copernicus: 1473 – 1543.
• 61. Giordano Bruno: 1548 – 1600.
• 62. Galileo Galilei: 1564 – 1642.
• 63. earlier Ptolemaic view: Claudius Ptolemy, circa 100 to 180 AD., astronomer, mathematician and geographer in Alexandria.
• 64. Copernicus: Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri VI, Nurnberg 1543.
• 65. before that, from 1401 – 1464, the individuality of Copernicus was incarnated as Nicholas of Cusa: the relationship of these two individualities was presented in greater detail in the lectures given in 1909, ‘Das Prinzip der spirituellen Oekonomie im Zusammenhang mit Wiederverkoerperungsfragen. Ein Aspekt der geistigen Führung der Menscheit’ (The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Relation to Questions of Reincarnation. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Mankind), GA 109/111 Dornach, 1965. Nicholas of Cusa: 1401 – 64. Wrote his work ‘De docta ignorantia Libri III’ in 1440.
• 66. since the founding of the Middle European section of the Theosophical Society: see Rudolf Steiner ‘The Anthroposophical Movement, its History and Life-Conditions in Relation to the Anthroposophical Society; an Occasion for Self-Recollection’, 8 lectures Dornach, June, 1923; London, 1933.
• 67. Here in Switzerland we have given lecture cycles on the four Gospels: ‘Das Johannes-Evangelium’ (The Gospel of St. John), 8 lectures, Basle, November 1907, in ‘Menschheitsentwicklung und Christuserkenntnis’ (Human Evolution and Knowledge of Christ) GA 100 Dornach, 1967; ‘The Gospel of St. Luke’. 10 lectures, Basle, September, 1909, Rudolf Steiner Press London, 1975; ‘The Gospel of St. Matthew’, 12 lectures, Berne, September 1910, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965; ‘The Gospel of St. Mark’, 10 lectures, Basle, September, 1912, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1977.
• 68. sermon of Benares: Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment: ‘The eightfold path, the cause of suffering and the alleviation of suffering.’

Dear attendees!

It is in a deeply moved and earnest frame of mind that I now speak these first words in this room that are dedicated to spiritual science. The mood must be serious. The need of the time stands in the background and all that which has led out of a negative spiritual life into this need of the time. But before my soul stands today also all that which has been done out of such a time by understanding souls who are enthusiastic for the development of the spiritual future of humanity, so that this building, in which we are now beginning the first college course in spiritual science, could be led at least up to this stage. Our thoughts must arise out of the spirit of the school of thought meant here, with the greatest gratitude for the beautiful attitude and its power, which was present in all the material and spiritual helpers in bringing about what is to come about here. And above all, I would now also like to address those numerous friends of our cause who have come here for this course. Those who have come here for this course are showing that they at least expect something from what is being done here, something that the serious need of our time, the particular state of our spiritual life in the present, demands.

By appearing here and wanting to attend the course, you are, in a sense, announcing how you expect that the powerful call of the time will be heard from these spiritual experiences, and that efforts will be made to serve the tasks to which this call of the time points. In this solemn and serious moment, it cannot be my task, esteemed attendees, to give the first of the lectures that this course is intended to offer. Everything that our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to bring will be presented to those present through the course itself, initially in a preliminary form. I would only like to speak about the intentions and goals that should prevail here.

Those who feel today that a new spirit must be brought to bear on the social ills and the ills of humanity as a whole often think at the same time: Let us take the science that has been cultivated in the lecture halls for a long time, let us popularize it, let us bring it to the people, who, through ignorance, are drifting into chaos, and it will be seen that the spread of intellectual life must result in an ascent of our civilization.

The work that is to be done here is based on a different conviction, the conviction that the science that has prevailed in its direction for three to four centuries, and which has essentially contributed to the decline, will bear no fruit if it is carried out of its narrow spaces into the expanses of folk education centers, folk high schools and the like. Here the conviction is effective that a new spirit of science must be carried into the lecture halls from new spiritual sources of research, into all the individual disciplines. If we did not have this conviction, we could rightly be mistaken for one of the sects that are opening up so numerously in today's confusing times, to put themselves, so to speak, alongside what is otherwise being done in the way of spiritual life. We do not want to be such a sect. And all our efforts are not geared towards being such a sect. All our efforts are geared towards making a contribution to the living spiritual life, to everything that contributes to the development of humanity in a broad sense.

