The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Life and form are the two ideas which have to lead us through the labyrinth of the world phenomena. Life perpetually changes into thousand and thousand forms. This life expresses itself in its most manifold shaping. It could not manifest in the world unless it appeared in new forms again and again. Form is the manifestation of life. But everything would disappear in the inflexibility of the form, all life would have to lose itself unless the form were continuously renewed in life unless it became the seed again and again to create new forms out of the old ones. The seed of the plant grows up to the organised form of the plant, and this plant must again become a seed and give existence to a new form. It is in nature everywhere that way, and just it is in the spiritual life of the human being. Also in the spiritual life of the human being and humanity the forms change, and life keeps itself in the most manifold forms. However, life would ossify unless the forms were perpetually renewed, unless new life emerged from old forms.

As the ages change in the course of human history, we see life changing in these epochs into the most manifold forms also in the big history. We have seen in the talk on Theosophy and Darwin in which manifold forms the human cultures and history have expressed themselves. We have seen some of the forms in the ancient Vedic culture of India. We have seen these forms changing in the ancient Persian epoch, then in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian epoch, then in the Graeco-Latin culture and, finally, in the Christian culture up to our time. However, this is just the significant of the mental development of our time that more and more a common life pours forth into forms, and our age may be almost called the age of forms, the age in which the human being is taught in every respect to enjoy life in the form.

We see the dominance of form everywhere. We have Darwin as the most brilliant example. What had Darwin investigated and delivered to humanity in his theory? The origin and metamorphosis of the animal and plant genera in the struggle for existence. This shows that our science is oriented to the outer form. What had just Darwin to say and explained openly? I have shown that he emphasised that plants and animals enjoy life in the most manifold forms that, however, according to his conviction there were primal forms which were animated by a creator of the universe. This is Darwin's own saying. Darwin looked at the development of the forms, of the outer figure, and he himself feels the impossibility to penetrate into the life of these forms. He accepts this life as given; he does not want to explain this life. He does not at all look at it; he rather asks only how life forms.

If we consider life in another field, in the field of art. I want to speak only of a typical phenomenon of our artistic life; however, I want to illuminate it in its most radical appearance just in this regard. What a lot of dust did the catchword naturalism not meant in the bad sense blow up in the seventies and eighties! This catchword naturalism completely corresponds to the character of our time. This naturalism appeared most radically with the French Zola (Emil Z., 1840–1902, writer). How stupendously he describes the human life! But he does not look directly at the human life, but at the forms in which this human life expresses itself. How it expresses itself in mines, in factories, in city quarters where the human being perishes in immorality et etcetera Zola describes all these different configurations of life, and all naturalists describe the same basically. They do not look at life, but only at the forms in which life expresses itself.

Look at our sociologists who should deliver the dates how life has developed and should develop in future. The catchword of the materialistic historical view and of the historical materialism became a talking point. However, how do the sociologists consider the matter? They do not look at the human soul, not at the inside of the human mind; they look at the outer life how it represents itself in our economic life how in this or that area trade and industry blossom, and how the human being must live as a result of this external configuration of life. The sociologists consider life this way. They say: we do not concern ourselves with ethics and the idea of morality! Provide better external living conditions to the human beings, then their morality and way of life progress by themselves. Yes, in the form of Marxism modern sociology has asserted that not the ideal forces are the most principal, but the external forms of the economic life.

All that shows you that we have arrived at a phase of development in which the human beings look preferably at the form of the external existence. If you take the greatest poet of our present, Ibsen, then you just see him looking at this form of existence and almost falling into despair, so to speak. For he is filled with the warmest feeling for the soul-life, for a free life, he despairs of the forms that have come into being. I mean Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian playwright and poet). He shows life in the most different forms, he shows us how living in the forms always causes contradictions, how the souls perish and atrophy under the pressure of the forms of life. It is really symbolic for the oblivion of soul and spirit finishing his poem When We Dead Awaken (1899). It is, as if he had wanted to say: we modern human beings are enclosed so completely in the external form of life which we have mastered so often ... and if we awake, what shows the soul-life in the inflexible forms of society and view of the West? This is the basic trend of Ibsen's dramas which finds expression in his dramatic will, too.

Thus we have thrown some sidelights on the western culture of form. Considering Darwinism we have seen how the form culture is directed to the external mechanical life of nature, and how our soul is clamped in completely measured forms of life and society. We have seen how this was achieved slowly and bit by bit, how our fifth, the Aryan race, went from the spirit of the ancient Vedic culture, which imagined life ensouled as a result of immediate observation, through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cultures, then through the Graeco-Latin culture with its view that the whole nature is ensouled. With the Greeks even the philosophers conceive the whole nature ensouled.

Then there came Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. He still finds life in the whole nature, in the whole universe, in the whole big star world. In even later time, life climbed down and is completely entangled in the external form. This is the deepest level. I do not say this disparagingly, because every point of view is necessary. The external form, what develops from any sprout makes the plant beautiful. Our cultural life is externalised in many respects, has attained the most diverse external form. This must be like that. Theosophy has to understand this as an absolute necessity. Least of all the theosophists are allowed to reprove. Just as once the spirit-imbued and life-imbued culture was necessary, the form culture is necessary for our age. A form culture came into being in science, in Darwinism, in naturalism, and in sociology.

In the middle of this consideration we have to hold still and ask ourselves: what must happen in our spiritual-scientific sense when the form has found expression? The form must be renewed; new, embryonic life must come again into the form! We will consider the necessary reversal of the human mind again in the series of talks entitled Basic Concepts of Theosophy.

Someone who considers Zola's contemporary Tolstoy carefully and impartially at first the artist from the point of view which I have just given will already find that with the artist the viewer of the different types of the Russian people, possibly of the soldier type which he described in his War and Peace (1869) and later in Anna Karenina (1879) another keynote prevails than in the naturalism of the West. Everywhere Tolstoy seeks something else. He can describe the soldier, the official, the human being of any social class, the human being within a gender or a race he seeks the soul, the living soul everywhere which expresses itself in them, even if not in the same way. He demonstrates the simple, straight lines of the soul but on the most different levels and in the most different forms of life. What is life in its different forms, what is this life in its diverse variety? This goes like a basic question through Tolstoy's creative work. From here he finds the possibility to understand life also where it cancels out itself apparently where this life changes into death. Death remains the big stumbling block for the materialistic world view. Who accepts the external material world only, how should he understand death, how should he cope with life, finally, because death stands like a gate at the end of this life, fulfilling him with fear and fright? Also as an artist Tolstoy has already advanced beyond this point of view of materialism. Already in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) you can see how artistically the most material is overcome how there in this figure of Ivan an entire harmony is produced in his innermost life. We have an ill human being before ourselves, not his body is ill but his soul.

We hear it and see it in all words which Tolstoy says to us that he is not of the opinion that in the body a soul lives which has nothing to do with the body; but we hear from his words that he finds the expression of the soul in the physical expression that the ill soul sickens the body that the soul flows through the veins of the body. We see from this form of artistic representation how life is found. A peculiar view of death faces us there, not as a theory, not as a dogma, but in the feeling. This idea gives the possibility to understand death not as an end, but as outpouring the personality into the universe, as disappearing in the infinite and as retrieval in the great primal spirit of the world. The problem of death is thereby artistically solved in marvellous way. Death has become fortune in life. The dying human being feels the metamorphosis of one life form to the other.

Leo Tolstoy as an artistic contemporary of the naturalists was the viewfinder of life, the questioner of the riddle of life in its different forms. That is why this riddle of life had also to be in the centre of his soul, of his thinking and feeling in scientific and in religious respect. He attempted to investigate this riddle of life that way; he also sought for life except the form, where he met it. Hence, he has become the prophet of a new epoch which must overcome ours, an epoch which again feels and recognises life in contrast to the configuration of natural sciences. In Tolstoy's whole criticism about the western civilisation we see nothing else than the expression of that spirit which represents a young, fresh, child-like life which wants to pour it into the developing humanity which cannot satisfy itself with a mature, indeed overripe, in the external form expressed civilisation. This is the contrast between Tolstoy and the western civilisation. From this point of view he criticises the social system and the life forms of the West everything in general. This is the point of view of his criticism.

We have seen in Darwinism that the western science has come to understand the forms of life that, however, Darwin said to not be able to understand anything of life which he presupposes as a fact. The whole western civilisation is based on the consideration of form: we look at the external form in the evolution of the minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever you open any book of the western science, it is the form that has priority. Remember again what we have already thought of: that just the researchers of the West admit that they face the riddle of life and are not able to penetrate it. The words “ignoramus, ignorabimus” sound toward us time and again if science should give information about life. This science knows something how life develops in forms. However, how this life itself behaves about that it knows nothing. It despairs of the task to solve this riddle and says only: ignorabimus. There Tolstoy found the right word, the right principle considering life itself. I would like to read out a crucial passage from which you see how he represents the point of view of life compared with all science of the forms of life:

“The wrong knowledge of our time” (of the West) “supposes that we know what we cannot know, and that we cannot know what we really know. The human being with wrong knowledge believes that he knows everything that appears to him in space and time, and that he does not know what is known to him by his reasonable consciousness.

It seems to such a person that the general welfare and his welfare is the most unexplorable object. His reason, his reasonable consciousness appears to him almost as unexplorable; he appears to himself somewhat more explorable as animal; the animals and plants appear as still more explorable beings, and the most explorable thing is the dead, endlessly distributed matter.

Something similar takes place with the human vision. The human being turns his look always unconsciously upon the most distant objects because their colours and contours appear to him the simplest: upon the sky, horizon, distant fields and forests. These objects appear to him the more certain and simpler, the more distant they are, and on the contrary, the closer the object is, the more manifold are its contours and colours.” – “Does not the same take place with the wrong knowledge of the human being? What is known to him certainly his reasonable consciousness appears to him unexplorable because it is not simple, however, what is inaccessible to him the limitless, everlasting matter seems to him easily explorable because it appears simple from a distance. However, this is just the opposite.”

