The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I tried to speak of certain inner experiences which can be called the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world.

We heard how occult reading and occult hearing are very living inner experiences to which the whole personality, the whole soul must be dedicated. I mentioned three such experiences for which careful preparation has to be made. One of these arises when we learn gradually to enter with consciousness that supersensible world in which we always are, but unconsciously, and thereby reach the Gate of Death. I also spoke of the experience which comes when we acquire the so-called faculty of transforming ourselves into other beings. And then I tried to show how we can so regard evil in the world that we recognise its origin in a misuse of higher spiritual forces which in their place and in their own mode of working are entirely justified.

Another such experience comes if we. take in earnest something that is linked with the last. We must transform ourselves into other beings but in such a way that the threads of inner soul-experiences are held intact. If they cannot be held intact it is just the same as when a man on the physical plane cannot remember what happened yesterday or some years ago in his physical life. Just as this continuity of experience has to be maintained in normal physical life, so the connecting thread must be maintained through the transformations in the spiritual world. This means that when a human being has transformed himself into a certain being or event he must not lose himself. He must retain a kind of higher, purely spiritual memory of other forms, processes and beings of the spiritual world. In other words: man has to become a multiple being, to ‘split up’ as it were in the spiritual world, to be able to divide himself. This inner experience produces a strange feeling: ‘You are here, you are this being, but you are also another being. You are within separate beings.’ Without this feeling of multiplicity, we should never be able to attain a real picture, for example, of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Along the paths we described yesterday and along others too we can get a picture of the Angeloi, the Hierarchy immediately above us. But to reach a more spiritually adequate picture of the Archangeloi, we must understand through inner feeling something of the experience of being multiplied. For it is only gradually that we learn to understand these Beings of the Hierarchies. We only gradually learn to understand because in the physical world all human conceptions, all human thoughts are bound up with the ordinary conditions of space and time. But quite different conditions of space and time exist when we ascend to the Beings of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi.

Starting from the ordinary physical consciousness, we have a certain basic feeling which is quite natural to this physical consciousness. If, for instance, through seership, I want to approach a human being who is living between death and a new birth, then—I am not speaking of myself here but quite generally, of one who has seership and is seeking for a dead soul—I have this feeling: ‘The dead is there, together with me!’ So far as the time element is concerned I can seek him just as on the physical plane I can seek another human being who is a contemporary ... it is only a matter of finding the way to him. When we are seeking one who is dead, this idea is also quite correct. In a certain sense it is still correct when it is a question of finding a Being of the Hierarchy of Angeloi. But it is no longer correct if we are seeking for a Being of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi, because such a Being has concentrated his consciousness at a time that is not our present time.

Suppose this line represents the flow of time. If the seer lives at this point, 1914, and is seeking a dead soul or a Being of the rank of the Angeloi, he finds that Being somewhere in the spiritual world at the same point of time. But this does not succeed if we are trying, for instance, to find a certain Being of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

In this case we have to transcend time, to overcome the principle of synchronism (Gleichzeitigkeit). In order to find a certain Archangelos we must go back, for example, to the fifteenth century. Thus we do not remain in our own epoch. Supposing this were the year 1914, we have to go back, say, to the year 146.5. and seek there (EE) for the Archangelos. His influence, it is true, rays over into our own epoch but here we have merely the influence, we do not find the Archangelos in his own real identity. Other Archangeloi must be sought for at different points (see the upper circles in the diagram). We have to go beyond time. It is a difficult conception, but we have to reach it.

We must realise that the name ‘Archangelos’ has meaning. We know for the first time why they have this name when we find them in the way described. They are ‘Angeloi of the Beginnings.’ They are always to be found at the beginnings of epochs of time on the stage of world-history. It is there that we find them in their full consciousness, in their real self; this remains through the following epochs in the influences streaming into the flow of time. To find the Archangeloi we must not remain in the present; we must go out of time and seek for the beginnings of epochs. Thus, nobody whose soul is only able to live, let us say, in October 1914, is in a position to find all the Archangeloi—perhaps not even one. This is possible only to one who can transfer his soul back into other epochs, in such a way that he can actually experience those other epochs, live in those other epochs.

But then it is necessary not to forget how we got there—just as in the physical world we must not forget what we did yesterday. This is a law of the multiplicity, of the outpouring into number.

And as regards the Primal Beginnings, the Spirits of Personality, the Archai, we find them only by going back to the middle of the Lemurian epoch, when the Earth was at the beginning of its physical evolution. There we find the Archai in their essential nature. We cannot find the Archai if we remain in the present.

Thus, you can see that the whole relation of the soul to time must change before we can penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge.

What We experience in this way—or even if we envisage these things and continue to feel them inwardly—imparts a kind of mood to the soul, a feeling of being outpoured into spiritual reality. This again is a ‘vowel’ in the spiritual world.

You can see how in the way described a man becomes more and more independent of the standpoint of Space, of the standpoint of Time, which are his in the physical world. He does not only go out of himself, but also into something: into the living weaving and working of the Cosmos, not only one-pointedly, inasmuch as he experiences himself in the spheres of Space, but many-sidedly, inasmuch as he experiences himself in Time as a living being, having in himself the centres of consciousness of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When, therefore, a man no longer lives only in himself, no longer even in the Space and Time known to him as a physical being, but when he has ‘taken Space to his body’ and ‘Time to his soul’—mark this well, for its full meaning only dawns upon us gradually—when he has taken Space to his body and Time to his soul, he then experiences something that is not an abstract feeling in spiritual generality, but a living weaving and working in a cosmic existence full of meaning. Everywhere there is meaning; it pours into his soul. Universal meaning, weaving and living in the Universe forms itself out of individual meaning. The meaning of things bursts forth like fruit out of many centres. And the Spiritual bursting forth in the single individual meanings weaves itself into a Cosmic Word that is full of meaning. Man lives and weaves within the Cosmic Word. This experience again is another vowel of the spiritual world—the original, primal vowel of the spiritual world. This experiencing of the Cosmic Word which must be pictured in its living wealth and not merely as a spiritual hearing, is Inspiration in the higher sense. With this Inspiration we can say: ‘What I know in this Cosmic Word, the Cosmic Word knows in me. It is not I who know, but the Cosmos knows in me. I fall short in knowledge of the Cosmic Word only because I am an imperfect instrument which can only let the Cosmic Word sound into me in broken streams. But it is the Cosmic Word itself which sounds in me.’

Humility increases the more we succeed in surrendering ourselves selflessly, without any pretentiousness in regard to our own achievement, our thinking, feeling and willing. The more we succeed in letting the Cosmic Word hold sway in the weaving of our own being, the more objectively do we reproduce, through the Cosmic Word, the mysteries pervading the universe.

Thus, again we have spoken of a cosmic vowel. As I can tell you only the essential principles, I wanted to give you an idea—although quite a primitive one—of what may be called the ‘vowels’ of cosmic Being.

When a man is inwardly schooled in such feelings as I have described them in these five cosmic vowels, when he can experience what can be experienced in the life of soul as an echo of these feelings, then the soul can listen to what is going on in the spiritual world and is there in the spiritual world. And then the spiritual world can speak to the soul.

What is it that happens when real communion with the spiritual world is cultivated in the way described? Ego and astral body—but the Ego has reached a higher stage because it has become selfless and has been submerged in the astral body—Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. With his Ego and astral body man is outside the physical and etheric bodies when, during life between birth and death, he is engaged in acts of spiritual perception; but he looks back to the etheric body and it is the etheric body that reflects these ‘vowels.’

The etheric body has the power of a seven-fold reflection. I have spoken of five of these reflections. There are still two other experiences of which we could speak if it were possible to go into greater detail. But the characteristic weaving and working of the etheric body, what it reflects in its life-processes, may be described as these ‘vowels.’ In other words: something happens in the etheric body when a man has developed the feelings connected with the experience of standing at the Gate of Death, or is able to face Evil with understanding, or when he lives in the Cosmic Word. According to the particular mood with which he confronts the spiritual world, something is reflected in the etheric body which he is then able to perceive. It is very difficult to describe these things. Cosmic Being reflects itself in a sevenfold way in the etheric body. Let me make a diagram.

If this represents man's etheric body (quite diagrammatically)—then, if a man confronts the spiritual world with the feeling that arises from the preparation for standing at the Gate of Death, his etheric body is as it were compressed up to here, at a, and acquires a certain radiance and resonance. And out of this radiance and resonance proceeds something that may be called one of the vowels of the spiritual world.

If a different mood is developed, the etheric body concentrates in another region—let us say, in the region of the heart (b). A different radiance and resonance are perceived, as emanating from the being into whom the Ego and astral body have been transposed.

What I have said up to now has referred to the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world. But there are also ‘consonants’ of the spiritual world, twelve consonants. We get at these consonants most easily by taking the physical body in the same way as we have taken the etheric body with its ‘vowels.’ The physical body is then revealed in its twelve-foldness.

There is not sufficient time even to hint how we can experience the twelve-foldness of the physical body as we have experienced the seven-foldness of the etheric body. But this I must say: To a man who is conscious outside his physical and etheric bodies, they become something quite different from what they are when he is living in them. The etheric body, then, is what contains the life-process which makes us living beings. The physical body is that which builds up the organism of our senses. We are within and we use our physical and etheric bodies to make us the beings we are on the physical plane. But when, in the sense indicated, we are outside the physical and etheric bodies, they appear to us as signs. True, the etheric body is still composed of life; but its task, that of being the life-principle of our physical organism, does not now reveal itself. The etheric body reveals itself as the signs of the seven vowels. It becomes objective, something at which we look and which in its variability and mobility becomes the ‘vowels’ of the Cosmic All. We become as foreign to our etheric body as to the vowels of physical script. And we become as foreign to the physical body—which is now revealed as a totality of twelve consonants brought together- as we are to the consonants of ordinary script. And just as consonants and vowels interpenetrate in the words of ordinary script, enabling us to read or hear, so in the spiritual world do we hear or read the etheric body which reveals itself in a sevenfold aspect by being joined with two or with three consonants of the physical body. On the physical plane, when we meet a human being we can understand him because he speaks to us, perhaps also by gesture or facial expression—but we must have eyes to see and ears to let the word enter our soul. Just as everything that constitutes a relationship to other human beings is transmitted by way of the senses, a similar thing happens in the spiritual world.

We prepare ourselves, let us say, to find a human soul who is living between death and a new birth. We know through inner experience that we are now united with that soul, that we are having experiences with it at the same time and in the same place in the spiritual world. Just as in the physical world we have sense-organs in order to come, to terms with other human beings, so in the spiritual world we have to look back to the etheric body and the physical body. And in their interplay, they reflect how the single processes of the etheric body are joined with those of the physical body—vowel processes with consonant processes. This interplay expresses the speech that is going on with the soul of the dead and is therefore necessary for understanding that soul.

Try to picture the following.—In the spiritual world you are united with the soul of one who is dead and is living between death and a new birth. You look back on your physical form which you can observe because you lived or are living in it on the physical plane; you also look back on the etheric form, and this reflects back all that you speak with the dead, what he has to communicate to you, what he is thinking, feeling and willing. The etheric and physical bodies have become one collective sense-organ. And we can say: In our physical life we have received the physical and etheric bodies so that we may have sense-organs for the spiritual world. A new light is now thrown on the truth that life in the physical world is not merely life in a vale of sorrow of which we must long to get rid, as false asceticism teaches. We realise that life in the physical world has its sublime, divine mission. Within the physical world we acquire what becomes sense-organs for the spiritual world.

You will understand this still more precisely if I tell you about the perception of spiritual beings and happenings when we ourselves are living between death and a new birth, that is to say, when we are not seeing the spiritual world clairvoyantly from the physical plane but are united in the spiritual world with spiritual beings. As long as we bear a physical and an etheric body as a garment, so long have we instruments for reflecting; these bodies serve us as sense-organs. When we lay aside these bodies at death, we naturally no longer have them as external realities. You may easily ask: Does this mean that in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, we cannot become aware of what we experience in connection with the other beings and processes of the spiritual world? But then everything is different, we become aware of it differently I Even the seer in the physical world must have what he experiences in the spiritual world reflected by the physical and etheric bodies. This is correct as long as he is living in the physical world, as long as the physical body has not passed away through decay m•; to the physical world and the etheric body through dissolution into the spiritual world. When we are in the spiritual world and no longer have physical and etheric bodies, then we are able, out of what is the substance of the spiritual world, to form the world of signs out of which the physical body was put together, and also the world of signs out of which the etheric body was given shape.

Suppose, as a soul between death and a new birth, you are to live together with another human being. You are aware of this common life. What the other soul says to you or you say to him expresses itself spiritually in such a way that you inscribe into the spiritual world what, in other circumstances, would have been reflected. But now with your own power you inscribe the picture into the spiritual world. What you otherwise express in the signs of the physical and etheric bodies, in vowels or consonants, you now inscribe, you actually inscribe with your own power into the spiritual world, into the Akashic Record, what you are saying to the other soul—obliterating it again, figuratively speaking, when it is no longer needed.

These communications and experiences are to be read and heard in the spiritual world as the result of mutual activity on the part of the souls.

I gave the first indications of these things at the beginning of the chapter in my book Theosophy, where the so-called ‘Spirit-Land’ is described. It is there said that at a certain stage of development in Devachan, in the ‘Spirit-Land,’ the human being sees his previous incarnation in the ‘Continental Region’ of the Spirit-Land. It is an inscription of a spiritual record.

The ideal would be if study of a book like Theosophy were so zealous that many a reader, from the indications given there, would arrive at these things for himself. There is a very great deal in these books and merely through one's own reading—if the contents are read with the heart and experienced with deep inwardness—everything can be gleaned from them. But books on Spiritual Science are, as a rule, not read with the attention that they really require. If they had been so read, after Theosophy and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and perhaps also Occult Science—an Outline, had been written, the lecture-courses could have been written or given by someone else than me. Everything, really, is contained in these books, only people do not generally believe it. And how much could be written if everything contained in the Mystery Plays were really to be assimilated 1 I am not saying this for advertisement's sake—I have already said enough about the humility of the occultist and the spiritual investigator—but I say it in order to stimulate genuine reading of the writings which had to be given out precisely in our epoch, and for which one really has, personally, so little merit.

So you see that the human being, as he lives on the physical plane, develops something in regard to the spiritual worlds which can be a seed for experiences in these higher worlds. The etheric body of man as it is in the physical world is not only his life-principle, but it is at the same time an instrument of preparation for unfolding understanding of the vowels of the spiritual world. And the physical body also is an instrument of preparation for experiencing the consonants of the spiritual world.

Much can be done if we try in all earnestness to get rid of the purely materialistic conception of the human physical body. Much can be done in the way of preparation in order that these feelings for the vowels and consonants of the Cosmos, these inner experiences and impulses in the soul may awaken. For this preparation we must call up an experience which, as regards development into the higher worlds, is somewhat similar to what a child must do in order to be able to read in the physical world—what it must do in order to learn the words of our physical language.

With the materialistic conception of the physical body, this body is taken just as it presents itself in the physical sense. It is as though somebody were to write down the signs: I N K. ... and then someone comes and says that he will investigate it. This is how we approach the physical body. It is looked at as though it were a scroll with flourishes going up here and down there ... and then it is described. Heart, lung, and so on, are described just as they present themselves externally.

This really is the way it is done. But the only people who get anything out of it are those who have learnt to read the word ‘ink’ out of the signs.

Thus, must we ascend from the physical plane into the higher spiritual worlds with the experiences of which we have spoken to-day. What we learn to read and hear in this way is an individual experience of the soul. But we can prepare if in the physical world we try to comprehend the physical body in its sign-nature. What is meant by this?

I will give you a brief example of understanding this sign-nature. I can do it only very briefly and must leave it to your own earnest meditation to see what is meant. For in many cases speech is not really adequate for understanding these things. It will become adequate only when Spiritual Science has worked for a while in the world and has given the words a stamp which really links them with spiritual activity and spiritual reality. Speech must become more pliant, and this will only be possible when contact with Spiritual Science has been cultivated for some hundreds of years and people have become accustomed to taking words differently from what is the case to-day when they are applied only to things and happenings of the physical plane. Now for the examples.

We find what transpires in the human head to-day enclosed in the bony formation of the skull. There it all is. With a few exceptions it is all physically shut up, as it were, inside. When we begin really to think about the human head, and not merely describe it in its material appearance, we find a tremendous significance in the fact that inside it complicated processes are going on which are shut in practically on all sides by a bony sheath. One part of the physical human being is separated off, surrounded on all sides by the hardest substance, namely that of the bones. It is, however, only a part of the human organism. The human being is by no means a simple entity! The primitiveness of the ideas prevailing at the present time are revealed by the criticisms of my books which grumble at someone who speaks of a Sentient Soul, a Mind-Soul and a Consciousness—or Spiritual Soul, whereas it was a splendid achievement—so it is said—to have been able to conceive of the soul as a unit. It is understandable that our materialistic culture should prefer the hotchpotch that goes by the name of Psychology to-day, to the real membering of the soul. These members of the soul are a reality; they belong to different worlds and are not designated without reason. It is comprehensible that modern culture should consider this foolish, but thereby it simply characterises itself, not what it condemns.

The physical organism of man is highly complicated and study of it may give rise to the following thoughts which may, certainly, seem foolish to those who call themselves scientists to-day. Yes … but St. Paul said that much that is wisdom in the eyes of God is foolishness in the eyes of men. And so perhaps it will be profitable to think of this ‘foolishness in the eyes of men’ which may be ‘wisdom in the eyes of God.’

Let us think about the following.—What about our hands? Our hands are quite definitely connected with our soul. If anyone has a living feeling for what goes on in his hands, it is not without significance if what he says to another human being expresses itself in the gestures of his hands. This means something in itself! I will pass over many of the intermediate steps, leaving this to your own meditation. Just suppose that as the result, not of a process emanating from the human body, but of a process rooted in the Cosmos, our hands were not formed in such a way that we could move them freely or make them follow our will. Suppose our hands were fettered to our body, were obliged to remain quite rigid, having been affixed to the body, as it were from outside, by external Nature. How would things be then? We should have hands but be unable to move them. But if we had hands and could not use them, we should still have the urge to do so! Although we could not move them physically, we should always be wanting to move the etheric hands! The physical hands would lie still, the etheric hands would move. This, in reality, is what we do with our brain. Certain lobes of the brain which now lie enclosed in the skull were freely mobile during the Old Moon evolution. To-day they are rigid and can no longer move physically. But they do move etherically, when we think. We move the etheric brain when we think. If we had not this firm skull enclosing the lobes of the brain, we should stretch out with these lobes and make gestures with them—gestures such as we now make with the hands—but we should not think. The lobes of the brain had first to be made physically rigid and it had to be possible for the etheric brain to tear itself free.

What I am now saying is not fantasy. The time will come when our hands and much else too will become rigid. This will be in the Jupiter epoch. That which to-day appears so free—attached as it were to the heart-region—will then be enclosed by a sheath, just as the brain to-day is enclosed by a skull. That which is most visibly expressed in the hands is something that is preparing to become an organ of thought. For the time being we have only rudimentary organs which at present are small structures because they have not fully developed. Suppose that to-day we had only certain portions of the skull here in front ... behind there are the shoulder-blades. They lie in the plane which later on will enclose the brain of the future. You have a true conception of the shoulder-blades in the human body when you regard them as small pieces of bone which really belong to a skull that will form—only the other parts have not yet developed. Therewith you have, as it were, added a second man to the first. Moreover—and here I shall say something very strange—there are other organs in the body which are also pieces of another skull which will develop in a still more distant future. These organs are now quite tiny compared with the organism as a whole: they are the knee-caps. The knee-caps are now these tiny surfaces—mere indications which later on will turn into a different spiritual organ. We characterise the human organism aright if we say (though this is only one isolated example): The human being has, in reality, three skulls. One is fairly well developed, shut off on all sides. The second has only pieces, in the shoulder-blades, the third only in the knee-caps. But the two latter—shoulder-blades and knee-caps—can, in thought, be expanded and rounded off into spherical forms. Thus, we get three brains. What we are as inner men is only slightly developed externally in the second brain. To-day it manifests externally; later on it will become an inner brain. When you make gestures with your hands to-day you are preparing for what will be thoughts later on—thoughts which will be quite as capable of grasping processes of the elemental world as your head now grasps the processes of the physical world. And strange though it sounds: everything lying outside and beyond the knee-caps, that is to say, the lower legs, the feet—these are still quite imperfect organs connected with the gravity of the Earth. These organs, in conjunction with what they receive spiritually from the Earth to-day, are preparing to become not only physical but spiritual organs, which will lead into the spiritual worlds when the Earth is replaced by the later Venus evolution. The present physical form must fall away and something else take its place.

So you see, much, very much is contained in the occult study of the world. The most important is not that we know: This or that book exists and contains this and that concerning the higher worlds. That is not the most important. What the books contain must, naturally, be assimilated because that is the only way of finding what is right and true. But the necessary thing is a certain ‘temper’ of the soul, whereby a man relates himself in a new way to the world, whereby he learns to have a different view of the things of the world. The important thing is that by this reading we prepare for the inner mobility and movement of the life of thought, for the weaving of thought, for the experience of thought-in-itself; that we also prepare to see the physical world in a different way. For even in their outer form things are not as they seem. Strange as it sounds, the shoulder-blade is not what you see physically. That it has such definite limits is Maya, is false. The shoulder-blade expands, when we really set about comprehending it, into an organ with much greater detail. And when we see a man kneeling, we should gradually get the impression: That is a false picture! The knee-caps there, those tiny parts, are illusory; this kneeling man is surrounded by a great spherical surface and he lives within that orb. The surface becomes a sphere and when a man prays he is preparing himself in the brain to live in the sphere in which he will live when the sphere of which the knee-caps are only tiny parts, encloses him.

Thus, we gradually learn to read in the physical world. We do not merely look at a man kneeling or making some gesture, but we begin to realise that although what presents itself immediately, is reality, none the less it is false and untrue. In the ‘letters’ we learn what the Cosmos is, not only in the present but what it expresses in its ‘Becoming.’ A man in prayer becomes, in his form, what the Venus man will sometime be. Thus, do we learn, step by step, to decipher, interpret, read in the true sense, and grasp the world as it really is. The physical world is no more than a written page before us. If we only stare at it, we can observe it without being able to read it at all. Neither do we know anything of the world if we look at it merely with the faculty of physical perception, for then we do not decipher, we do not really penetrate into the world. We must read the world, learn its meaning.

If we become more and more conscious that the world is a book which the Hierarchies have written for us, in order that we may read in it, then only do we become Man in the full sense of the word. The building on which we are working is intended in its form to draw out those feelings and intimate moods of soul which make us capable of reading the world and of hearing the secrets of the Universe. The building is as it is in order that it may draw out what is within us—a certain part, at least.

It is good, my dear friends, to take a picture in our meditations of the task which Spiritual Science has in the world over against what is in the world to-day; it is good to picture what must develop out of Spiritual Science and how Spiritual Science must find its way into the further development of history.

If only there could be in the Anthroposophical Society a body of human beings filled with the living consciousness that Spiritual Science has to be worked and woven into the evolution of humanity!

It was not merely in order to impart truths to you, but to stimulate such feelings in your souls, my dear friends, that I have given these lectures.

It can be said that the original purpose of festivals was to induce men to look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things; and it is the Easter Festival in particular that can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries of civilization we have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has led man farther and farther away from a clear conception of his connection with cosmic forces and powers. He has become ever more reduced to contemplating only his relation to earthly forces and powers, and it is quite true that with the means recognized today as legitimate it could not be otherwise. If someone imbued with the old Mysteries in the pre-Christian or early Christian centuries could learn of our modern knowledge, and if he approached the matter in the frame of mind prevalent in those days, he would not be able to understand how man could live without an awareness of his extra-earthly, cosmic connection.

I shall now merely sketch various matters which you will find dealt with in detail in this or that cycle. As these lectures are intended especially to acquaint you with the Easter idea there is naturally no time to elaborate all the points that I shall merely indicate.

Harking back to the various older systems of religion, we may take as an example the one with which the closest contact still persists: the Hebrew-Jewish system. In certain religious systems of Antiquity, provided they are monotheistic, we find the veneration, the worship, of a single divinity. It is the divinity we speak of in our Christian conception as the First Person of all divinity, as the Father-God.

Now, in all religions embodying the idea of this Father-God there obtained to a greater or lesser degree the connection of this Father-God with the cosmic Moon forces streaming down to Earth; and the Mystery priests in particular were fully aware of it. Nowadays little remains of this old awareness of the connection between the human being and the Moon forces but the inspiration they impart to the poetic soul; and in the realm of medicine, the counting of the ten lunar months of man's embryonic life. But in the older cosmogonies is to be found a clear consciousness of the permeation, the empowering by impulses emanating from the Moon at the time man descends to his physical existence from the spiritual world, where he had lived his pre-earthly life as a being of soul and spirit. When a man seeks that which gives him life, which lives in him as forces of digestion, of breathing and so forth—in short, all forces of growth—he must not look for these among the Earth forces but among extra-terrestrial forces. By examining the Earth forces—well, he can perceive how these act upon him; but if our body were not held together by cosmic forces, if these did not give our body its form, what could Earth forces contribute to its cohesion? The moment the cosmic forces leave the body and the latter is exposed to the terrestrial forces only, it breaks up, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. The Earth forces can only make a man into a corpse; they cannot create his form. It is to the mighty influence of the Moon that we are indebted for the forces so active in man as to lift him out of his physical limitations, to give him a cohesive organization which during life does not succumb to those forces that seize and destroy him at death; forces that combat this destruction during his entire Earth life—and this they must do.

If we know theoretically, on the one hand, that the Moon forces contain the potential human body, we must observe, on the other hand, how the old religions reverenced these forces that introduced man, so to speak, into physical existence through his birth—revered them as the Father forces, the forces of the divine Father. And the ancient Hebrew initiates were clearly aware that from the Moon emanated the forces which lead man into his Earth life, maintaining him there, and from which he severs himself, as physical man, when he passes through the portal of death.

To look up with loving soul to these divine Father forces and to relive them in the ritual and in prayer, that was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these old monotheistic religions were more consistent than you might think: such matters are utterly misrepresented in history, because history is dependent upon material documents and has no access to what can be observed in spiritual vision.

The religions that focused on the Moon and the spiritual beings abiding there are really later religions: the primordial ones embraced in addition a clear idea of the Sun forces and even—as we must add here—of the Saturn forces; but particularly of the Sun forces.

You see, this leads to a study of history for which no material documents exist, a period antedating the foundation of Christianity by many millennia; it takes us back to the epoch which, in my Occult Science, I called the Ancient Indian—in order to give it a name and because it evolved in the locality that later became India. The civilization following this was the Ancient Persian. During these civilizations the manner in which man developed was very different from what it became later; and upon this development depended his creed. We human beings have been developing, during the last two thousand years or more, in such a way that we really do not notice any break in the continuity of our earthly development, and indeed, the break is scarcely noticeable. Something that takes place in us around our thirtieth year remains largely in the subconscious, unconscious mind of present-day man. This was by no means the case among those who lived eight or nine millennia before the beginning of our era. At that time a man's development was continuous up to about the thirtieth year, but then a mighty metamorphosis set in. I must express this rather drastically, for thus the facts in the case will best be made clear.

Here is something that could happen in those ancient times: before his thirtieth year, someone had become acquainted with another who was three or four years younger, and who thus passed through the metamorphosis at a later time. Now, if these two people had not seen each other for a certain time and then met again—I am using the language of today that shows the matter in a still more radical way—it could happen that the one who had experienced the metamorphosis would fail to recognize the other when addressed by him. So great was the change that had come over his memory.

In these very old times it was the custom in the small communities such as then existed to register events in the lives of young people, because they themselves forgot it all after passing through the mighty revulsion in their thirtieth year, and had to be informed of what they had experienced previously. And then, when these people realized that in their thirtieth year they had become different beings, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their previous experiences—this was actually so—then, through the instruction they received, they became aware at the same time that before their thirtieth year it was exclusively the Moon forces that had acted upon them, and that now the Sun forces entered into the development of their earthly life.

The influence of the Sun forces on man is entirely different from that of the Moon forces; but what does present-day man know of the Sun forces? Only their external physical effect. He knows that they warm him, make him perspire; and he knows a bit about their therapeutic value—sun-baths and the like—but only in quite an external way. He cannot remotely conceive of the effect of the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun.

Julian the Apostate, last of the pagan Caesars, still knew something of these Sun forces from reminiscences of the Mysteries; and because he tried to revive this knowledge he was murdered on his expedition to Persia. That shows us how strong were the powers that were out to exterminate the knowledge of such matters in the early Christian centuries. It is therefore not surprising that today it is impossible to learn about these things.—While the Moon forces determine man, permeate him with an inner necessity so that he must act according to his instincts, his temperament, his emotions—in fact, according to his whole physico-etheric body, the Sun forces liberate him from this necessity. They melt, so to speak, these forces of necessity, and it is really through their agency that he becomes a free being.

In ancient times these two influences were sharply divided. In his thirtieth year a man simply became a Sun-man, a free man, whereas up to that time he had been a Moon-man, un-free. Nowadays these conditions overlap: even in childhood the Sun forces are active along with the Moon forces, and the latter continue to influence later life, with the result that today compulsion and freedom interact. But as has been said, this was not always the case, and in the prehistoric times with which we are dealing the effects of the Moon and of the Sun were sharply separated in life's course. It was considered pathological, abnormal, when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the turning point in his life; therefore it was said of normal people that they were born not once, but twice. And when humanity began to develop in such a way that this second or Sun-birth (the first was called the Moon-birth) became less noticeable, certain exercises, certain cult rituals—in short, certain methods were applied to those who were to be initiated in the Mysteries. These experienced what no longer existed for mankind in general, and they were then the twice-born.

The term “twice-born” which we find nowadays in oriental writings is one of mere tradition. I should really like to ask every orientalist, every Sanscrit scholar, whether our knowledge of the Orient discloses the substance of the term in a clearly definable way. I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst: you can ask him whether or not his studies in this field confirm my doubts. Quantities of formal explanations of the term are available, but the meaning of the substance is not known. Only those can understand it who know that it goes back to a reality such as I have just set forth. In such matters spiritual research alone can speak; and when it has spoken I should like to ask any unprejudiced exponent of external science whether all available documents do not bear out at every step the results of spiritual research. This will prove to be the case, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain matters antedating the science based on documents must be pointed out, for the latter cannot unlock the knowledge of human life.