This building is an outward sign of this. It does not stand there as chosen from any of the traditional architectural styles. It stands there in terms of its forms, its artistic language, as an original creature from the spirit of this spiritual research, which is to be carried out in it. And just as the material form surrounding the spoken word is intended to fulfill this purpose, so too should the spoken word have enough living power to penetrate far into all those spheres of life that need to be renewed and transformed if we are to overcome the impending decline and achieve a new spiritual ascent. That is why, in recent times, a broad social endeavor has been driven out of what is called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here. The aim here is not to strive in theoretical, abstract seclusion, but in harmony with everything that can advance humanity in any field.

This, esteemed attendees, is connected with the tragedy of our time, that such unity has not been sought, that the search for such unity has been gradually lost for centuries, and that this loss has reached its highest peak in the present day. When we consider such things, we must, of necessity, cast our eyes back into the primeval times of human development, when, out of an instinctive, original wisdom, that which now confronts us as a trinity was born: art, science and religion. There were times in the development of humanity – and I hope that the proof of what I am now only hinting at can be provided within the course itself – there were times in the development of humanity when there were no separate educational institutions, no separate churches, no separate art institutions; rather, there was a unified activity that was both artistically discerning and religiously oriented. There were places that can be called mysteries, where an art was cultivated that was both religion and science at the same time, where a religion was cultivated that expressed the artistic striving of the time in its cults , in which a science was cultivated that, out of the spirituality from which it arose, led directly to those divine sources of human and world existence that are to be experienced in religious feeling.

Of all the aspects that were once part of this unity, I would say that art is the one that has most closely adhered to its original form. Until very recently, art remained, I would say, the child of the ancient mysteries that remained young, the child through which our culture seeks to incorporate the spirituality in which the human being can live into external material. All that spirituality that has emerged from the original instincts of mankind had to be paralyzed in the course of cultural development. It must be regained. What mankind once possessed in instincts, what it had to lose in this form, must be regained in freedom and with full consciousness, so that man can strive for it again out of freedom.

Art, in a sense the childlike child of the ancient mysteries, but it was also seized by the gradual paralysis of inner human spirituality in recent times. So that this art gradually had to flee into unreality, while once everything that man had experienced in terms of deep religious feeling and will, everything that man had experienced in terms of deep spiritual knowledge, was incorporated into his artistic creations, so that spiritual reality was revealed to him through his artistic creations. All this, there is nothing more that today's science goes to, nothing more that today's religiosity goes to. Art gradually embodied the spirit, but one no longer had the spirit as a living thing. And so one felt that which art presented as something spiritual, but as something unreal, as something that should arise from mere fantasy. I would like to say, using the Greek word in its sense, that our art gradually turned from cosmism into acosmism, moving away from the beauty of the universe in faith. That people sought a way out for art in naturalism, in the imitation of an external sensual-physical reality, only proves that they had lost access to those sources of spiritual life from which the creative artist must shape in every field of art if art is to be a revelation in spiritual life.

And so we have an acosmic, an unreal art emerging in our most recent age and up to the present. Why did it emerge? Because the original, artistic-religious-cognitive unity has formed the trinity, which gradually lost its connection: art, science, religion. Science, which had separated from the old mystery being, from its siblings religion and art, gradually pushed towards where the one naturalism exists for it, where it can no longer grasp the underlying spirituality of nature from the spirituality in the human soul, where it is only able to grasp the external sensual-physical fact through experiment or observation. This science, it became, out of what once strove out of instincts for knowledge of the spirit behind nature, a science that can be described as agnosticism. And this agnosticism, which actually came about through the observation of nature and through the experiment on nature, only to be able to establish for itself: I am no longer exactly, I am no longer really understanding nature, when I ascend into spiritual regions, this agnosticism cannot give that warmth to the soul, it cannot give that light to the spirit that leads to a real art created from the spirit. Acosmism in art gradually became agnosticism in science.