The western scientist considers the lifeless matter as his reliable starting point. Then he observes how the plants, animals and human beings build themselves up out of the chemical and physical forces; he observes how the lifeless matter moves, conglomerates and finally produces the movement of the brain. But he cannot understand how life comes about: because what he investigates is nothing else than the form of life. Tolstoy says: life is next to us, we are in it, we are life; of course, if we want to understand life observing and investigating its forms, then we never understand it. We only need to see it in ourselves, we only need to live it, and then we have life. People who believe to be unable to understand it do not understand life at all. Here Tolstoy starts with his consideration of life and examines what the human being can conceive as his life, even if the refined, overripe way of thinking cannot understand it along the lines of simple thinking: if you want to understand the form correctly, you have to look into the inside. If you want to investigate the formal laws of nature only, how do you want to distinguish a meaningful life from a meaningless life?

According to the same higher principles the organisms are healthy and the organisms fall ill; exactly according to the same principles of nature the human being falls ill as he is healthy. Tolstoy expresses himself again characteristically in his treatise On Life (1887): “As strong and rapid the movements of the human being may be in the fever delirium, in insanity or death struggle, in drunkenness, even in the burst of passion, we do not accept the human being as living, do not treat him as a living human being and allot the possibility of life to him only. But as weak and immobile a human being may be if we see that his animal personality has submitted to reason, we accept him as living and treat him correspondingly.”

Tolstoy thinks that the outer form gets sense for us unless we study it only externally, but if we try to directly understand what not form is what is mind only, and what is the essential part. We cannot understand the true life if we try only to conceive its form; but we understand the forms if we move from life on the forms.

However, Tolstoy did not understand his problem only in this scientific way; he understood it also from the moral side. How do we come in our human form to this real life, up to the lawfulness of the external form? Tolstoy got this clear in his mind asking himself: how do I and my fellow men satisfy the need of our own well-being? How do I satisfy my immediate personal life? Going out from the configuration of the animal life, the human being has no other question than: how do I satisfy the needs of the external form of life? This is a low view. Those have a somewhat superior view who say: the single person has not to satisfy his needs, but he has to adapt himself to the public welfare to fit into a community. He has not only to provide what satisfies his own external life, but he has to ensure that this form of life is satisfied with all living beings. We should fit into the community and subordinate to the needs of the society. Numerous personalities, numerous ethicists and sociologists regard this as the western ideal of the cultural development: subordination of the needs of the single to the needs of the community. However, this is not the highest goal Tolstoy says , because what else I have in mind than the external form? It refers only to the outer form how one lives in the community how one fits into it. These outer forms change perpetually. If my single personal life is not directly meaningful, why should the other lives be meaningful? If the personal welfare of the single human life form is not an ideal, an ideal of the public welfare cannot originate from the summation of many single forms of life. Not the well-being of the single, not the well-being of all can be the ideal: this only concerns the forms in which life only lives. Where do we recognise life? To whom should we submit, if not to the needs dictated by our low nature, if not to that which the public welfare or humanity dictates?

Life of the most manifold forms is that which longs for well-being and happiness of the single and the community. We want to understand our moral, our innermost ideal not according to external forms, but according to that which results as an ideal from the inside of the soul, from God who lives in it. That is why Tolstoy resorts again to a kind of higher organised Christianity, which he considers as the true Christianity: do not look for the kingdom of God in external gestures, in the forms, but inside. Then you understand your duty if you understand the life of the soul if you can be inspired by the God in yourselves, if you listen to your soul. Do not be wrapped up in the forms, as large and immense they may be! Go back to the original unified life, to the divine life in yourselves. If the human being does not take up the ethical and cultural ideals from without, but allows rising from his soul what rises in his heart what God has lowered in his soul, then he has stopped living only in the form, then he really has a moral character. This is internal morality and inspiration.

From this viewpoint he attempts an entire renewal of all views of life and world in the form of what he calls early Christianity. Christianity has externalised itself according to him, has adapted itself to the different life forms which have come from the culture of the different centuries. He expects a time again, when the form must be penetrated with new internal life when life is seized immediately. Therefore, he does not get tired of pointing in new forms repeatedly to the fact that it is necessary to understand the simplicity of the soul, not the intricate life which always wants to get to know something new. No! The fact that the simplicity of the soul must meet the right thing that first of all the confusing of the external science, of the outer artistic representation, the luxurious of modern life must be connected with the immediately simple that emerges in the soul of everybody no matter in which life form and social system he is: Tolstoy regards this as an ideal. Thus he becomes a strict critic of the various cultural forms of Western Europe; he becomes a strict critic of western science. He states that this science has solidified bit by bit in dogmas like theology, and that the western scientists appear as the real dogmatists imbued with wrong mind. He is hard on these scientists. Above all, he criticises the ideal, which is striven for in these scientific forms, and those who consider our sensuous well-being as the only goal of any striving.

For centuries humanity intended to develop the forms highly and to regard the external possession, the external well-being as the highest. And now we know that we do not have to reprove this, but have to consider it as a necessity , well-being should not be limited only to single social ranks and classes, but everybody should take part in it. Indeed, nothing is to be argued against that, but Tolstoy opposes the form in which this is tried to achieve by the western sociology and the western socialism. What does this socialism say? It takes the transformation of the outer forms of life as starting point. The material culture should induce the human being to get a higher level of living. Then one believes that those who feel better who have a better external livelihood also have a higher morality. All moral endeavours of socialisation are directed to subject the external formation to a revolution.

Tolstoy opposes that. For this is just the result of the cultural development that it developed the most manifold differences of ranks and classes. Do you believe if you develop this form culture highly that you really get to a higher cultural ideal? You have to understand the human being where he gives himself form. You have to improve his soul, to pour divine-moral forces into his soul, and then he reshapes the form from the soul. This is Tolstoy's socialism, and it is his view that a renewal of the moral culture can never arise from any transformation of the western form culture, but that this renewal has to take place from the soul, from the inside.

Hence, he does not become the preacher of a dogmatic ethical ideal, but the furtherer of a perfect transformation of the human soul. He does not say that the human morality increases if the external situation of the human being is improved, but he says: just because you have taken the external form as starting point, your dismal circumstances of life came into being. You are able to overcome this life form again if you reshape the human being from the inside. In sociology we have, just as in the Darwinist scientific consideration, the last branches of the old form culture. On the other hand, we have the incipient stages of a new life culture. As we have the descending line there, we have the ascending one here. As little as the old man, who has got to his determination, to his life form, is able to be renewed completely, as rather from the growing up child the new life form arises from internal stimulation, just as little a new life form can arise from an old cultural nation.

That is why Tolstoy regards the Russian nation, which is not yet taken in with the cultural forms of the west, as that nation within which this future life has to originate. Considering this Slavic people, which still looks at the European cultural ideals in dull indifference today at the European science as well as at the European art , Tolstoy states that in it an undifferentiated spirit lives that has to become the supporter of the future cultural ideal. His criticism is based on the big principle of evolution, on that principle which teaches the change of the forms and the perpetual merging of life.

In the tenth chapter of his book On Life one reads: “And the principle which we know in ourselves as the principle of our life is the same principle according to which also all external phenomena of the world take place, only with the difference that we know this principle in ourselves which we ourselves must carry out however, in the external phenomena as something that takes place without our assistance according to these principles.”

Thus Tolstoy positions himself in the forever developing and changing life. We would be rather bad representatives of spiritual science if we could not understand such a phenomenon correctly; we would be bad spiritual scientists if we wanted to preach ancient truth only. Why do we make the contents of the ancient wisdom our own? Because the ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its profoundness because it shows us how in the most manifold figures the one divine appears again and again. A bad representative of spiritual science would be that who would become a dogmatist, who only wanted to preach what contains the ancient wisdom, who would withdraw and would face life cold and distantly, who would be blind and deaf to what happens in the immediate present. The doctrine of wisdom has not taught the ancient wisdom to us, so that we repeat it in words, but live with it and learn to understand what is round us. The development of our own race, which has disintegrated into different forms since the ancient Indian culture up to ours, this development is exactly described and predetermined in that ancient wisdom. There is also spoken of a future development, of a development in the immediate future. One says to us that we stand at the starting point of a new era. Our reason, our intelligence, they attained their configuration as a result of the way through the different fields of existence. The forces of our physical intelligence have attained their biggest triumphs in the form culture of our time. Reason has penetrated the principles of form and masters them to the highest degree; it produced the big and immense progress of technology, the big and immense progress of our life. Now we stand at the starting point of that epoch in which something has to pour out in this reason that must seize and form the human being from within.

Hence, the theosophical movement has chosen its motto and is dedicated to establishing the core, the rudiment of a general human fraternisation. One must not make distinctions of views, classes, religions, gender, and skin colour; one has to look for life in all these forms. Our spiritual ideal is an ideal of love which the human being experiences as the kingdom of God if he becomes aware of his divinity. Theosophy calls the culture of intellectuality manas; it calls buddhi what is filled with the inner being, with love, what does not want to be wise without being filled with love. As our race has got to the manas culture because of its reason, the next will be now that we get to the individuality imbued with love where the human being acts out of the higher, internal, divine nature, and neither is wrapped up in the chaos of the external nature nor in science nor in the social life. If we understand the spiritual ideal this way, we are allowed to say that we understand this ideal correctly and then we are also not allowed to misjudge a person who lives among us who wants to give new life impulses to the human development.

How nice and congruent with our teachings is something that just Tolstoy says concerning the view of the human being in his directness. I would like to read out a passage that is distinctive especially of his moral ideal: “The whole life of these human beings is turned upon the imaginary increase of their personal welfare. They see the personal welfare only in the satisfaction of their needs. They call personal needs all those living conditions upon which they have directed their reason. The conscious needs, nevertheless those upon which their reason is directed always grow as a result of this consciousness ad infinitum. The satisfaction of these growing needs closes up the demands of their true life to them.”

Tolstoy says: however, the personality does not comprise the reasonable consciousness. Personality is a quality of the animal and the human being as an animal. The reasonable consciousness is the quality of the human being only. Not before the human being advances beyond the mere personality if he realises the preponderance of the individuality over the personal if he understands to become impersonal to let the impersonal life prevail in himself, he leaves the culture entangled in the external form and enters a future culture full of life.