So we look back to an epoch of Antiquity in which people spoke of the Moon-birth of the human being as the creation of man by the Father; and they understood that in the Sun-birth the rays of the Sun were permeated with the Christ force, the force of the Son, the liberating force. Consider: what does this Sun force effect? It enables us human beings upon Earth to make something of ourselves. Without the liberating Sun forces, without the impulses that break down compulsion, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable natural necessity—not of the necessity imposed by destiny but by Nature.

When a man imbued with the old cosmogonies looked up to the Sun he knew that this world-eye, from which the power of the Christ streamed forth, released him from bondage in that inexorable necessity into which he had been born through the Moon forces, and subject to which he would otherwise have had to develop throughout life. He knew that these Sun forces, these Christ forces raying down upon him through the cosmic eye of the Sun, enabled him to make something of himself through his inner freedom, something he had not been through the agency of the Moon forces when he entered life.—What the Sun forces gave to man was this consciousness of his ability to transform himself, to make something of himself.

For completeness' sake and parenthetically I should add that the third source to which men looked were the Saturn forces. In these they saw all that sustained the human being after passing through the portal of death; that is, when he experienced the third earthly metamorphosis.

Physical birth—Moon-birth
Second birth—Sun-birth
Third birth (physical death)—Saturn-birth

After death the human being was sustained by the forces of Saturn, which at that time was considered to lie at the extreme periphery of the Earth's planetary system. These were the forces that bore him up and out into the spiritual world, that maintained the cohesion of his being when the third metamorphosis occurred. There is no doubt that this was part of the ancient cosmogonies.

But humanity changed as a result of evolution, and the time came when only the effects of the Sun forces were known in the Mysteries. The knowledge of these survived longest in the therapeutic sections of the Mysteries, because the same forces that give man his freedom, the ability to make something of himself—namely, the Sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and other beings and things of the Earth, and in this form contain healing properties.

For the most part, however, mankind lost just this contact with the Sun. For a long time people were still aware of their dependence upon the Moon forces, the Father forces; but the consciousness of being dependent upon the Sun forces for their liberation disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of Nature—about the only ones mentioned in our philosophies—are really nothing but the Moon forces reduced to complete abstractions. But One Who still knew the Sun forces and was able to be guided by them was the Christ Bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them because it was His mission to receive them in His own body as they streamed down to Earth, whereas in the old Mysteries they could be reached only by ascending in vision to the Sun.

I explained that yesterday; but the essential point is that in the thirtieth year of His life a transmutation occurred in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; the same transformation that took place in everyone in primeval times, except that then the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual Sun entered into all men, whereas here it was the primal Being of the Sun, the Christ Himself, Who descended to enter human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what underlies the Mystery of Golgotha as the primal fruit of the whole life of the Earth.

You will now be able to understand the whole context of these matters by considering the manner in which Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, as I might put it, existed as a quite human institution in those days, for it meant initiation. Primarily this comprised three stages; but the first requirement for attaining to true enlightenment, to initiation, was that everything offered the candidate by the Mysteries should engender in him a degree of inner humility such as nowadays hardly anybody can even dimly imagine. Today people consider themselves enormously modest in respect of their achievements, even in cases where one who can see through them knows that they are veritably possessed by vanity. At the inception of an initiation, the most important realization that had to come to the neophyte was that he could not think of himself as a human being at all: that it still remained for him to become one. Today it would be asking too much of anyone to admit that at any given period of his life he was not a human being. But that was the very first requirement, and the neophyte had to meditate as follows: Before descending into an earthly body I was indeed a human being; in pre-earthly existence I was a human being of soul and spirit. In this form I then descended into the physical body, received from my mother, from my parents. I was then—not clothed in a physical body—that would be a wrong term: I was permeated by this physical body.

Of the manner in which, over a long period of time, the spirit and the soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—of all this men are completely unaware. They know nothing of it. They are conscious of perceiving with their senses, of seeing their physical surroundings with their eyes. But when soul and spirit have so far permeated a man's physical body that he considers himself a fully developed adult, where has he actually arrived? He can only see out of his eyes, listen out of his ears, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness, through his skin: he can only perceive outward, not inward. He cannot look into himself with his eyes: the most he can do is to dissect the human corpse and then imagine he is looking into himself. But in reality he is not. Supposing here is a house. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I procure some tools, and if I am strong enough I demolish the house. Then I have all the separate bricks before me; but is it not childish to imagine I am looking into the house when I am only looking at this pile of rubbish? Yet that is the way people go to work nowadays. They dissect the human being and cut him up in order to learn to know him; but in that way they do not learn to know him, for that is not at all the human being. If we would learn to know the human being we must be able to look back inward through the eyes, to listen back inward through the ears, just as today we perceive outward through the senses.

All that taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the Door to Man, the Gate to Man. The point of departure in the initiations was the candidate's realization that he could know nothing of the human being; and having no human self-consciousness, he could not even be a human being. He must first learn to look inward through his senses as previously he had only looked outward. That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment the neophyte learned this looking inward he experienced himself also in his pre-earthly existence, for then he knew that he was in his spirit-soul element.

So the neophyte learned to look inward instead of outward, and in so doing he became aware of what had entered him through eyes, ears, skin, and so forth, as prenatal existence. At this point he was told that only now could he come to understand what today we would call natural science. How do we of today go about studying natural science? We are taught to observe the phenomena of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is the same as though I had known someone very well, and I were told to forget, when

I meet him again, everything we had ever had in common. Fancy, if you can, a married couple meeting again after a separation and being obliged to forget everything in the way of their common experiences! Well, I can imagine that occasionally it might be pleasant to do so; but life could not be maintained under such conditions.

Yet those are exactly the conditions imposed upon men of our time by our system of civilization, for they did learn to know the kingdoms of Nature from their spiritual aspect before descending to Earth. And while today men are encouraged to forget all they had learned about the minerals, plants and animals before descending to Earth, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, was instructed somewhat as follows: he was shown, for example, a block of quartz; and then everything possible was done to recall to his memory what he had known, before descending to Earth, about quartz—or about the lily, or the rose, as the case may have been. Recognizing was the factor taught as natural science; and when the candidate had learned to study Nature in the light of what he had seen in his prenatal life, he was admitted to the second stage.

In the second stage he learned music and what was then architecture, geometry, surveying, etc.; for this second stage comprised everything the neophyte could perceive when he not only looked inward through his eyes and listened inward through his ears, but actually entered into himself. Then he was told that he was about to enter the human Temple Grotto, and this he came to know. It meant that which was physically permeated by the psycho-spiritual forces that constitute man before he descends to life on Earth. There he penetrated into himself. This Temple Grotto, he was told, was made up of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought, where one learned everything connected with thinking. Seen from without, the head is small; but if one enters into it and looks at it from within, it is as comprehensive as the world, and there one's spiritual activity becomes manifest. That was the first chamber. In the second chamber one learned to know feeling; and in the third, willing.

In this way the initiate learned how man is organized in respect of his organs of thinking, feeling and willing; he learned about the factors concerned in the Earth life. Knowledge of Nature has significance not only in connection with the Earth: it is acquired before one descends to Earth. Here we must remember that yonder in the spiritual world houses are not built with tellurian architecture. There is music there, but it is spiritual melos. What we know as music is projected down into our air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as we experience it, it is of this Earth It is the same when we survey: we measure the Earth; and surveying, geometry and the like are earthly sciences. It was important for the candidate for the second stage to have his attention drawn to the fact that all thought of gaining enlightenment or knowledge by earthly means alone is delusive, except in the case of geometry, architecture or surveying; that a genuine science of Nature must consist in recalling prenatal knowledge. That is what he was taught; and he came to understand that geometry, architecture, music and surveying were the sciences that can be learned here on Earth.

Thus the mystic entered into himself and came to know the human being as consisting of three chambers, as opposed to the human being of one particular incarnation, which is all one encounters by knowing him only from the outside.—And in the third stage the neophyte learned the nature of man as it was when he not only entered into himself, comprehending his spiritual self, but when his spiritual self learned about the body as well. In all the old Mysteries this was therefore the stage inevitably called the Portal of Death. There the initiate learned what he was like after laying aside the earthly body. But there was a difference between this actual death and the death of initiation. Why this had to be so I shall explain in the following lectures; at the moment I am merely emphasizing the facts.

When we actually die we discard the physical body and are no longer bound to it. It ceases to respond to Earth forces, and we are free of these. But one who is still bound to the physical body, as was the case in the initiations of old, must obtain by his own strength and efforts what comes to him automatically through death, namely, this freedom from the body; and he must sustain this condition for a certain length of time. Initiation demanded the attainment of these strong inner forces of the soul by which the latter could remain independent of the physical body; and these forces at the same time provided higher cognition of matters not to be perceived by the senses or thought by the intellect. They transported the initiate as a human being into the spiritual world, just as man is placed by his physical body into the physical world.

But at that point the candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a psycho-spiritual human being, as an initiate, while still in his Earth existence. From that time onward he saw the Earth as a star existing detached from man; and in the older Mysteries it was with the Sun in particular that he had to live, instead of with the Earth. He knew what came to him from the Sun and how the Sun forces worked in him.

The stage that followed the one I have just described, the fourth, may be explained in this way: When a man eats on this Earth he knows, this is cabbage, that is game—he drinks various things, and he knows that now these things are outside him, now inside. He breathes the air which is alternately outside and inside. He is connected with the Earth forces in such a way as to carry within him the forces and substances of the Earth that are otherwise outside him. It was made clear to the candidate that before being initiated he was an Earth-carrier, a carrier of cabbage, game, pork, and so forth. But if you have completed the third stage of initiation, so he was told, and if you receive what you are now able to receive by having freed yourself from the body, you will no longer be a carrier of cabbage, pork and veal, but you will be a bearer of what the Sun forces give you.—And this spiritual gift of the Sun forces was called in all the Mysteries christos. Hence the neophyte who had passed beyond the third stage and could now feel himself as a bearer of the Sun forces—just as on Earth he could feel himself to be a cabbage carrier—was called a christophor, a Christ bearer. In the majority of the old Mysteries that was the appellation of a neophyte of the fourth stage.

In the third stage certain things had to be thoroughly understood, in particular, that the craving for the physical body must cease if enlightenment was to enter; and the neophyte had clearly to realize that while he belonged to the Earth as far as his physical body was concerned, yet the function of the Earth was really to destroy that physical body, not to build it up. Now he came to know the constructive forces that derive from the cosmos.

And he learned something else when he became a christophor, namely, that even in the Earth's matter there are spiritual forces at work, only they are not perceptible to earthly senses. Another language was current in those times, but in modern words—and I can use only these—the sense of what was made clear to the candidate was this: if you would know the science of matter, know how different elements combine or separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter out of the cosmos. That is impossible if you are not initiated: it is necessary to have passed through the fourth stage. You must be able to see by means of the forces of the Sun existence—then you can study chemistry.

Imagine nowadays confronting a candidate for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry with the requirement that he must first be able to feel himself in the same relation to the forces of the Sun as he does to the cabbage of the Earth! It would seem quite mad.—But in the old days realities were dealt with, and people came to understand that by means of all the forces active in the body—forces employed for ordinary learning—only geometry, surveying, music and architecture can be studied. Not chemistry. Today chemistry is studied from the outside, and so it has been since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine enlightenment must despair at the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon data, not upon inner penetration of the subject. And if people were open-minded they would realize that something more is necessary, that other things must be understood if chemistry is to be studied. What stifles such impulses in man is the cowardice of modern cognition in which he has been reared.

Now the neophyte had attained to the still higher stage of astronomus. The external study of the stars, by computation and the like, was considered wholly futile: spiritual beings inhabit the stars, and these can be known only after physical observation has been surmounted—after even geometry has been overcome—so that one can live in the universe and get to know the spiritual nature of the stars. Then the neophyte became a resurrected one; then he could really see the Moon and Sun forces at work upon earthly man.

Today I have described to you from two aspects how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries—not at a given season but at a certain degree of human maturity: Easter was the arising of the psycho-spiritual man out of the physical body in the spiritual universe; and those who still knew something of Mystery wisdom saw the Mystery of Golgotha in this light when it took place. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not intervened? In olden times it was possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in still older times it was a matter of course for a man to experience his second birth in his thirtieth year or thereabouts. And later on there were at least memories, as well as the science of the Mystery schools, that kept alive in tradition what in earlier epochs had been actually experienced. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, all that had been lost or forgotten; and humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not that power, to which the initiate attained in becoming a christophor, descended into a Jesus of Nazareth and henceforth remained on Earth, so that man could be united with this power through Christ Jesus.

Undoubtedly, then, the Easter Festival as we know it is linked with a phase of the Mysteries, and we can really become conscious of the substance of our Easter only by reviving this aspect of them. You will readily understand that in this way we can at least approximate a realization of what the ancient neophyte experienced at his initiation. This will be the subject of further consideration. The neophyte could say to himself: Initiation has disclosed to me how Sun and Moon act within me in their mutual celestial relationship. For now I know that as a physical being I am constituted in a certain way. The circumstance that my eyes, my nose—my whole bodily form within and without—are shaped thus and so, that this bodily form could grow and is still growing through being nourished, all this depends upon the Moon forces, as does everything in the way of necessity. But that I can be active within my bodily nature as a free inner being, can transmute and master myself, this is due to the Sun forces, the Christ forces. These I must activate if I would, by conscious effort, build within me what otherwise they would have to bring about by compulsion.

From all this we can understand why even today we look to Sun and Moon and their relative position to determine the date of Easter. Nothing remains of all this but our calculation, When is the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the spring equinox? We place Easter on the Sunday following this first full Moon, thus indicating that in the nature and form of Easter we see something that must be determined from above, from the cosmos. I shall elaborate that tomorrow. But what must be grasped anew is the idea of Easter. This can only be done by contemplating the old Mysteries, which first of all drew attention to what was experienced by introspection—the portal of man; by the achievement of freedom—the portal of death; by moving freely in the spiritual world—becoming a christophor.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear when the time came for the development of human freedom to assert itself; but now the time has come to rediscover them. We must find and make them our own again; and we must fully realize that today efforts are necessary to this end.

With this in mind the Christmas Conference was held, for there is urgent need of a sanctuary on Earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society must lead the way in its further development to the modern Mysteries. It will be one of your tasks, my dear friends, to collaborate in this way with the right understanding. But in order to succeed you will have to reflect on human life in its three stages: that of introspection, that of self-penetration, and that of a consciousness such as results in outer reality only through death.

And to remind us of what has been said in this hour, let us carry away with us and meditate upon these words:

Stand at the portal of man's existence,
Read above its arch stones cosmic scripture.

Dwell in the deep of man's inner soul-life,
Feel within its orbit the world's beginning.

Ponder the end of man's earth-chapters,
Find thou there the turning-point of spirit.¹

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Weltbeginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

• 1. Translation by Barbara Betteridge.

We can say that the original purpose of festivals is to make human beings look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things. The Easter festival in particular can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries we in the civilized world have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has made us focus less and less upon our connection with cosmic forces and powers. We have gradually been reduced to contemplating only our relation to earthly forces and powers. Of course, given the means for acquiring knowledge recognized as legitimate today this could scarcely be otherwise. However, if in pre-Christian times or even in the early centuries of Christianity someone who was connected with a Mystery center could have experienced what we moderns call knowledge, and if he were to approach the matter with the state of mind characteristic of those earlier times, he would not at all understand how human beings can live without an awareness of their connection to extra-earthly, cosmic things.

I would now like to sketch various matters that you will find dealt with more thoroughly in this or that lecture cycle. As the present lectures are intended to acquaint us specifically with the Easter idea, I naturally cannot elaborate on every detail, but only touch upon the most important points.

If we go back to certain ancient monotheistic religious systems—for example, to the Hebrew-Judaic system, with which we are most familiar—we naturally find the veneration and worship of one deity. That deity is the one of whom we speak in our Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead, as God the Father.

Now all the religions in which the concept of the Father-God played a part had a greater or lesser awareness of his connection to the cosmic moon forces, forces that stream down to the earth from the moon; the Mystery priests were particularly aware of this connection. In our time this consciousness of our relationship to the moon has all but disappeared. Perhaps the only place it lives on is in the inspiration of poetic imagination by the forces of the moon, or in medicine in the counting of human embryonic life in ten lunar months. But older world views were clearly aware that the human being, who exists in the spiritual world as a being of spirit and soul, is permeated and strengthened by forces emanating from the moon as he descends into earthly existence.

If we want to know what shapes our living form, to know what lives in us as nutritive and respiratory processes, as overall forces of growth, we must look not to earth forces but rather to cosmic forces. For a consideration of earth forces readily reveals their relation to us. If we did not hold our bodies together with extra-earthly forces, if our bodies did not receive their form from cosmic forces, how could the earth forces alone hold them together? The moment the human body is forsaken by cosmic forces and exposed to merely terrestrial forces, it falls apart, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. Earth forces can only make us into corpses; they cannot shape us. It is to the influence of the moon that we owe the uplifting forces within us, the forces that give us a cohesive, organized form, a form that during life does not succumb to forces that seize and destroy us at our death. It is due to this that throughout our earthly lives we can resist destruction, as indeed it must be resisted.

Although in this way we may say theoretically how the form of our body is dependent upon the forces of the moon, we must also see that these forces, which guide us, so to speak, through birth into a physical existence, were revered by ancient religions as the forces of the divine Father. The ancient Hebrew initiates knew that the moon radiates those forces that lead us into our earthly life and maintain us there. Our physical being is severed from these forces only when we pass through the gate of death.

To look up lovingly to these divine Father forces, to express devotion to them in ritual and prayer, this was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these religions were more consistent than you might think. For history completely misrepresents them, basing itself, as it must, merely upon external evidence, not upon what can be observed in spiritual vision.

Religions that focused on the moon and the spiritual beings living in it were really of relatively late origin. The truly primordial religions had in addition to this a clear perception of the sun forces and even, it must be added, of the forces of Saturn. However, with this we are entering into a period of history of which no physical documents survive, one that antedates the foundation of Christianity by many thousands of years. In my Outline of Occult Science I called this period the ancient Indian—partly to have a name for it, but also because it took place in the area we now call India. The civilization following this was the ancient Persian. During these civilizations human beings still developed very differently than they did later, and this is reflected in their religious beliefs.

During the last two thousand years or more, human beings have been developing in such a way that they no longer notice a certain discontinuity in their earthly development, and indeed, the break is really hardly noticeable. Something that takes place in human beings around the thirtieth year today remains largely in the subconscious or the unconscious. However, this was not the case among people who lived eight or nine thousand years before Christ. At that time a person's development was continuous up until about the thirtieth year, when a profound metamorphosis set in, which I shall be quite direct in describing. Although what I have to say might sound somewhat strange, it nevertheless fits the relevant facts.

In those ancient times the following could happen. Let us say that before turning thirty, a man had made the acquaintance of someone much younger, say three or four years younger, who would therefore experience the thirtieth-year metamorphosis much later than the former. Suppose now that the two men had not seen each other for some time and were then reunited. It could happen, and in today's words this sounds indeed strange, that if the younger person were to address the older one, the latter might not recognize him. The metamorphosis would have completely transformed his memory.

Because in these very ancient times people around the age of thirty tended to forget all they had experienced previously, it was the custom in the small communities of the time to record events in young peoples' lives in order to inform them of their earlier experiences after they had passed through the profound transformation. And then, when such people realized they had become different persons in their thirtieth year, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their earlier experiences—yes, it really happened this way—then at the same time they were also taught that before their thirtieth year only moon forces had acted upon them, whereas now sun forces were entering into their development.

The sun forces' influence on the human being is entirely different from that of the moon forces. Of course, people today know little of sun forces, for they know only their external, physical effects. They know, for example, that because of sun forces—pardon my bluntness—they sweat, feel hot; they are also no doubt aware of sunbathing and its therapeutic uses, but this is all superficial. The average person nowadays cannot even begin to conceive of the effect that the forces spiritually connected with the sun have upon him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, acquired some knowledge of the sun forces in the dwindling Mysteries, and was murdered on his expedition to Persia because he wanted to make it official again. [Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus), A.D. 331–363. Roman emperor 361–363. ] That is how strong the powers that wanted to exterminate such knowledge in the early Christian centuries were. It is therefore not surprising that no knowledge of such matters has survived.

While the moon forces determine the human being, permeate us with an inner necessity so that we must act according to our instincts, our temperament, our emotions, in a word, our whole physical and etheric nature, the spiritual sun forces free us from this. They dissolve, so to speak, the forces of compulsion, and it is really through their agency that we become free.

In ancient times the influence of the moon and that of the sun were sharply divided. Around the age of thirty people simply became sun people, that is, free, whereas up until then they had been moon people, or unfree. Nowadays these two overlap; even in childhood the sun forces act along with the moon forces, and the moon forces continue to work on us in later years. Thus in our time necessity and freedom intermingle.

As has been said, however, this was not always the case. In the prehistoric times of which we have been speaking, the effects of the moon and the sun upon human life were sharply separated, it was considered pathological when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the new beginning in his thirtieth year. By the same token, people spoke of having been born not once, but twice. As humanity began to develop in such a way that the second or solar birth (the first was called the lunar birth) became less noticeable, certain facts, including exercises and cult rituals, began to be applied to initiates in the Mysteries. In this way the initiates experienced something that the rest of mankind no longer did. They were now the twice-born.

The term twice-born that may be found in ancient oriental writings even today no longer carries its original meaning. It would be interesting to ask every orientalist and Sanskrit scholar—I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst, you can ask him how things stand according to his professional studies—whether they think modern scholarship can explain the meaning of this expression clearly and in no uncertain terms. [Professor Hermann Beckh, 1875–1937, orientalist. From 1922 on priest in the Christian Community. ] In fact, any number of formal analyses are available, but the essential meaning remains a mystery. Only those who know it derives from such a reality as I have just described can grasp its true meaning. About such things spiritual observation does, after all, have something to say; and once it has spoken, I would challenge any unprejudiced researcher in a conventional academic discipline to prove that existing documents do not at every step bear it out. Ordinary science will confirm spiritual research, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain things transcending ordinary science must be brought to light since the study of documents cannot lead to a true understanding of human life.

Thus we look back to an ancient time when people spoke of their lunar birth as of a creation by the Father. Regarding their solar birth people understood that in the sun's spiritual rays Christ's power, the power of the Son, is active, and that it sets human beings free. Consider what it does for us. Only through its action can we make something of ourselves in earthly life. Without the liberating forces and impulses of the sun, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable determinism, and not even the determinism of fate, but merely that of nature.

People in ancient times knew this. To them, the sun was a celestial eye from which the power of Christ streamed forth. They knew that this power released them from the bondage of iron necessity into which the moon forces had placed them at birth and which would otherwise govern their entire lives. The sun forces, the Christ forces looking down upon them through the cosmic eye of the sun, enabled them to make something of themselves in inner freedom, something they could not have become merely by virtue of the moon forces. Thus in the sun forces people saw the possibility of transforming or making something of themselves here on earth.

For completeness' sake I should briefly mention that ancient people also looked to the forces of Saturn, in which they saw all that sustains us when we pass through the portal of death, that is, when we experience the third earthly metamorphosis.

After death the human being is maintained by the Saturn forces that reign at what was in ancient times considered to be the outer limit of our planetary system. These forces support us and carry us out into the spiritual world; they maintain our being's integrity when the third metamorphosis occurs. This was unquestionably the world view of ancient times.

But humanity changes, and the time came when the sun forces' effects were known only in the Mysteries. This knowledge survived longest in the Mysteries' therapeutic sections, because the same forces that give us our freedom, our ability to make something of ourselves—namely, the sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and in other earthly beings and substances, which as a result possess healing properties.

For the most part, however, human beings lost this knowledge of the sun. Although knowledge of our dependence on the moon or Father forces remained with people for a long time, consciousness of our dependence on the sun forces, or we must really say, of our emancipation through those forces, disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of nature, which seem to be the sole topic in modern philosophy, are really nothing but a completely abstract version of the moon forces.

One person who still knew the sun forces and was able to let himself be guided by them was the Christ-bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them. For, whereas in the old Mysteries the sun forces could be reached only by looking up spiritually to the sun, it was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to receive these forces in his own body as they streamed down to earth. This I explained yesterday. The essential point, however, is that in his thirtieth year a transformation occurred in Jesus of Nazareth's body. It was the same transformation everyone experienced in primeval times, except that in those times only the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual sun entered into people, whereas here the primordial sun being himself, the Christ, descended into human evolution and dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This event central to all earthly life is at the root of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will be able to understand these things in their full significance if you consider the way Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, one might say, was as yet a human affair, for it was initiation.

Basic initiation consisted of three stages. The very first requirement for initiation was to develop, through exposure to what the Mysteries had to offer, a degree of inner humility we cannot fathom today. Although today people do indeed consider themselves enormously modest with respect to knowledge, anyone who can see through them knows they are truly possessed by arrogance.

Above all, at the outset of initiation the candidate had to believe that he was not yet really human, that this was a goal yet to be achieved. Today it would be asking too much of people at any stage of life that they should not consider themselves human beings. But for initiation this was the very first requirement. The candidate had to know that it was only before descending into an earthly body that he had been a human being, that in pre-earthly existence he had been a human being of soul and spirit, which then entered a physical body provided by a natural mother, by the natural parents. It did not “clothe itself” with the body—for that is an inaccurate expression—rather it permeated itself with a physical body.

Now just how, over a long period of time, the spirit and soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—is something most people are not aware of. What everyone is aware of, what everyone perceives through the senses, is the physical world around us. When spirit and soul have completed their permeation of our physical bodies at adulthood, we can only look to the outside with our eyes, listen with our ears to what is outside us, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness outside us through our skin; in other words, we perceive only what is outside not what is inside us. We cannot look into ourselves with our eyes: the most we can do is to dissect a human corpse and imagine we are looking into ourselves. But in reality we are not.

Suppose I have a house here before me. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I take some tools and, if I am strong enough, I can demolish the house. The individual bricks then lie before me in a heap; they are all that is left of the house. This is the way things are done today; people dissect the human being, cut him up, in order to get to know him. But in this way they do not get to know him; what they get to know this way is not at all a human being. To really know ourselves we must be able, just as today we look out of our eyes, to look in through them, to listen in with our ears, and so on.

All this taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the door to the human being. Initiation started from the candidate's realization that he knew nothing about the human being, and that, having no consciousness of himself as human, he could not really claim to be one. He would first have to learn to look in through his senses, in the same way he otherwise looks out.

That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment a person learned in this way to look inside himself, he experienced how he had been in pre-earthly existence, for then he knew himself to be a being of spirit and soul.

The initiate thus learned to look in (red) instead of out (yellow), and in so doing became aware of what had entered him as pre-earthly existence through his eyes, ears, skin, and so forth (green—see diagram). Aware now that he had had such an existence, he was told that now he could begin to acquaint himself with what today we would call natural science.

When we learn about natural science today, we are taught to observe the phenomena of nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is analogous to being told upon meeting someone we have known for a long time to forget everything we have ever had in common with that person. Fancy, if you will, a married couple being told upon seeing one another after a long separation to forget everything they had ever been through together. Well, yes, I can imagine that once in a while such a thing might actually be preferable, but life could not be carried on in that way.

Such, however, are exactly the circumstances imposed upon us by our modern system of civilization. We all become acquainted with the kingdoms of nature from their spiritual aspect before we descend to earth. And while today people are encouraged to forget all they learned then about minerals, plants, and animals, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, attempted to remember it. He was shown, for example, a quartz crystal, and then everything possible was done to remind him of what he had known about quartz—or about lilies, or roses—before he descended to earth. The knowledge of nature taught in the Mysteries was essentially recognition.

After a candidate had mastered the method of recollecting things viewed in pre-earthly existence, he was admitted to the second stage, which consisted of learning the music, architecture, geometry, surveying, etc., of the time. This was because the second stage comprised everything a person could learn not only by looking inside with his eyes and listening to what is inside him with his ears, but by actually entering into himself. Here the candidate for initiation was told he was entering the Temple Grotto of Man, which was the part of himself physically permeated by the soul-spiritual forces of which he had consisted before descending to life on earth. Into this he penetrated.

The Temple Grotto, he was told, consisted of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought. There he became acquainted with everything—well, yes, when looked at externally, it is the human head, which is small, but when entered into and viewed from within, it is as big as the world. The candidate came to know himself there as spirit. That was the first chamber. In the second he acquainted himself with feeling; and in the third with willing.

In this way initiates learned how the human being is organized with respect to the organs of thinking, feeling, and willing; they acquainted themselves, that is, with what matters on earth. Knowledge of nature, on the other hand, transcends such merely earthly matters. One acquires it before one even descends to earth. After that, it is simply a question of recalling it. By contrast, no houses are built in the spiritual world with earthly architecture. Similarly, the music that exists in the spiritual world is entirely spiritual; earthly music is merely its projection into the terrestrial air. Surveying is concerned with the dimensions of the earth; both it and geometry are earthly sciences.

It was important for the novice of the second stage to realize that all talk of gaining knowledge by purely earthly means, except as it applies to geometry, architecture, and surveying, is nonsense. He realized that a genuine science of nature must consist of recalling pre-earthly knowledge; however, geometry, architecture, music, and surveying are sciences that can be learned here on earth.

The candidate thus entered into himself and came to know the cosmic human being. This consisted of three chambers, unlike the single earthly organization we encounter by approaching the human being only from the outside.

In the third stage the candidate not only delved down into himself, coming to know himself spiritually, but as spirit he came to know the body as well. Initiates in all the old Mysteries called this level of knowledge “the Portal of Death.” Here one learned what it is like to lay aside the earthly body. There was, however, a difference between actual death and the death experienced in initiation. I will explain in the following lectures why this had to be so; at the moment I only want to point out the facts.