That which once lived united with art and science as religion in the mysteries became more and more separated and became a mere inward matter of the soul. And if we follow its course – this course is intended to present it – we find that what once offered man such a rich religious content, indeed in an ancient form, a content so rich that the human soul, after it stood there physically born into the world, felt reborn, reborn out of soul and spirit alongside the physical birth, this religious impulse, it lost its content. And that is precisely the tragedy of the present day: that alongside acosmic art and agnostic science, an atheistic religion is becoming more and more prevalent, especially among those who so that what once belonged together, primal art, primal religion and primal science, is now gradually becoming more and more acosmism, agnosticism, atheism in the broadest sense.

What today may be heard only by a few in its full meaning and strength - those who want to establish anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, they feel it strongly. That is why they want to open up the sources of spiritual research that leads, in turn, to the life that man lives with his surroundings, to seeing, to seeing a spirit behind the perception of the sensory world. From this seeing of the supersensible in the sensual, the power to implant a creative power of art will arise again. One would like so much to be able to feel how, however, a first weak attempt has been made in this construction to express the spiritual content of the outer forms through the living comprehension and living observation of the spiritual and supersensible world. And this observation of the supersensible in the sensual should lead to art, to the recognition and comprehension of the supersensible by the human spirit in science. Our science, in turn, should become spiritual, then it will, by recognizing, ignite inwardly in the human soul, so that not abstract ideas arise from this human soul, not abstract laws of nature arise, but that living spiritual experience that expresses itself in ideas, but that is also powerful and capable of shaping itself in art.

Alongside such a seeing art, such a spiritual science, there must arise what may be called a religious mood and feeling, which emerges from all this and unites again with all this in a unified way. Just as art must become a seeing of the supersensible, science a knowing of the supersensible, so religion must become an experiencing of the supersensible. How could a science that aims to lead to the beholding of the supersensible in art and to the comprehension of the supersensible in understanding, act differently than to create a religious mood that leads to the experience of the supersensible? Out of such a religious mood, man will learn anew to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, which has placed itself before the development of mankind in order to reveal to man, through the divinity of Christ that appeared on earth, how that which is born sensually must be reborn in the supersensible in order to attain a fully human existence.

We would like to bring three new forces to creative expression from spiritual sources: a seeing art again, a recognition of the supersensible as spiritual science, an experience of the supersensible for the rebirth of soul and spirit in that religion, the mood of which must be formed out of this art and this science. We are not only convinced that what is to be born as a force in this way, but we who work here have an insight into it, so that we can carry it into the individual branches of human cultural life, into all the details of our present-day social life, that which can arise from the new trinity, from the observing art, from spiritually grasping science, from religion newly experiencing rebirth in the supersensible, from all this for the living existence of humanity. This building should be dedicated to this task.

How wonderful it would be if I could say today that this building is complete, that this building could be handed over for its intended purpose, that after seven years of work – because seven years ago we laid the foundation stone for this building here – that after seven years of work this building could be handed over for its intended purpose. I cannot do that. For much remains to be done, many sacrifices will still have to be made before this building can reach its completion. So today we are not opening this building, but we want to present to the world, provisionally at first, in this college course, what we believe from our spiritual stream, even in this unfinished building.

And so those who have come to this course are not led into the finished building, but, I would like to say, are first led in, so that they may perhaps - as we expect, confidently expect - gain the conviction from what they will hear here: Yes, the building must be finished. And so we may hope that those among whom we may find understanding will help us in every possible and necessary way to complete this, our building.

Therefore, and no less gratefully, I thank all those who have brought this building to its present stage from the spirit of our spiritual science. It is out of this gratitude and satisfaction that I turn first to those who, as older or younger members of the Anthroposophical Society, have come here today in such large numbers to work with us on what is to be worked out of a new spirit for the progress of humanity.