Even if that is not the ideal of theosophy and also not the ethical consequence which we theosophists draw, it is a step toward the ideal, because the human being learns to live only unless he looks at the personality but at the eternal and imperishable.

This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, is the rudiment of wisdom which rests in the soul, it has to replace the civilisation of mere reason. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future development of the human being. However, the most important one is that similar forces already make themselves noticeable in life which we have to understand really to fulfil us with their ideals.

This is great with Tolstoy that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and to deepen him spiritually that he wants to show him that the ideals are not outside in the material world, but can stream only from the soul.

If we are right theosophists, we recognise the development, then we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us in the theosophical sense in our present, but we really recognise these forces of which is normally spoken poetically in theosophical writings.

This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he has overcome darkness and error, that he learns to appreciate and recognise life and world.

A theosophist who withdraws, who faces life cold and distantly, would be a bad theosophist even if he knew a lot. Such theosophists who lead us from the sensuous world to a higher one, who are able to behold super-sensible worlds, they should teach us also to be able to observe the super-sensible on the physical plane and not to be carried away with the sensuous.

We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual in order to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stop within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual one.

Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous; therefore, it talks of the ancient wisdom. It wants to reshape the human being so that he clairvoyantly beholds the lofty super-sensible secrets of existence, but this should not be purchased with lack of understanding for that which exists immediately around us.

Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to that which happens in the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in his immediate surroundings and, moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a personality by which in our time the human beings are led to the super-sensible. And what is the use in us becoming clairvoyant and not being able to recognise the next task immediately before us?

A theosophist must not withdraw from life; he has to understand how to apply theosophy directly to life. If theosophy has to lead us to higher worlds, we have to bring the super-sensible knowledge down to our physical plane. We must recognise the causes which are in the spiritual. The theosophist has to stand in life, has to understand the world, in which his contemporaries live, and has to recognise the spiritual causes of the different epochs of evolution.

In these talks I have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the theosophical world view does not lead the human beings away from the work in the sensuous field that it does not lead to fantastic, illusory fields as the adversaries of this world view suggest so often. I have rejected this repeatedly. Today I have to emphasise this in particular before we enter the world which the human being transmigrates between death and a new birth. For the adversaries of the theosophical world view are inclined only too easily to explain everything that I describe in this field as something imaginary, as something completely fantastic. Nevertheless, someone who is able to look deeper in the nature of things recognises these super-sensible worlds that are beyond the sensuous world as the real nature of all beings. As well as nobody is able to construct a vapour machine unless he knows the being of vapour, nobody is able to understand and to explain what takes place before our sense-organs unless he knows the being of the psychic and spiritual. The causes of the physical are in the super-sensible, in the supra-physical. As true it is that we climb up to the higher fields, it is true that we try to understand this super-sensible being only to be able to work here in this world. We have to know the nature of the super-sensible to bring it into the sensuous world. That is why this must be emphasised because we enter fields that escape completely from the sensory eye. To the sensory observation the human being is dead at the moment when the psycho-spiritual has separated from the physical. No eye and no ear can give information of the human destiny in that time when the human being progresses to a new embodiment after death.

We want to consider this destiny between death and rebirth. For this purpose we want to become engrossed in two fields of our existence which belong to our life which belong also to our life like the sun and the moon and like all things which are on our earth. The human being only equipped with the physical senses knows nothing about these higher worlds. He lives in them; however, living in a world and knowing about it are two completely different matters. The German philosopher Lotze (Hermann L., 1817–1881, German philosopher) and also the poet and philosopher Hamerling (Robert K., 1830–1889, Austrian poet) expressed very well again and again that if the human being were without eyes and ears the whole world around us would be dark and silent. Only because we have these sense-organs the world gleams in colours and sounds. We must say of this world that we only know as much of it as it is accessible to us by our sense-organs.

Just an interesting book has appeared which tells of the soul-life of a lady—Helen Keller (1880–1968, American author, The Story of My Life, (1903)—who became deaf-mute and blind at the age of one and a half years and has still developed a wide-ranging and virtually ingenious soul-life. Imagine clearly once how the world, which gleams and sounds to the other human beings, must appear to such a human being, and we imagine how to a blind-born whose eyes are operated the world, which had no colours before and was without light, gleams and is enriched with new qualities; then we have an idea of the human being who awakes from the sensory view, who comes from the darkness to light like after an operation. About the everyday world lies a soul-world which is real for that whose spiritual eyes are opened. Theosophy also calls this soul-world the astral world. One has argued a lot against the term astral world because one believed to find a medieval prejudice. But not without reason this world has been called astral by those who are able to behold in the soul-world. For just as colours and sounds appear to the physical senses, all those facts appear as true realities in this astral world which we subsume with the terms: desires, instincts, passions, impulses, wishes and feelings.

Just as the human being digests as he sees and hears, he wishes, has passions and feelings. He lives in the world of passions, impulses, desires, feelings and wishes, as well as he lives in the physical world. And like the physical eye if it faces another human being sees his physical qualities, the opened spiritual eye sees what we subsume as soul qualities. Just as the physical senses can distinguish electricity from light or light from heat, the opened soul-eye can make a distinction between an impulse, a desire, which exist in the soul of the fellow man, and the feeling of love, devotion, and piety. As heat and light are different, love and piety are different in the soul-world. Because these qualities gleam to the opened soul-eye like colour phenomena, which are full of sounds like the astral, they were called astral.

Here I have to insert some occult ideas. We understand them as those ideas which refer to the super-sensible which can only be obtained by such whose spiritual and psychic senses are opened. Nothing is absolutely hidden. Wishes, desires and passion are hidden only for that whose soul-organs are not opened. We can recognise with our soul-organs which qualities of the soul-world the human being has in him. As he faces us with a particular countenance, every human being faces us with a particular countenance of his soul. As he has a physical body, he also has a body gleaming in the soul-light which is bigger than his physical body in which he is wrapped up like in a light cloud which gleams in the most different colours.

I mention both intentionally, because both exist. One sees some of the qualities that refer to thoughts and ideas shining, other only gleaming. One calls this light cloud that is invisible for the usual eye however, visible to the seer the human aura. It contains everything that I have called soul qualities. We can make a distinction just between those qualities which the soul has because it inclines towards the sensuous because it clings to the sensuous, to the desires which come into being because the human being desires the sensuous and those which concern unselfish devotion, feelings of love or piety. If the aura is irradiated with feelings that come from the lower instincts that are connected with the material life, various figures, lightning-shaped or other figures of blood-red or reddish-orange or reddish-yellow colours flow through the soul, while everything that is connected with nobler feelings, with nobler passions, like with enthusiasm, with devoutness, with love, appears in the human aura in marvellous greenish, greenish-blue, blue-violet and violet-reddish colours.

Thus the human being has his soul on one side pointing to the material, longing for the material, clinging to it, and on the other side this soul is equipped with the opposite pole with which it rises to the noble and is glowed through and flowed through with the noble again and again. Between these both qualities the soul-life is split. Those who live in the green, blue, violet colours go through many reincarnations to acquire these nobler qualities to themselves. The soul is equipped with the lower qualities at first, with impulses, desires, passions, instincts. It must have these, for the soul would not have what we call the desire for the sensuous in the occult philosophy, the soul would not get round to acting in the sensuous world. The fact that the human being is active in the sensuous world that he acquires property, forms tools with the materials of the sensuous world for his life results from the human desires for the sensuous life. This desire is the only driving force for the still undeveloped soul in the times in which it goes through its first reincarnations.

The youthful soul is induced to act only that way. If the soul walks then through the reincarnations, it brings itself to work more and more not only out of the desires, but out of knowledge, out of devotion and love. Thus the soul progresses on its pilgrimage through the world from desire to love. This is the way of the soul: from desire to love. The desiring soul sticks to the physical-sensuous. However, the loving one can be penetrated by the spirit, obeys the spirit, and fulfils the commandment of the spirit. This is the difference of the age of the souls. The young souls are the longing ones, the ripe souls are those which love, which make the spirit work in them. In the soul-world or in the astral world we see this soul body of the human being gleaming in its different qualities, and we can thereby distinguish the degree of maturity of a human soul. All qualities which we can observe in this soul body come from the devotion to the sensuous or from the devotion to the spiritual.

Now we also understand what death means, actually. We want to try to understand the concept, the idea of death once with this idea just won. What happens at first when the human being dies? That which has followed not only the physical principles in his physical body up to now, but what has also complied with the soul principles: the hand which has moved in accordance with the feelings which have surged through the soul, the look which has looked out into the world because it has been carried by the spiritual qualities in the soul, the countenance which has changed its expression depending on the soul , everything that has obeyed the soul in life goes its own ways after the death of the body.

The human body, in so far as it is a connection of physical and chemical forces, does no longer follow the impulses of the soul but the physical forces of the world which has now completely claimed it for itself. It belongs to the external physical world from now on, and nobody who has only occupied himself with those who have ignored this can decide about the fact that the psycho-spiritual, which has controlled the body, has disappeared, because now the psycho-spiritual is merely accessible to the open eye of a clairvoyant person. We will hear in the last hours, which deal with the theosophical basic concepts, how the human being already gets opened his eye for the higher life in this life and becomes aware of that which I have told. But you see from the start that the post-mortal destiny of the spirit can only be understood from the point of view of the super-sensible. Somebody who occupies himself only with natural sciences does not have a vocation to recognise anything of the spiritual. The human being was equipped with physiological-chemical forces. He does no longer control them after death; then his “body” is only a soul body.

What had lived in him as wishes, desires, passions, love, enthusiasm and piety was not engaged in the physical-chemical principles, and it has drawn them rather in its influence. The soul is there after death as it was there before, only not intermingled with the physical body. If the human being consists of mind, soul and body during his physical life, as we have seen, he consists of mind and soul after death. And as the human life takes place in the physical world, it also takes place in the higher world, in the soul-world or in the spiritual world. These are the places of residence which the human being has to go through, the soul-land and the spirit-land.