When we die, we discard our physical bodies and are no longer bound to them. We cease to respond to, and are henceforth free from, earth forces. But while we are still connected to our physical bodies, as was the case in the initiations of old, we must achieve by inner exertion something that in death happens of itself, namely, freedom from the body; we must hold ourselves outside the body for a time. Initiation required that one attain strong inner forces of soul, by virtue of which one could remain free from the physical body.

These same forces also provided higher knowledge of matters that could neither be perceived with the senses nor thought with the intellect. They brought human beings into relation with the spiritual world, just as our physical bodies bring us into relation with the physical world. At this point a candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a human being of spirit and soul, as an initiate, while still living on earth. From that time on he experienced the earth as outside himself and could live with the sun rather than with the earth, particularly in the older Mysteries. He knew what he had from the sun, how the sun forces were active in him.

After this third stage followed then the fourth. The fourth stage had an effect that may be explained as follows: When a human being on earth eats, he recognizes, for example, that he is eating cabbage or venison. He can drink various things, and know that first these things are outside, then inside him. He breathes the air; first it is outside, then inside, then outside again. In short, he carries within him earthly forces and substances that also exist outside him. What the Mysteries made clear to the student was that before initiation he had been an earth-bearer, a bearer of cabbage, venison, pork, and so on, but that upon completing the third stage of initiation and experiencing what it is possible to experience when one frees oneself from the body he would no longer be a bearer of cabbage, pork, and veal, but rather of what the sun forces gave him.

In all the Mysteries this spiritual gift of the sun forces was called Christos. Hence the candidate who had gone through the three stages and now felt himself to be a bearer of the sun forces, just as he had been a cabbage-bearer on earth, was called a christophor, a Christ-bearer. This was the term applied to a neophyte of the fourth stage in most of the ancient Mysteries.

In the third stage the candidate had to understand certain things thoroughly, most importantly that his craving for the physical body had to cease during moments of knowledge. He had to understand that the human being, as far as the physical body is concerned, belongs to the earth, but that the earth actually only destroys the physical body and does not build it up. It was at this point that the initiate came to know the upbuilding forces that originate in the cosmos.

He also learned something else. Precisely when he became a christophor, the initiate realized that spiritual forces are at work even in the substances of the earth, albeit in a way imperceptible to earthly senses. Had our modern way of speaking, which is the only one I can use, been comprehensible to people of ancient times, the sense of what the neophyte was told might be expressed as follows: “If you wish to know and understand substance, to see how the different elements combine and separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter from the cosmos. You can only do this, however, once you have been initiated into the fourth stage. For only when you are able to perceive by means of forces of the sun-existence will you be able to study chemistry.”

Now in our time it would be thought quite absurd, wouldn't it, to require of candidates for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry that they experience sun forces in the same way that they do earthly cabbage. In the old days, however, such demands were made. Furthermore, initiates realized that all the forces of ordinary cognition alive in the body can be used only to study geometry, surveying, music, and architecture. They are useless for the study of chemistry.

Chemistry as we know it today deals only with superficial realities, and has done so ever since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine knowledge must despair at having to learn the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon descriptions, not upon an inner penetration of the subject. If people were open-minded, they would realize that something more is necessary, that a different method of cognition is required, for a true study of chemistry. That this is not realized is simply the result of the cowardice so prevalent today.

When a candidate had passed the fourth stage, he was ready to become an adept in astronomy, which was an even higher stage of initiation. The merely external study of the stars, based on calculations and the like, ancient people considered thoroughly trivial. For the stars are inhabited by spiritual beings, and these beings can be known only after physical observation and even geometry have been left behind, when one can literally live in the universe and know the spiritual nature of the stars. At this stage the candidate became one of the resurrected and could observe the forces of the moon and sun at work, particularly in their effects upon earthly humanity.

Today I have described for you from two sides how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries, not in a particular season but at a certain stage of human development. Easter, we have seen, was the inner human being's resurrection out of the physical body into the spiritual universe. Those still cognizant of ancient Mystery wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha saw that Mystery in this light. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?

In ancient times it had been possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for even earlier than that it had been a matter of course for people to experience a second birth around their thirtieth year. Memories of this had been preserved, as had the knowledge of the Mystery schools, and thus what had been experienced directly in earlier epochs was kept alive as tradition. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, this had all been lost or forgotten. Humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not the power to whom the initiates had raised themselves in becoming christophors descended into Jesus of Nazareth and remained on earth since then, enabling people to unite themselves with it through Christ Jesus.

Easter as we know it today is thus a link in the evolution of the Mysteries, and we can become aware of its true content only by reviving that evolution. In the lectures to come you will be able to get at least an idea of what the ancients experienced in initiation. A new initiate could say to himself: “Initiation has revealed to me how sun and moon, as celestial opposites, work within me. I know now that my physical form—the particular shape of my eyes, nose, indeed of my entire body, inside and out—as well as the fact that this form could grow, and continues to grow through nourishment, is a result of the moon forces. Upon them all necessity depends. But that I can come to life within my physical body as a free human being, that I can alter my character and master myself, this is due to the sun forces, to the Christ forces. These I must awaken within me if I am to achieve through my own efforts a conscious freedom over and above that given me by the sun forces through another kind of necessity.”

From all this one can understand why even today human beings calculate the date of Easter from a particular constellation of sun and moon. All that remains of the old consciousness is an interest in finding the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. That Easter is set on that Sunday indicates, as I shall elaborate tomorrow, that people see in Easter's nature and form something that must be determined from above, that is, from the cosmos.

More than this, however, is necessary. The very content of Easter must be grasped anew, and this can happen only if we examine the old Mysteries. These showed first of all what people could experience if they looked inside themselves, the portal of Man, then when they descended into themselves and came to know the remotest inner recesses of their being, the three-chambered, cosmic human being; when they liberated themselves from the body—the portal of Death; and when they moved freely in the spiritual world, they became christophors.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear at the time human freedom started to assert itself, but the time to rediscover them has arrived. The Mysteries must be found anew, and we should be fully conscious that preparations to that end must now be made.

It was with this in mind that the Christmas Conference was held. An earthly sanctuary for the re-founding of the Mysteries is urgently needed. The Anthroposophical Society, as it continues in its development, must lead the way to that re-founding. It will be partly your task, my dear friends, to help this along in the right spirit. But for that you will need to examine the three stages of human life: introspection, self-penetration, and a consciousness one has in outer reality only in death.

As a reminder of what has been said in this hour, I would like us now to carry away and meditate upon the following words:

My dear sisters and brothers,

It is not possible every time to give the corresponding introduction about the task and meaning of the School and about membership in the School. Therefore, although a large number of new members are again present, I will not give the introduction, but will continue from where we left off last time, and I must remind the members who are to give the previous mantras to the newcomers in the usual way, that they must to do so under the conditions which I will mention at the end of this lesson. They should also describe the conditions for acceptance in this School.

*

We shall begin by again letting our souls hear the words which are spoken by all the Beings and processes of the world to the human being who wishes to be worthy of the name, and who has an unbiased sense that in them lies the exhortation to seek true self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that leads to knowledge of the world. And we are exhorted from all sides, from all the Beings of all the kingdoms of nature and all the kingdoms of spirit to this self-knowledge in the true sense of the word, which is the path to world-knowledge. Thus, all the Beings of nature and of the spirit exhorted humans in the past, exhort them in the present, and will exhort humans in the future. These exhorting words that urge the soul of man, if he wants to hear them, from all sides, from the east and the west, from the south and the north, from above and below, may also today begin to describe what this Michael-School should mean:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

*

We have seen how the seeker of knowledge approaches the Guardian of the Threshold, how—after the seeker of knowledge has stood there shattered by the impression of the three beasts, which show the true nature of his present willing, feeling and thinking as they appear before the visage of the spiritual world—how he is gradually lifted up by the Guardian of the Threshold.

And we have already heard what the Guardian of the Threshold speaks to the one he wants to lift up, how he points, on the one hand, above, where a battle is taking place between the light and the dark powers in the realm from which the force of our thinking streams into our humanity. The Guardian of the Threshold thinks that we need this image. We need—if we wish to feel in the right way, by seeking knowledge, the origins of our thinking, the force of our thinking in our humanity—to look up to that realm from which our thinking comes, where however a terrible battle rages between the powers of light, the light which wants to guide thinking along the right track, and the powers of darkness, who want to divert thinking from the right track and lead it along paths of aberration. Our thinking is rooted above. We must know it to be so rooted if we want to be knowledgeable in the battle between light and darkness.

And then, if we understand what striving towards the light is, we find that we must remain erect. And we must know that we are involved with the battle between light and darkness: The light wants to bring us to a state of spiritual powerlessness, so to speak; the darkness wants to make us lose ourselves in matter. But we must seek the state of equilibrium between them—not letting ourselves be overtaken by light, nor letting the darkness transform us into matter, but to stand firmly in our selfhood and find the equilibrium for our thinking between light and darkness.

And then when we consider our feeling, we must see—in that realm which reaches out into the horizontal, into the cosmic distances—how we are involved in the battle between the warmth of soul and the coldness of soul.

In the warmth of soul are working all the luciferic powers, the powers of beauty, the powers of brightness, the powers who want to give us divine forces without our own effort. We would be unfree and lacking independence if they were to catch us.

But on the other side are the powers of cold, the coldness of soul that is permeated by ahrimanic Beings who would cause us to lose our Selves in the cold. We must find the equilibrium between that spiritual blissfulness into which the forces of warmth, the forces of heat, of fire wish to bring us, and that region into which, with enormous all-embracing intellectuality, the ahrimanic powers wish to seduce us with coldness. We must maintain our equilibrium between both of them in order to find the right sense of feeling for knowledge.

Then, when we observe our willing, we must look below. There is the realm of the earth and of gravity from which the force of our will comes for our earthly life. For the earth does not only contain the force of gravity; spiritually, it also contains the force of human will. Once again, we stand face to face with two powers—the powers of life and the powers of death. We can succumb with our willing to the powers of life. Then it is as though the powers of life want to seize us, use our will forces in the cosmos. We must hold our Self erect, and find the equilibrium between these powers of life and the powers of death, the latter wanting to confine us in a constricted space in order to eternally interweave our will with materiality.

The Guardian of the Threshold exhorts us at this point to maintain ourselves in equilibrium between light and darkness, in equilibrium between warmth and cold, in equilibrium between life and death. For we may not only belong to the power of the light. In light alone we would be benumbed, dazzled. We may not devote ourselves to the darkness alone, for then we would lose ourselves in the substance of darkness. We must strive for what is striven for in all the world.

Wherever you look, my sisters and brothers, light and darkness intermingle. Look at your hair. The light plants it in your head. But it must be permeated with darkness, otherwise your hair would be entirely rays of light. Look at your whole body: it is woven of light. But it could have no solidity if darkness were not also interwoven in it. Look at any object, my sisters and brothers! Blossoming plants: they are created from light; but the powers of darkness must press up from the soil so that from light and darkness what the plants represent in their solid consistency—the nature of plants on earth—can be found.

Just as in all of nature a balance between light and darkness is found, so must the human being strive psychically for it in the spiritual world if he wants to be a real seeker after knowledge. And it is also the case for equilibrium between warmth and cold, and for equilibrium between life and death.

So, there we are at the yawning abyss of being, still looking, as behind us the gleaming colorful kingdoms of nature, to which we belong with our senses, become darker and darker as it becomes clear to us that our real being is not revealed by all of wondrous sensory nature, nor is it what leads us to self-knowledge. In front of us, like a black wall, is still the border of the dark realm, into which we must go so that there will be light within by means of the force which we ourselves bring. We are still standing at the yawning abyss of being, but have become bolder in confidence that through the Guardian's admonitions we will grow wings to cross the abyss in order to enter the darkness, and there is light in the darkness.

This is one of the last of the Guardian's admonitions:

The light does battle with powers of darkness
In that realm, where your thinking
In spirit-being longs to enter.
You find, striving lightward,
Your Self, taken from you by spirit;
You can, when darkness entices you,
The Self in matter lose.

The warmth does battle with the cold
In that realm, where your feeling would
In spirit-interweaving live.
You find, loving warmth, your Self
In spirit-longing blown away;
You can, if cold does harden you,
The Self in sorrow grind to dust.

Thus, life does battle with death
In that realm where your will
Would act with spiritual creation.
You find, holding on to life,
Your Self vanishing in spirit's power;
If death's power binds you fast,
You may constrict the Self to nothing.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian at the abyss exacting equilibrium:

The light does battle with powers of darkness
In that realm where your thinking
In spirit-being longs to enter.
You find, striving lightward,
Your Self, taken from you by spirit;
You can, when darkness entices you,
The Self in matter lose.

The warmth does battle with the cold
In that realm, where your feeling would
In spirit-interweaving live.
You find, loving warmth, your Self
In spirit-longing blown away;
You can, if cold does harden you,
The Self in sorrow grind to dust.

Thus, life does battle with death
In that realm, where your will
Would act with spiritual creation.
You find, holding on to life,
Your Self vanishing in spirit's power;
If death's power binds you fast,
You may constrict the Self to nothing.

You will find, my dear sisters and brothers, that if you devote yourselves to these mantric worlds with the right conviction and with peace in your souls, with a feeling of sacrificial devotion to the spirit, you will find that what instills equilibrium in the soul is present in the words themselves.

As seekers after knowledge, we stand now before the Guardian of the Threshold at the yawning abyss of being. Next the Guardian of the Threshold teaches us how we, in wanting to choose the right direction between light and darkness, warmth and cold, life and death, can find our own Self.

In no other way can we do this, my dear sisters and brothers, than by pondering the following: In order to achieve true knowledge it is necessary that we become one with the world, that we have a feeling respecting the world as a finger would if it could feel for itself, feel itself to be a part of the entire human body. If the finger could feel for itself it would say: I am only a finger as long as I am a part of the human body, when the human body's blood is my blood, when the human body's pulsation is my pulsation. If I am cut off, I cease being a finger. The finger loses its meaning when separated from the organism to which it belongs and only as part of which it can be a finger.

The human being must learn to feel in this way in respect to the entire world. We are members of the spirit-soul organism of the entire world, and only seem to be separated from the spirit-soul organism of the world. We must connect in the right way to the spirit-soul organism of the world and must know that around us the elements earth, water, air, fire are spread, and we must learn to feel that our bodily nature—for it is composed of these elements—is at one with these elements.

The Guardian of the Threshold teaches us that we should do this, and how. Just consider exactly what learning streams in those mantric verses the Guardian of the Threshold has given us, which have brought us to the abyss of being.

My dear sisters and brothers, think that you tentatively touch some object with your finger. You know that the object is there where you touch it. You touch an object. You have the feeling of being at one with this object, because at the moment you touch it the sense of touch is what makes a finger, or whatever you touch it with, at one with the object. Now think that you as a whole are like a finger, a touching finger. You are standing on the earth, on the element earth. You are standing here because the earth's main property is the element of gravity. You are touching the earth with the soles of your feet, regardless of whether you are standing on the floor of a room or outside on the bare earth. The point is that you feel, in standing, that you are touching the earth's gravitational element. You could be standing above on a mountain, or on a tower: you sense—just as you sense at the tip of your finger the hard and the soft, the warm and the cold—in the process of touching you sense the unity in your soles of your feet, where you sense the weight of gravity.

The Guardian of the Threshold says this when he admonishes us in the following way:

O man, touch within your body's entire being
How earthly forces support you in existence.

That earthly forces are our support, that the earthly element supports us so we don't sink down, is what the Guardian of the Threshold is telling us now.

Then he leads us further, so that we not only feel that we are like a whole finger, but that we also feel what is within the finger: it is the element of water, of fluid. For everything which is in the human being—something also known by physical science—is born from the fluid element. Solid is isolated from fluid, as ice is from water. We must rise to the sensation of the element of water. Out in the world everything is of a fluid nature. Our own formative forces are formed in us by the fluid element. Just as we feel the earth as our support, we also feel, in that we feel our organs, that we are formed as human beings out of the fluid element. It creates the formative forces for us. Our lungs and our livers are solidly formed, but they solidify from out of the fluid element, from out of the element of water. Just as we feel the earth to be our support, we also feel, in that we feel our organs, that the water element forms us as human beings. The water forces are our sculptors; the earth is our support. Therefore, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

O man, experience in the circle of your touch

(We can touch everywhere, but when we feel the touching itself ...)

O man, experience in the circle of your touch,
How water-beings are your being's sculptors.

Now the Guardian of the Threshold continues to admonish us. He teaches us how we can also unite with the powers of air. We breathe in the air. We know that if we breathe in the air in the wrong way we feel it; so, it has to do with our feelings. We have feelings that make us fearful, that breech the coherence of our existence. Just as the water element shapes us, so do does the air element care for us. The Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

O man, now feel in all your life's interweaving
How powers of air are your caregivers in existence.

Now the Guardian leads us farther on to the warmth element. We feel ourselves united internally with warmth. We feel the earth outside of us as support. We know little about how the water forces shape us, during growth, for example; that stays in the subconscious. The powers of air thrust themselves in only when they are abnormal, when they don't work normally. But we feel united with warmth when we have the right amount in us. Our souls and our whole being become warm when we feel warmth from without. We stiffen when we must experience cold from without. Warmth and cold are at one with us in a completely different way in the elemental world. There they are neither merely supporters, nor our sculptors, nor our caregivers—they are our true helpers in physical existence. The Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

O man, think in all the streams of feeling,
How fire-powers are helpers in your existence.

If we heed all that is entailed in these demands, we will find the path to conscious unification of our corporeality with the elements. And in different degrees our corporeality is one with the elements. At first the earth-element supports us in an exterior, mechanical way. The earth-element is support for us; it is mechanical and exterior. It will become more inward, but still consists of formations which do not reach the soul; water-beings form us, are our “sculptors”. When we become one with the air-elements, we rise to the level of morality. The air-element is no longer a mere exterior designer, it is our caregiver. And our feelings are of anxiety if we do not breathe in the right way. The powers of air are “caregivers”; warmth and cold are “helpers”, enabling us to be earthly beings. They are fire-powers, now wholly at the moral level.

The summation of the Guardian of the Threshold's admonitions with respect to the escalation of the elements:

O man, observe yourself in the elemental kingdom.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian's teaching:

O man, touch within your body's entire being
How earthly forces support you in existence.

O man, experience in all the circle of your touch,>
How water-beings are your being's sculptors.

O man, now feel in all your life's interweaving
How powers of air are your caregivers in existence.

O man, think in all the streams of feeling,
How fire-powers are helpers in your existence.

We have here the escalation [the words are underlined on the blackboard.]: “support”, “sculptors”, “caregivers”, “helpers”.

We also have another escalation. For in a mantric verse every word is in the right place, and there is no word there that only serves to fill an empty space. Everything coincides with its inner meaning with which we should unite ourselves in meditation on the mantric verse. We have an escalation [underlined on the blackboard] “touch”, “experience”, “feel”, “think”. It is a special escalation. So in meditation we must also sense the inner, meaningful structure of such a mantric verse.

Once the Guardian has said this, he sums it up again in one line:

[It is written on the blackboard:]

O man, observe yourself in the elemental kingdom.

Thus, the Guardian leads us to an inner experience of the verses, through which we can unite our corporeality with the elements to which it belongs.

Then he guides us further on to the soul. Here he doesn't point us to the elements earth, water, air, fire; here he points us to the planets. He points out to us how we should feel about what mutually draws the planets' orbits around the earth, how one planet or another draws the orbit. The orbits have a relationship and speak to each other when the human being rises in his soul to this secret of the universe-pointing, planetary powers. Then he lives with his soul in the spiritual kingdom of the cosmos, just as he had previously lived with his body in the elemental kingdom. We can only psychically feel to be at one with the cosmos if we bring ourselves to live into the kingdom of the planets and their orbits. The Guardian of the Threshold tells us this with these words:

O man, let rule within your depths of soul
The universe-pointing planetary powers.

[It is written on the blackboard.]

O man, let rule within your depths of soul
The universe-pointing planetary powers.

Again, the Guardian of the Threshold sums up the direction-giving forces in these two lines for how the soul can feel to be at one with the secrets of the planets:

[written on the blackboard]

O man, become yourself...
(which means: make yourself existent)
... through the cosmic orbits.

The cosmic orbits of the various planets are drawn together into one cosmic orbit. We have thereby felt body and soul to be at one with the cosmos: the body with the earthly elements, the soul with the planets.

If we want the spirit to feel at one with the universe, we can neither look to the elements nor to the secrets of the planets, rather must we look to the stars. For there is the power with which we must feel our spirit to be at one with in the distant universe, if we wish to feel ourselves to be members of this universe in the true sense. There the cosmos begins to intone the music of the spheres. Therefore, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

O man, preserve within your spirit's creation
The planets' words proclaimed in heaven.

[It is written on the blackboard.]

O man, preserve within your spirit's creation
The planets' words proclaimed in heaven.

Again, the Guardian of the Threshold summarizes the requirement in one line:

O man, create yourself through heaven's wisdom.

Every moment our spiritual existence is a creation of our Self.

[It is written on the blackboard.]

At every moment our spiritual existence is a creation of our Self.

If we sense and feel this in the right way, we are internalized by the Guardian of the Threshold. We recall how the words of self-knowledge were intoned from all creation still in an abstract form, how they rang out to us from all sides of natural and spiritual existence. But now the phrase: “O man, know thyself”, is clarified in all its parts. It now consists of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine parts.

“O man, know thyself” should be seen as nine rays of light, so to speak. Then it will be filled with what our meditation needs.

That is how we should feel. And, in a certain sense, we should pledge to the Guardian of the Threshold that we will adhere to his admonition:

O man, touch within your body's entire being
How earthly forces support you in existence.

O man, experience in all the circle of your touch,
How water-beings are your being's sculptors.

O man, now feel in all your life's interweaving
How powers of air are your caregivers in existence.

O man, think in all the streams of feeling,
How fire-powers are helpers in your existence.

O man, observe yourself in the elemental kingdom.

O man, let rule within your depths of soul
The universe-pointing planetary powers.

O man, become yourself through the cosmic orbits.

O man, preserve within your spirit's creation
The planets' words proclaimed in heaven.

O man, create yourself through heaven's wisdom.

We make a kind of pledge to the Guardian of the Threshold that we will always adhere to his admonitions, letting them run through our soul as mantras.

Again, and again we look back, and at every step we feel bound to remember what is happening on this side of the threshold. And on this side of the threshold every stone and every plant, every tree, every cloud, every spring, every rock, every lightning, every thunder has called to us:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

Thus, when these words of the Guardian of the threshold ring out with full spiritual force in this room—words which he as the serving member of Michael's power, the reigning power of our time—when these words ring out we can be certain, because this esoteric school has been founded by Michael's might itself, that Michael is present with his force, with his spirit, with his love, that Michael is psycho-spiritually present among us.

And that can be confirmed—here where responsibility is felt by the leadership of the School towards the power of Michael—that nothing else streams through this School than what is present in the holy will of Michael. It may be confirmed by Michael's sign and Michael's seal; this Michael-Sign [in red]:

and the Michael-seal, which confirms that Michael-Power enters into the true Rosicrucian training and is thus conjoined with what is being taught in the Michael School with Michael's seal, which the Rosicrucian endowment seals in the Rosicrucian verse accompanied by the seal-signs:

Ex deo nascimur

[seal gesture]

In Cristo morimur

[seal gesture]

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

[seal gesture]

and that means:

I revere the Father

[first seal gesture]

I love the Son

[middle seal gesture]

I unite with the Spirit

[third seal gesture]

“I revere the Father”: in saying “Ex deo nascimur”, this feeling passes through our soul;

“I love the Son”: in saying “In Cristo morimur”, this feeling passes silently through our soul;

“I unite with the Spirit”: is silently felt when saying “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”.

The mantric verses come to you, my sisters and brothers, with the sign and seal of Michael:

[Michael Sign]

[Together with the seal gestures is spoken:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Cristo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

*

Only those who have been accepted as members of this School may possess the verses which are imparted here. Those who cannot be present during a lesson when verses have been given, may receive them from those who have received them in the School itself. However, in order to receive the verses, permission must first be granted by either Dr. Wegman or by me. The request to Dr. Wegman or to me can only be made by the one who wants to give the verses to another. Therefore, the one who wants to receive them should not request them; it would serve no purpose. He can go to someone and ask that he be given them; but the one who gives them must ask permission in every case. This is not an administrative rule, but an occult arrangement which must be followed, because the handing over must begin with this real act.

The request may not be done in writing—it has happened, so I must be clear about it—but must be done orally, except when exceptional circumstances make an oral understanding impossible. Least of all in esoteric matters should even the hint of bureaucracy exist. Everything must be alive, just as it should be in the Anthroposophical Society.

Furthermore, whoever writes down more than the verses is obliged to keep what has been written for only one week and then to burn it. For it is not good that they somehow remain longer. They can go in all possible directions. Esoteric material must be handled in this way; it is not an arbitrary rule. In esoterica, everything is determined from true occult foundations. And if esoteric mantric verses are revealed in an incorrect way by the members who have the right because they either received the verses here during a lesson or by the correct way as described—if they are received by others in an incorrect way, they lose all their spiritual force. That is an occult law. And in the spiritual world there are laws which may not be ignored without punishment. So, this is not an arbitrary rule, but one which obeys an occult law.

*

Now for some announcements. Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. the course about Pastoral Medicine will continue, then at 12 noon the course for Speech Formation and drama; in the afternoon at 3:30 p.m. the course for Theologians. At 5 p.m. there will be an eurythmy performance. The next Esoteric Lesson, in which the Michael teachings will be rounded out, will take place on Monday at 8:30.

If you give a public anthroposophical lecture today in our present time - and what is said here in relation to a public lecture must be taken into account in everything we bring from anthroposophy to the outside world, to people who do not join an anthroposophical Society, then we must always bear in mind that although the souls of people today have a great longing for anthroposophy in their depths, in their subconscious, there is very little connection with spiritual truths in those parts of their soul life of which they themselves are aware. Therefore, in a public lecture, it is not important to pay attention to what is popular or unpopular with such personalities. One should never ask oneself what they like or dislike to hear, but one must take into consideration that our age has habits of thought and ways of imagining things that are in many ways directly opposed to what we are working towards through anthroposophical knowledge. I always try to pay careful attention to the aspects that need to be considered when I try to determine the difference between the tone in which a public lecture must be delivered and the tone in which we can speak to our anthroposophical friends. And we should get used to really observing this distinction. Even if people who are still far from anthroposophy are perhaps unpleasantly affected by what they are told, this need not trouble us in any way, as long as we are aware that we have brought them what is good for their souls. But then, when we are among ourselves, we must try to penetrate deeper and deeper into the things. We can, among ourselves, discuss certain very definite truths that are already extraordinarily important and significant for our present time. We must discuss them among ourselves so that they can penetrate deeper and deeper into the spiritual life of the time, and then, so to speak, we can bring them to the outer world in clearly formulated words.

We must understand this matter quite correctly. Let us assume that we are talking about what constantly plays a role in human life, about the fact that all human life on earth is permeated by the Ahrimanic, by the Luciferic forces, or we are talking about certain things that relate to life between death and a new birth. What should prevent us from speaking so readily about these things to the unprepared should not be what often occurs in a society like ours, and what could be called a certain secrecy, where most people do not even have the right idea of why it is done. What should prevent us from speaking about these things to the unprepared is that people who are unprepared cannot take things seriously enough, cannot take them deeply enough. The words Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces should gradually become something so significant for the life of the anthroposophist, something that so deeply moves his feelings and perceptions when these words are spoken that one has the feeling: If you throw these words at the head of the unprepared, the inner power that you are supposed to feel when they are spoken is taken away, and we also harm ourselves if we use these words in ordinary life on every occasion that suits us. For example, when we reach into our wallet and have to deal with money, we are indeed dealing with Ahrimanic forces. But it is not good to apply the word 'Ahrimanic' so readily to everyday situations. When we apply such words to everyday situations, they become dulled for our perception, for our feeling, and we then no longer have the possibility of having words that, when we think or speak them, exert on us that elementary, significant meaning that they are meant to exert. It is extremely important that we do not get too casual about these things in our daily lives, for we will gradually lose the best and most effective that anthroposophy can give us. The more we use anthroposophical words in our daily lives, the more we deprive ourselves of the possibility that anthroposophy will truly become something that supports our soul and deeply permeates our soul. We need only consider the power of habit and we will see that there is a difference when we use words, such as, let us say, the words 'aura' or 'Ahrimanic forces' or 'Luciferic forces', with a certain sacred awe, with a certain awareness that we are speaking of other worlds. If we always feel that we have to stop before using such words, and only use them when it is really important for us to consider our relationship to the supersensible world, then it is quite different from speaking of these things of the higher world in everyday life and constantly using words taken from these worlds.

I had to give this introduction because, in this hour, we want to point out something in the human soul that should always be present in our consciousness, but which we only truly contemplate when it is done with a certain sacred awe. Take in hand the little book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. There you will find a description, so to speak, of the processes that take place in a developing human being from seven to seven years. It shows that up to the age of seven, until the change of teeth, we are mainly dealing with the development of the physical body; that in the next period, from the age of seven to fourteen, until sexual maturity, we are dealing with the development of the etheric body and so on. If you consider this development of the human being from seven to seven years, then you are primarily dealing with what the, so to speak, normal beings of the higher hierarchies bring about in human evolution. This is the true progressive evolution that takes place from seven to seven years, so that we can say: the actually progressive divine-spiritual powers guide and direct this evolution from seven to seven years. If only these progressive divine spiritual powers were active in man, then the whole of human life would take a completely different course, a completely different course from the one it actually takes. Above all, man would approach a small child in a completely different way. He would always have the feeling that a spiritual individuality was speaking through the child. One would even always have the feeling that the small child, in everything it does, receives the impulses from higher worlds. And people would certainly have no other feeling than that the child acts out of far higher impulses than those that they themselves can penetrate with their minds. And that would take quite a long time in relative terms.