But I turn especially to those visitors to our course who belong to the student body in various countries. To them, these students, I would like to say that it gives me the deepest satisfaction to see them here, because I believe that, although it has been a long time since I belonged to the student body, I can still feel among them in the truest and best sense. Because that which strives as has been characterized here, must be striven for primarily out of youthful spirit and youthful zeal. Combine your youthful strength with the seriousness that resides in those who work here for spiritual science out of serious need of the times, and that which the need of the times demands so urgently must succeed. Therefore, above all, welcome!

It has already been shown in practice in many ways how the spirit of spiritual science at work here affects the human mind of our contemporaries. We have often noticed it, and in the last few days it has been noticed here in particular, how those workers who had to do hard work either downstairs in the accommodation building or up here on the building site, so that everything could be completed in time for our friends to be here and for the course to could begin, we have seen how these workers, who have to work hard, want to work harmoniously and fraternally with those who work here spiritually, really working long overtime hours so that what is to begin here today can come about. It is particularly gratifying in our socially troubled times to welcome as a manifestation of the times that such a thing has become possible here, out of the spirit of work.

And so it will be seen that, basically, peace and harmony will spring from all that is drawn from spiritual sources here, if only it is allowed to sprout. We can happily leave it to others to create disharmony and discord.

Another sign of the times, ladies and gentlemen, is that thirty-five personalities have come together to carry our spirit into all the individual sciences, who will pursue spiritual science from the most diverse points of view in our course. Thirty-five lecturers will carry what is to be given here as a spiritual impulse, one may say, into seventeen different branches of human knowledge and feeling and work. We will hear lectures on special parts of spiritual science, we will hear lectures on philosophy, theology, on history, on linguistics, on physics and mathematics, on chemistry and medicine, on Indology, on jurisprudence and pedagogy. We shall hear what artistic natures have to say about the spiritual foundations and the spiritual forces of their art. We shall hear what the creative spirit in poetry has to say about its connection with our spiritual science. Eminent personalities from the field of technology will speak, and, particularly welcome, we shall hear from practitioners of economics and business. And it is one of the advances that we are striving for above all, that life is understood as a unity, that what leads up to philosophical heights forms a unity with what the factory director has to utilize in his factory practice in practical life down to the last detail, that factory practitioners will speak within our course, we welcome it with particular joy.

Because, dear attendees, not the cultural direction is truly spiritual that says one must seek the spirit in cloud heights, far from all materiality, the cultural direction contains real spirit that out of this spirit becomes the power to carry it, this spirit, everywhere into material life, into everyday life, into the difficulties of the machine, into the difficulties of commercial life. Only that is spiritual which knows how to carry the spirit into matter.

Therefore, in addition to philosophical lectures, this course will include something that is to be welcomed with particular joy: “The Industrialist in the Past and Future from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”. It will also include what practitioners have to say from a commercial and economic point of view. If we look through the list of our lectures and our lecturers, we can already say, my dear attendees, that this spiritual scientific endeavor has already borne fruit. It has already had an inspiring effect on a number of personalities who feel the strength within themselves to dare to try not only to show the individual sciences and also practical branches of life in the light of this spiritual science, but to show how the practical becomes even more practical, the cognitive even more powerful through the impulse of spiritual science, which is to be given here.

Of course, it should not be thought immodestly here - that would be against the spirit of spiritual science - but a right volition arises only from a genuine conviction, from a cognizant conviction. Therefore, it is perhaps not immodesty, but only what, I would like to say, flows naturally from the forces gained from spiritual research, when it is said to the one what is the need of the time, to the one what is already being characterized by enlightened minds as necessary currents of decline , which is almost characterized as if it were inevitably leading to the decline of the whole Western civilization. Something should be set against it here, out of the power of artistic, cognitive, religiously intimate and social will, that can lead to the ascent, to the building of a new civilization.

Therefore, out of modesty, but at the same time out of the conviction gained from spiritual science itself, we call upon all those whom we would like to see here today, who want to join us in our work, to express the spirit in which we want to meet here:

To turn to the light
In dark times of need,
To the dawn of the spirit,
Send the soul's gaze:
Let it be the will of man here
And remain so for evermore.