Let us look at these closer. One can look at them, the astral world or mental world, as at our physical world. As there are the most manifold natural forces in our physical world, like heat, electricity, magnetism, there also are the most manifold forces. These can be divided into particular groups which we must get to know because we can thereby gain an insight of the destinies of the soul after death only. There we have the lowest class of soul qualities, the real world of desires which the occultist calls the region of desires. It is that world which is generated in our soul by its lowest propensities to the physical body. All those emotions of our soul express themselves in the world of desires which come from the desires of the soul for the physical. This is the lowest form of the soul life, the region of burning desires which one has called the burning fire of desires in mysticism.

Let us now look ahead at the nature of the consideration; this explains to you which difference exists between the life in the body and the life without body if you look at this soul quality which is connected with the burning desires. What is desire for the soul living in the body? The soul desires a physical object, a physical satisfaction. The colour of the burning desire, which streams out of the soul as electric current streams out of a point of a needle, changes only if the desire is satisfied.

The current changes immediately if the desire is satisfied. Then the fire stops burning. This is a significant moment for the soul researcher if a desire finds its satisfaction. It looks for the soul observer as if a fire is extinguished with water. The fact that this fire can be extinguished with giving satisfaction results from the fact that the human being has a body. The sensual desire can be satisfied only sensually. There is the palate which desires something tasty. At the moment, however, when no palate is there, it is impossible to satisfy the desire. The soul clings to the feeling, to the sensuous world. The desire can be satisfied as long as the soul is connected with the body. At the moment when it is no longer connected with the body it cannot satisfy the desire, and that is why the soul suffers inexpressibly. This is one of the conditions which the soul has to go through in kamaloka. It has to get to know that condition which allows the desire to exist but shows the impossibility of satisfaction. Then the soul learns gradually to take off the desire. This is an idea which the human being has to attain if he wants to get a concept of that which happens between death and a new birth. We get to know the further processes only after we have cast a precise look at the soul-world and the spirit-land.

Before I describe the destinies between death and a new birth, I want to describe this group of soul qualities and processes exactly which we find in the super-sensible world. The desire was the first. The second is the psychic stimulus, that which is not directly a desire. However, what surrounds us if we speak of the human sensuousness is connected with the sensuous. It is the stimulus which expresses itself in nobler colours which signifies the joy of devotion to the immediate sensuousness. It provokes the sensations of colours and forms round us, of smells approaching us. We call this susceptibility to the sensuous, this weaving and living with the sensuous organs in the environment the force of the emotional stimulus.

Another region of the soul-life is the region of wishes. The wishes refer to the fact that the soul feels sympathy for that which lives in its environment, and, hence, turns its emotions to this object of the environment just in the form of a wish. It does no longer live only with the senses in the sensuous environment, but it fulfils itself with the feeling of love for this environment. However, it is still completely fulfilled with selfishness, with egoism. The theosophists call that soul love which is still fulfilled with egoism the real quality of the soul wishes, the region of wishes. With it we have got to know the third group of soul experience, the region of wishes.

The fourth group is that where the soul no longer tends to anything in the surroundings, but to that which lives in the own body; where the feeling tends to that which occurs in the own body as weal and woe, as pleasurable sensations and as reluctances. We call these internal waves of the feelings in the own existence, this self-desire, this desire for existence with every being the fourth group of soul forces. And the fifth group leads us from the region of desires to the region where the soul pours out in sympathy.

Everything that we have got to know up to now was connected with desire, with the fact that the soul has referred the matters to itself. Now we get to know the matters where the soul spreads out its being, where it sympathises with other beings of its surroundings. There are two types. First we deal with love of nature and then with the love for our fellow men. We call this fifth group of soul facts soul-light. Just as the sun gives off its physical light, the soul gives off its light if it sympathises with the world, if it wraps it, if it illuminates it with the light of its love. This appears to that person, who only has organs for the physical, as something illusory. However, it is much more real for somebody who has spiritual eyes and ears than the table and the walls round us, much more real as the light of the physical flame.

The sixth group of soul facts is that which the occultist calls the real soul-force, what fulfils the soul with enthusiasm for its task in the world, the affectionate devotion to the duty which shines in marvellous violet and blue-violet colours. This forms the spiritual light which gets the driving forces and impulses for the human activity from the soul. This is developed in particular with philanthropical human beings. These feelings accompany the big devoted actions of the human soul in the physical world. These are the experiences of the sixth group.

The experiences of the seventh and highest group are the forces of the most real spiritual life. It is there where the soul no longer refers to the only sensuous with its emotions, but where it makes the light of the spirit shine in itself where the soul addresses itself to higher tasks than it can get in the sensory world where its love goes out to that spiritual love, which Spinoza (Baruch S., 1630–1647, Jewish-Dutch philosopher) describes at the end of his famous Ethics where he speaks of the fact that the highest pours into the soul and that it reappears as God's light.

We have observed and pursued the aspects of the human soul from the selfish desire up to the spiritual all-love. These seven levels of spiritual facts meet someone everywhere in the world whose eye is opened. The world shines not only in colours and sounds not only in acoustic phenomena, but shines also in the world of wishes, desires and passions, shines also in the world of love effects. All that is reality. And if the soul is taken away from this scene, it is on another scene which differs from the external sensory scene in this respect that this external sensory scene only offers what eyes and ears and the other senses can perceive at first. The sensuous just covers the soul because the soul expresses itself in the sensuous. Thus the soul comes to the fore only by the sensuous. The soul hears by the sounds of the language, feels by touching et etcetera.

The spiritual eye sees beyond that, it sees the sheer nature, the nakedness of the soul facts. If the soul is taken away from the scene of the senses, it lives in the soul-world. These are the experiences of the soul in the soul-world which it goes through immediately after death. There it lives in a world free of all physical and chemical forces, in a world of suffering, of desires and impulses. At first it has to develop everything that can be developed there. Uncovered, that is without physical cover, it is given to that which flows to it and through it. It purifies itself gradually by these qualities flowing through it, while it gets to know the desires without being able to satisfy them. There the soul learns to live without the physical body. There it learns to be a self without physical desire and without physical pain, without physical feeling of well-being and without physical discontent. There it does no longer feel as a self at first.

The incarnated soul feels as a self because it is in the body. The soul in the body says to its body “I”. However, if it wants to say “I” after death, it gets to know the feeling of the body without being able to live it. If it stopped this, it learns to regard itself as a soul. The human being learns to regard itself as a soul in the fourth region, and the more often the human being has gone through this region, the longer his pilgrimage has lasted, the stronger his sense of self is developed, the more he knows also when he is re-embodied to say “I” not only to his body, but also to his soul, the more he feels as a soul-being. This is the difference between a human being, who has gone through many, and a human being, who has gone through few incarnations. The advanced human being feels as a soul-being.

Then the human being also gets to know this higher region which we have called soul-light, soul-force and the spirit soul. There the human being settles and works. One is used to calling these highest regions of the astral world the summer land in the theosophical literature. This is that region in which the soul moves on the spheres of sympathy, on the spheres where it learns to live in pure love for the environment and in pure love for the colours. Only if the human soul has gone through these different regions after death, his mind, his third part, the highest part of the human being, is enabled to leave behind everything astral that is filled with wishes, desires and passions and which still clings to the sensuous. And only what of the soul belongs to the spirit, what has developed spirit in the soul lives on, after the human being has cast off the tendency, the desire for the sensuous.

The soul now enters that region where it has to do nothing more with the forces which go downward. Because the spirit penetrates it completely, it enters the devachan, the real spirit-land. The spirit-land which the soul experiences takes up the longest time of the life after death. The time of purification in the kamaloka is relatively short. Afterwards, in the devachan, the soul acts out the experiences which it has obtained in the earthly, physical world freely and uncheckedly, so that it can work in love in this physical sensuous world. The spirit cannot come completely to expression in the physical-sensuous world. We acquire experiences between birth and death perpetually. But these are got hemmed like a plant is got hemmed in a rock crevice. In the spirit-land the soul strengthens and invigorates itself. The next lecture deals with this stay of the soul in the spirit-land.

It shows which destiny the soul has to go through in the time longest by far between death and a new birth. The astral world still appears as something depressing destined to take off a lot. The spirit-land is a realm which one not needs to fear. Nothing connects the spirit flowing through a soul with that which tends to the only sensuous-material. We will have to describe the destiny which the human being experiences there and which should reveal the true nature of the human being to us on account of the experiences in the devachan. Let me only mention one matter. It could seem easily that the single regions of the astral world lie on top of each other like single layers. This is not the case. They are to be understood more like different states of consciousness. Not the place changes in which the human being is, but the state of consciousness changes. The soul land, the spirit-land is everywhere around us. Everywhere a soul-world and a spiritual world is around us, which like colour and light light up if the soul becomes able to use the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears. This makes the whole physical world disappear to the soul. Just as you could see a veil and if the veil sinks you can see behind the veil, the soul experiences what takes place in the world of desires if it removes the veil of the sensory touching, seeing, and hearing. Then another world comes to the fore round it, a world which was there also round it before, but was not experienced, which is experienced now. It is another state of experience which the soul undergoes. It is a metamorphosis of the human life not a change of place or region. The human being advances step by step on his pilgrimage of life.

This teaches us that we have to seek for the reasons of the sensuous. We want to look at the super-sensible in order to go back strengthened that way into the real world with the full consciousness that we are not only sensuous beings, but that we are beings with soul and mind. With this full consciousness we work in the world hard, full of courage and more confidently, as if we only thought that we are only sensuous beings. It is that which the theosophical world view brings immediately. It has to make the human being not more inefficient, but stronger, more courageous, more audacious. This is not the right theosophy which draws the human being off from life. We want to provide the knowledge of the super-sensible because in the super-sensible the origin and the nature of the sensuous are to be sought. All true recognisers and occultists have said this at all times, and this is also to be found in the inspired writings of nations of all times. And it sounds to us from our own mystics, particularly from the marvellous, artistically perfect literature of the East. We find there a passage in the Upanishads with which I would like to close this consideration today which speaks of the interrelation of the sensuous-limited and the super-sensible, the eternal. It shows how the sensuous-limited comes from the eternal, how the single spark comes from the flame. The flame remains a whole, something permanent, even if the sensuous spark dies away. The single sensuous phenomenon separates from the eternal and returns to the eternal again. The Upanishads say: “As well as the sparks issue a thousand and one times from the well burning flame and are of equal nature, the manifold beings issue form the imperishable and return to it again.”