What seems so desirable to people today, that children should be clever in a human and earthly sense as early as possible, would then seem highly unwelcome to people, because of a child that causes the delight of those around it today because it already or did, would be a child that would be guided by the progressive divine-spiritual powers according to the seven-year periods. If people had only children, they would say, if the child spoke cleverly in the modern sense as early as possible and they were accustomed to the different circumstances: How godforsaken the child is! What is considered delightful today would be seen as a punishment. And a young person of fifteen who was as clever as is expected today would be seen as a completely godforsaken being. For it is only through the progressive divine spiritual powers that the human being is actually called upon to gradually emerge completely with his ego between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight; and before that, what he does would appear much more as if higher spiritual, supersensible impulses were working through him. Of course, a certain dreamy life would be characteristic of the children; but this dreamy life would be felt as a blessing from God or the spirit, and there would be no attempt to educate the children to be precocious in the modern sense.

Now, as we know, something else also occurs during these developmental periods of the human being. This is what we have often emphasized: the development of self-awareness in the third, fourth, fifth year, at that point in time that we can generally characterize by saying: it is the point in time up to which a person remembers in later life. It is the occurrence of that moment from which the person begins to say “I” to themselves. You must now actually think of the whole development of man as two currents: as that of evolution, in which the progressive divine-spiritual entities are at work, and in addition the other current, through which man, within the first seven-year period, begins to develop an inner self-awareness, to develop a memory that later allows him to consciously remember back to that point in time. This does not come from the progressive divine spiritual beings. They would let us dream for much longer and would work through us into the world. The fact that we become self-aware so early and say 'I' so early is purely the result of the forces of Lucifer working in people. Thus we are dealing with two currents, with a regular progressive divine-spiritual current, as it were, which would actually only lead us to a clear, distinct sense of self between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, and with a Luciferic current within us. This luciferic current works in us in such a way that it completely crosses the other current, so that it does something completely different in us than what the progressive divine-spiritual beings actually want from us. They work in such a way that we learn to say “I” to ourselves in the midst of the first period, learn to develop our egoity inwardly, soul-wise, and to remember back in our memory.

If we really consider this, we can get an idea of our ongoing development. Imagine for a moment the luciferic influence just characterized away and only what the progressive entities would make of man as a calmly flowing water. We think of this calmly flowing water as an image of the progressive life stream of man under the influence of the actually good divine entities. And now let us take the water that flows so calmly for a walk, then take a blue or red substance, pour it into the calmly flowing water and, choosing a chemical liquid that can be kept separate from the clear water, let a second current flow alongside the first current from a certain point on. Thus, in our own true, calmly progressive, we might say, “Yahweh-Christ” current, the Luciferic current flows with us from about the middle of our first seven-year period. And so Lucifer lives in us. If Lucifer did not live in us, we would not have this second current. But if we only lived in the first stream, then we would have the consciousness until well into our twenties: we are actually a member of the divine-spiritual powers. We attain the consciousness of independence, of inner individuality and personality, through the second stream. Thus we see at the same time that it is full of wisdom that this Luciferic stream pours into us.

But in the second seven-year period, too, something occurs that we can, in a sense, understand as a current that is not connected with the merely progressive divine beings. From a certain point of view, this has already been repeatedly characterized in us. It occurs around the ninth or tenth year, that is, in the second seven-year period. For some, the perceptive people, the experiences come as I have mentioned them, for example, with Jean Paul. For him it occurred perhaps a little earlier, for others it usually occurs around the ninth or tenth year. There can be a significant intensification, one might say a condensation of the sense of self. But the fact that something special is happening can also be established in another way. However, I would not recommend that this other way should become a particular educational rule. It can only be said that once it happens, one might say, of its own accord, it can be observed, but one should not play with it, one should not make it a principle of education. If you let a child, especially around the age of nine or ten, look at himself naked in the mirror, and the child is not jaded by our often strange educational principles today, he will always feel a certain fear in a natural way at the sight of his own body, a certain fear if he has not been made flirtatious earlier through looking in the mirror a lot. This can be observed especially in naturally sensitive children who have not looked in the mirror much before, because during this time something grows in the human being that acts as a kind of counterbalance to the luciferic current that is present in the first period. In this second period, around the ninth or tenth year, Ahriman takes hold of the human being and forms a kind of balance with his current to the luciferic current. We can now accomplish that which does Ahriman the greatest favor if, at this very time, we develop the mind of the growing child, which is directed towards the external sensory world, if we say to ourselves: During this time, the child must be trained in such a way that it comes to its own independent judgment in everything. You know that I am mentioning an educational principle that is now quite generally accepted in pedagogy. The almost universal demand today is to foster independence, especially in these years. They even put adding machines in front of children so that they are not even encouraged to learn the multiplication table by heart. This is based on a certain benevolence of our age towards Ahriman. Our age wishes, unconsciously of course, to educate children in such a way that Ahriman can be cultivated as strongly as possible in the human soul. And when we go through the current educational methods today, we say to ourselves as occultists: These people who advocate these educational methods are only bunglers. If Ahriman himself were to write these educational principles, he would do better! But what is said there about children's independence and their own judgment is a true discipleship of Ahriman. What is implied here will become more and more prevalent in the near future. Ahriman will become a good guide for the external powers and spiritual guides of our age.

Now take a matter such as we have just mentioned. We must regard it as something quite natural and self-evident that it should appeal to man; that man feels Lucifer and Ahriman approaching him. It would be quite wrong to believe that it would be better if we were now to eliminate Lucifer and Ahriman altogether. That would be quite impossible. The following reflection can show you how impossible it would be. If our life were not regulated, as it were, by the interaction of the progressive divine spiritual beings with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, if only the progressive powers were to work on us, then we would come to a certain independence much later and we would also have this independence in such a way that, just as we now perceive colors and light, we would then no longer doubt that divine spiritual entities also really prevail behind colors and light, behind that which we perceive externally. We would perceive the thoughts of the world simultaneously with our sense perceptions. We would only come to our independence in our twenties, but then we would also perceive world thoughts externally. We would then dream away our youth because divine spiritual powers would be working in us, and when these would cease to work from within, they would then confront us from without. We would perceive their thoughts from the outside as we now only receive sensory perceptions. We would therefore, with the exception of a few years, towards the twentieth year, when we would become visible, otherwise never have any proper independence at all. As children we would be dreamy beings, in middle age we would not be able to make our own decisions and determine our own course, but wherever we encountered the outer world we would simply see what we had to do, as the people of ancient Atlantis could still do. Independence flows into us through the working of Lucifer and Ahriman within us.

Of course, it is extremely important that we do not speak in the same way as today's foolish pedagogy speaks about the human being, which always speaks of development, as if one were to extract the inner being from the human being. In an educational sense, we only speak meaningfully about the human being when we know that three things are involved in his soul: the progressive good divine spiritual beings, and Lucifer and Ahriman, and when we can distinguish between them. It is now of particular value to first take the main point of view of the progressive divine spiritual beings and consider above all: What are the requirements when we look at the seven-fold periods of human development? For in this respect we can really help every human being simply by behaving in the right way towards this child of man. If in the first seven years of the child's life we bring about conditions in which it lives in an environment that has a healthy effect on its physical body, we are doing something good for the child under all circumstances. If during the second period we create around the human being good authorities, authorities that may be called such in the noblest sense, so that the human being does not become a clever talker in these times, but rather a being that builds on the people around him as authorities, the child has respect for and devotion to, then we are doing something good for him under all circumstances. We are doing something good when we educate children who, in their ninth or tenth year, do not already want to know everything themselves, but who, when asked, “Why is this or that right or good?” they will say: because their father or mother said it was good, or because their teacher said so. If we educate our children in such a way that the adults around them are seen as self-evident authorities, then we are doing our children a favor in all circumstances. And if we violate these seven-year periods, if we bring about a situation in which children begin to criticize those who are self-evident authorities during this period, if we do not avoid this criticism, then we do something bad for the growing person under all circumstances. And if we do not find the opportunity to speak to a person between the ages of fourteen, fifteen and twenty-one in such a way that we can naturally rise with him to ideals, to ideals that fill the heart with joy, then we are not doing this young person any good either. With people in these years, one must speak of ideals, of what later life must bring under all circumstances to the person growing up properly. One may say: Today, one's heart could really break sometimes when eighteen-year-old boys – pardon me, personalities – come and already carry their feuilletons into the newspapers. If, instead of accepting something from them, one were to talk to them about things that do not yet interfere with their outward lives, but which they are only to realize later, if one were to talk to them about the great ideals of human life and be inspired by them, then one would relate to them in the right way. Actually, anyone who, as an editor, accepts the feature section of a person who has not yet reached the age of twenty, does something worse under all circumstances than someone who, when the young person comes up with this feature section, says to him: Yes, look, that's very nice what you've done. But when you are ten years older, you will have completely different ideas about it. Now put it nicely in your drawer and take it out again in ten or twelve years. The person who does that, then takes a look at the manuscript and talks to the person concerned about the ideals of life that can be associated with it, does something good for him.

I just want to characterize that the things that were said in my writing “The Education of the Child” should always be taken into account in education under all circumstances. Everything else, where Lucifer and Ahriman are involved, does not allow for general rules, it is actually different for every person, because it relates precisely to the personal. In many cases, it is a matter of the educator's personal tact, and one cannot intervene in these matters with all kinds of pedantic rules. I wanted to give you a characterization of what is in the human soul, and how we must take into account Lucifer and Ahriman if we want to understand the full human nature, if we really want to consider everything, not just look at it and say: we must fight Lucifer and Ahriman. If we wanted to fight Lucifer at all costs, we could do so in a very sure way: we would only have to prevent people from developing a memory. For just as it is true that certain lunar beings were brought into our earthly development, it is equally true that all memory is a Luciferic power. So we would simply have to avoid developing our memory! We must, however, realize that we have to develop this memory in the right way. And that is why it was said in that writing that the right period for the education of memory is between the ages of seven and fourteen. In the previous period, we do not particularly need to systematically educate memory, because it develops itself then, because that is when Lucifer is most present in man. We leave the children to themselves. But then, after the change of teeth, when Ahriman has most clearly taken hold of the human being, we begin to train the memory. For by then Ahriman has already created his counterweight to Lucifer, so we no longer work directly in the service of Lucifer when we train the memory. We must not even entertain the idea that we want to fight Ahriman. There would be a very simple way to combat the grossest Ahrimanic effects, but it would not do the human being any good. When the human being gets his second teeth, they would have to be hammered in, because that is when the most intense Ahrimanic effects occur. Of the progressive powers, man has only his so-called milk teeth. What man receives as his independent teeth throughout his life has a purely Ahrimanic effect.

Thus we must realize that much of what is in us at all can only be in us because the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer are in us. Sometimes we even succeed in being quite dissatisfied with our unconscious counteraction to Ahriman. In the course of our lives, we prepare ourselves to have certain powers when we have passed through death, so that Ahriman cannot do too much to us between death and a new birth. But sometimes we clearly show ourselves that we do not even welcome the fight against Ahriman, for example when we regret every tooth loss. But with every tooth that falls out, we gain a power that we can put to very good use. I am not, of course, speaking against the filling or insertion of teeth, because nothing Ahrimanic grows in us through this, at most the gold itself, but that is not the point. So there is no question of this being a bad thing. The fact that we gradually lose our Ahrimanic teeth is due to the fact that in evolution we also receive certain impulses that defeat Ahriman. And regardless of whether we have a tooth inserted again or not, once it has been lost, we have gained an impulse that helps us in the forces that we have to develop between death and a new birth at the very lowest level. It is a small thing at first, but it can show us how, when we approach reality and look beyond the appearance and the great deception that usually surrounds us, we really have to get into the habit of looking at things in life quite differently than they are usually looked at. And even the weakness of old age, for example, is a strength that, by feeling it, we gain directly to have something against Ahriman when we have passed through the gate of death. While we can indeed be angry here between birth and death if we age prematurely, in terms of what we want after death to cope with Ahriman, we have to be glad that we age.

And now you see how wonderfully beautiful it is that our inner spiritual and soul core remains, which, by developing between birth and death, has everything to do with the progressive powers. For this germ, which passes through the gate of death, is there, where it has developed its strongest inner powers of tension, purely dominated by the progressive powers. That which is outside of it, which withers away externally, that is where the Ahrimanic powers are. And we must now consider what the seer of this Ahriman actually is.

When our plants grow out of our soil, wither towards autumn and the leaves fall, then the elemental spirits that Ahriman sends to the earth's surface appear everywhere. There he reaps the first dying; he reaps it through his elemental spirits. When one walks through the fields in autumn and clairvoyantly sees nature dying, then Ahriman is stretching out his forces everywhere, and everywhere he has his elemental messengers to bring him the withering physical and etheric entities. But as human beings, we are actually also in a kind of autumn and winter mood throughout the day. Truly, the soul's summer mood is actually only present when the soul is asleep. It is really the case that the sleeping human body, physical body and etheric body, is of the same value as a plant; and what is outside, the I and the astral body, reflect their rays back onto the physical and etheric body, acting like the sun and stars and causing the forces that we have destroyed during the day to sprout out. Vegetable life grows, and the thinking during the day is actually only there to remove what the night has caused to sprout. When we wake up, we flit over our vegetative life, just as autumn flits over the plants of the earth. And what winter does to the vegetation of the earth, we do in exactly the same way to our physical and etheric body when we wake up, to that which they bring forth in the summer time of the soul, namely during the time when we are asleep at night. When we are awake, it is wintertime, the soul's real wintertime, and if we want to have the soul's springtime, we have to fall asleep. It is so. And from this point of view, it is actually easy to understand why people who do not at least mix something from the soul's summertime into their waking lives dry up so easily. Dry scholars, scrawny little professors, they are those who do not like to take in what is not fully conscious, who do not like to take in something of the soul's summer time. Then they dry up, then they become quite pronounced winter people. And to the seer, the whole development of human daily life presents itself as quite similar to what I have just said for nature. When man forms his ordinary thoughts that relate to the external, when he thinks only in a materialistic way about what happens externally, then his thoughts engage the brain in such a way that the brain secretes substances that Ahriman can put to good use, so that Ahriman actually accompanies the waking life of the day. And the more materialistic we are, the more possessed we are by Ahriman. No wonder it is true that materialism is connected with fear. If you remember the “Guardian of the Threshold”, you will realize how fear is in turn connected with Ahriman.

We should get the feeling that we are indeed facing complicated spiritual worlds in life. And what we should get from anthroposophy is not just that we know this or that, that we know there is Ahriman, Lucifer, a physical body, an etheric body. That is the very least. What we are to acquire from anthroposophy is a certain mood of the soul, a basic feeling for human life, what is actually there in these depths of the soul. Therefore, it is necessary that we keep the words that are connected with these higher things with a certain sacred awe. If we always have them on our lips, then it all too easily happens that their seriousness and dignity become dulled for us.

Thus we see man between birth and death, in his relationship to the progressive spiritual entities, standing in a certain way between Lucifer and Ahriman. And in order that the entire development of man may take place in the right way, this relationship must remain the same between death and a new birth, only that which is inward between birth and death becomes outward between death and a new birth. Inwardly, from the moment we can remember back, Lucifer has joined his claws to the human soul. Inwardly, man knows nothing about it unless he learns something through spiritual science and learns to feel about it. After death, the matter is different. At a certain point in time, Lucifer makes his appearance, just as surely as inwardly between birth and death, outwardly in the life between death and a new birth. So he stands there in full form before us, so he stands by our side, so we walk with him! Just as little as man knows Lucifer before he has stepped through the gate of death, so surely and clearly does he know him when he walks by his side between death and a new birth. Only that in the present cycle of time this consciousness can become a rather unpleasant one. We can pass through the region between death and a new birth in such a way that we have Lucifer beside us, so to speak, and realize his necessity for the world. The time is drawing near when people will only be able to pass through the life after death with Lucifer if they have already properly sensed and recognized the Luciferian impulses in the human soul here in life. Those people – and there will be more and more of them in the future – who want nothing to do with Lucifer, and that is probably the majority, will know all the more about Lucifer after death. Not only will he stand by their side, but he will continually tap their soul-forces, he will vampirize them. This is what man, through ignorance, prepares himself for, to be vampirized by Lucifer. In this way he robs himself of strength for the next life, for he gives it, in a sense, to Lucifer.

It is very similar with regard to Ahriman. With regard to him, the matter is as follows. The two spirits are always there between death and a new birth, but one time one is more present and the other less, the other time it is the other way around. We go there, and then back again in life between death and a new birth. At the time of passing away, Lucifer is especially at our side, and at the time of returning towards a new birth, Ahriman is especially at our side. For he leads us back to the earth, and he is an important personality in the second half of the return journey. And he too can, as it were, do harm to those people who do not want to believe in him in their life between birth and death. He gives them too much of his powers. He gives them what he always has left over, those powers that are connected with earthly heaviness, that bring illness and premature death upon people, that bring all kinds of misfortunes that look like coincidences into earthly existence, and so on. All this is connected with these Ahrimanic powers.

From a slightly different point of view, I presented the matter over in Munich. There I pointed out that after death the human soul can be the serving spirit for the powers that send illness and death from the supersensible worlds into the sensual. What makes life weak is what Ahriman welcomes so much and what makes it possible for him to further weaken our lives. But again, we must not judge one-sidedly. It would be quite wrong to say: So it is very bad that Ahriman has introduced us into life and that we have to suffer from his after-effects in life. — No, that is good, because under certain circumstances an effect of illness can be what contributes most to our ascending development.

It is always the case that when we approach the threshold that separates the supersensible from the sensory world, we must be prepared to modify our judgment somewhat and not to judge as we are accustomed to doing in the ordinary physical world. For it is true, in the physical world, there is indeed Maja in abundance. Where does materialism come from in the physical world, that materialism that says: There is no Ahriman, there is no devil at all! Who shouts the loudest: There is no devil? — He who is most possessed by him. For the spirit we call Ahriman has the greatest interest in having his existence most of all denied by the one who is most possessed by him. “The devil never senses the little people, even if he has them by the collar!” So not believing in Ahriman is a bad Maja, because he has you by the collar most of all when you don't believe in him, because then you give him the greatest power over you. So that you judge wrongly when monists appear and rail against the devil, and you say: They are fighting the devil. No, a materialistic-monistic gathering that rails against the devil is set up to conjure up the devil. And the modern materialists conjure up the devil much more than the old witches are said to have done, much, much more! That is the truth and the rest is Maya. So we must learn to judge differently. And anyone who goes to a monistic meeting that is nuanced in a materialistic way is not telling the truth when they say: People free people from the devil. — They should say: Now I am going to a meeting where the devil is being invoked into human culture with all the powers that people have. That is what we should really come to realize: that we, as we grow into spiritual life, not only learn to absorb concepts and ideas, but we also learn to think and feel differently. And yet, when we face the external world, we remain rational enough not to mix this external world all the time with what is true for the supersensible worlds. When people constantly use words in relation to the external physical world that actually only have the right value for the supersensible worlds, then they take away what is most important: that we learn to distinguish between the sensory and supersensible worlds, that we learn to apply the words in the right sense.

This is the single thing that should be hinted at today, when we have gathered here, for the first time in such large numbers, with friends from outside the city, at our recently established Augsburg branch. And today, when we wanted to gather our thoughts here in our souls, which should help us in our work in this place, a serious word, a very serious word, should also be spoken as a kind of opening word for our Augsburg branch. For then, under the guidance and direction of the masters of wisdom and harmony of feeling, who serve the advancing divine-spiritual beings, the work of a branch will flourish quite surely when this spiritual work harmoniously integrates itself into a larger spiritual stream of work. And our friends from outside have come here to you, my dear friends from Augsburg, in order to develop thoughts of love and devotion for the general anthroposophical cause and for each individual anthroposophical striving person here with you in their souls, and this will remain in these souls, which from this hour has taken its starting point and developed like a source of togetherness in these souls. You will, my dear friends in Augsburg, continue to work here alone from week to week, from time to time, but only seemingly, only outwardly and spatially alone. The fact that many friends are together with you will be the starting point for those strengthening forces that can actually flow That is why it is so wonderful when the opportunity arises for our friends to come together with a young branch in larger numbers. Because then the point at which they come together in time is also an outward sign, which we as human beings need, that from there the will can really go to And if you, my dear friends in Augsburg, who have been working faithfully on anthroposophy for some time now, continue to work faithfully in the future, remember that there will be friends all over the world who will think to you with the intention that your work may be a worthy In this way we practise our togetherness and never lose sight of our togetherness in spirit. Let us always keep it clear, but also strongly present, for only in this way can we really be helped by those powers that prevail over our true work, the forces of the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. These forces will invisibly flit through your thoughts when you The dear local members have shown through so much in their anthroposophical work and activities how faithfully and truly they want to work with us. And so we are all doing something important when we now, through this gathering, have the opportunity to unite our thoughts in the goal that has brought us together: May the work of our Augsburg sisters and brothers be blessed and strengthened by the powers to which we always appeal! It is in this spirit that I invoke the blessing of the Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings upon this branch, that blessing which I know is with us in our work if we make ourselves worthy of it.

My dear friends!

Congresses, such as the first Stuttgart and then the second Vienna Congresses were, have actually become a necessity for the anthroposophical movement, as a result of external pressure. From the very beginning, the anthroposophical movement has worked from within the esoteric, and it is self-evident that an esoteric movement does not appear in an agitative way, but rather seeks its way in such a way that, although it gives everyone the opportunity to hear, it only addresses those people who feel a certain inclination towards it from their hearts and minds, and who then, it must be said, find their way to it in a fateful way. But now, from a certain point on, our literature in particular has spread very rapidly and has thus come into the hands of many people, especially those who have a certain scientific orientation in the sense of the current times. All kinds of scientific schools of thought then began to deal with anthroposophy in a polemical or other way.

This in turn inspired many to defend this anthroposophical worldview with the scientific tools that were their own, and so it came about that – one might say – challenged by the world, the anthroposophical movement had to be active in the most diverse branches of life. It is fair to say that this simply came to us from outside; at first we were not at all inclined to deviate from the old ways of spreading anthroposophy. We were forced to do so.

At the beginning, we were on the defensive on many different fronts. Anthroposophy was attacked, and usually in the most unobjective way. However, a number of extraordinarily capable people gradually grew into the role of defending it, and are indeed able to apply the basic anthroposophical principles and also anthroposophical research to the individual fields. Little by little, work could begin on developing a large number of important branches of life and science in the anthroposophical sense. The fact that publications were then also issued in these various fields meant that the anthroposophical movement was all the more exposed to the most diverse circles, and after a certain time it was simply necessary to go before the general public. From the anthroposophical point of view, too, there were the great issues of the day, at least from the standpoint of culture, to which one had to take a definite stand, for the reasons we have often discussed here. It was this that essentially provided the impetus for something like the first Stuttgart Congress and, now, the Vienna Congress.

Now our friends have set the Vienna Congress a special task. This task was obvious. It was obvious, I would say, from the nature of Vienna – the nature of Vienna within the Austrian nature. And recently there has been a lot of talk among us about the special cultural characteristics of the East and those of the West. From this, one tried to recognize the foundations from which, in the face of the forces of decline that are so active today, forces of the rising will arise. This led to the fact that in this particularly suitable place, in Vienna, this approach was moved to the center of the congress negotiations. The congress was named the “West-East Congress”. This was based on the conviction that we are now at a point in the history of Western civilization where we need to come to an understanding of the entire cultural world of the earth, and this must come primarily from intellectual and spiritual sources.

I have also pointed out here, as was rightly said by an English colonial minister, that the point of consideration for world affairs is actually shifting from the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. One can say – and this is an extremely significant statement – that in the past, Europe and the connection between Europe and America were what mattered, and what has actually mattered since the fifteenth century, since Asia was more or less cut off from Europe by the Turkish incursion. At that time, a great cultural upheaval took place, and what then essentially became the cultural life of modern times was a Western-oriented cultural life. Now, with the shift in the focus of external cultural life across the Pacific Ocean, the beginning has been made that the whole earth must become one large area to be treated uniformly in terms of all cultural issues. But since understanding and trust are necessary between people who want to have anything to do with each other at all, this must first be preceded by an understanding in the spiritual realm.

If we look across to Asia today, we see everywhere that people are living in the last remnants of an ancient and magnificent spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that has driven out everything else, both in terms of state and legal life and in terms of economic life. We, like these people in Asia, cannot understand the people of the West, how they look at the machine-like nature of the West's external culture, how they find that something machine-like also appears in the external social order, how they look down with a certain contempt on the externalized view of life in the West. On the other hand, we know how the West has produced those cultural forces that must now develop in the future, and how the West also carries a spirituality within it, but which has not yet fully emerged today.

But everything depends on the West learning to look again with a greater understanding at what the East contains, even if today it is definitely producing and even feeling a sense of decline, and on the East learning to look at the West in such a way that it affirms it, not just negates it, as has been the case so far. Of course, a great deal remains to be done in order to create the spiritual foundations necessary for such an understanding. Today, when economic conditions are so extraordinarily pressing for cooperation, we cannot hope that the order of these economic conditions, even if it sometimes appears so, can achieve anything other than a surrogate, which will wait for a definitive solution for so long that it will have to wait until an understanding of the spiritual conditions has been reached that extends to the very core of human nature. Our Congress of Vienna should serve this understanding in a certain way, and I would say in the central intellectual field.

And in this respect, one could indeed indulge in certain hopes. One must take into account the whole Austrian essence in order to find such hopes justified. You see, my dear friends, for many decades people have been predicting the dissolution of Austria, and it has not happened. It took a world war for it to come to this dissolution. At present, the situation is such that the German part of Austria is actually in a terrible position. This German part of Austria cannot, in principle, survive on its own. For however much could be objected to the old Austria, the individual areas that now form the successor states could only advance together for certain reasons within Europe, especially in Central Europe. And this is particularly evident in those parts of the old Austria that are inhabited by Germans, where the purely nationalistic idea will be impossible to implement in the long term.

It is, after all, a purely abstract idea and essentially arose from the fact that, in the absence of a real intellectual life, the national question in the nineteenth century increasingly came to be seen as a surrogate for intellectual life.

What exists today as German Austria has no economic means of surviving independently, and in particular it has no means of having Vienna as its capital. The fact of the matter is that Vienna, in the size to which it has gradually developed, could only survive as the capital of old Austria; now it is much too big for what remains of German Austria, and therefore does not internally provide the conditions for a viable existence everywhere.

But again, it must be said that this Austria, also “German-Austria”, has absorbed cultural enzymes in the course of its development, which nevertheless offer the possibility that precisely this Austria, especially in intellectual terms, could create a bridge between the West and the East, between which it is stuck precisely because of its peoples and its geographical location.

One must only realize the following: In Austria, the “fact exists that the German element forms a kind of cultural basis everywhere. Start from the east of Austria. You will find a pure German people, the Transylvanian Saxons, mixed with Romanian and Serbian ethnic elements in old Transylvania, who had retained their German identity until well into my youth. But the Transylvanian Saxons were an ethnic element that contained a thoroughly German core and a very specific type of German individuality, which was, I would say, a cultural colony.

Then go further up, south of the Carpathians. Hungary did indeed extend as far as these Carpathians. Today, north of the Danube, lies the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia. It used to belong to Hungary. Of course, there is a Slovak population there, and there has been extensive Magyarization, especially through schools, since the 1860s. But the Spiš Germans and the other Germans lived there like a cultural ferment, scattered everywhere as far as Pressburg. And everywhere in Slovak-Magyar culture, the German element lives on the bottom, although in the second half of the nineteenth century it was on the verge of disappearing. From the western part of this German element, as you know, we borrowed our Christmas plays, which were transplanted there from more western German areas centuries ago.

If you go back down to the area between the Theiss and the Danube, that is, to central and southern Central Hungary, you will find a Swabian population, a Swabian-German population. Go to the west of Hungary, where Hungary bordered on present-day Burgenland, and you will find the so-called “WasserKroaten”, a thoroughly German population. So in this eastern part, you will find the formerly immigrated Germans at the bottom of the population speaking other languages. They often adopted the other element in later times, but they were very effective; blood does not deny itself there. And above all, it does not deny itself in the thought forms. Anyone who is well versed in such thought forms knows how to distinguish between them, even if they are still present in Magyar or Romanian, or even if they appear in another language, such as the Germanic elements that migrated there in earlier centuries and were gradually dying out, but which nevertheless continue to have an effect.

If you go over to the present-day western part, to Czechoslovakia, to the former Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, you will again find a German population everywhere at the bottom. Not only that there is such a closed population south of the Erzgebirge, but you will find everywhere - in Prague, for example, about a third or a quarter of the population was German - everywhere, as in the other areas, too, Germans were scattered. The process was definitely such that although German culture gradually disappeared, German culture asserted itself everywhere, even in areas where other languages were spoken.

If you go to the south, for example, in southern Slovenia, in a Serbian area, you will find a district – the Gottschee region – with a small German cultural colony interspersed among it. And you will find a compact German community in northern Styria, in Salzburg, in northern Tyrol, where it meets other populations to the south, but where Germans were scattered everywhere down to the German national borders in Austria. You will then find the compact German population in Upper and Lower Austria. That was the old Austria.

More and more, the individual nationalities came to the fore. More and more, the individual nationalities asserted themselves. But basically, there was no area in which the German element – I would say – had not somehow found its way in, as a force, and was not somehow effective.

But still, Austria was changing more and more. And then it came to the point that more and more of the other nationalities asserted themselves: the Romanian, the Ukrainian, the Ruthenian, the Polish, the Hungarian, the South Slav, Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian and the Slavonic, the Italian, the Bohemian, that is, the Czech. Today we see the process taking hold in the interior of Austria as well. It is hardly possible to say that Vienna is a German city in the other sense, that at least German is still spoken there. But even if it should come to pass that the Slovenian element from the south and the Czech element from the north spread further and further, and that the German character of Austria would disappear altogether, the German forces would still be present throughout Austria as effective forces. But the essential thing is that precisely within that which originated in the German element in Austria, a certain independence asserted itself against all other Germans on the European continent. The Austrian element, however intimately it interacted with the rest of the German character, was always something thoroughly independent. And that came about because Catholicism in Austria retained a certain form.

Now, it is of course very easy to misunderstand me in my present arguments, but since I cannot be sufficiently explicit, I must expose myself to these misunderstandings. It is true that one can, of course, object to much of what was present in the domination of Catholicism in Austria – and this was done within Austria itself. But this Catholicism in Austria always gave Austria and especially Vienna a very specific character. One could see how a liberal wave of cultural life was sweeping over Austria in the 1860s and 1870s, a liberal wave that only looked at – I would say – external forms of thought. But even within these external forms of thought, what was contained in Catholicism continued to have an effect.