We stand at an important point of the development of the spiritual human being between death and a new birth where he moves from the so-called soul-world on the spirit-land or realm of spirits. The human being has been released as we have already heard last time in this point from all that binds him that makes him cling to the physical-material existence. All wishes, desires and passions, all his tendencies to the physical, to the material existence have fallen off from the spirit-man. They do no longer disconcert him in his further development, and then this spiritual human being goes through the spirit-land for long time which is normally called devachan in the theosophical literature. Deva is a divine being, a being that has its reality only in this field of existence; it has no physical body, but a body, which only consists of substances of this spirit-land. The human being has been as it were a companion of these beings in a higher region.

We must not imagine and I would like to emphasise this over and over again as if this devachan is to be sought for anywhere else in space. This spirit-land is around us, it fills our world approximately in such a way as the air fills the physical world everywhere. It can only not be perceived by those people who are only able to make use of their physical senses. If the physical sense is closed and the spiritual eye is opened, the world shines around us in a new light. It takes on new qualities. Then the human being sees things that he has not seen before. As well as that which I have described eight days ago as an astral, as a soul world exists only for the corresponding soul organs, the spirit-land exists for the spiritual eye.

It is difficult to design a picture of this area of reality. You can imagine that this is difficult, because our language is not made for these higher areas of existence. Our words are only appropriate to the everyday life. Any word is assigned to a sensuous thing. However, we must make use of these words if we want to describe the totally different worlds to which we ascend. Hence, one can only speak comparatively, in a more symbolic language of which I must make use to describe it to you. This land is constantly around us, the open eye of the seer sees it. It shines round him as it shines to the human being if not only the physical body, but also all those astral qualities, like desires, impulses, passions which chain him to the physical existence have melted down from him, like the snow melts down from a boulder if the sun shines on it.

The only thing of the spirit-land the human being knows during his physical existence is his thought. However, the thought is only a weak image, a shadow-image of this spirit-land. Normally human beings also say who cling to the physical that the thought is no reality. One also hears saying that something is “only a thought.” For that, however, who knows how to settle down into the world of thoughts who knows the significance of the thought life who knows how to live in the thought life as the usual human being in our world, for that the life of thought gets a different significance.

In no other way than by the means of thought the spirit-land can communicate itself to the human being. The thought life corresponds to this higher spiritual reality. Someone who is capable to behold into this spiritual reality learns to distinguish in it. For him the regions of this higher reality separate as here on our earth the different regions separate for the physical eye. I speak figuratively saying this, but it corresponds to the facts. As well as we have the solid earth's crust which consists of rock and of the solid land, a particular region corresponds to it also in the spirit-land. To the oceans, to the waters of the earth corresponds another particular region; and the atmosphere of the earth corresponds to a kind of atmosphere in the devachan. But these three regions of the devachan are related to the experiences on our earth in a certain way. Everything that you can experience in the physical that you can experience as physical objects which are round you, everything that you see with the eyes, perceive with the senses constitutes, so to speak, the solid crust, the dry land in the devachan. There you see spiritual archetypes of everything that you perceive here with the physical eyes.

But this archetypal land looks very different. If you look at a physical human being, a certain part of the room is filled with his physical organisation. On all sides you see nothing else of the human being. However, for the seer the so-called aura attaches itself as we have described it last time. In the spirit-land or devachan this is completely different. Its reality is related to the physical picture of the human being as the physical reality is related to a photo.

In the spirit-land everything that is filled out with the physical matter is, so to speak, left blank, is a hollow space. If the human being descends again to the physical, the hollow space fills with physical matter again. There is radiant existence, radiant organisation where nothing is in the physical world. Hence, it shines through some things what the first Christian initiates called the higher light of aeons. This organises the human being and connects him with the spiritual world. Thus the human being does not exist in the spirit-land where he exists in the physical. He exists just beside himself, except the physical space which he fills.

If the seer enters the spiritual world, he beholds everything filled with higher reality that appears blank round the things to the physical eye. This is filled with brilliant and radiant light. This light is another light than that which composes the aura of the soul. The human being is not only this soul-aura. This aura is traversed by a higher aura. While the aura of the soul shines in a softly gleaming light, this higher spiritual aura, which remains still visible if the physical body of the person has fallen off, shines brightly; it is not only something smouldering, but something blazing. It also has a particular quality by which it is distinguished from the astral aura. This is the fact that one can see through the spiritual aura, while one cannot see through the astral one. Any spiritual region is completely transparent for that which is in the spirit-land.

This is the lowest part of the spirit-land which I have described now. If the seer ascends to even higher regions, he experiences the all-encompassing life. This all-encompassing life flows through all things. It is the liquid element of the spirit-land. As well as a sea or a river appears to us with its peculiar colours, this all-encompassing life appears to us as an ocean or river of the spirit-land. It shines in colours which can be only compared with the colours of the peach-blossom. In this all-encompassing life you do not find such irregularly shaped rivers and oceans like here on earth, but quite regularly shaped ones, so that the comparison would be much better with the heart and its veins.

The third that can be experienced is the atmosphere of this land. However, this atmosphere is composed of that which we can call the sensations here on earth. One perceives, so to speak, the airy sentient world completely penetrating the space of the spirit-land; there one is able to perceive the universal feeling of the whole earth. However, this feeling also penetrates us from without, like the wind or the storm, like lightning and thunder in the physical atmosphere. There is no longer our own feeling and sensing. The human being has there cast off his own feelings. There the feelings of all the others approach him. He feels one with the feelings of others. Grief and pain flow through this spiritual world like lightning and thunder. You can probably imagine that the insight into this world gives another understanding of reality. Someone who looked once at this sea of human and animal sufferings and joys has seen what it, actually, means: suffering and being glad, what it means that the passions are raging. He then has another concept of war and peace of the world, another concept of the “struggle for existence.” The human being experiences also something of that between death and a new birth.

Then an even higher region comes. You must not imagine these regions in such a way that one proceeds from one place to the other. They all are into each other, they penetrate each other completely. The fourth region is related to our earth only a little, whereas we can perceive qualities in the three regions mentioned above which refer to our earth. Here we already get in touch with higher natured beings, with the beings which are possibly never embodied on this earth. Here those forces face us that already extend beyond the physical. What the human being performs out of the purely ideal, the pure thinking, a purely benevolent attitude, out of love, what the human being performs beyond the physical realm comes from forces that become visible in this region. These regions of the devachan always surround the human being, work perpetually on him. Someone who has intuition, inventiveness creates things which are not images of our earth; he creates something that is brought in from a higher region to our earth. This comes from this fourth region.

One does not need to believe that what is not aware to us does not exist in this sphere. We are not allowed to believe that if a single human being does not perceive these things they are also not there. Someone who comes into the world with a special genius brings it with him from his stay in this region of the devachan.

With it we have arrived at the border, which has to do a little only, as we saw, with our life on earth, which contains, however, what gives just a higher shine to our earth and is intended to be brought down immediately to the sensuous existence what still depends on the sensuous existence, too. The human being can form no work of art, can construct no machine if he does not comply with the physical reality. With the work of art he must study the material.

The other three regions of the devachan which are even higher are regions, which are still less connected with the earth, which, so to speak, shine from a very different world. If the human being ascends to this region either as a seer or in the time between death and a new birth , then he takes everything from it that I would like to call the heavenly spark which the human being brings in to this world. It is that which appears to him as the divine, as the higher spiritual, as the actually idealistic, which comes as higher moral, as higher religiousness and subtler spiritual science into the physical world with him. The human being takes from these three higher regions of devachan any wisdom, any higher shine of existence, which he brings as it were as a messenger of God in to this physical world.

Once again I would like to emphasise that it concerns states of consciousness what I have described, so that the human being can still stay at one and the same place in his consideration, while round him the different regions of devachan light up and appear to him as a much richer reality than the reality is which the physical eye can see, the physical ear can hear or the physical hand can grope. I would like to compare it again and again with a human being who cannot be aware of his physical eyes and ears. Last time I have already pointed to the interesting biography of the blind and deaf-mute American Helen Keller. We look there into a spiritual life which is very different. Imagine once how the world would appear to you if you had no ears and no eyes. Those were the capacities of Helen Keller. Today, however, she has successfully completed a university study and owns an education like one who has successfully completed a university study. We see there how this Helen Keller has already created a wealth within the physical world which has basically different shading, has another nature than what, otherwise, the physical human being owns. She herself says: “People who are of the opinion that all sensory impressions come to us through the eye and the ear were surprised that I notice a difference between the streets of a city and the ways in the country. They forget that my whole body reacts to the surroundings. The roaring of the city whips up all my nerves. The discordant, tumultuous with its strident impressions, the simple rattling of the machines is even more torturing for the nerves because my attention is not deflected by brightly varying pictures like with the other human beings.” Already for this peculiarly organised nature the world is completely different round her. Even more different it is if at the moment of death the physical eye is no longer the intermediary if the impressions do no longer approach us from without. The seer can describe this because he is able to pass the gate of death by means of his mystic contemplation in certain respect.

Imagine you would have red glasses which make everything appear in reddish hues. The world thereby gets a quality that it does no longer have immediately if you take away the red glasses. As well as you take away the red glasses, you give everything away at the moment of death that your eyes and ears make of the environment. What the human being has of the spiritual world in his surroundings as it were as something veiled or coloured, with which his eyes and ears were marked, appears to him now, begins to gleam if I may make use of a Goethean expression from a rich, varied, manifold world. I have described last time what flames up in the astral world. If the human being has now cast off the wishes, desires and passions which induced him to spend some time in the astral world, he comes to new states. Then the veil falls off from his astral eyes, he enters that world which just as our physical world is irradiated by the sun is irradiated by the light of aeons as the Christian mystics called it, that light which can shine from within also to the human being if he has opened his spiritual eye. This light penetrates the whole spiritual world. In the more or less long periods the human being experiences the states between death and a new birth which I have described to you. The human being gets to know the regions of the spirit-land really, he gets to know what it means if the physical matter disappears. Where physical matter is are now hollows. There is nothing. Very different regions of existence appear.

In the Indian Vedanta philosophy a saying is especially practised which the mystics said to themselves over and over again. This saying is practised in the corresponding languages everywhere, and this saying is: thou art that. If the mystic says this to himself again and again, he thinks that the human being is not really only that which is enclosed in his skin physically. The human being could not exist as a single being in the universe; he is connected with forces and levels of existence which are beyond his physical body, so that there is reality to which he belongs, wherever he looks. As he separated from this reality, every other human being is separated from this reality. There the human being experiences that he is basically nothing else than a leaf of a big tree. This tree signifies humanity. Like a leaf withers if it falls off from the tree, the single human being would have to perish if he wanted to separate from the tree of humanity. But he is not able to do this! The physical human being does not know this only; however, at this level it comes true to him. If the human being comes into the world with a disposition which is not merely materialistic which does not cling to the sensuous-physical existence only, he comes into contact with the spiritual world. The more he rises to an idealistic attitude, the more he is able to have an idea of something higher, the more he is able to act out in this world of the spirit. In this world the human being is enclosed in manifold physical connections: here the human being is enclosed in family, people, and race; there he has his friends. It is all connections in the physical world.

He experiences these connections again in the spirit-land. There he only realises the friendship completely. There the sense of togetherness, the feeling of adherence to his native land becomes clear to him to a large extent. There it lives out what here the relationship in the physical world signifies. He now lives within the world of the archetypes. The more he has turned the sense to one of these connections here, the more he has to realise in the region of the spirit-land, while he is enclosed here in the physical body by the physical reality. Like the plant if it is planted in a rock crevice cannot develop in all directions, the same also applies to the human spirit.

Here in the physical cover the qualities are constricted. Only a small part of that appears which he owns as friend love, family love, patriotism et etcetera. If the human being can develop, however, as the plant on free field, his being also lives out freely if he is no longer enclosed in the physical cover and comes back with increased forces. Who has experienced a higher sense of family, lives it out here intensively and will then enter life again with a particular sense of family.

In this region the human being experiences what I have described as “all-encompassing life”. He experiences the liquid element in the spirit-land. There we see if we obtain an insight as a seer someone slowly brightening up who already developed a sense of the “all-encompassing life” on earth, which weaves and flows in all beings. That means developing religious devoutness. The devout human being raises his sense to the “all-encompassing life” flowing through everything. The human being freely lives out the religious devout sense in this second region of the devachan. This sense appears strengthened and invigorated at the new birth. Here we see the human being rising up above the barriers which this incarnation has put to him in the physical life. We see the Hindu, the Christian experiencing their particular kind of the “all-encompassing life” in the devachan if the barriers have fallen and a bigger unity is produced in this region.

In the third region, we discover the archetypes of grief and desire, of joy and pain where this element surrounds us like the atmosphere surrounds the earth. If the human being settles down in this region, he learns to develop a sense of unselfish devotion to everything that suffers in the world, to everything that can rejoice in the world. No longer sensory desire and sensory pain depress him. He no longer knows any difference between his pain and the pain of others, but he knows what desire and pain are in themselves. We learn to recognise the reality of grief and pain. We get to know the great philanthropists here; all those who can appear in the world as the geniuses of philanthropy, the geniuses of charity, as great creators of philanthropic connections of sympathy and goodwill, of human community are in this third region and attain their abilities there.

In the fourth region, the human being takes up what he realises using the earthly forces and abilities, using the qualities of the earthly things with his intuition, his inventions and discoveries. Here are those who serve their fellow men in the new life as artists, as great inventors or in some other way with brilliant ideas, with encompassing view of the world, with encompassing wisdom. Depending on how the human being has developed these or those qualities already in this life, the work of the consciousness lasts in the devachan longer, of course. It is a state of the highest bliss. What limited and hampered him on earth has fallen off from him. Now he freely unfolds his abilities. All obstacles have been removed. The human being feels this possibility to spread out his wings in all directions to let flow his increased forces then again into the physical incarnation and to work even more vigorously and energetically on earth. This appears to him as a state of the highest bliss. The religions of all times have described this bliss as the heavenly salvation. Hence, devachan also appears with different religions as the so-called kingdom of heaven.

The time in devachan is not of equal length for all human beings. The uneducated savage who has experienced a little of this world only who has applied his mind and sense only a little has a short stay in the devachan. The devachan is basically supposed to elaborate what the human being has learnt in the physical, to unfold it freely, to make it suitable to a new life. The human being, who is on a higher level of existence who has collected rich experiences, has to process a lot and, hence, has a long stay in the devachan. Only later, when he is able to look into these states, the stays become again shorter up to the point where the human being can immediately walk after death again to a new incarnation because he has already experienced what is to be experienced in devachan.

There are even higher stages which are beyond devachan to which the human being will walk when he has already developed his higher being. We have to imagine this is also spoken figuratively that every human being passes that region of the spirit-land between death and a new birth which is beyond the connection of all earthly, and that devachan extends into far higher regions of existence where from the human being gets the divine forces he brings in as a messenger of God to this world. The messengers of God come from this region. Also the uneducated human being, however fast he may hurry through it because he has to look a little in it because he can unfold a little in it, must spend short time at least between death and a new birth in this region of devachan which is the freest from all earthly bonds. There all gravity of the earth has fallen off from him. There he takes share in the breeze which flies from the divine world to him, which penetrates him between death and a new birth. Those who have got to a higher level of existence stay here longer. They obtain the possibility to descend with particular wisdom, with particular spiritual forces again to the earth to help as higher natured individualities their fellow men.

The guides of humanity stay in this region for longer time. Also those who are transported away from the world are to be found here, beings whom the theosophical literature calls masters, those beings whose development is far beyond what still sticks to the present human being. The longer the human being can delight in the contact of these beings between death and a new birth, the purer, the nobler and more moral he enters the earthly scene again. The more he has again seen to it that he has become pure, noble, and idealistic on this earth, the longer he can share of the air which blows in these parts of the devachan.

This is the way the human being has to go through on his pilgrimage between death and a new birth. These are states of consciousness, not different places. The human being does not go from one place to the other wandering through these regions. On the contrary, one could say that they disappear, fade away, but only in such a way, as for example the outer physical world disappears if you close the eyes or block the ears. But as it becomes dark and silent in this case around you, it becomes clear and bright round you in that case, and a new world rises.

What is to be said about the time which the human being has to spend in this devachan can be decided only according to the experience, of course. Only that is able to say something about it who has any anyhow natured experience in this field, who is able to remember his own former incarnations or who can consciously as a seer attain an insight of the luminous world of the spirit.

It is very different according to the developmental state of the human being how much time he spends in devachan. But one can approximately find the time which the human being spends in the heavenly world. You find it if you multiply the earthly lifetime, the time between birth and death, with a number which lies between twenty and forty. The time depends on the development the human being has achieved but also on the physical lifespan. If a child soon dies after birth, you need to multiply only the time of life by twenty to forty, and you receive the time of the stay in the devachan. Who has a long life has to go through long and important states in devachan and has also to feel a lot of that which one calls the beatific sensations of devachan in mysticism. This life in devachan differs quite substantially from all that the physical eyes or generally the physical senses can imagine.

Even if the concepts, the words with which I have described this region could be only approximate, I tried to describe as faithfully, as accurately as possible. These regions themselves do not belong not in their substance, not in their real being to the deepest nature of the human being. This deepest nature of the human being, which Giordano Bruno calls the monad, the highest spiritual-living in the human being comes from even higher worlds. I tell something of these even higher worlds the next hour which deals with the basic concepts of theosophy. Then I also speak about the way how the capacities of the human beings have to develop to take a look at these higher worlds. The mystic describes not only what he sees in them, but he is already allowed to describe also how the human being can get round to developing his dispositions to take a closer look at these worlds.

At the end, I would like to do only few remarks.

It is common practice that those who first hear something of the described region of the devachan say that this region is an illusion, something illusory; because it reminds of its shadow-image, the thought in the physical life; it must also have a less real existence than our physical world. However, this is not the case. To somebody who has obtained insight in this higher world it has become clear that in it much stronger, much higher realities exist than in our physical reality. One gets to know the physical existence in its true significance if one is able to see it in the light of these higher worlds. As well as a piece of steel can be before you but you do not suspect that it entails electric or magnetic forces, an object of the physical world can extend before you, but you do not suspect that it contains a much higher being. Hence, also those who knew something of the coloured and sounding world describe it in the most shining colours and describe the sounds, which penetrate to their spiritual ear, in the most marvellous words. The old Pythagoreans spoke of the music of the spheres.

Nobody else knows the music of the spheres than someone who has an insight into this world of the devachan. Many people think that it is something figurative, something symbolic. No, it is something of the highest reality. From the spiritual world the rhythmical melodies sound toward us which are the cosmic forces of the universe. The cosmic forces are rhythmical, and we hear that rhythm if we are able to use the “devachanic ear”, and that inexpressible bliss occurs which the mystic is able to perceive. If everything of this world disappears, everything escapes from his attention what sounds by the senses, and then he describes the impression of the devachan.

The human being has to go through this between death and a new birth. There he is a sprout of the new reincarnation. He is the grain of mustard seed, which lives through the devachan time to a new incarnation. The German mystic Angelus Silesius (born Johann Scheffler, 1624–1677, mystic and religious poet) who spoke so many beautiful moving words in his Cherubinic Pilgrim (1657/1674) described the sensation and the whole being in this marvellous mystic book briefly and clearly in a saying, how the spirit lives from death to a new birth as a seed which prepares itself for a new existence to unfold new and higher forces. Angelus Silesius says with the following words what every mystic knows that the heart giving off the spiritual light is able to radiate:

A grain of mustard seed is my mind;
If His sun shines through it,
It grows, equal to God, with joyful delight.

Someone who puts the task to himself to describe the relation of the modern cultural life to the theosophical view of life must not pass the phenomenon Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Like a big riddle Friedrich Nietzsche stands in the cultural development of the present. Without doubt, he has made a deep impression on all our thinking contemporaries. For the ones he was a guide, for the others a person against whom one has to fight most intensively. He stirred up many people, and left many very effective results of his work. An extensive literature about Nietzsche has appeared, and today one can open almost no newspaper some years ago this was even more the case without stumbling against the name Nietzsche or without finding cited his way of thinking directly with his sayings, with his thoughts, or, otherwise, any echo of him. Friedrich Nietzsche has deeply taken root in the whole structure of our age. He stands there like a phenomenon, also already for a mere viewer of his life.