You only have to consider how long it actually was that in Austria, with the exception of very specific areas of educational life, no one could actually become an educated person, a truly scientifically leading person, without somehow joining the leading forces of Catholicism. One studied at grammar schools, which were essentially run by monks. The monks were everywhere grammar school professors, for the most part exemplary grammar school professors. The strict scholastic thinking in its further development into the nineteenth century was something that was imposed on the whole of Austrian educational life, and on Austrian scientific life, and which has remained to this day.

We must not forget such phenomena as, for example, that in my youth the textbooks – up to those of descriptive geometry – were written by Benedictine monks or other monks. The individual grammar schools were looked after by the clergy, who certainly had to pass their state exams, but who brought a very specific spirit, a very specific way of thinking, into Austrian grammar schools. The Austrian grammar schools, which one could say only brought down the liberal era, had been liberalized by an excellent man, who, however, made them into excellent grammar schools: by Leo Thun in the 1850s. So that if you really want to understand much of what Austrian educational life is, you have to go to the monasteries, not exactly to the archpriests, not to the archbishops and bishops, but to the monasteries. Throughout the entire 19th century, there was still an incredible amount of learning in the monasteries. The learning that was then expressed by the most important researchers at the university was in the monasteries. The most important researchers had emerged from the monasteries, or if they had not emerged from the monastery, they were still part of an educational tradition that was deeply influenced by the monasteries. Only Austrian Catholicism, until it experienced its reaction at the end of the nineteenth century, was actually a development trend that moved towards an extraordinarily liberal element. You could see everywhere in the monks in the various branches of science how the sharply trained thinking that the monk had acquired from the old scholastic science had an effect on science, and especially on the pedagogy of science, and how only the Catholic, theocratic essence should remain untouched, so to speak. So that actually everything that did not reach the level of a world view developed within Austria, and thus the concept of the sciences in their specialties developed something extraordinarily significant.

You see, one of the most important researchers in the field of modern science, who is now mentioned everywhere, is Gregor Mendel. He was an Austrian religious in Moravia. While we were holding our Congress of Vienna, anniversary articles about Gregor Mendel appeared everywhere. It was perhaps the most interesting side event of our congress that the newspapers everywhere were full of tributes to Gregor Mendel. It was the case that this Gregor Mendel had actually emerged from the monastic education, that he had become a natural scientist who is now recognized everywhere, and whose theory of heredity is regarded as something extraordinary throughout the world. And Gregor Mendel is truly the type of person who, growing out of the Austrian essence, is active in individual fields of knowledge.

But there were many others like Gregor Mendel, people of action – not all of them made epoch-making discoveries – in nineteenth-century Austrian education, so that one can say that it was precisely in the field of science that Catholicism bore its most significant fruit. In addition, there was something else that is often overlooked.

A German who outgrows the Austrian way of life also outgrows a dialect. In addition to this dialect, there is a kind of general Austrian language that is not really spoken from the heart by anyone, but which is all the more suitable for being a language that goes beyond the needs of the day and which has then become the language of science. Because it is elevated above the dialects, it has also found its way into Latin logic in an extraordinary way. In the Austrian form of expression there is something on the one hand that is extraordinarily pliable, but on the other hand there is also something lively. All of this is just there.

If you take that as a basic feature of the Austrian character, then again you also have to take into account the external Austrian character. You see, my dear friends, certainly one could come to Austria in the 1970s, in the 1980s, in the 1990s, one could come to Austria in the twentieth century, one can come now, one finds, of course, in Austria everywhere in a certain sense also that which is otherwise also in the world. The inventions and discoveries, even the scientific achievements come everywhere, of course. Of course, Vienna and Austria have not been spared cinemas and so on. But in all this, there is still this very peculiar essence of Austria. And one would like to say: throughout the entire nineteenth century, perhaps precisely because of its close ties to Catholicism, there was no particular inclination in Austria to become more intimately connected with what was flowing in from outside. The Austrian retained himself when he began to dress in the French or English fashion for my sake, but always something specifically Austrian up to the aristocratic classes.

Now, my dear friends, you know that I don't really want to become a psychoanalyst – you know I have no particular inclination for it – but when it comes to the Austrian character, I feel like saying: external circumstances force you to develop something like psychoanalysis, because when you get to the Austrian character, there is something everywhere that is not fully realized in consciousness.

The Austrians readily absorb everything foreign; in many respects they are even extraordinarily proud of this foreignness. But then, inwardly, in their consciousness, they have no full connection with it. And just as when one psychoanalyzes an individual person, one searches for hidden “soul provinces,” so one is always tempted, when one comes upon the Austrian character, to search for such hidden soul provinces, even in the individual Austrian. If one approaches him with a psychoanalytic eye, one finds everywhere: He carries something with him from earlier. It is buried deep in his unconscious being; it sometimes comes to the surface. But it must first be brought to his attention, or he must do it himself. And if you go about it thoroughly, if you just analyze enough, you will discover in almost everyone, especially in the educated Austrian – in the uneducated, it can be seen from the outside – something that Emperor Joseph, Emperor Franz and everything that came later in the nineteenth century, actually has little to do with it; you go back to Empress Maria Theresa and even further back than Maria Theresa. Something from the eighteenth century comes to light everywhere. Every Austrian has something from the eighteenth century at the bottom of his soul, a hidden province of the soul; just as a psychoanalyst seeks out this repressed region of the soul and then detaches it from the soul, because people have not processed the eighteenth century at all, it is as if the whole of Austria has not fully processed the eighteenth century, as if at some point in time of Empress Maria Theresia this had settled in the soul and then it was brought up again. So that one really has to reckon with an extraordinary amount of instinct, but, I would say, historical instinct. You come across a lot of things that existed earlier, hidden in the heart, when you get to know the Austrian completely, as they say in Austria, inside and out. And in Austria, people try to get to know each other inside and out. All this predestines the Austrian to build a kind of bridge between West and East. Much of what has led to the tearing down of this bridge, what especially the present time in the West and in the East and also in the center just outside of Austria carries within itself, that comes to light when one looks at Austria so superficially , but if you look at the deeper level, you will find that there are hidden soul provinces everywhere, from which much can be brought up to build this bridge between West and East.

You see, with the West-East Congress we were now placed in this life, we were really placed differently than in Stuttgart with the first anthroposophical congress! We were placed quite differently, I would say, by the whole outward nuance in Stuttgart! Yes, in Stuttgart, right, there spoke for my sake = let's say - Hahn next to Kolisko, Blümel next to Fräulein von Heydebrand, Leinhas next to Baravalle. That makes no difference for Stuttgart.

Yes, for Vienna it made a very considerable difference, of course, and you could notice this difference everywhere you listened. You were simply placed in a very special element at this West-East Congress. And our Austrians made no effort at all at this West-East Congress to somehow deny their Austrian identity. For example, I paid particular attention when an Austrian came, and I always thought to myself: now I am curious to see if he will start his speech with “if”. He put a conditional sentence at the beginning! This is something that is deeply rooted in the character. It announces something that works quite differently in the Austrian. On the one hand, there is something in the Austrian that wants to look very thoroughly at the conditions of his own behavior, but on the other hand, there is also something in him that always wants to apologize a little. And all of this can be done better through the conditional sentences than if you thunder out a position.

Yes, these are the things that must be considered if one wants to understand the full significance of this West-East Congress. Isn't it true that everything was geared towards building a bridge between the West and the East? Scientific results, scientific methods, the artistic, everything was considered in this sense.

It is extremely difficult for me to express what I would like to say as impressions; but it seems to me that if I summarize this in a few images, these images could indeed convey some of the impressions that one can have.

You see, in our Austrian speakers at the Congress of Vienna, Austrianness was not completely denied. You could still psychoanalyze the speeches. I hope you won't take offense at this, because it's meant well, and after all, it doesn't do any harm if we can reach a general understanding. You see, there is our extraordinarily capable Kolisko. But if you want to grasp his individuality, if you want to grasp what he presents himself as when he speaks in Vienna, then you have to say: you are actually quite involuntarily led to the question: what kind of monk would he have become if he had sought his path of education in the pre-Deserian era? Well, our dear Kolisko would undoubtedly have become a Dominican, just as Baravalle and Blümel would undoubtedly have become Benedictines, Doctor Schubert would have become a Piarist and Doctor Stein would have become a Cistercian.

So, you see, today we can see – I would even say with our own hands – what was there at the bottom of their souls. I would like to say: someone who has an ear can still hear today from Baravalle and Doctor Blümel the fine spirit that once only the Benedictines had within Austrian education; from Doctor Schubert one can hear what the Piarists had, from Doctor Stein what the Cistercians achieved, and likewise the trained dialectic and sharply contoured concepts sharp-contoured concepts, the scientific method of searching thoroughly, all this, when viewed from this perspective – which is only possible if one takes a cultural-historical approach, as Dr. Kolisko did at the Congress of Vienna – is reminiscent of what was brought into Austrian education by the Dominican element.

I would remind you that Austrian university professors used to be Dominicans. They no longer know this, but in their soul province it is present, they were in an old Dominican monastery! And one must only be aware of the fact that a very old element is present there. The Austrians, and the other numerous foreigners – the congress was extremely well attended from all over the world – also hear this specific coloration, which is then incorporated into the entire congress proceedings. It is certainly the case that because there are so many Austrians among us, our lecturers, especially the Viennese, undoubtedly felt a sense of home in Vienna.

Now, one must just be clear about one thing: the other gentlemen, let's say, our dear Uehli, Hahn, Schwebsch, Dr. Heydebrand, Rittelmeyer, Leinhas, Husemann, Unger, Heyer - yes, in Austria these are the very clever foreign gentlemen who come as guests. And that is how they are perceived: the very clever foreign gentlemen who come to visit, who are only allowed in at the border, if you notice that they are clever, because there are enough of the other kind in the country. You see, I'm not saying this on my own initiative, but only what the mood is: these are the clever guests – just as one has always appointed strangers to the universities, right, who then actually have the task of being clever! That is something that is taken for granted. One becomes more objective. One becomes more objective in Vienna in particular. Then something as magnificent as the first lecture by our dear friend Dr. Hahn was this time seems tremendously incisive. And then, in turn, a certain impartiality that has remained comes into play.

For example, there was something extraordinarily beneficial that came out of the whole event, in that Dr. Schwebsch treated Bruckner with North German thought-forms; and then there was also the Bruckner performance, and something - I would say - not only Austrian, but generally cultural played into the matter. But because it was like that, the congress took on an extraordinarily pleasant character – I am really saying this now, whether someone I am talking about is there or not: I speak in the same way. For my sake, everyone I am talking about could be there.

The congress was given a particularly pleasant touch by the fine lecture given by our dear friend Steffen. In Vienna, we have a particularly fine sense for this nuance. On the one hand, we clearly felt the connection – the Swiss connection. In a sense, there is something Swiss about it, but the Austrian has a small reservation. He feels uncomfortable when he is in Vienna, and the Swiss – he comes by train. He actually expects the Swiss to come on foot and to have stayed in Innsbruck, Salzburg and Linz beforehand, and that people there had already heard of him and that he had written letters to people there. Otherwise, people are too surprised by the one who killed Gessler, aren't they, because that's the Swiss in Vienna after all. And so, at first, what brings the Swiss to Vienna is something amazing, and people are then angry. And that was certainly the case with our dear friend Steffen, that he did not give further lectures. And I am convinced that people would have wanted Steffen to have given at least three lectures of the exquisite subtlety that he gave in Vienna. The only reason I might not have wanted it was because he would have been so well understood that they would not have let him leave. He is needed here in Dornach.

So you see, there were various nuances. Yes, I am not just saying this out of theory, I have already received voices in the last few days that have told me: We could make good use of Steffen in Vienna, can't we have him? But I declined. So not out of theory — as I generally speak out of experience more than it might initially appear.

Well, it's true that I myself have been away from Vienna and Austria for so long that all these things are less relevant to me; but of course, when you enter Austria, you feel all that I have said. And that is why you feel compelled to place your own things in what is there in such a nuanced way that it takes into account what it is all about. For example, I have been away from Austria for so long that people have naturally forgotten that I was ever there and no longer give any credence to the fact that I was there. But Dr. Kolisko, you see, a mishap occurred that was quite fatal at this congress. Dr. Kolisko was invited by the Viennese medical association to give a lecture to this association as early as May 26. Now, this has its downsides; it is always unpleasant to give a lecture on a completely new field, on a completely new treatment method, only to experts, and as they say in Austria, there was a huge fuss, a terrible row, which of course was a bad start to our congress. The commotion did not continue into our congress, which was extraordinarily harmonious in all respects, but the doctors actually stayed away from the congress in their entirety. And since important medical matters were to be discussed in the seminars, this was of course a significant failure of the whole congress. We wanted to engage with the people. But that didn't happen at all. The medical profession wasn't there. And that is something that will probably trouble us for a long time to come, and it will make it extremely difficult to assert the medical side in Austria. And that would have been extremely important for the very reason that medicine in Austria has always had an extraordinarily respected representation.

Just think, if we had succeeded in making even a small initial breakthrough with the medical profession in Austria, it would have been a tremendous step forward for our medical cause. That is something we missed out on. It would not have led to anything if I had advised Dr. Kolisko against attending the conference, because it was not possible, since he had already been invited. On the other hand, we could not say that we would or wanted to withdraw from this invitation. That could not be said either. So there was a certain difficulty. That was the general difficulty, that Dr. Kolisko's excellent discussion was mocked and laughed at, and that it led to the medical profession sabotaging the congress.

But in the case of Dr. Kolisko, something specific was added. Otherwise I would not have said that I had been away for so long. But Dr. Kolisko wanted to come up with something really drastic. So people said to themselves: Dr. Kolisko, the son of a pathologist at the University of Vienna who was still famous in his nineties, who studied with us, who is a true member of the Viennese medical school, who also worked as an assistant in Vienna, yes, can he really do that? He still has the pencil that he bought in Vienna, that was used in Vienna at the time to copy the lecture notes, which he has now sharpened so often that it is now a tiny stump. He is using our pencil to write down the Anthroposophical matter, that is of course not allowed, we cannot allow that!

Yes, you see, that was of course also effective. Such things must certainly be taken into account. And so of course we had this somewhat unpleasant start. But despite that, our congress went really extremely well. It can be said that the individual contributors expressed themselves in the very best way there, and it can be said that the Viennese audience really went along with it in a very unique way.

Now, we must not forget in all of this: the congress was extremely well prepared in a certain direction, and our friends van Leer, Polzer, Breitenstein, Zeissig, Eichenberger and many others went to great lengths, really worked for months in the most intensive way because preparing for the congress requires an extraordinary amount of work to do everything that was necessary to administer it, so that the congress was prepared in a truly extraordinary diligent and dedicated manner. At the same time, it was the case that, for the first time, we were working in full public view, so to speak. Of course, this was also the case with our other endeavors. But it was not the case in the way it was in Vienna, where we worked in full public view and the Congress was taken as something that the whole Viennese public took for granted as being their concern. The whole of Vienna's public was involved with this congress, and of course all kinds of phenomena arose from that; for it is natural that people could not immediately digest everything we had to give them, everything we had to present to them.

But it must be said that, both in the way the lectures were received and in the way the eurythmy presentations were received, which were never actually as warmly received as in Vienna, and also in the way, for example, the declamatory was received, everywhere it has been shown that with a certain artistic feeling, apart from listening only to the dogmatic, in an artistic grasp lay only that which actually came towards one.

And so it is precisely at this congress, with its artistic aspects – with the Bruckner performance, with the performance of the Thomastik Quartet, with the very beautiful evening that was organized by Mrs. Werbeck-Svärdström, ärdström, who has supported this congress with her art in a truly devoted way. In all that we have been able to offer artistically, and in the artistic reception of the lectures, there has been a very special atmosphere. And at least the feeling will have remained there that one would have to deal with the problems that were at issue, that the question of East-West in such a way, which goes back to the spiritual, must actually be tackled.

And in this respect, Vienna was a well-chosen place, that is, the given place, because in no other city would one have been able to feel just as much the need to grasp the matter spiritually today. The fact is that this Austria, which is so terribly afflicted today, is not really paying much attention to the other areas of life; they go on as usual – or rather, they do not go away. But precisely because everything else is already so far in decline in this rump of Austria, in this “German-Austria” with the much too large city of Vienna, that is why people there turn to the spiritual. And that is precisely the advantage of Austrian Catholicism, that it has never sworn by dogma like any other Catholicism. Austrian Catholicism is actually much more based on looking, on feeling. Even within the clergy, the dogmatic is something that is respected and cultivated, but it is not what actually has an effect. In Austria, people do not think that they have to swear by a dogma or be as strongly opposed to a dogma as they do in Switzerland or Germany. A dogma is something that is also regarded more like a work of art.

And so this very ancient Viennese culture, with its strong artistic influence, has indeed been extraordinarily receptive to what we were able to bring from our side, especially from an East-West point of view, so that it really must be said: everything went as each individual event increased more and more.

And when the conference was over, it became clear from talking to people in Vienna that the conference was seen as a strong stimulus everywhere, quite apart from the fact that it was possible to see how strongly what had emerged from anthroposophy in recent years had taken effect in Vienna, particularly in certain sections of the population. It is the case that, for example, the threefold social order is very much on people's minds there, without it being mentioned, without anything being said about its origin. They are thinking in this sense, in this style. So, looking at the course of the congress itself, one must say: I know, of course, that there has been a lot of grumbling and there will be a lot more, the worst is yet to come in this regard, that is not the question now. But one must say: there is a growing interest, a participation of all sections of the population.

On the last evening, a number of workers who had attended the entire congress appeared before me and expressed their great interest. Other groups, including some that used to belong to the upper classes, also showed great interest. This congress has already had such an impact that one has to say: It means something within the outer element of our anthroposophical movement. And of course we will have an extraordinary amount to learn from what happened there, because now, for once, complete outsiders were present who, even though they emphasized that they disagree with much or even everything, at least see the matter as something that needs to be addressed.

This is something that, if understood in the right way, can be pursued very specifically in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, so that the world will judge: this is something that a person who cares about something must take into account and deal with today, not only with the forces of decline but also with the forces of the rising.

It can certainly be said that apart from the external success, which was indisputably there in the benevolent reception of all our speakers, the approval that our speakers received, the approval that our artistic performances received, there was also undoubtedly a certain internal success. And from this, in turn, new duties arise for us, duties that are actually of a very profound nature. For we will again have to become a little more broad-minded if the congress is to be what it can be. It is precisely under the effects of this congress that we will have to become more broad-minded again. It is absolutely necessary that we do not close ourselves off within the Anthroposophical Society, but that we draw the threads to everything that confronts us today, even if it often has a very unclear striving within itself; that we also not avoid coming into contact with our opponents in those relationships that can at least open up the possibility – even if one has to be a fierce opponent – of somehow engaging with each other in certain forms. This is something that is at least imposed on us as a duty.

Another duty is that we must try to work out ever more clearly the fact that anthroposophy can truly work fruitfully in all areas of life. So that one can say overall: the Congress of Vienna is a kind of turning point in relation to what the anthroposophical movement should be.

I do not believe that I have left anything to be said about the details of the Vienna Congress unconsidered, although I have spoken in seemingly general terms. But I believe that one can only understand the Vienna Congress if one understands it in terms of the whole will of the anthroposophical movement and if one understands it in the way it was able to work into the specific Austrian being. And there it has worked in a characteristic way. Those of our friends who were present from all countries will have felt this, and I believe that on the one hand the anthroposophical movement has every reason to welcome with deep satisfaction the fact that so many friends were really there from all over the world, and that on the other hand these friends will not regret having taken part in this event in Vienna.

I do not want to fail to explicitly mention in this reflection that it gave me great satisfaction that this call to come to Vienna found an echo in so many of our friends in different countries, that so many came. It was important that a great many of our friends were there to take away what was said, sung, played and so on. But it was also important that a great many of our friends take with them the feeling that created a special atmosphere there. That is how I wanted to describe this congress.

If we wish our human thought and action to be permeated once more by spiritual life, it will be necessary to receive again in full earnestness such conceptions of the spiritual world as have passed through our souls in these last lectures. For many centuries these conceptions have in reality been lacking to mankind and notably to civilised mankind.

Looking back into various epochs of human history we shall find how in earlier ages human action upon earth was everywhere connected with what was taking place in the super-sensible. It is not that a consciousness of the super-sensible—a certain abstract consciousness of it—has been lacking to the greater part of mankind in recent times. No—but the courage has been lacking to attach the concrete deeds and happenings in the earthly sphere to the equally real forms of life and movement in spiritual worlds.

With our recent studies we are coming to do this once more. And we do so especially when we bring the earthly life of men, as we have been doing here, into connection with the life between death and a new birth, when we connect what is taking place in one earthly life with that which is accomplished in the successive lives of man.

We have begun to consider that spiritual, super-sensible stream of which I was allowed to say that it is connected with our present stream of Michael in the service of which Anthroposophy has placed itself. We have thus entered upon the path which in a certain sense is to approach the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement itself, and at the same time, the karma of the individuals who unite the life of their soul and spirit sincerely, out of a straightforward inner impulse, with the Anthroposophical Movement.

I told you of a super-sensible event which took place under the aegis as it were of the Michael Power at the very time when the Council of 869 was taking place on earth. We know how deeply the whole life and civilisation of the Middle Ages was influenced by that Council. We need only watch the deep reserve with which enlightened spirits in the Middle Ages avoid speaking of the threefold human being, of body, soul and spirit. For the 8th Œcumenical Council at Constantinople had declared the doctrine of the threefold man heretical. Considering the power of such edicts in the Middle Ages it is quite clear that the whole of the spiritual life here on earth then had to take its course as it were under the shadow of this declaration which condemned Trichotomy as heretical.

But all the more intense was that spiritual life which has been working for a long time preparing the Michael stream for the 20th century, the Michael stream in which we stand since the last third of the 19th century and in which mankind will be for three or four centuries to come.

To-day we will speak of the course of this stream of Michael to which we have already begun to turn attention. Then, next Sunday, we shall approach more nearly matters connected on the one hand with the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement, and on the other hand karmically with the spiritual and intellectual life of the present time.

I told you of a kind of super-sensible Council which took place in spiritual regions over the earth at the same time as the 8th Œcumenical Council in Constantinople. In that spiritual council there met together the individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of his wise counsellor, and also the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle. Moreover there were also gathered there the individualities from the time of the spiritual service of King Arthur; and as I explained, all this took place under the aegis of Michael.

Then I told you how Haroun al Raschid appeared again, bringing with him into Europe an oriental spiritual life with an Aristotelian doctrine that had become unchristian. I told you how he appeared again as Bacon, Lord Bacon of Verulam, who had a great influence on the spiritual life of Europe, but an influence of an essentially materialistic tendency. Moreover I told you how the counsellor of Haroun al Raschid whom I had described, appeared again as Amos Comenius. Much is said, and justly, in praise of Amos Comenius. Nevertheless, in one aspect, in his striving to introduce clear pictorial representations into the methods of teaching, he worked powerfully for materialism. For in effect, he laid the greatest stress upon the immediate perception of things with the physical senses.

Thus we see bursting in upon this earthly life at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, a stream which lies not in the straightforward line of Christian development, but which brings a foreign element, foreign to Christianity, into the spiritual and intellectual evolution of Europe. On the other hand the individualities of Aristotle and Alexander who remained united with the true stream of Michael worked on and on with all those who belonged to them. They went on working in the spiritual worlds.

Moreover other personalities were working within the same stream, partly in the spiritual worlds and partly on the earth itself. There were individualities connected with these spiritual streams and living between death and a new birth. There were others who appeared as personalities on earth in the course of the centuries. These were the individualities connected with Platonism rather than with Aristotelianism, connected also with all that the Platonic conception had since become.

Especially in the centuries following the 9th, we see Platonic spirits descending on to the earth, spirits of a Platonic trend and orientation. It was they who continued through the Middle Ages a Christian teaching regarded as heretical by official Christianity, official Catholicism, but which was nevertheless the truer Christian teaching. Meanwhile the individualities who continued the stream of Christian Aristotelianism remained, to begin with, in the spiritual worlds. For with the given conditions of evolution there was no real point of attachment for their stream down on the earth in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. On the other hand, those who were more Platonic in character could unfold their spiritual life with remarkable intensity in isolated places, in isolated provinces as it were of the spirit. Interspersed with the Roman Catholic kind of Christianity which asserted itself more and more officially, we find individuals gathered in schools here and there, carrying on traditions of the ancient Mysteries and illuminating Christianity from these ancient sources. And there was one place where all these streams of old tradition seemed to flow together. I mean, of course, the School of Chartres, to which I have so often referred in recent lectures, a school which was spiritual through and through and in which there worked such great spirits as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others. Now what kind of a spiritual life was it which having thus evolved, flowed at length into the wonderful School of Chartres, only the external aspects of which have really become known to mankind? It was a spiritual life which has been completely silted up in modern times, a spiritual life in which the ancient traditions of the Mysteries were handed down.

Above all within that spiritual life we find a deep and spiritually penetrated conception of Nature, altogether different from that abstract conception of Nature which was afterwards made so much of, which knows only natural laws expressed in abstract thought. The spiritual stream to which I now refer received something spiritual from Nature into the human soul. So that in all Nature, not only abstract, dead, conceptual natural laws were recognised, but living creative activity. Men did not look so much to our present day chemical elements which have since commanded so much admiration, but they looked all the more deeply at what were called the Elements in the ancient sense: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. It was not a question of knowing them in words by mere tradition. The tradition was impregnated still with the most ancient of the Mysteries. And when this is so, we see in the Elements what is indeed not present in our seventy to eighty chemical elements, the world of elemental spirituality the world of certain elemental beings into which we penetrate when we enter livingly into the four Elements.

Then we see how man himself in his outer bodily nature partakes in the life and movement of the Earth, Water, Air, Fire which become in him the organic form and figure. They who thus looked into the life and movement of the Elements, of Earth, Water, Air and Fire did not see mere natural laws, but behind all this life and movement they saw a great and living Being, the Goddess Natura. And from their vision they had an immediate feeling that this Goddess Natura shows only one side of her being to man to begin with, while the other side remains hidden in the world in which man spends the time of sleep between falling asleep and reawakening. For then the ego and astral body are in a spiritual environment which lies at the foundation of Nature. The ego and astral body are with the elemental beings who underlie the Elements. Everywhere in the scattered schools and spiritual centres to which I have referred we find the teachers speaking to larger or smaller groups of pupils, and telling them how in the outer phenomena of Nature as they appear to men in waking life, the Goddess Natura shows only one part of her living and creative being. While on the other hand, in all the working in the Elements in wind and weather, in all that surrounds the human being and constitutes him, there also works what the human being cannot see, what is hidden from him in the darkness of sleep.

These scholars of the Middle Ages felt the great Goddess Natura as the Goddess who ascends for half of the time, revealing herself in the outer movement and activity of physical sense Nature and who on the other hand descends nightly and yearly to live and work in fields of creation hidden from man by the dark consciousness of sleep.

Now this was the direct continuation of the old conception of Proserpina as it existed in the ancient Mysteries. We must consider what this signifies. We to-day have a conception of Nature woven out of abstract thought, consisting of natural laws, speaking and thinking in abstract terms, containing nothing that is alive. But in that old conception of nature they still contemplated Nature as men had once contemplated the very active Goddess Proserpina, the daughter of Demeter. And in the ideas in which the pupils of those schools were instructed, proceeding as they did from a still living tradition, there were many sayings and expressions which were in reality an exact continuation of what had been said of Proserpina in the ancient Mysteries.

Then the teachers would lead the human being from a conception of his bodily life to an understanding of his life of soul. They made it clear to him: With respect to your bodily nature you consist of the Elements in which the elemental beings are working with you. But you also bear the soul within you. This is not subject to the influence of the Elements alone. On the contrary it rules over the organisation of the Elements within you and this your soul stands under the influence of the planetary world, of Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, of Sun and Moon, Saturn and Mars. Thus if psychology were to be studied, man's vision was directed upward to the secrets of the planetary world. The reality of the human being was extended from the bodily into the soul nature in such a way as to perceive always the living connection with the universe. From the working and weaving of the Elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire, it was expanded to all that the planets do in the soul-life of man—the planets in their circling, in their glory, in the actions of their light, in their mysterious occult influences. Thus from the Goddess Natura, the successor of Proserpina, they looked up to the Intelligences, to the Genii of the planets when they wished to understand the human life of soul.

Then when it was a question of understanding the spiritual life (for the teachers of these isolated schools had not let the dogma of the 8th Council of Constantinople deter them from studying the spirit in itself)—when it was a matter of considering the spiritual life, they turned their gaze upwards to the fixed stars, and their configurations. They looked up above all to what is represented in the Zodiac. And they regarded what man bears within him as the spirit in connection with the constellations, the glory of the fixed stars, the spiritual Powers whom they knew to be there in the stars.

Thus from the whole universe, from the cosmos, they understood the human being. Thus the macrocosm was there in reality, and the microcosm, man. Such was the doctrine of Nature in that time, taught with enthusiasm in isolated schools and also offered to mankind by isolated individuals who were scattered here and there. And at length as in a kind of culmination, all these things were wonderfully reproduced by such individualities as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others in the School of Chartres.