He came from a Protestant parsonage. In 1844 born, he already shows a great interest in all religious questions on the high school. Some notes of this time show not only a premature lad, but also a human being illuminating some fields of the religious questions with brilliant brain waves. During his university studies, he is not only interested in his professional studies so that he belongs to the most excellent students but also in the general problems of the human development. He already performs a lot in the field of philology in his youth, more than others can perform in a whole life. Before he conferred a doctorate, a chair was offered to him at Basel. His teacher Ritschl (Albrecht R.,1822–1889, German theologian) was asked whether he could recommend that Friedrich Nietzsche should take this. The famous philologist answered that he could only recommend Nietzsche, because Nietzsche knew everything that he himself knew. When he was already a professor and wanted to confer a doctorate, it was said to him: we are not able to examine you! Nietzsche, the associate professor, conferred a doctorate; one reads that on the certificate! This is a sign how deeply one esteemed his mind. Then he made an acquaintance that was decisive for his whole life. He made acquaintance of Schopenhauer's philosophy, in which he settled in such a way that he made not the philosophy but the personality of Schopenhauer (1788–1860) his guide, so that he regarded him as his educator.

The second important acquaintance was that of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). From these both acquaintances the first epoch of Friedrich Nietzsche's spiritual life developed. This happened in a quite personal way. When Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel, he went, so often he was able at times any Sunday , to Triebschen near Lucerne. At that time, Richard Wagner occupied himself with Siegfried. There the most works of Wagner and the deepest problems of the cultural life were discussed with the young Nietzsche in the spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner often said that he could find no better interpreter than Friedrich Nietzsche.

Considering the writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), we find that Richard Wagner's art is moved into such a light that it appears directly as a cultural-historical action which shines for centuries, even for millennia. Seldom such an intimate relationship existed like that between the younger pupil and the older master who got to know his ideas, with which he was bubbling over, anew in an intellectually stimulating way, so to speak. They faced him friendly with their effects like from without, so that he was able to arrange them in the right light. It was a phenomenon that had never existed before. Wagner was happy who could say that he found somebody understanding him, as few people were in the world; Nietzsche was not less happy who looked back at the times of the ancient Hellenism of which he believed that the human beings still created divine things at that time, in contrast to that time he calls the decadent one. In Richard Wagner he saw a resurrection of the rarest kind, a human being who owned such a pure spiritual content in himself as it is seldom found in life.

Only from 1889 on, a lot was written about Nietzsche. People who repeat his words pay attention to his works only after this point in time. However, those who already occupied themselves with Nietzsche about 1889 knew that he had lighted up like a comet beside Richard Wagner, up to about 1876, that, however, he was nearly forgotten then. Only in the smallest circles one still spoke of him. Then he wrote his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) by which he became known again. Then a writing appeared by which he seemed to smash everything that he had considered once as his own. This was The Case of Wagner (1888). Thereby he became known again. Those who occupied themselves with Nietzsche separated in two factions. Georg Brandes (1842–1927, Danish critic and scholar) held lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen. Nietzsche had become not only a university professor in young years even if he retired soon for reasons of health he also was accorded the honour of becoming an object of university lectures. This news probably brought consolation to his darkened soul; however, it could not save him from the menacing mental derangement. Then the news came that Nietzsche went incurably insane. This is more or less the outline of his outer life.

As I have already mentioned, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music was his first writing. This was born from a rare absorption in Schopenhauer's philosophy and from an absorption in art as it faced him in the work of Richard Wagner. Who wants to understand what this writing means as Nietzsche's daybreak, and also wants to understand his life must explain it out of a threefold consideration. First he must explain it out of his time with which Nietzsche lived intimately. I myself have tried to explain Nietzsche in this way objectively. One can show him secondly as a being which one allows to arise from his personality. There he is one of the most interesting psychological, psychiatric problems. I have also tried to show this in a medicinal magazine in an article about Friedrich Nietzsche. Thirdly one can show him from the spiritual world view.

His first writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music delivers important clues from the theosophical point of view, from a spiritual world consideration. Our age is the age of the fifth principal race of humankind of which two others have led the way which had to develop other forces than our principal race. Our fifth principal race has preferably to develop thinking and reason. The preceding principal race is the Atlantean one which lived on the continent that is now on the ground of the Atlantic. These human beings did not yet have reason, had not yet developed intellectuality, but memory preferably. One of these preceding principal races was the Lemurian one. This still was on the level of imagination.

Our principal race has to develop the intellectual life. Since some centuries in particular, the European humanity is developing the intellectual force, intelligence. Our great philosophers, up to Kant and Schopenhauer, are completely involved in this development of our principal race.

As to them the big problem became the question: what is the significance of the human thought, how can the human being recognise anything? These questions became the big riddles of existence to them. Now, however, something quite peculiar takes place for our principal race. Thinking which the philosophers have brought to the highest development was detached for our time, so to speak, from its mother soil. Our time has developed thinking in the purest and most marvellous way in science concerning the external technical life. But these thoughts or, actually, these ideas tore us out of nature.

The human thought is only a picture of something much higher that we have discussed in the preceding talks; it is a shade, an image of the spiritual world. The thought is a spiritual being. Modern times developed thinking powerfully; however, one has forgotten that this thought is nothing but the shadow-image of the spiritual life. This life transmits, so to speak, the spiritual forces to us, and then we get the idea. That is why the origin of the thought, of the idea was mysterious, in particular for the philosophy of the 19th century. The thought, the idea itself became appearance. One forgot that the thought has its origin in spirit as Jacob Böhme says. When one had tried in the modern times to look for the primary sources of existence, to penetrate to that primary source which one had lost and about which one did no longer know that it has its origin in the spirit one could find it only according to Schopenhauer's philosophy in the unreasonable blind will; however, the thought is nothing but a simulacrum which our imagination offers to us. Thus the world became idea on one side and will on the other side. But both do no longer have their origin in spirit, only in the mere appearance. How could it be otherwise that this materialistic philosophy sought for a support of the spirit in an element which any unbiased observer can find directly in the world where the spirit exists as such only in the form of a blind will, as a proliferation of nature? This is just the personality. Indeed, one had forgotten that something spiritual is in the personality; but one was not able to deny the personality as such.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the spiritual human personality was at least accepted as the highest; the personality that stands out by its ingenuity or devoutness or holiness and shows as it were a level of development within the rest of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer became hard and showed the average human being as manufactured goods of nature; however, from the dark impulses of nature single great personalities emerge. This view had an effect on Nietzsche.

But something else had an effect on him. By means of thoughts and ideas we can never experience anything of that which flows in the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer finds the true being of the chaos of the basic instincts in music. That is why Schopenhauer was not able to penetrate this simulacrum to the being which expresses itself in the will, but the being of music became a solution of the riddle of the world to him. Everybody who is familiar with the questions of mysticism knows how somebody can get to the view that music offers a solution of the riddle of the world.

There is music not only on the physical plane or the sensuous world but also in the higher worlds. If we ascend through the soul-world to the higher spiritual worlds, something of a higher music sounds to us. Not the music which we perceive on the physical plane; for it is no allegory but reality: the movement of the stars in the world, the growth of plants, the feeling of the human beings and animals appear like sounding words! That is why the occultist says: the human being finds out the secrets of the world only if the mystic word which exists in the things speaks to him. What Schopenhauer found is an expression of a higher fact, something that is much more significant than what he understood of it; for it sounds with him only into the physical ear. We call the principle manas that outlasts time and extends to the eternal. This manas finds its physical expression in the sounds of music which come toward us from the outside world. Schopenhauer expressed something absolutely right, and Nietzsche took up this thought. He felt with the whole wealth of his mind that somebody who wants to express himself about the world's secrets with mere words is not able to do this in the same way as the master of the sounds can express himself about the world's secrets. Therefore, Friedrich Nietzsche just as Schopenhauer regards the musical expression as the expression of the higher world's secrets. Thus the way was shown to them to the ancient times of the old Greeks where art, religion and science were a whole where in the mystery temples the mystery priests, who were scientists and artists, arranged the destiny of the human being and of the whole world in grand pictures before the soul.

If we look into the temple, we find shown the destiny of the god Dionysus. This was the solution of the riddle of the world. However, Dionysus had descended to the matter and had been dismembered, and the human mind is destined to release him who is buried in the matter and to lead him up to the new splendour. While the human being seeks for his divine nature in himself, he wakes the god in himself, and this awakening is the awakening of the god who had found a kind of grave in the low nature. This big destiny of the world was shown to the mystes not only sensually, but also spiritually in a magnificent way. This was the primal drama of the ancient Greece. We go back to far-off times, and from this core the later Greek drama comes. The drama of Aeschylus, of Sophocles was only art; however, it had arisen from the temple art. Art, science and religion had separated from the temple art. Who looks back at these primeval times sees something more profound from which the human understanding and conduct of life have come. The living god Dionysus was the great figure of the Greek mysteries. Nietzsche within the circle of Wagner did not recognise but suspect this.

It was a big dark inkling, and from it his view of the nature of the Greeks before Socrates resulted. At that time, the human being was not one-sided, but the Dionysian human being drew on unlimited resources. Because everything is imperfect, the Greek created the redeeming religion and wisdom and later also the redeeming art to himself. Hence, what later appeared as art Nietzsche regarded as an image of the primal art only that he calls the Dionysian one. This still seized the whole human being not only the imagination one-sidedly, but all spiritual forces. Later art was only an image.

Thus the concepts Dionysian and Apollonian face us in his works. By means of them he has an inkling of the origin of all artistic life and the language by which the old Greeks expressed themselves. This was a language that was music at the same time. In the middle, the drama was staged, around was the choir, which showed life and death in powerful sounds.