Wonderful indeed was this School of Chartres. If we look at its writings to-day they seem, as I already said, like catalogues of names. But in that time it was not customary to write in any other way of things which one wished to have before one in full living spirituality. One simply catalogued them as it were. He however who can read such things, he above all who can read the order in which they are placed, can very well perceive how permeated by ancient spirituality are the writings that come to us from the teachers of Chartres. But the deep spirituality of the school worked not only in the teaching that was given, nor in the fact that there were many pupils who carried out again into the world what they had learnt there. No, it also worked in a direct spiritual way. The living spirituality that was present in that School radiated out even in an occult way into the spiritual atmosphere of mankind. We see the spiritual rays of the School of Chartres passing through France even into Italy. And in many schools whose outer name has been handed down to history, a teaching about Nature was given such as I have here indicated. Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante, returning from his post as an Ambassador in Spain suffered at the same time a slight sunstroke and a great shock as he came near to Florence, the city of his fathers. At that moment he was really touched by the occult radiations of the School of Chartres and underwent an experience which he himself describes as follows.—He said that as he came near the city of Florence he entered a deep forest. There he first met three animals and then he met the Goddess Natura who built up the kingdoms of Nature in the very way in which this had been taught for centuries as I have indicated. He, however, beheld it directly. In the semi-pathological condition which soon passed, what had been taught in the School became immediate vision to him. Then, having seen the Goddess Natura, the successor of Proserpina, in her creative work, he beheld how man is built up out of the Elements and how the soul lives and moves in the forces of the planets. Then with his thought he was uplifted even into the heaven of the fixed stars. Thus in his own person he experienced the whole of this majestic, medieval science. And he was the teacher of Dante. Had he not been so, had he not given to his pupil Dante what he had received in this majestic vision, we should not have the Divina Commedia, for the Divina Commedia is the reflection of Brunetto Latini's teaching in the soul of Dante.

Now you must see that in that time there was no other possibility than to work with such things within the institutions of the Church, and these indeed were much freer than they afterwards became. In effect, all these teachers of Chartres belonged to Monastic Orders. We see them wearing the garment of Cistercians. We see them connected with the good tendencies within the life of the Christian Monastic Orders.

Then came a strange phase of development. During the whole of this period, when the Platonists had been active in the way just described, the Aristotelians could not work on earth. The conditions were not there. But instead, they were preparing for the Michael stream in the super-sensible world, maintaining a continuous connection with those who were working on earth in the same direction and who then found their way to Chartres. The School of Chartres was in full flower from the end of the 11th and throughout the 12th century, and then a kind of super-sensible exchange of ideas took place between the Platonic souls from the School of Chartres who were now coming up into the spiritual world through the gate of death and the Aristotelian souls who had remained above. It was an exchange of ideas which took place in the Middle Ages at the turn of the 12th and 13th century, as to the manner of working in the future. (Earthly terms have to be used for these things, although naturally they are not really in keeping and can easily make one appear ridiculous.)

The outcome of this exchange of ideas—since different conditions now prevailed in the spiritual life of European humanity—was that the Platonists who had been so active in Chartres and were now coming up into the super-sensible world, passed on their mission to the Aristotelians. And these Aristotelian souls now descended into the physical world in order to carry forward in the way that conditions allowed, what I will call the cosmic service of Michael.

Within the Dominican Order, where they were active in the most manifold ways, we find again those souls who worked more in the Aristotelian sense. For the work on earth, the Platonic souls were replaced, so to speak, by the Aristotelian souls. And now there developed that system of thought which in truth can be rightly appraised to-day only within the Anthroposophical Movement—I once gave lectures here on the true form and background of Scholasticism [ The Redemption of Thinking. A Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Three lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1920. Translated and edited with an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendices, by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicholl (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1956).]—there developed medieval Scholasticism, the teaching which in an age already hastening towards materialism strove to preserve as much spirituality in human concepts as it is possible to preserve.

Before Bacon of Verulam and Comenius appeared on earth, Scholasticism had been carrying forward the service of Michael. We see how Scholasticism, the so-called realistic school of philosophy, strove to rescue the source of spirituality which man bears in his thoughts. The Scholastics ascribe reality to that which man grasps through his thoughts. It is a thin, attenuated spirituality that could there be rescued, but it is spirituality.

Thus is the spiritual life carried forward in the evolution of the worlds. Seeing it in its reality, possessing the science of Initiation, we can do no other: we must always perceive the physical, or that which takes place in physical history upon earth, together with the spiritual that permeates it, coming from spiritual worlds. Thus we reach a united and harmonious conception. First, until the time of Chartres, the Platonic souls are working, and then the Aristotelian. We first behold the Aristotelian souls influencing with inspiration from the super-sensible worlds the teachers who, as Platonic souls, are dwelling upon earth, teaching and unfolding science upon earth in earthly forms of understanding. We gaze into this living interplay; we see the teacher of Chartres sitting there on this earthly ground, unfolding his studies that are permeated by spiritual vision, while there penetrates into this earthly scene the inspiring ray from the Aristotelian soul above, bringing the Platonically coloured teachings into the right channels. It is a very different conception of life from what is usual to-day. For in external life men are so fond of contrasting and dividing Platonists from Aristotelians. But in reality it is not so. The times and epochs of the earth require teachings to be given, now in Platonic, now in Aristotelian terms. But if our wisdom includes the super-sensible life in the background, we perceive the one fructifying the other, the one enclosed within the other.

Then again, when the Aristotelians were teaching in the Dominican Order, the Platonic souls, who were now once more in the spiritual world, were the inspiring genii. They had already come to an understanding in the spiritual worlds with these Aristotelian souls who afterwards descended to the earth. Life was altogether different in those times. One may believe it or not, but it was so. Looking back spiritually into those Middle Ages we find such a spirit as Alanus ab Insulis sitting in his lonely cell, given up to his studies, and receiving from the super-sensible world, like a spirit-visitor who comes to him as a companion, an Aristotelian soul. Nay, even afterwards, when the Aristotelians appear in the Dominican Order, there is still a powerful consciousness of belonging to the spiritual world. We can see it in such an instance as the following. One of the Dominican teachers descends into the physical earth-life earlier than another soul with whom he is united. The other soul remains behind in the spiritual world to begin with, in order to accomplish something there which he will afterwards carry down to his companion who went before him. And at length the two are working together again on the earth. All this takes place with consciousness. In their work and activity they know themselves to be in living connection with the spiritual world.

Subsequent history has left no trace of these things. But, my dear friends, to know the truth about historical life we must not seek to derive it alone from the documents of modern time. Moreover, we must see life with open-minded vision. It may be that it unfolds in circles with which perhaps we can have little sympathy. Yet we must see it as something which is placed by karma into these very circles, and the inner significance of which is altogether different.

The task and possibility of thus reading in the real events has come to me in many remarkable ways during my life. Only now do I perceive and penetrate many an experience that I have met with in the course of my life, clear and distinct like an occult writing. Indeed for the most significant of our experiences karma works and weaves in deep and mysterious ways. And if I may say so, there is a very strong karma underlying the fact that to-day and in recent times, at many places, I have been speaking of such things as the School of Chartres, and what preceded and what came after it. For the greatest of those who taught in the School of Chartres belonged to the Cistercian Order. Now the Cistercian Order, like the other Orders in the Catholic stream of development, has become decadent, but in this growing decadence there is also much illusion of appearance. For individualities occasionally find themselves in outer life-connections to which they do not properly belong, while in reality they are carrying forward old threads of spiritual life which are indeed of the greatest value for Anthroposophy itself. But life and karma brings them into these outer connections. Thus I have always been struck by the fact that from my earliest youth, until a certain period of life, something of the Cistercian Order again and again approached me. Having gone through the elementary school, I narrowly escaped—for reasons which I explained in my autobiography The Story of My Life—becoming a pupil in gymnasium or grammar school conducted by the Cistercian Order. Everything seemed to be leading in this direction; but my parents, as I have explained, eventually decided to send me to the modern school instead. Thus I did not become a pupil in the grammar school connected with the Cistercians, and, needless to say, this was also for very good karmic reasons.

But the modern school which I attended was only five steps away from the Cistercian grammar school. Thus we made the acquaintance of all those excellent Cistercian teachers whose work was indeed of a high quality at that time. I need not speak of the Order itself; it is the individuals to whom I refer. To this day I think with profound appreciation of one of those Cistercian priests who taught German literature at that grammar school with deep enthusiasm. And I see the Cistercian priest before me in many other individualities, in the Alleegasse in Wiener Neustadt, where the teachers used to walk up and down before the school hours began—Cistercian priests in civilian costume, eminently gifted men. At that time I was far more concerned to read the essays of the teachers in the school year-book at the end of the year, than the ordinary text-books during the year. I read with keen devotion what these Cistercians wrote of their own wisdom in the year-book of the grammar school in Wiener Neustadt.

In short, the Cistercian Order was near to me. And without a doubt (though these of course are hypotheses such as one uses only for purposes of illustration), if I had gone to the Cistercian school I should, as a matter of course, have become a Cistercian.

Then I came to Vienna. (All these things are described in The Story of My Life). After a time I came into the circle around Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, where many professors of the theological faculty in Vienna used to gather. I learned to know some of them intimately. All those professors were members of the Cistercian Order. Thus once again I came together with Cistercians, and through the currents which flow through the Cistercian Order to-day, I have been able to follow many things back into the past.

To show how karma works I will refer to one event. I had to give a lecture. Now through the afternoon teas at delle Grazie's I had grown well acquainted with the Cistercian professors of theology who frequented her house. I gave a lecture. A priest of the Cistercian Order was there—a remarkable and excellent man. When I had finished my lecture he made a very peculiar remark, the nature of which I will only indicate by saying: he uttered words in which was contained his memory of having been together with me in a

Such things do indeed educate us for life. It was in the year 1889. In Das Goetheanum, former life on earth.

Thus I have shown how the Platonic stream and the Aristotelian worked together. Then the Aristotelians too went once more through the gate of death. And as we know, with the age of the Spiritual Soul, materialism became more and more predominant on earth. But at the very time when materialism took its start on earth there was founded in the super-sensible worlds a kind of Michael School. As I said, we can refer to these things only with our everyday terminology. It was a far-spread School of Michael in which spirits like Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis were united after death. And with them once more Alexander and Aristotle. These and other human souls who were not in earthly incarnation at that time, were united here with spiritual beings who, though they spend their lives without ever being incarnated on the earth, are yet connected with earthly souls. Michael himself was a Teacher, gazing back over all that had been the great teachings of the ancient Mysteries, comprehending in a marvellous sweep of vision the secrets of the ancient Mysteries, and opening out at the same time a mighty panorama of what was to come.

In one form or another we find certain souls who took part in that super-sensible school in the 14th/15th century. They had been connected together in many lives on earth. We find them among the hosts which strive towards the stream of Michael, receiving into the impulses of their will what we may call: The will to be united with the stream of Michael.

We gaze upon these souls. Very few of them were on earth. Most of them were in the life between death and a new birth, partaking in that super-sensible gathering, in that spiritual school. We find them there, these souls, we find them there, harkening to the teachings of Michael, and we find them again to-day in the souls who, connected on the earth, unfold a sincere and upright striving of their inner life towards the Anthroposophical Movement.

In the karma of those who tend with inner sincerity towards the Anthroposophical Movement, there lie the deep impulses, the karmic significance of which must again be studied in the spiritual worlds themselves. Of course the fact that those souls were driven by their karma to such a heavenly community at that time, is due again to the fact that in former earthly lives they had shaped their karma accordingly, so that it led them there. Nevertheless one cannot recognise the karma of human souls without looking, not only at what happens at any given time on earth, but also at what happens between death and a new birth.

Our outlook on the world is infinitely enriched by this. Contemplating the souls who labour in the world—and in the last resort this applies to all men—we no longer have to begin at the point where they enter earthly existence, or cease at the point where they die; for in effect they neither then begin to work, nor do they cease. And in all that takes place spiritually, not only the souls that are incarnated on the earth to-day are working, but other souls, who are now between death and a new birth, and who send their rays of influence in upon the earth. In our own actions their impulses are contained. For all these things work together, even as the deeds on earth penetrate into the heavenly regions, and continue working there, as I indicated pictorially, for instance, in the characters of Capesius and Strader in the first Mystery Play.

Brunetto Latini, Dante's teacher, he is there. He died. He went through the gate of death, but death itself is a transformation of life. He is still there. He works on, and we find him if we seek him spiritually.

The picture of the spiritual evolution of mankind is made complete if we are able to include the so-called dead. Nay, in reality, they are far more living than the so-called living. In very many things that happen on the earth we find Brunetto Latini living and working to-day, although he is not incarnate on the earth. Thus you will see how intimately united the earthly life is with the super-sensible. We cannot speak at all of a super-sensible world separated from the earthly world of sense. For everything that is of the senses is permeated at the same time supersensibly, and everything that is super-sensible is revealed somewhere and sometime in the world of sense. Moreover we can only truly receive and understand the earthly life if we recognise that these things are behind it.

This, my dear friends, is to be the future of the Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must treat of the super-sensible facts openly and without reserve, confessing them in fullness of knowledge. This should be the esoteric trait permeating the Anthroposophical Movement. Thus alone will it be possible to give it its real spiritual content.

For you see, all that I described to you as the stream of Michael has gone on into our time. But individualities appearing again on earth have to make use, in the first place, of the physical bodies that are possible in a given age. They must find their way into the impulses of education which a given age provides. In the materialistic age all these things become their external garment. And our materialistic age offers the greatest imaginable hindrances to souls who had a rich spirituality in former lives on earth. To pour this spirituality into the bodies of this age, especially when they have to be prepared by modern educational methods, is extraordinarily difficult. Thus you need not wonder when I say: The souls which strive earnestly towards Anthroposophy are to be found in this way in former epochs of evolution. We cannot lay the foundations of true knowledge unless we can perceive the real interplay of all that lives and works in the world. For spiritual research itself depends on the spiritual life and requires us to seek the spiritual along its own true path. The paths of the spirit are different in every age. In our age they are possible only if we have beneath our feet the firm ground of a spiritual knowledge of external Nature.

The former age which I described within the stream of Michael was followed by one which here on the earth shows an altogether materialistic aspect, an age in which all things are developed materialistically. In the super-sensible evolution of this age there is the most intensive work of preparation for the impulses of Michael, which have now been carried down, so to speak, from heaven to the earth. But this new age to-day cannot take its start from what has gone before in the last few centuries. We must indeed be familiar with the things that have unfolded upon earth in the last few centuries, but we cannot take our start from them. With the consciousness of this modern age we must take our start from what has taken place in the super-sensible during the last few centuries. In saying this we touch upon ground which must become the basis of anthroposophical life and work in this present time. Conceptions such as I have explained in the last few lectures must not merely be received with cold intellect and indifferent hearts. They must be received by the full human being, by the whole compass of the human heart and mind. Anthroposophy can mean something for mankind only if it is received with the whole compass of the human heart and soul.

Such is the foundation of the will of the Anthroposophical Movement, which is united since the Foundation Meeting with the Anthroposophical Society. We long that this should enter deeply into the souls of human beings who are united with this Movement, that they should grow conscious of what is truly connected with their karma in the depths of their own souls.

Thus we have laid a kind of foundation, and from this point we will proceed next Sunday when we will study the further course of the stream of Michael, so as to perceive its resulting tasks for Anthroposophy and for the whole spiritual life of the present time.

It is in the nature of the case that the subject of a lecture course like this one is inexhaustible. Matters could be elaborated and looked at more thoroughly. But since, unfortunately, we must come to an end, we have to be content with given guidelines and indication. Today, therefore, I shall only supplement the scanty outlines and hints already discussed to that in a certain sense the picture will be rounded out.

Proceeding once again from the being of man as viewed by spiritual science, we must say that we member man into physical body, etheric or formative forces body, astral body (which essentially represents the soul life) and ego. Let us be clear that properly speaking the physical body resides only in the small part of the human organization that we can describe as solid and sharply defined. On the other hand, all that pertains to liquid or fluid forms is taken hold of by the etheric body in such a way that it is in a constant process of blending, separating, combining, and dissolving. It is in perpetual flux. Then there are the gaseous, aeriform elements, such as are active in oxygen and other gases. In these, the astral body is at work. Finally, the ego organization is active in everything that has to do with warmth.

What I have just outlined cannot, however, be reduced to a diagram. We must clearly understand, for instance, that because the formative forces body pulsates through all fluid and liquid elements of the body, it also sweeps along the solid substances. Everything in the human organization is in close interaction, in constant interplay. We must always be aware of that. But now let us also remember that this human organization has been experienced in different ways in the course of evolution. This was one of the main themes of these lectures.

What is described today as the subject matter of external physics or mechanics, was originally attained through an inward experience of the physical body. Our present-day physics contains statements that originated because there once existed an internally experienced physics of the physical body. As I have explained a number of times, this inward physics was divorced from man and now continues to function merely as a science that observes outer nature. During the decline of the medieval alchemy the same thing happened with what lives inwardly in man by virtue of the etheric body. The work of this body in the fluids was once experienced, but now it is only dimly perceptible in the fantastic, alchemistic formulas that we find in ancient writings. Originally this was intelligent science, but inwardly experienced within the etheric. In a way, this is still in the process of being divorced from man, because as yet we really do not have a fully developed chemistry. We have many chemical processes in the world that we seek to understand, but only in a physical and mechanical way.

In the beginning man experienced all this inwardly by means of his organization, but in the course of time he cast it all out of himself. In this process of casting out all our science developed, from astronomy to the meager beginnings of modern chemistry. On the other hand, thinking, feeling and willing, the subject matter of abstract psychology (which today is no longer considered real) was in former times actually not experienced inside man. Man felt himself at one with the external world outside his own being, when he experienced the soul life. Thus what was corporeal was once experienced inwardly, whereas the soul element was experienced by leaving one's being and communing with the outer world. Psychology was once the science of that aspect of the world that affects man in such a way that he appears to himself as a soul being. Physics and chemistry were cast out of man, whereas psychology and pneumatology (which I shall discuss directly) were stuffed into him and lost their reality. They turned into subjective perceptions with which nothing could be done.

What was experienced together with the cosmos through the astral body (which leaves us in sleep) has become the subject of psychology. What man experienced as spirit in union with the universe was pneumatology. Today, as I have already pointed out, this has shrunk down to the idea of the ego or to a mere feeling. Therefore we now have as science of external nature what was once inner experience, while our science of man's inner nature is what was once external experience.

Now we must call to mind what is needed, on the one hand for physics and chemistry, and on the other for psychology and pneumatology, in order to develop them further in a conscious way, since man today finds himself in the age of the development of the consciousness soul. Take physics, for example, which in recent times has become mostly abstract and mechanical. From all that I have said you will have seen that the scientific age has increasingly felt impelled to restrict itself to the externally observed mechanics of space. Long ago, man accompanied motion by means of inward experience and judged it according to what he felt within as movement. Observing a falling stone, he experienced its inner impulse of movement in his own inner human nature, in his physical body. This experience, after the great casting out, led to the measuring of the rate of fall per second. In our attitude toward nature, the idea prevails that what is observed is what is real.

What can be observed in the outer world? It is motion, change of position.⁸³ As a rule, we let velocity vanish neatly in a differential coefficient. But it is motion that we observe, and we express velocity as movement per second, hence by means of space. This means, however, that with our conscious experience, we are entirely outside the object. We are not involved in it in any way when we merely watch its motion, meaning its change of position in space. We can do that only if we find ways and means to inwardly take hold of the spatial, physical object by an extending of the same method with which we separated from it in the first place. Instead of the mere movement, the bare change of position, we have to view the velocity in the objects as their characteristic element. Then we can know what a particular object is like inwardly, because we find velocity also within ourselves when we look back upon ourselves.

This is what is necessary. The trend of scientific development in regard to the outer physical world must be extended in the direction of proceeding from mere observation of motion to a feeling for the velocity possessed by a given object. We must advance from motion to velocity. That is how we enter into reality. Reality is not taken hold of if all we see is that a body changes its position in space. But if we know that the body possesses an inner velocity-impulse, then we have something that lies in the nature of the body. We assert nothing about a body if we merely indicate its change of position, but we do state something about it when we say that it contains within itself the impulse for its own velocity. This then is a property of it, something that belongs to its nature. You can understand this by a simple illustration. If you watch a moving person, you know nothing about him. But if you know that he has a strong urge to move quickly, you do know something about him. Likewise, you know something about him, when you know that he has a reason for moving slowly. We must be able to take hold of something that has significance within a given body. It matters little whether or not modern physics speaks, for example, of atoms; what matters is that when it does speak of them it regards them as velocity charges. That is what counts.

Now the question is: how do we arrive at such a perception? We can discuss the best in the case of physics, since today's chemistry has advanced too little. We have to become clear about what we actually do when, in our thinking, we cast inwardly experienced mechanics and physics into external space. That is what we are doing when we say: The nature of what is out there in space is of no concern to me; I observe only what can be measured and expressed in mechanical formulas, and I leave aside everything that is not mechanical. Where does this lead us? It leads us to the same process in knowledge that a human being goes through when he dies. When he dies, life goes out of him, the dead organism remains. When I begin to think mechanistically, life goes out of my knowledge. I then have a science of dead matter. We must be absolutely clear that we are setting up a science of dead matter so long as the mechanical and physical aspect is the sole object of our study of nature. You must be aware that you are focusing on what is dead. You must be able to say to yourself: The great thing about science is that it has tacitly resolved that, unlike the ancient alchemists who still saw in outer nature a remnant of life, it will observe what is dead I minerals, plants, and animals. Science will study only what is dead in them, because it utilizes only ideas and concepts suitable for what is dead. Therefore, our physics is dead by its nature.

Science will stand on a solid basis only when it fully realizes that its mode of thinking can take hold only of the dead. The same is true of chemistry, but I cannot go into that today because of the lack of time.

When we look only at motion and lose sight of velocity, we are erecting a physics that is dead, the end-product of living things is then our concern, and the end-product is death. Hence, when we look at nature with the eyes of modern mechanics and physics, we must realize that we are looking at a corpse.

Nature was not always like this. It was different at one time. If I look at a corpse, it would be foolish to believe that it was always in this condition. The fact that I realize that it is a corpse proves to me that once it was a living organism. The moment you realize that modern mechanics and physics lead you to view nature in this way, you will see that nature is now a corpse so far as physics is concerned. We are studying a corpse.

Can we attain to something living, or at least an approach to it? The corpse is the final condition of something living. Where is the beginning condition? Well, my dear friends, there is no way to rediscover velocity by observing motion. You may stare at differential coefficients as long as you will but you will not find it. Instead, you must turn back to man. Whereas formerly he experienced himself from within, you must now study him from without through his physical organism, and you must understand that in man—and especially in his physical and etheric organizations—the beginning of a living condition must be sought.

No satisfactory form of physics and chemistry will be attained save through a genuine science of man. But I expressly call attention to the fact that such a genuine anthropology will not be reached by approaching man with the methods of present-day physics and chemistry. That would only carry death back into man and make his body (his lower organization) even more dead than before.

You must study what is living in man, and not revert to the method of physics and chemistry. What is needed are the methods that can be found through spiritual-scientific research. Briefly stated, spiritual-scientific research will meet the historic requirements of natural science.

This historic requirement can be put in the following words: Science has reached the point of observing what is corpse-like in nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science must discover in addition to this the beginning of a living condition. This has been preserved in man. In former periods of evolution it was also externally perceptible. At one time, the processes of nature were totally different. Today, we walk around on the corpses of what existed in the beginning. But in the two lower bodies of man, the beginning condition has been preserved. There we can discover all that once existed, right back to the Saturn condition. An historical approach leads beyond the present state of science. It is quite clear why this is so. We are in the midst of a period of development. If, as is so frequently the case, we consider today's manner of thinking to be the most advanced and do not realize that the real course of events was very different, then we are looking at history the wrong way. As an example, a twenty-five year old person need not only be observed in the light of the twenty-five years that he has been alive,—one must also observe the element in him that makes it possible for him to live on. That is one point.

The other point is that our psychology has become very thin, while pneumatology has nearly reached the vanishing point. Again, we must know how far it has gone with these two sciences in the present age. If one speaks today of blue or red, of C-sharp or G, or of qualities of warmth, he will say that they are subjective sensations. That is the popular attitude; But what is a mere subjective sensation? It is a “phenomenon.” Just as we observe only motions in outer nature, we study only the phenomenon in psychology and pneumatology. And just as velocity is missing from motion in our external observation, the essential thing—the living essence—is missing from our observation of the inner soul life. Because we only study phenomena and no longer experience the living essence, we never get beyond mere semblance. The way thinking, feeling and willing are experienced today, they are mere semblance. Modern epistemologists have the man who wants to lift himself up by his own pigtail, or like the man in a railroad car who pushes against the wall without realizing that he cannot move the carriage in this way. This is how modern epistemologists look. They talk and talk, but there is no vitality in their talk because they are locked into the mere semblance.

I have tried to put a certain end to this talk. The first time was in my Philosophy of Freedom,⁸⁴ where I demonstrated how this semblance, inherent in pure thinking, becomes the impulse of freedom when inwardly grasped by man in thinking. If something other than semblance were contained in our subjective experience, we could never be free. But if this semblance can be raised to pure thinking, one can be free, because what is not real being cannot determine us, whereas real being would do so. This was my first effort. My second effort was at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, when I analyzed the matter psychologically. I attempted to show that our sensations and thoughts are in fact outward experiences, rather than inward ones, and that this insight can be attained by careful observation.

These indications will have to be understood. Then, we shall realize that we must rediscover being in semblance, just as we must rediscover velocity in movement. Then, we will understand what this inwardly experienced semblance really is. It will reveal itself as the initial state of being. Man experiences this semblance; experiences himself as semblance and as such lives his way into semblance and thus transforms it into the seed of future worlds. I have often pointed out that from our ethics, our morals, born of the physical world of semblance, future physical worlds will arise, just as from today's seed the plant will grow.⁸⁵ We are dealing with the nascent state of being. In order to have a proper natural science, we must realize that psychology and pneumatology must understand what they observe as nascent states of being. Only then will they throw light on those matters that natural science wants to illuminate. But what is this “nascent” or “initial state?”

Now this nascent state is in the outer world, not within. It is what I see when I behold the green tapestry of plants, the world of colors—red, green and blue—and the sounds that are out there. What are these fleeting formations that modern-day physics, physiology and psychology regard only as subjective? They are the elements from which the worlds of the future create themselves. Red is not engendered by matter in the eye or the brain, red is the first, semblance-like, seed of future worlds.

If you know this, you will also want to know something about what will correspond in these future worlds to the corpse-like element. It will not be what we found earlier in our physics and chemistry, it will be the corpse of the future. We shall recognize what will be the corpse of the future, the future element of death, if we discover it already today in the higher organization of man, where astral body and ego are active. By experiencing the final condition there in reference to the initial one, we at last gain a proper comprehension of the nervous system and the brain insofar as they are dead, not alive. In a certain sense, they can be more dead than a corpse, inasmuch as they transcend the absolute point of death—especially in the case of the nervous system—and become “more dead than dead.” But this very fact makes the nervous system and the brain bearers of the so-called spiritual element—because the dead element dwells in them, the final state not yet even reached by outer nature—because they even surpass this final state.

In order to find psychology and pneumatology in the outer world, we shall have to discover how the inanimate, the dead, dwells in the human organism; namely, in the head organization and in part of the rhythmic organization, mainly that of breathing. We must look at our head and say of it that it is constantly dying. If it were alive, the growing, sprouting living matter could not think. But because it gives up life and constantly dies, the soul-spiritual thoughts, endowed with being, have the opportunity to spread out over what is dead as new living, radiant semblance.

You see, here lie the great tasks that, by means of the historical manner of observation result quite simply from natural science. If we don't take hold of them, we move like ghosts through the present development of science, and not with the consciousness that an epoch that has begun must find a way to continue. You can imagine that much of this is contained implicitly in what science has discovered. Scientific literature offers such indications everywhere. But people cannot yet distinguish clearly; they like what is chaotic. They don't care clearly to contemplate physics and chemistry on one hand, and psychology and pneumatology on the other, because then they would have to consider seriously the inner and outer aspects. They prefer to vacillate in the murky waters between physics and chemistry. Due to this, a bastard science has arisen that has become the darling of natural research and even philosophy; namely, physiology. As soon as the real facts are discovered, physiology will fall apart into psychology on the one hand—a psychology that is also a perception of the world—and on the other, into chemistry, meaning a chemistry that is also a knowledge of man.

When these two are attained, this in-between science, physiology, will vanish. Because today you have a morass in which you can find everything, and because by juggling a bit to the left or the right, it is possible to find a bit of a soul or a corporeal element, people do quite well. The physiology of today is what above all must disappear as the last remnant of former conceptions that have become muddled. The reason physiological concepts are so abstruse is that they contain soul and corporeal elements that are no longer distinguished, thus they can play around with words and even juggle the facts. One who aims for clear insight must realize that physiology amounts in the end to fibbing with words and facts.

Until we admit this, we can't take the history of natural science seriously. Science does not proceed only from undetermined past ages to our time, it continues on from the present. History can only be understood, if one comprehends the further course of things, not in a superstitious, prophetic sense but by beginning now to do the right thing. And infinitely much needs to be set right, particularly in the domain of science. Natural science has grown tall; it is like a nice teenager, who at the moment is going through his years of unpolished adolescence, and whose guidance must be continued so that he will become mature. Science will mature, if murky areas like physiology disappear, and physics and pneumatology arise again in the way outlined above. They will come into being, if the anthroposophical way of thinking is applied in earnest to science. This will be the case, when people feel that they are learning something, when somebody speaks to them of a real physics, a real chemistry, a real psychology and pneumatology; when they no longer have the urge to comprehend everything concerning the world and the human being through bastardized chaotic sciences like physiology. Then, the development of human knowledge will once again stand on a sound basis.

Naturally, therapy is particularly affected and suffers under present-day physiology. You can well imagine this, because it works with all manner of things that elude one's grasp, when one begins to think clearly.

We cannot confront the great challenges of our time with a few anthroposophical catchwords and phrases. It also does not suffice to dabble with physiology on the borderline between psychology and chemistry. The only way to proceed is to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific anthroposophy to physics and chemistry. If you are lazy—forgive me for this harsh expression, I don't mean it in such a radical sense in this case—you say: These matters can only be correctly judged, if one is clairvoyant. Therefore I will wait until I am clairvoyant. I won't venture to criticize physics and chemistry or even physiology.

My dear friends, you need not have insights that surpass ordinary perception in order to know that a corpse is dead and that it must have originated in life. Neither do you need to be clairvoyant in order to analyze properly the true facts of today's physics and chemistry, and to refer them back to their underlying living element, once your attention is directed to the fact that this living element is to be found by studying the “lower man.” There you will have the supplement you need for chemistry and physics. Make the attempt, for once, really to study the mechanism of human movement.⁸⁶ Instead of constantly drawing axis of coordinates and putting the movements into them apart from man; instead of multiplying differential coefficients and integrals, make a serious attempt to study the mechanics of movement in man. As they were once experienced from within, so do you now study them from without. Then you will have what you need, to add to your outer observation of nature, in physics and chemistry.

In outer nature, those who proclaim atomism will always put you in the wrong. They even work themselves up to the very spiritual statement that when one speaks about matter in the sense of a modern physicist, matter is no longer material. The physicists, themselves are saying it;⁸⁷ our very opponents are saying it. In this case they are right, and if we in our replies to them stop short at the half-truths—that is to say, at the final conditions of being—we shall never be equal to that which issues from them.

Here lie the tasks of the specialists, here lie the tasks of those who have the requisite preliminary training, in one or another branch of science.

Then we shall not establish a physicized or chemicized Anthroposophy, but a true anthroposophical chemistry, anthroposophical physics. Then we shall not establish a new medicine as a mere variation on the old, but a true anthroposophical medicine.

The tasks are at hand. They are outlined in all directions. Just as the simple heart can receive the observations that are scattered everywhere in our lectures or lecture cycles, and that give spiritual sustenance, so too the need is to take up on every hand the hints that can lead us to the much-needed progress in the several domains of science.

In the future, it will not suffice if man and nature do not again become one. What physics and chemistry study in nature as the final state of being, must be supplemented by the state of being in “lower man” belonging to the realm of physics and chemistry—in man who is dependent on the physical and etheric bodies. It is important that this be sought. It is not important to single out as essential the valences of the structural formulas or the periodic law in chemistry, because these are but schemata. While they are quite useful as tools for counting and calculations, what matters is the following realization. If the chemical processes are externally observed, the chemical laws are not within them. They are contained in the origin of chemical processes. Hence, they are found only, if, with diligent effort, one tries to seek in the human being for the processes that occur in his circulation, in the activity of his fluids, through the actions of the etheric body. The explanation of the chemical processes in nature lies in the processes of the etheric body. These in turn are represented in the play of fluids in the human organism and are accessible to precise study.

Anthroposophy poses a serious challenge in this direction. This is why we have founded research institutes⁸⁸ in which serious, intensive work must begin. Then the methods gained from anthroposophy can be properly nurtured. This is also the main point of our medical therapy; namely, that the old, confused physiology finally be replaced with a real chemistry and psychology. Without this one can never assert anything about the processes of illness and healing in human nature, because every course of illness is simply an abnormal psychological process, and each healing process is an abnormal chemical process. Only to the extent that we know how to influence the chemical process of healing and how to grasp the psychological course of illness will we attain to genuine pathology and therapy. This will emerge from the anthroposophical manner of observation. If one does not want to recognize this potential in anthroposophy, then one only wants something a bit out of the ordinary and is unwilling to get to work in earnest. Actually, everything that I have sketched here is only a description of how the work should proceed, because a genuine psychology and chemistry come into being through work. All the prerequisites for this work already exist, because very man facts can be found in scientific literature that researchers have accidentally discovered but don't understand. Those of us who work in the spirit of anthroposophy should take up these facts and contribute something to their full comprehension. Take as an example what I emphasized yesterday⁸⁹ in speaking to a smaller group of people. The essential point about the spleen is that it is really an excretory organ. The spleen itself is in turn an excretion of the functions in the etheric body. Countless facts are available in medical literature that need only be utilize—and that is the point: they should be utilized—then the facts will be brought together and what is needed will result.

A single person might accomplish this if a human life spanned six hundred years. But by that time, other tasks would confront him and his accomplishments would long since be outmoded. These things must be attained through cooperation, through people working together. So this is the second task—we must see to it that this becomes possible. I believe that these tasks of the Anthroposophical Society will emerge most clearly and urgently from a truly realistic study of the history of natural science in recent times.

This history shows us at every turn that something great and wonderful has arisen through modern science. In earlier times, the truly inanimate dead aspects could never be discerned, hence, nothing could be made of them. In those times inward semblance could never really be observed; therefore, it couldn't be brought to life by human effort, and hence, one couldn't arrive at freedom. Today, we confront a grandiose world, which became possible only because natural science studies the dead aspects. This is the world of technology. Its special character can be discerned from the fact that the word “technique” is taken from the Greek. There, it still signifies “art,” implying that art reveals, where technology still contains spirit. Today, technology only utilizes spirit in the sense of the abstract, spirit-devoid thoughts. Technology could be achieved only by attaining a proper knowledge of what is dead. Once in the course of humanity's evolution it was necessary to concentrate upon the dead; it thus entered into the realm of technology. Today, man stands in the midst of this realm of technology that surrounds him on all sides. He looks out on it and realizes that here at last is a sphere in which there is no spirit in the proper sense. In regard to the spiritual element, it is important that in all areas of technology human beings experience this inner feeling, almost akin to one of pain over the death of a person. If feeling and sensation can be developed in knowledge, then such a feeling will arise, somewhat like the sensation one experiences when a person is dying and one sees the living organism turn into a corpse. Alongside the abstract indifferent cold knowledge, such a feeling will arise through the true realization that technology is the processing of the inanimate, the dead. This feeling will become the most powerful impetus to seek the spirit in new directions.

I could well imagine the following view of the future: Man looks out over the chimneys, the factories, the telephones—everything that technology has produced in wondrous ways in the most recent times. He stands atop this purely mechanical world, the grave of all things spiritual, and he calls out longingly into the universe—and his yearning will be fulfilled. Just as the dead stone yields the living fiery spark if handled correctly, so from our dead technology will emerge the living spirit, if human beings have the right feelings about what technology is.

On the other hand, one need only understand clearly what pure thinking is; namely the semblance from which can be brought forth the most powerful moral impulses—those individual moral impulses that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom. Then, in a new way, man will face the feeling that was once confronted by Nicholas Cusanus and Meister Eckhart. They said: When I life myself beyond everything that I am ordinarily accustomed to observe, I come to “nothingness” with all that I have learned. But in this “nothingness” there arises for me the “I.” If man really penetrates to pure thinking, then he finds in it the nothingness that turns into the I and from which emerges the whole wealth of ethical actions, that will create new worlds. I can imagine a person who first lets all knowledge of the preset, as inaugurated by natural science, impress itself on him and then (centuries after Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus) turns his gaze inward and with today's mode of thinking arrives at the nothingness of his inner life. In it, he discovers that the spirit really speaks to him. I can imagine that these two images merge. On the one hand, man goes to the place where barren technology has left the spirit behind. There he calls out into cosmic expanses for the spirit. On the other hand, he stops, thinks and looks within himself. And here, out of his inner being, he receives the divine answer to the call he sent out into the distances of the universe.

When we learn, through a new, anthroposophically imbued natural science, to let the calls of infinite longing for the spirit, sent out into the world, resound in our inner being, then this will be the right starting point. Here, through an “anthroposophized” inner perception, we will find the answer to the yearning call for the spirit, desperately sounded out into the universe.

I did not want to describe the development of natural science in recent times in a merely documentary fashion. Rather, I wanted to show you the standpoint of a human being, who comprehends this natural-scientific development and, in a difficult moment of humanity's evolution, knows the right things to say to himself in regard to the progress of mankind.

• 83. See Drawings, pages 92, 95 and compare with the ones on page 125.
• 84. See footnote 45.
• 85. See Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Vocation (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 86. Literature: Adolf Fink has studied the mechanism of human movement and the heat produced by muscular work, and published in 1857, 1869, and 1882 Gesammelte Schriften, (1903–06 in German).
• 87. In the beginning of the century Rudolf Steiner pointed to the speech of the philosopher and Prime Minister A.J. Balfour of August 17, 1904, in front of the British Association, immediately after it was held; see Rudolf Steiner, Lucifer Gnosis (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1969), GA Bibl. No. 34, p. 467. Often Steiner also mentioned the lecture of Max Planck of 1910: “Die Stellung der Neueren Physic zur Mechanischen Weltanshaung” in Max Planck, Physikalische Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Brunswick, Germany, 1958), Vol. 3, pp. 30–46.
• 88. In 1920 a research institute was founded in Stuttgart for physics and chemistry, with a biological branch through the joint stock company “Der Kommende Tag.” A few years later it was transferred to Dornach. The first works from the Institute were published in Der Kommende Tag: Scientific Research Institute News. It contains Heft I (1921), “Milzfunktion und Blaettchen Frage” von L. Kolisko; Heft II (1923), “Der Villardsche Versuch” von Dr. Rer. Nat. R.E. Maier; Heft III (1923): “Physiologischer und Physicalischer Nachweis Kleinster Entitaeten” von L. Kolisko. Later works appeared in the volumes Gaea Sophia, Jahrbuch der Wissenschaftlichen Sektion der Freien Hochschule fuer Geisteswissenschaft am Goetheanum, Volume I (1926), etc.
• 89. From this scientific discussion of January 5 no known copy exists.

First of all, my dear friends, I want to say that I am very glad we are meeting here at this branch of the Anthroposophical Society today. I remember with great pleasure our meeting last year, and my greeting at the beginning of this lecture is as sincere and heartfelt as that memory.¹

Today I want to talk about a subject closely connected with the core of our anthroposophical movement. All the results of our spiritual movement are based on research that may be called clairvoyant. While I have often emphasized that our heart, mind, and feelings are primarily affected by anthroposophical truths, we cannot ignore that these truths depend on clairvoyant research, which is an expression of a soul condition different from that of everyday life. It appears to lead us away from the things that seem so important to us in daily life, but in reality, clairvoyant research leads us right into the heart of truly human life.

Today, I do not want to speak about the paths to clairvoyant research since I have already described them in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.² Rather, I would like to characterize the condition and mood of soul that develops as a consequence of this research.

Indeed we must bear in mind that if we follow the paths to clairvoyant research, we will feel completely different from our usual self. What happens to our soul when it becomes clairvoyant can be compared with our dreams, which are like surrogate clairvoyance. When we dream, we live in a world of images, which contains nothing of what we call “the sensation of touching an object outside us.” In our dreams there is usually nothing we can compare with normal ego consciousness. If any aspect of our ego does appear in our dreams, it seems to be separate from us, almost like another being outside us. We face our ego like a separate entity. Thus, we can speak of a doubling of the ego. However, in dreams we perceive only the part of ourselves that has separated, not the subjective ego. All statements apparently contradicting what I have just said can be traced to the fact that most people know of their dreams only from memory, and cannot remember that in the actual dream the subjective ego was extinguished.

The images of clairvoyant research resemble dreams because in both the sense of touch and the subjective ego are absent. A clairvoyant recalling his or her experiences must feel that the clairvoyant reality is permeable and, unlike physical objects, offers no resistance to touch. In the physical world we have ego awareness because we know: I am here, the object is outside me. However, in clairvoyant perception we are inside the object, not separated from what we perceive. Consequently, the individual objects are not fixed and distinct as physical ones, but are in continuous movement and transformation. Objects in the physical world are fixed because we can touch them and because they offer us boundaries, which objects of clairvoyant perception do not have. The same thing that causes our ego to fuse with the objects of clairvoyant perception also forces us to be very careful when we encounter what we call in the physical world another ego, another human being.

Let us first look at what happens when we encounter a person who has died through our clairvoyant faculties. Such an encounter can come about when the figure of the deceased approaches us in clairvoyant perception like a very vivid dream image, looking every bit as we remember the person looked in life. However, this is not the usual type of such encounters, but a rare exception.

Another possibility is that we clairvoyantly perceive a dead person who has taken on the form of either a living or another dead individual, and thus does not appear in his own form. The appearance of the deceased, then, is of very little relevance in identifying him. Perhaps we were particularly fond of another dead person or have a particularly close friendship with a living one; the deceased approaching us can then take on the form of either of those other individuals. In other words, we lack all the usual means of identifying the ego and appearance of a person in the physical world. It will help us find our way to remember that the appearance or form is not at all important; a being is meeting us in one form or another, and we need to note what this being does. If we take our time and carefully observe the image before us, we will realize that, based on everything we know about the individual in question, this person could not act the way he does in the clairvoyant sphere; his actions are totally out of character. We will often encounter a contradiction between the person appearing to us and his actions.

If we allow our feelings to accompany these actions, ignoring the individual's appearance, we will get a sense in the depths of our soul telling us what being we are actually dealing with. Let me repeat that we are guided by a feeling that rises up from the depths of our soul, for that is very important. The individual's appearance in the clairvoyant sphere seems to resemble a physical figure but can be as different from the being really present as the signs for the word “house” are from the actual house. Since we can read, we do not concentrate on the signs that make up the word “house” and do not describe the shape of the letters, but instead we get right to the concept “house.” In the same way, we learn in true clairvoyance to move from the figure we perceive to the actual being. That is why we speak of reading the occult script, in the true sense of the word. That is, we move inwardly and actively from the vision to the reality it expresses just as written words express a reality.

How can we develop this ability to go beyond the appearance, the immediate vision? We do so, above all, by looking at new ideas and concepts we will need if we want to understand the clairvoyant sphere—new, that is, in contrast to the ideas we use in the physical world.

In the physical world we look at an object or a being and say, quite rightly, I perceive that being, that object. We perceive the plant, mineral, and animal kingdoms, the realm of physical human beings, as well as clouds, mountains, rivers, stars, sun, and moon. The feeling expressed in the words “I perceive” undergoes a transformation when we enter the clairvoyant sphere.

Let me try to explain this with an analogy, though it may sound simplistic. If you were a plant, how would you relate to people perceiving you? If this plant had consciousness and could speak, it would have to say: People look at me, I am perceived by them. Of course, we say: I perceive the plant, but at its level of consciousness, the plant would have to say that it was perceived by human beings. It is this feeling of being perceived, being looked at, we must acquire in relation to the beings of the clairvoyant sphere. For example, concerning the beings of the first hierarchy, the angels, we must be aware that strictly speaking it is not correct to say “I perceive an angel,” but we have to say “I feel an angel perceiving me.”

Based on our Copernican world view, we know full well that the sun does not move. Nevertheless, we say that it rises and moves across the sky, thus contradicting our better knowledge. Similarly, in everyday language we can say that we see an angel. But that is not the truth. We would actually have to say that we feel ourselves seen or perceived by an angel. If we said we experience the being of an angel or of a dead person and can feel it, we would speak the truth from the clairvoyant point of view.

Perhaps an example from clairvoyant observation will help you understand this. More than ten years ago, at the beginning of our work with spiritual science, a dear friend of ours worked with us for a short time.³ This individual possessed not only enthusiasm for what we could give her in the early stages of spiritual science, but also a profound artistic sensitivity and understanding. One could not help but love this person, a love that may well be described as objective because of her qualities. Having worked with us for a relatively short time and having learned a great deal about the results of spiritual science, she left the physical world. There is no need to go into the next four or five years after her death, so let me get directly to what happened after that. In 1909, we presented our mystery plays in Munich, preceded, to our great delight, by Children of Lucifer by our highly respected friend Edouard Schuré.⁴ Whatever you may think about the way the plays were produced then and later, we had to present them the way we did. The circumstances under which we had to work on the performances were such that we needed an impulse from the spiritual world, an impulse that also included the artistic aspect we wanted to incorporate. Now, I can assure you that even at that time, in 1909, and even more so in later years, I always felt a specific spiritual impulse as I was working on the arrangements for the performances.

You see, when we have work to do in the physical world, we need not only intellect and skills but also the strength of our muscles. Our muscles objectively help us; they are given to us, unlike the intellectual capacities we ourselves dwell in. Now, in dealing with matters of the spirit we need forces from the spiritual world to combine with our own, just as we need the strength of our muscles for physical action. In the case I mentioned, the impulse from the individual who had left the physical world in 1904 entered more and more into our artistic work on the Munich plays. To describe what happened, I would have to say the impulses from this individual came down from the spirit plane and flowed into my intentions, into my work. She was the patron of our work.

We develop the right feelings toward the dead if we become aware that their spiritual gaze—if I may use that expression—and their powers focus on us; they look at us, act in us, and add to our strength.

To experience such a spiritual fact in the right way, we need to develop a very specific type of selflessness and a capacity for love. That is why I stressed that one could love that person objectively, as it were, because of her qualities; one had to love her because she was as she was. A subjective love, a love arising out of personal needs, can easily be egotistical and can potentially keep us from finding the right relationship to such a dead individual. The difference between the right love, the selfless love we have for such a person, and selfish love becomes perfectly obvious in clairvoyant experience.

Let us assume such a person would want to help us after her death, but we cannot develop true selfless love for her. Her spiritual gaze, her spiritual will streaming toward us would then be like a burning sensation, causing a piercing, burning feeling in our soul. If we can feel and maintain a selfless love, this stream, her spiritual gaze as it were, flows into our soul like a feeling of warm mildness and pours itself into our thoughts, imagination, feeling, and willing. It is out of this feeling that we recognize who the dead person is and not on the basis of his or her appearance, because the dead may manifest in the guise of a person we feel close to at the moment. The form in which the beings of the higher world appear to us—and after death we are all beings of a higher, spiritual world—depends on our subjective nature, on what we habitually see, think, and feel. The reality is what we feel for the being manifest before us, how we receive what comes to us from this being. Regardless of what Joan of Arc said about the appearance of the higher beings in her visions, the occultist who is able to investigate these things knows that it was always the genius of the French nation who stood behind them.⁵

I described how we can feel the gaze of spiritual beings resting upon us and their will flowing into our souls. To learn this is analogous to learning to read on the physical plane. Those who merely want to describe their visions would be like people describing the shape of the letters on a page rather than their meaning. This shows you how easy it is to have preconceived notions about the experiences in the spiritual realm. Naturally, it seems most obvious to attach great importance to the description of what the vision looked like. However, what really matters is what lies behind the veil of perception and is expressed in the images of the vision.

Thus, in the course of occult development, the soul immerses itself in specific moods and inner states different from those of our everyday life. We have entered the world of the hierarchy of angels and the hierarchy, or we could also say hierarchies, of the dead as soon as our occult exercises have brought us to the stage where the sense of touch characteristic of the physical world no longer exists, and where a person's appearance is no longer characteristic of the I concerned. Then our thinking changes and we no longer have thoughts in the sense we have them here in the physical world. In that world, every thought takes on the form of an elemental being. In the physical world, our thoughts can agree or contradict each other. In this other world we enter, thoughts encounter other thoughts as real beings, either loving or hating each other. We begin to feel our way into a world of many thought beings. And in those living thought beings, we really feel what we usually call “life.” Here life and thinking are united, whereas they are completely separate in the physical world.

When we speak on the physical plane and tell our thoughts to someone, we have the feeling that our thoughts come from our soul, that we have to remember them at this particular moment. Speaking as a true occultist and not someone who just tells his experiences from memory, we will feel that our thoughts arise as living beings. We must be glad if we are blessed at the right moment with the approach of a thought as a real being.

When you express your thoughts in the physical world, for example, as a lecturer, you will find it easier to give a talk for the thirtieth time than you did the first time. If, however, you speak as an occultist, thoughts always have to approach you and then depart again. Just as someone paying you the thirtieth visit had to make his way to you thirty times, the living thought we express for the thirtieth time has to come to us thirty times as it did the first time; our memory is of absolutely no use here.

If you express an idea on the physical level and someone is sitting in a corner thinking, “I don't like that nonsense, I hate it,” you will not be particularly bothered by it. You have prepared your ideas and present them regardless of the positive or negative thoughts of someone in the audience. But if as an esotericist you let thoughts approach you, they could be delayed and kept away by someone who hates them or who hates the speaker. And the forces blocking that thought must be overcome because we are dealing with living beings and not merely with abstract ideas.

These two examples show that as soon as we enter the sphere of clairvoyance, we are immersed in living and weaving thoughts. It is as if these thoughts are no longer subjective and as if you yourself are no longer within yourself, as if you are living outside in the wide world. When you are in this world of living and weaving thoughts, you are in the hierarchy of angels. And just as our physical world is everywhere filled with air, the world of the hierarchy of angels is filled with the mild warmth I spoke about earlier that the beings of this hierarchy pour out. When our inner development has brought us to the stage where we can live in this spiritual atmosphere of streaming mildness, we feel the spiritual eyes of the hierarchy of angels resting on our souls.

Now, in our earthly life, we have certain ideals and think about them abstractly. As we think of them, we feel obligated to pursue these ideals. In the clairvoyant sphere, however, there are no abstract ideals. There ideals are living beings of the hierarchy of angels and flow through spiritual space, looking at us with warmth.

In the physical world, we may have ideals, know them well, and yet we may not do anything to apply them. Our emotions, and perhaps passions, can tempt us to shirk them. However, if we knowingly ignore an ideal in the clairvoyant sphere, we feel the spiritual gaze of a being of the hierarchy of angels directed at us with reproach, and this reproach burns. In the spiritual world, ignoring an ideal is thus a reality, and a being of the hierarchy of angels reproaches us. Their gaze makes us feel the reproach; it is the reproach we feel.

You see, learning to develop a real feeling for ideals is one way of entering the world of the hierarchy of angels. Limiting our consciousness to the physical plane may lead us to think that nothing will happen if we are too lazy to act on our ideals. However, we can learn to feel that if we do not act on an ideal, then, regardless of other consequences, the world becomes different from what it would have been had we followed our ideal. We are on the way to the hierarchy of angels when we begin to see that not acting on our ideals is something real, and when we can transform this insight into a genuine feeling. Transforming and vitalizing our feelings allows our souls to grow into the higher worlds.

Through continued esoteric training, we can rise to an even higher level, that of the hierarchy of archangels. If we ignore the angels, we feel reproach. With the archangels we feel reproach as well as a real effect on our being. The strength and power of the archangels works through our I when we live in their world.

For example, a few months ago we lost a very dear friend when he left the physical plane. A profound poet, he had quickly found his way into the anthroposophical world view in the last five years, and the feelings it evoked in him are beautifully reflected in his recent poetry.⁶ From the time he joined us, and even before that, he had been struggling with an infirm and deteriorating body. The more his body deteriorated, the more his soul was filled with poetry that reflected our world view. Only a short time has elapsed since his death, and so one cannot yet say that this individual possesses a clearly existing consciousness. Nevertheless, the first stages of his development in the existence after death can be seen. The astral body, now separated from the physical and living in the spiritual world, reveals the most wonderful tableaux of cosmic development as we understand it in spiritual science. Having left the deteriorated physical body, the astral body has become so illuminated, comparatively speaking, that it can present the clairvoyant observer with a complete picture of cosmic evolution.

Let me use an analogy to explain what I mean. We can love nature and admire it, and still appreciate a beautiful painting that recreates what we have seen in nature. Similarly, we can be uplifted when what we have seen in the clairvoyant sphere lights up again, as a cosmic painting, so to speak, in an astral body of a person who has died. The astral body of our departed friend reveals after death what it absorbed, at first unconsciously but later also consciously, in the course of his anthroposophical development when the beings of the hierarchy of archangels worked actively on the poetical transformation of his anthroposophical thoughts and ideas.

Our progress in our esoteric development can be called mystical, because it is initially the inner progress of the soul. We transform our ordinary personality and gradually reach a new state. This step-by-step growth of the soul is mystical progress because at first it is experienced inwardly. As soon as we can perceive the mildness looking down from the spiritual world, we are objectively in the world of the angels, which reveals itself to us. And as soon as we can recognize that real forces of strength and power enter into us, we are in the realm of the archangels. With each stage of inner mystical progress we have to enter another world.

However, if we fail to develop selflessness and reach the stage of living in the world of the angels while remaining selfish and unloving, then we carry the self intended for the physical world into their realm. Instead of feeling the mild gaze and will of the angels upon us, we feel that other spiritual powers are able to ascend through us. Instead of gazing at us from outside, they have been released by us, shall we say, from their underworld while we were raised to a higher world. Instead of being overshadowed, or rather illuminated, by the world of the angels, we experience the luciferic beings that emerge from us.

Then, if we reach the stage of mystical development allowing us to enter the world of the archangels—without, however, having first developed the wish to receive by grace the influences of the spiritual world, we carry our self up into their realm. As a result, instead of being strengthened and imbued with the power of the archangels, the beings of the ahrimanic world emerge from us and surround us.

At first glance, the idea that the world of Lucifer appears in the realm of the angels and the world of Ahriman in that of the archangels seems terrible. However, there is really nothing awful about this. Lucifer and Ahriman are in any case higher beings than we are. Lucifer can be described as an archangel left behind at an earlier stage of evolution, Ahriman as a spirit of personality also left behind at an earlier stage. The terrible thing is not that we encounter Lucifer and Ahriman, but that we encounter them without recognizing them for who they are. Encountering Lucifer in the world of the angels really means encountering the spirit of beauty, the spirit of freedom. But the all-important thing is that we recognize Lucifer and his hosts as soon as we enter the world of the angels. The same is true of Ahriman in the realm of the archangels. Lucifer and Ahriman unleashed in the higher worlds is terrible only if we do not recognize them as we release them, because then they control us without our knowledge. It is important that we face them consciously.

When we have advanced in our mystical development to the level of living in the world of the angels and want to continue there with really fruitful occultism, we have to look for Lucifer as soon as we expect the spiritual gaze of the angels to rest on us. Lucifer must be present—and if we cannot find him, he is within us. But it is very important that Lucifer is outside us in this realm, so that we can face him.

These facts about Lucifer and Ahriman, angels and archangels, explain the nature of revelation in the higher worlds. From our viewpoint in the physical world, we are easily led to believe that Lucifer and Ahriman are evil powers. But when we enter the higher world, this no longer has any meaning. In the clairvoyant sphere, Lucifer and Ahriman have to be present just as much as the angels and archangels. However, we do not perceive them the same way. We identify the angels and archangels not by their appearance, but we know the angels by the mildness that flows from them into us, and recognize the archangels by allowing their strength and power to flow into our feeling and will. Lucifer and Ahriman appear to us as figures, merely transposed into the spiritual world; we cannot touch them, but we can approach them as spiritual projections of the physical world. Clearly, it is important that we learn in our mystical clairvoyant development to see forms in the higher world and to be aware that we are seen, that a higher will focuses on us.

You see, higher development does not consist merely in acquiring clairvoyant faculties, but in developing a certain state of soul, a certain attitude or relationship to the beings of the higher world. This new attitude and state of soul must be developed hand in hand with the training of our clairvoyant faculties. In other words, we must learn not only to see in the spiritual world but also to read in it. Reading is not meant here in the narrow sense of a simple learning process, but as something we acquire through transforming our feelings and sensations. It is important to keep in mind that a split of our personality occurs when clairvoyance begins, and we reach a revelation of the higher worlds. Our earthly personality is left behind, and a new one is acquired on ascending into a higher world. And just as the beings of the higher hierarchies look at us in the higher world, so we perceive our own ordinary personality from a higher perspective. Our higher self discards the lower one and observes it. So, to make valid statements about the higher worlds we had better wait until we are able to say: That is you; the person you see in your clairvoyant vision is yourself. “That is you” on the higher level corresponds to “this is I” on the physical one.

Now remember when you were eight or thirteen or fifteen years old and try to reconstruct from your memory a small part of your life at that time. Try to recall as vividly as possible your thinking in those years. Then concentrate on your current feelings about the girl or boy you were at eight, thirteen, or fifteen. As soon as we move from the physical level to the higher world, the present moment we live in now becomes a memory of the kind we have just recalled. We look back at our current existence on the physical level and at what we may still become during the remainder of our physical life in the same way you look back to your experiences at eight, thirteen, or fifteen from your vantage point in the present moment.

Everything we consider part of ourselves on the physical level, such as our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and actions, becomes a memory as soon as we enter the higher world. We look down at the physical world and become a memory to ourselves when we live in the higher world. We have to keep our experiences in the higher worlds separate from those in the physical realm, just as we distinguish between our present situation and an earlier one. Imagine a person who is forty years old and vividly remembers the feelings and abilities he or she had as an eight-year-old boy or girl. For instance, the person might be reading a book now, at the age of forty, and all of a sudden he or she begins to relate to the book as an eight-year-old would. That would be a confusion of the two attitudes, the two states of soul, and is analogous to what happens when we confuse our state of soul on the physical level with what is required in the higher worlds.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that every unbiased person can understand what I say about the higher worlds; in other words, we do not merely have to believe these descriptions, but we can understand them if we approach them without preconceived ideas. People may object that we cannot describe the higher worlds with concepts, thoughts, and ideas from the physical world because the former are completely different from the latter. This objection makes as much sense as saying that we cannot give people an idea of what we mean by writing h-o-u-s-e; for them to understand that concept, we have to bring them a house.

We talk about physical facts and objects by means totally independent of the object or fact. So we can also describe phenomena of the spiritual world with what we understand on the physical plane. However, we cannot understand the higher worlds with our everyday concepts and ideas, but need to acquire others and expand our thinking. People who honestly tell us about the higher world must also extend our concepts beyond our everyday life; they must give us concepts that are new and different and yet comprehensible on the physical plane.

People find it difficult to understand genuine spiritual science and serious esotericism because they are so reluctant to expand their concepts. They want to understand the higher world and its revelations with the ideas they already have and don't want to create new ones. When people in our materialistic age hear lectures on the spiritual world, they believe all too easily that the esoteric world can be understood simply by looking at it. They think the shapes there may be slightly more delicate and more nebulous than in the physical world, but similar nevertheless. It may seem inconvenient to some that the serious occultist is expected to do more than merely follow instructions on how to see angels. A change in thinking is necessary, and the concept “angel” must include that we are perceived by them, that their spiritual gaze is focused on us.

Mystical development, or ascending to the higher worlds, cannot be separated from enriching and giving greater scope to our ideas, feelings, and soul impulses. To understand the higher worlds, we must not let our life of ideas remain as impoverished as it is on the physical plane.

To provide esoteric help for this enrichment, we are constructing our modest building in Dornach in a completely new style. That building is, of course, nowhere near the ideal, but it is a humble beginning. After all, we have only limited means at our disposal, despite the fact that our friends have done everything within their power for this project.

The spiritual impulses behind the building styles that developed in the third, the fourth, and in the current fifth post-Atlantean epoch included the task of guiding humanity to knowledge of the physical world. For example, Egyptian architecture initiated this development with its succinct geometrical forms. Greco-Roman architecture is like a marriage of soul and spirit with etheric and physical body. Here soul and spirit on the one hand and etheric body and physical body on the other connect in a state of complete equilibrium. The rising, pointed arches of the Gothic style are the first architectural attempt to rise again from the physical into the spiritual world.

If anthroposophy is to be represented in a building the next step must be to bring to life the living and weaving thought patterns themselves, flowing, and pouring into space. Then we will see in physical form what Imagination and Inspiration reveal directly of the spiritual world. That is why the forms of the Dornach building are such that it is pointless to ask in materialist fashion what they symbolize and what their shapes stand for. They have to be taken on their own merit, since they are nothing more than immediate spiritual experiences poured out into spatial forms. We have attempted to transform everything that can be seen and experienced in the spirit into artistic form. So if people ask what a form stands for, they have misunderstood the building; for every form signifies only itself, just as our hands or head stand only for themselves and nothing else. Such a question also indicates a complete misunderstanding of our position in regard to occultism. We will be glad to leave behind the old theosophical nonsense of examining every fairy tale, every figure, and every myth for what it signifies and symbolizes.

All our forms really exist in the spiritual world and therefore express only themselves and nothing else. They are not symbols, but spiritual realities. You will not find a single pentagram throughout the building, no form of a pentagram, nothing to make you wonder what this or that form means. At most, there is one place where subtle forms could be interpreted as a pentagram, but so can every five-petaled flower. People may ask what our fourteen pillars mean, which are not shaped as pentagrams, but are five-sided for aesthetic reasons. They may wonder what the pillars supporting the cupolas mean besides representing spatial relations perceptible in the spiritual world. In reply we can only point out how materialistic our age is when even spiritual intentions must be clothed in materialist garments.

Our building will be understood if people stop asking what it symbolizes and instead think about what it is. They will understand our building when they realize it is better not to use any of the usual terms and the old verbal images to help our materialist age comprehend it. Spiritual science can at most be a synthesis of religions; unlike the ancient religions, it does not build temples, but rather a structure that expresses its innermost nature. This building can only be understood gradually, and only if we do not apply old words to this new development.

We know only too well that we can realize our intentions in Dornach only in the most modest, rudimentary way. But I ask only that you make a real effort to understand this humble beginning from the perspective and significance of our spiritual science. Try to understand what this simple beginning, paid for with considerable sacrifices, is aiming at. Any other attitude would be most disheartening.

Enough grand words and pompous phrases have been bandied about in the so-called occult movement. All we want is that even if our way of expressing things no longer exists fifty years from now, people will still say of our movement that it endeavored with every fiber to be totally sincere and honest. And the more modestly and simply, but thus perhaps the more objectively, we discuss what we wish to do, the better we serve our cause. Every word that is superfluous or returns to the old, convenient concepts does untold damage to what we are striving to achieve—please excuse me for saying this—honestly. If people understand us in this way, then perhaps the mood will arise that we need if we are really, in December at the earliest, to inaugurate our modest building without pomp and fuss.⁷ The mood we need will be there only if we concentrate on our goals, even if we do not create a stir in our materialist age.

Please accept these words in the spirit of the serious intentions of our movement. They must fill our souls if this spiritual impulse is really to take root in our age. There is a real need for an honest spiritual movement that truly promotes the mystical life of the soul and allows revelations of the higher worlds to flow into this materialist age. Only when our friends understand this purpose and attitude of our spiritual movement, then and only then shall we be able to fulfill the task given us by the wise, guiding individualities in the spiritual world.

Based on what I have tried to explain today, I will speak to you the day after tomorrow about the progress in our understanding of Christ through the ages and about the position of our movement concerning the Christ.⁸

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, Die Welt des Geistes und ihr Hereinragen in das physische Dasein, Vol. 150 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1972), lecture of May 5, 1913. There are no transcripts of the lectures of May 4 and 9, 1913, in Paris.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, repr., (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press 1986).
• 3. Steiner here refers to the actress Maria von Strauch-Spettini, 1847–1904. See Lecture Two, note 7.
• 4. Edouard Schuré, French writer. His play Children of Lucifer was performed in German in Munich on August 22, 1909, under Rudolf Steiner's direction. See Steiner The East in the Light of the West and Schuré, Children of Lucifer, both in one volume, (Blauvelt NY: Spiritual Science Library, 1986).
• 5. Joan of Arc, 1412–1431, French national heroine and saint.
• 6. Morgenstern, see Lecture Two, note 8.
• 7. Due to complications and delays caused by World War I (1914–1918), the building neared completion only in 1920. The inauguration ceremony never took place because of the fire that destroyed the Goetheanum. A “provisional inauguration” took place on September 26, 1920, on the eve of the first event held in the building, the “first anthroposophical academic course,” which lasted from September 27 to October 16, 1920.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner, Vorstufen zum Mysterium von Golgotha, Vol. 152 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1964), Lecture of May 27, 1914.

The latter part of the Bhagavad Gita is permeated by feelings and shades of meaning saturated with ideas of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In these last chapters our whole mode of thinking and feeling must be attuned so as to understand what is said in the sense of those three conditions. In the last lecture I sought to give an idea of those important concepts by making use of present-day experiences. Certainly anyone who enters deeply into this poem must perceive that since the time when it arose those concepts have shifted to some extent. Nevertheless, it would not have been correct to describe them simply by verbal quotations from the poem because our mode of feeling is different from what is contained there and we are unable to make those very different feelings our own. If we tried to we would only be describing the unknown by the unknown.

So in the Bhagavad Gita you will find with regard to food that the concepts we developed last time have shifted a little. What is true for man today about plant food was true for the ancient Indian of that food Krishna calls mild, gentle food. Whereas rajas food, which we described correctly for man today as mineral food (salt, for instance), would have been designated at that time as sour or sharp. For our constitution meat is essentially a tamas food, but the Indian meant by this something that could hardly be considered food at present, which gives us an idea of how different men were then. They called tamas food what had become rotten, had stood too long, and had a foul smell. For our present incarnation we could not properly call that tamas food because man's organism has changed, even as far as his physical body.

Thus, in order to understand these feelings of sattwa, rajas and tamas, so fundamental in the Gita, it is well for us to apply them to our own conditions. Now if we would consider what sattwa really is, it is best to begin by taking the most striking conception of it. In our time the man who can give himself up to knowledge as penetrating as our present knowledge of the mineral kingdom is a sattwa man. For the Indian he was not one who had such knowledge, but was one who went through the world with intelligent understanding as we would say, with heart and head in the right place. A man who takes without prejudice and bias the phenomena the world offers. A man who always perceives the world with sympathy and conceives it with intelligence; who receives the light of ideas, of feelings and sentiments streaming out from all the beauty and loveliness of the world; who avoids all that is ugly, developing himself rightly. He who does all this in the physical world is a sattwa man. In the inorganic world a sattwa impression is that of a surface not too brilliant, illuminated in such a way that its details of color can be seen in their right lustre yet bright also.

A rajas impression is one where a man is in a certain way prevented by his own emotions, his impulses and reactions, or by the thing itself, from fully penetrating what lies around him, so that he does not give himself up to it but meets it with what he himself is. For example, he becomes acquainted with the plant kingdom. He can admire it, but he brings his own emotions to bear on it and therefore cannot penetrate it to its depths.

Tamas is where a man is altogether given up to his bodily life, so that he is blunt and apathetic toward his environment, as we are toward a consciousness different from our own. While we dwell on the physical plane we know nothing of the consciousness of a dog or a horse, not even of another human being. In this respect man, as a rule, is blunt and dull. He withdraws into his own bodily life. He lives in impressions of tamas. But man must gradually become apathetic to the physical world in order to have access to the spiritual worlds in clairvoyance. In this way we can best read the ideas of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. In external nature a rajas impression would be that of a moderately bright surface, say of green, a uniform green shade; a dark-colored surface would represent a tamas impression. Where man looks out into the darkness of universal space, when the beautiful spectacle of the free heavens appears to him, the impression he gains is none other than that blue color that is almost a tamas color.

If we saturate ourselves with the feeling these ideas give we can apply them to everything that surrounds us. These ideas are really comprehensive. For the ancient Indian, to know well about this threefold nature of his surroundings meant not only a certain understanding of the outer world, it also meant bringing to life his own inner being. He felt it somewhat as follows. Imagine a primitive country man who sees the glory of nature around him—the early morning sky, the sun and stars, everything he can see. He does not think about it however. He does not build up concepts and ideas about the world but just lives on in utmost harmony with it. If he begins to feel himself an individual person, distinguishing his soul from his environment, he has to do so by learning to understand his surroundings through ideas about them.

To set up one's environment objectively before one is always a certain way of grasping the reality of one's own being. The Indian of the time of the Bhagavad Gita said, “So long as one does not penetrate and perceive the sattwa, rajas, and tamas conditions in one's environment, one continues merely to live in it. A person is not yet there, independently in his own being, but is bound up with his surroundings. However, when the world about him becomes so objective that one can pursue it everywhere with the awareness that this is a sattwa condition, this a rajas, that a tamas, then one becomes more and more free of the world, more independent in himself.” This therefore is one way of bringing about consciousness of self. At bottom this is Krishna's concern—to free Arjuna's soul from all those things that surround him and are characteristic of the time in which he lives. So Krishna explains, “Behold all the life there on the bloody field of battle where brothers confront brothers, with all that thou feelest thyself bound to, dissolved in, a part of. Learn to know that all that is there outside you runs its course in conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Then wilt thou contrast thyself with it; know that in thine own highest self thou dost not belong to it, and wilt experience thy separate being within thyself, the spirit in thee.”

Here we have another of the beautiful elements in the dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. At first we are gradually made acquainted with its ideas as abstract concepts, but afterward these become more and more vivid. The concepts of sattwa, rajas, and tamas take on living shape and form in the most varied spheres of life. Then at length the separation of Arjuna's soul from it all is accomplished, so to say, before our spiritual gaze. Krishna explains to him how we must free ourselves from all that is bound up with these three conditions, from that in which men are ordinarily interwoven.

There are sattwa men who are so bound up with existence as to be attached to all the happiness and joy they can draw from their environment. They speed through the world, drinking in their blissfulness from all that can give it to them. Rajas men are diligent, men of action; but they act because actions have such and such consequences to which they are attached. They depend on the joy of action, on the impression action makes upon them. Tamas men are attached to laziness, they want to be comfortable. They really do not want to act at all. Thus are men to be distinguished. Those whose souls and spirits are bound into external conditions belong to one or other of these three groups.

“But thine eyes shall see the daybreak of the age of self-consciousness. Thou shalt learn to hold thy soul apart. Thou shalt be neither sattwa, rajas nor tamas man.” Thus is Krishna the great educator of the human ego. He shows its separation from its environment. He explains soul activities according to how they partake of sattwa, rajas or tamas. If a man raises his belief to the divine creators of the world he is a sattwa man. Just in that time of the Gita, however, there were men who in a certain sense knew nothing of the Divine Beings guiding the universe. They were completely attached to the so-called nature spirits, those behind the immediate beings of nature. Such men are rajas men. The tamas men are those who in viewing the world get only so far as what we may call the ghost-like, which in its spiritual nature is nearest to the material. So, in regard to religious feeling also these three groups may be distinguished.

If we wished to apply these concepts to religious feeling in our time we should say (but without flattery) that those who strive after anthroposophy are sattwa men; those attached to external faith are rajas men; those who, in a material or spiritual sense, will only believe in what has bodily shape and form—the materialists and spiritualists—are the tamas men. The spiritualist does not ask for spiritual beings in whom he may believe; he is quite prepared to believe in them, but he does not want to lift himself up to them. He wants them to come down to him. They must rap, because he can hear rapping with physical ears. They must appear in clouds of light because such are visible to his eyes. Such are tamas men in a certain conscious sense, and quite in the sense too of the tamas men of Krishna's time.

There are also unconscious tamas men; the materialistic thinkers of our time who deny all that is spiritual. When materialists meet in conference today they persuade themselves that they adhere to materialism on logical grounds, but this is an illusion. Materialists are people who remain so not on the basis of logic but for fear of the spiritual. They deny the spirit because they are afraid of it. They are in effect compelled to deny it by the logic of their own unconscious soul, which does indeed penetrate to the door of the spiritual but cannot pass through. One who can see reality can see in a materialistic congress how each person in the depths of his soul is afraid of the spirit. Materialism is not logic, it is cowardice before the spiritual. All its arguments are nothing but an opiate to damp down this fear. Actually, Ahriman—the giver of fear—has every materialist by the neck. This is a grotesque but an austere and fundamental truth that one may recognize if one goes into any materialistic meeting. Why is such a meeting called? The illusion is that people there discuss views of the universe, but in reality it is a meeting to conjure up the devil Ahriman, to beckon him into their chambers.

Krishna, then, indicates to Arjuna how the different religious beliefs may be classified, and he also speaks to him of the different ways men may approach the Gods in actual prayer. In all cases the temper of man's soul can be described in terms of these three conditions. Sattwa, rajas, and tamas men are different in the way they relate to their Gods. Tamas men are such as priests, but whose priesthood depends on a kind of habit. They have their office but no living connection with the spiritual world. So they repeat Aum, Aum, Aum, which proceeds from the dullness, the tamas condition of their spirit. They pour forth their subjective nature in the Aum.

Rajas men look out on the surrounding world and begin to feel that it has something in it akin to themselves, that it is related to them and therefore worthy to be worshipped. They are the men of “Tat” who worship the “That,” the Cosmos, as being akin to themselves. Sattwa men perceive that what lives within us is one with all that surrounds us in the universe outside. In their prayer they have a sense for “Sat,” the All-being, the unity without and within, unity of the objective and the subjective. Krishna says that he who would truly become free in his soul, who does not wish to be merely a sattwa, rajas or tamas man in any one respect or another, must attain to a transformation of these conditions in himself so that he wears them like a garment, while in his real self he grows out beyond them.

This is the impulse that Krishna as the creator of self-consciousness must give. Thus he stands before Arjuna and teaches him to “Look upon all the conditions of the world, with all that is to man highest and deepest, but free thyself from the highest and deepest of the three conditions and in thine own self become as one who lays hold of himself. Learn and know that thou canst live without feeling thyself bound up with rajas, or tamas, or sattwa.” One had to learn this at that time because it was the beginning of the dawn in self-liberation, but here again, what then required the greatest effort can today be found right at hand. This is the tragedy of present life. There are too many today who stand in the world and burrow down into their own soul, finding no connection with the outer world; who in their feelings and all their inner experiences are lonely souls. They neither feel themselves bound up with the conditions of sattwa, rajas or tamas, nor are they free from them, but are cast out into the world like an endlessly, aimlessly revolving wheel. Such men who live only in themselves and cannot understand the world, who are unhappy because in their soul-life they are separated from all external existence—these represent the shadow side of the fruit that it was Krishna's task to develop in Arjuna and in all his contemporaries and successors. What had to be Arjuna's highest endeavor has become the greatest suffering for many men today.

Thus do successive ages change. Today we must say that we are at the end of the age that began with the time of the Bhagavad Gita. This may penetrate our feelings with deep significance. It may also tell us that just as in that ancient time those seeking self-consciousness had to hear what Krishna told Arjuna, those seeking their soul's salvation today, in whom self-consciousness is developed to a morbid degree, these too should listen. They should listen to what can lead them once more to an understanding of the three external conditions. What can do this?

Let us put forward some more preliminary ideas before we set out to answer this question. Let us ask again, what is it that Krishna really wants for Arjuna, whose relation to external conditions was a right one for his time? What is it that he says with divine simplicity and naïveté? He reveals what he wishes to be even to our present time. We have described how a kind of picture-consciousness, a living imagery, lighted up man's soul; how there was hovering above it, so to say, what today is self-consciousness, which men at that time had to strive for with all their might but which today is right at hand. Try to live into the soul condition of that time before Krishna introduced the new age. The world around men did not call forth clear concepts and ideas, but pictures like those of our dreams today. Thus the lowest region of soul-life was a picture-like consciousness, and this was illumined from the higher region—of sleep consciousness—through inspiration. In this way they could rise to still higher conditions. This ascent was called “entering into Brahma.” To ask a soul today, living in Western lands, to enter into Brahma would be a senseless anachronism. It would be like requiring a man who is halfway up a mountain to reach the top by the same way as one still down in the valley. With equal right could one ask a Western soul today to do Eastern exercises and “enter into Brahma” because this presupposes that a man is at the stage of picture consciousness, which as a matter of fact certain Easterners still are. What the men of the Gita age found in rising into Brahma, the Western man already has in his concepts and ideas. This is really true, that Shankaracharya would today introduce the ideas of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte to his revering disciples as the first stage of rising into Brahma. It is not the content, however, it is the pains of the way, that are important.

Krishna indicates a main characteristic of this rising into Brahma, by which we have a beautiful characterization of Krishna himself. At that time the constitution of the soul was all passive. The world of pictures came to you, you gave yourself up to these flowing pictures. Compare this with the altogether different nature of our everyday world. Devotion, giving ourselves up to things, does not help us to understand them, even though there are many who do not wish to advance to what must necessarily take place in our time. Nevertheless, for our age we have to exert ourselves, to be alive and active, in order to get ideas and concepts of our surrounding world. Herein lies all the trouble in our education. We have to educate children so that their minds are awake when their concepts of the surrounding world are being formed. Today the soul must be more active than it was in the age before the origin of the Bhagavad Gita. We can put it so:

Bhagavad Gita Age—rising to Brahma with passive souls.

Intellectual Age (our present age)—actively working our way up into the higher worlds.

What then must Krishna say when he wishes to introduce that new age in which the active way of gaining an understanding of the universe is gradually to begin? He must say, “I have to come; I have to give thee the ego-man, a gift that shall impel thee to activity.” If it had all remained passive as before—a being interwoven with the world, devoted to the world—the new age would never have begun. Everything connected with the entry of the soul into the spiritual world before the time of the Gita, Krishna calls devotion. “All is devotion to Brahma.” This he compares to the feminine in man; while what is the self in man, the active working element that is to create self-consciousness, that pushes up from within as the generator of the self-consciousness that is to come, Krishna calls the masculine in man. What man can attain in Brahma must be fertilized by Krishna. So his teaching to Arjuna is, “All men until now were Brahma-men. Brahma is all that is spread out as the mother-womb of the whole world. But I am the father, who came into the world to fertilize the maternal womb.”

Thus the consciousness of self is created, which is to work on all men. This is indicated as clearly as possible. Krishna and Brahma are related to each other as father and mother in the world. Together they produce the self-consciousness man must have in the further course of his evolution—the self-consciousness that makes it possible for him to become ever more perfect as an individual being. The Krishna faith has altogether to do with the single man, the individual person. To follow his teaching exclusively means to strive for the perfection of oneself as an individual. This can be achieved only by liberating the self; loosening it from all that adheres to external conditions. Fix your attention on this backbone of Krishna's teaching, how it directs man to put aside all externals, to become free from the life that takes its course in continually changing conditions of every kind; to comprehend oneself in the self alone, that it may be borne ever onward to higher perfection. See how this perfection depends on man's leaving behind him all the external configuration of things, casting off the whole of outer life like a shell, becoming free and ever more inwardly alive in himself. Man tearing himself away from his environment, no longer asking what goes on in external processes of perfection but asking how shall he perfect himself. This is the teaching of Krishna.

Krishna—that is, the spirit who worked through Krishna—appeared again in the Jesus child of the Nathan line of the House of David, described in St. Luke's Gospel. Thus, fundamentally, this child embodied the impulse, all the forces that tend to make man independent and loosen him from external reality. What was the intention of this soul that did not enter human evolution but worked in Krishna and again in this Jesus child? At a far distant time this soul had had to go through the experience of remaining outside human evolution because the antagonist Lucifer had come; he who said, “Your eyes will be opened and you will distinguish good and evil, and be as God.” In the ancient Indian sense Lucifer said to man, “You will be as the Gods, and will have power to find the sattwa, rajas and tamas conditions in the world.”

Lucifer directed man's attention to the outer world. By his instigation man had to learn to know the external, and therefore had to go through the long course of evolution down to the time of Christ. Then he came who was once withdrawn from Lucifer; came in Krishna and later in the Luke Jesus child. In two stages he gave that teaching that from another side was to be the antithesis of the teaching of Lucifer in Paradise. “He wanted to open your eyes to the conditions of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. Shut your eyes to these conditions and you will find yourselves as men, as self-conscious human beings.” Thus does the Imagination appear before us. On the one side the Imagination of Paradise, where Lucifer opens man's eyes to the three conditions in the external world, when for a while the Opponent of Lucifer withdraws. Then men go through their evolution and reach the point where in two stages another teaching is given them, of self-consciousness, which bids them close their eyes to the three external conditions. Both teachings are one-sided. If the Krishna-Jesus influence alone had continued, one one-sidedness would have been added to another. Man would have taken leave of all that surrounds him, would have lost all interest in external evolution. Each person would only have sought his own perfection. Striving for perfection is right; but such striving bought at the price of a lack of interest in the whole of humanity is one-sided, even as the Luciferic influence was one-sided. Hence the all-embracing Christ Impulse entered the higher synthesis of the two one-sided tendencies.

In the personality of the St. Luke Jesus child Himself the Christ Impulse lived for three years; the Christ who came to mankind to bring together these two extremes. Through each of them mankind would have fallen into weakness and sin. Through Lucifer humanity would have been condemned to live one-sidedly in the external conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Through Krishna they were to be educated for the other extreme, to close their eyes and seek only their own perfection. Christ took the sin upon Himself. He gave to men what reconciles the two one-sided tendencies. He took upon Himself the sin of self-consciousness that would close its eyes to the world outside. He took upon Himself the sin of Krishna, and of all who would commit his sin, and He took upon Himself the sin of Lucifer and of all who would commit the sin of fixing their attention on externalities. By taking both extremes upon Himself he makes it possible for humanity by degrees to find a harmony between the inner and the outer world because in that harmony alone man's salvation is to be found.

An evolution that has once begun, however, cannot end suddenly. The urge to self-consciousness that began with Krishna went on and on, increasing and intensifying self-consciousness more and more, bringing about estrangement from the outer world. In our time too this course is tending to continue. At the time when the Krishna impulse was received by the Luke Jesus child mankind was in the midst of this development, this increase of self-consciousness and estrangement from the outer world. It was this that was brought home to the men who received the baptism of John in the Jordan, so that they understood the Baptist when he said to them, “Change your disposition; walk no longer in the path of Krishna”—though he did not use this word. The path on which mankind had then entered we may call the Jesus-path if we would speak in an occult sense. In effect, the pursuit of this Jesus-path alone went on and on through the following centuries. In many respects human civilization in the centuries following the foundation of Christianity was only related to Jesus, not to the Christ Who lived in Jesus for the three years from the baptism by John until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Every line of evolution, however, works its way onward up to a certain tension. In the course of time this longing for individual perfection was driven to such a pitch that men were in a certain sense brought more and more into the tragedy of estrangement from the divine in nature, from the outer world. Today we are experiencing this in many ways. Many people are going about among us who have little understanding left of our environment. Therefore, it is just in our time that an understanding of the Christ Impulse must break in upon us. The Christ-path must be added to the Jesus-path. The path of one-sided striving for perfection has become too strong. It has gone so far that in many respects men are so remote from their surroundings that certain movements, when they arise, over-reach themselves immediately, and the longing for the opposite is awakened. Many human souls now feel how little they can escape from this enhanced self-consciousness, and this creates an impulse to know the divinity of the outer world. It is such souls as these who in our time will seek the understanding of the Christ Impulse that is opened up by true anthroposophy; the force that does not merely strive for the one-sided perfection of the individual soul but belongs to the whole progress of humanity. To understand the Christ means not merely to strive toward perfection, but to receive in oneself something expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” “I” is the Krishna word. “Not I, but Christ in me,” is the Christian word.

So we see how every spiritual movement in history has in a certain sphere its justification. No one must imagine that the Krishna impulse could have been dispensed with. No one should ever think either that one human spiritual movement is fully justified in its one-sidedness. The two extremes—the Luciferic and the Krishna impulses—had to find their higher unity in the mission of the Christ.

He who would understand in the true anthroposophic sense the impulse necessary for the further evolution of mankind, must realize how anthroposophy has to become a means of shedding light on all religions. He must learn to see how the different streams in evolution all flow into the one main current of development. It would be a dilettante way of beginning to do this if one tried to find again in the Krishna stream what can be found in the stream of Christianity. Only when we regard the matter in this way do we understand what it means to seek a unity in all religions. There is, however, another way of doing so. One may repeat over and over, “In all religions the same fundamental essence is contained.” In effect, the same essence is contained in the root of a plant, in the stem, leaves, flowers, the pollen, and the fruit. That is true, but it is an abstract truth. It is no more profound than if one were to say, “Why make any distinctions? Salt, pepper, vinegar, and milk all have their place on the table; all are one, for all are substance.” Here you can tell how futile such a way of thought can be, but you do not notice it so easily when it comes to comparing religions. It will not do to compare the Chinese, Brahmin, Krishnan, Buddhist, Persian, Moslem, and Christian faiths in this abstract way, saying, “Look, everywhere we find the same principles. In each case there is a Savior.”

Abstractions can indeed be found in countless places and in countless ways, but this is a dilettante method because it leads to nothing. One may form societies to pursue the study of all religions, and do so in the same sense as saying pepper, salt, etc. are one because they are all substance. That has no importance. What is important is to regard things as they really are. To the way of looking at things that goes so far in occult dilettantism as to keep on declaiming the equality of all religions, it is one and the same whether what lived in the Christ is the pivot of the whole of evolution or whether it can be found in the first man you meet in the street. For one who wishes to guide his life by truth it is an atrocity to associate the impulse in the world's history that is bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha and for which the name Christ has been preserved—to associate that impulse with any other impulse in history, because in truth it is the central point of the whole of earthly evolution.

In these lectures I have tried by means of a particular instance to indicate how present-day occultism must try to throw light on the different spiritual movements that have appeared in the course of human history. Though each has its right and proper point of contact, one must distinguish between them as between the stem of a plant and the green leaf, and the green leaf from the colored petal, though all together form a unity. If one tries with this truly modern occultism to penetrate with one's soul into what has flowed into humanity in diverse currents, one recognizes how the different religious faiths lose nothing of their greatness and majesty. How sublime was the greatness that appeared to us in the figure of Krishna even when we simply tried to get a definite view of his place in evolution. All such lines of thought as we can give only in outline are indeed imperfect enough, and you may be assured that no one is more aware of their imperfection than the present speaker. But the endeavor has been to show in what spirit a true consideration of the spiritual movement toward individuality in mankind must be carried out. I purposely tried to derive our thoughts from a spiritual creation remote from us, the Bhagavad Gita, to show how Western minds can perceive and feel what they owe to Krishna; what he, through the continued working of his impulse, still signifies for their own upward striving.

However, the spiritual movement we here represent necessarily demands that we enter concretely, and with real love, into the special nature of every current in man's spiritual history. This is a bit inconvenient because it brings us all too near to the humble thought of how little after all we really penetrate into their depths. Another idea follows upon this, that we must go on striving further and ever further. Both of these ideas are inconvenient. It is the sad fate of that movement we call anthroposophy, that it produces inconvenient results for many souls. It requires that we actively lay hold of the definite, separate facts of the world's development. At the same time it requires each of us to say earnestly to himself, “I can indeed reach something higher, and I will. Always it is only a certain stage and standpoint that I have attained. I must forever go on striving—on—and on—without end.”

Thus, all along it has been not quite comfortable to belong to that spiritual movement that by our efforts is endeavoring to take its place in what is called the Theosophical Movement.¹ It has not been easy, because we demand that people shall learn to strive ever more deeply to penetrate the sacred mysteries. We could not supply you with anything so easy as introducing some person's son or even daughter, saying, “You need only wait, the Savior of mankind will appear physically embodied in this boy or girl.” We could not do this because we must be true. Yet, one who perceives what is happening cannot but regard these latest proceedings as the final grotesque outcome of the dilettante comparison of religions that can also be put forward so easily, and that continually repeats what should be taken as a matter of course, the tritest of all sayings, “All religions contain the same essence.”

The last weeks and months have shown—and my speaking here on this significant subject has shown it again—that a circle of people can be found at the present time who are ready to seek spiritual truths. We have no other concern than to put these truths forward, though many, or even everyone, may leave us. If so, it will make no difference in the way the spiritual truths are here proclaimed. The sacred obligation to truth will guide that movement that underlies this cycle of lectures. Whoever would go with us must do so under the conditions that have now become necessary. It is certainly more convenient to proceed otherwise, not entering into another side of the matter as we do by pointing out the reality in all things. But that also is part of our obligation to truth. It is simpler to inform people of the equality and unity of religions, or tell them they are to wait for the incarnation of a Savior who is predestined, whom they are to recognize not by themselves but on someone's authority.

Human souls today will themselves have to decide how far a spiritual movement can be carried on and upheld by pure devotion to the ideal of truthfulness. In our time it had to come to that sharp cleavage, whose climax was reached when those who had no other desire than to set forth what is true and genuine in evolution, were described as Jesuits. This was a convenient way of separating, but the external evidence was the work of objective falsehood. This cycle of lectures may once more have shown you that we have been working out of no one-sided tendency, since it comprises the present, the past, and the primal past, in order to reveal the unique, fundamental impulse of human evolution. So I too may say that it fills me with the deepest satisfaction to have been able to give these lectures here before you. This shows me there is hope because there are souls here who have the impulse, the urge toward that which works also in the super-sensible with nothing but simple, honest truthfulness.

I was forced to add this final word to these lectures, for it is necessary in view of all that has happened to us in the course of time down to the point of being excluded from the Theosophical Society. Considering all we have suffered, and all that is now being falsely asserted in numerous pamphlets, it was necessary to say something, although a discussion of these matters is always painful to me.

Those who desire to work with us must know that we have taken for our banner the humble, yet unconditional, honest, striving for truth; striving ever upward into the higher worlds.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring here, and in the following passages, to his break with the Theosophical Society and to the formation of the Anthroposophical Society. A full account of these events can be found in G. Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, pp. 186–189, available from the Anthroposophic Press, Inc.