Then others who were familiar with the circle of Wagner also showed this destiny intimately. Above all, you find it described out of the spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries in the book: The Sanctuaries of the East (1898) by Schuré. Edouard Schuré (1841–1929, French esoteric) not only described what Nietzsche only suspected from imagination but from spirituality. Nietzsche just wanted that, but he did not achieve it. On this basis, the whole materialistic way of thinking of our time became a big riddle to him: How did the human being come from this time in which he expressed himself as a riddle of the world to the prosaic materialistic time? For others this may be a prosaic riddle of reason; however, what others want to treat and solve with reason, mind and imagination it became a problem of the heart to Nietzsche. Nietzsche had merged with his time like parents with their children. However, he could not be glad about the time, but only suffer from it. Nietzsche was able to suffer; but not to be glad. The solution of the Nietzsche problem lies therein.

He regarded Wagner as the renovator of the old Greek art which expresses the highest secrets in sounds. The old human being should ascend to the superman, to the divine human being. One needed the human being who extended beyond the average human beings. There Schopenhauer came in the nick of time. According to Schopenhauer the human being was average manufactured goods. The human being became the psycho-spiritual human being who is not on the earth but floats above the earth, and the dramatic music was used as means to get beyond the human being. Nobody wrote so reverentially about Richard Wagner like Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay: Wagner in Bayreuth in 1876. However, the everyday had become something deeply detestable to him. Therefore, he also combated what David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) expressed in his work The Old and the New Faith (1872).

There exists another writing from the beginning of the seventies, a writing without whose knowledge one cannot understand Nietzsche at all. From this writing it follows that Nietzsche suspected that problem of our time which we recently called the Tolstoy problem also just like the great problem of the Greek culture. He suspected that our time, which just passes, is lacking something. The external figures are that in which birth and death prevail forever. We have seen how any plant lives in its figure between birth and death, how whole nations pass between birth and death, how the most marvellous works are subjected to birth and death. But we have also seen how one thing remains that defeats birth and death and makes the old rise again in new incarnations. Tolstoy showed this life which the seed of a plant carries over to a new plant and appears there again.

And again: our present human race is embodied in forms which have birth and death in themselves. We rush towards a point in time which will recognise life itself. Nietzsche had recognised that our time suffers from the consideration of the figures, not only from the consideration of the figures in the natural sciences, but also in history. From this sense he wrote his significant writing about the advantage and disadvantage of history, about the historical illness. The human beings go back to the most distant primeval times and want to look at the rudiments of culture, from people to people, from state to state. However, birth and death live in everything. While we stuff ourselves with historical knowledge, we deaden that life which we have in ourselves. We deaden what lives in eternal present in us. The more we stuff our brains with history, the more we deaden the will for life in ourselves. If we look back and estimate what that means, then we see that we can only find anything considering the human life, considering ourselves directly. Thereby we get closer to a new future.

Nietzsche points to this new culture-epoch which we have to regard as that of form and figure. That lives in Nietzsche. He believed in the art of Richard Wagner, he regarded it as the renewal of life, as a new Renaissance. Wagner was much more realistic than Nietzsche. He stood completely in his time; he said to himself: the artist cannot do the third step before the first. And when Nietzsche came to Bayreuth in 1876, he saw something strange. He saw that the ideal he had got of Wagner was too big, that it was bigger than what Wagner could fulfil. As Nietzsche had a dark inkling of the origin of the Greek tragedy from the mystery time and of our whole time from the primeval times, he also had an inkling of the fact that a future culture, which is not based only on reason, must come from the spiritual powers slumbering in the human being even today.

He suspected this, and he confused this with that which was there already. He believed that the big riddle of the future was already solved in the present. What he had to argue against Socrates is that our culture had become one-sided by his influence that it had split on the one hand in a culture of reason and on the other hand in a soul movement. Therefore, he also mocks Socrates and combats the Socratic culture, the culture of reason.

When Wagner's pieces of art set faced him in Bayreuth, he became disloyal, not really disloyal, because he had never seen Wagner correctly, he had assumed that Wagner had realised what he had dreamt of as a future ideal; there Nietzsche said to himself: I have seen something wrong.

The adult Nietzsche became disloyal to the young Nietzsche, and the hard words are not directed so much against Wagner than against what he himself had been in his youth as an admirer of Wagner. One cannot really be an adversary of anybody; one can only be his own adversary. He said to himself: I feel all my youth ideals compromised. He stood in midst the ruins of a world view and had to look around at something else. Then this became the “new Enlightenment.” He wanted now to inspire and enliven what he had rejected once. He wanted to obtain life out of the dead matter as science treats it. He himself became a student of the form, of the external figure which passes us by in birth and death forever.

And now understand the profound theosophical truth that three essential conditions exist in the world: the external figure which is subjected to birth and death which comes into being and passes, appears again, which rushes from form to form in life. The second is life which is the expression of the soul. The soul breaks the form to be reincarnated in a new form. And the third is consciousness of its different degrees. Any stone, any plant and in the higher degrees any human being has consciousness. So we have three conditions in the world: form, life and consciousness. These three represent a world of the bodily, a world of the soul and a world of the spirit.

This is the wisdom that is made gradually accessible to the world again. This is also the ancient wisdom of the mysteries of which Nietzsche had a dark inkling which he could not express clearly from which he suffered and which he longed for as a new life that should arise from our culture. Now he himself was entangled in the natural sciences. He had no eye for the fact that consciousness lives in life and ascends to higher and higher figures. This is the course of the world. Consciousness takes that from the form which is worth to be pulled out to higher formation. Thereby we have a development of the things from form to form, from one condition of life to another condition of life where life remains and the forms and figures show higher formation. He did not understand the consciousness that develops and goes into higher and higher figures. Nietzsche saw the form only; he did not understand the moving agent that comes to the fore in always higher form.

Thus he realised the return of the things and beings, but did not realise that they re-embody themselves in higher and higher forms. Hence, he taught the “eternal recurrence of the self-similar form.” He did no longer know that the consciousness returns on higher levels. This is the thought to which he was influenced by the natural sciences: as well as we are here, as we are sitting here, we were there countless times and will be there again. This must impose on the thinker who does not know that the consciousness does not return in the same figure, not in the same form, but in a higher figure, in a higher form. This was the second state of Nietzsche's development.

The third state is that in which still spiritual life was inside of Nietzsche's soul which he could not get out, however, in such a world view of the mere form. Indeed, he did not know that the higher fields of existence were closed to his mind; however, the mighty urge lived in him for these higher fields of existence. The human being developed higher with his figure, from the animal up to the human being, however, this development cannot be finished. As the worm developed to the human being, the human being must develop further. From that his idea of the “superman” (Übermensch) originated. This Übermensch is the future human being. Compare him with the corresponding mystic idea, and then you find that they border on each other closely. The urge in the human nature which expresses itself also in us is the urge for spiritualisation, so that one can even now find the God-man on the bottom of the soul who appears from the future world as Nietzsche's big spiritual ideal which he strives for.

If you do not only look at form and figure but also at life and consciousness, at soul and spirit, this superman appears in his true figure, he appears as the whole human being who hastens to the higher spheres of existence. As to Nietzsche this thought existed in the seminal state, but he could express himself only with words of the naturalist. As the human being has developed from thousand and thousand figures, he must also develop in higher figures to the superman. When Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy, he stood before the gate of the Greek mysteries, he stood before the gate of the temple of Dionysus, but he could not unlock the front gate. Then he struggled on and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra: once again he stood before the gate of the temple and could not unlock it. This is the tragedy of his life, his destiny. If the ego of a single human being is suffering vicariously, is sympathetic to his time, to the psycho-spiritual, then something particular happens to this ego. Everybody who knows the phenomena of the astral world knows what must ensue to this human ego if it faces nothing but riddles and gates which do not open themselves to it: before every question is something in the world of soul and spirit that is like the shade of this question that appears as a pursuer of the soul. This seems to the materialistic thinker a little bit peculiar at first. But this man who stood before Christianity and did not know how it develops, before our philosophy, before the materialism of our time and desired a new Dionysus and was not able to bear him from himself this man stood there like before shades of the past. Thus as to Nietzsche, indeed, beside the figure of Christ that of the Antichrist stood in the astral world, beside the figure of the moralist the immoralist. What he knew as philosophy of our time stood besides as negation. That tormented him like a pursuer of his ego.

Read Nietzsche's last writings, his Will to Power (posthumous fragments), and his Antichrist where he describes the ghost, the criticism of Christianity, the criticism of philosophy in his nihilism. He does not get out from these matters; the moral of our time inhibits him which cannot get out from good and evil which does not want to recognise karma, although it strives for it. Finally, the eternal change of the figure appeared to him like the recurrence of the eternal similar figure. The fourth work has not come to an end. He wanted to call it Dionysus or the Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence. Thus only the urge of the single ego for the superman remained.

Nietzsche would have had to see into the human self and to recognise the divine human being, then that would have lighted up to him which he longed for. So, however, it seemed inaccessible to him. It was only the urge of his inside for seizing these contents. He called it his will to power, his striving for the superman. With the whole intensity of his nature he found a lyrical expression in Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is soul-raising, is soul-amusing and soul-consuming as well, also sometimes paradoxical. This is the shout of the present human being for the God-man, for wisdom who, however, only got to the will to wisdom, to the will to power. Something lyrically brilliant can arise from this urge. But something that can seize the human being in his deepest inside and lead up to these heights cannot arise from this urge. Thus Nietzsche's figure is the last great empathy out of materialism, the human being, who suffered tragically, perished tragically in the materialism of the 19th century and points with all longing to the new mystic time. Master Eckhart (1250–1327, German mystic) says: God has died so that I also die away toward the world and become a god. Nietzsche also says this in a prose saying: “If there were a God who could stand it to be no god?” Nietzsche says that there is no God! He did not understand Goethe's saying:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

What brightened up in our time so much and what he felt as grief had to be consumed. I do not want to say that his illness has to do anything with the cultural life. What he longed for but could not get was the theosophical world view. He felt longing for something that he could not find. He himself felt this in some nagging expression of his life. That is why his last writings also contain a longing for life which he wants to conjure up from the form, and then still a lyrical outcry for the God-man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Then the destruction of everything that the present cannot give him which he attempted in the writing The Will to Power or in The Eternal Recurrence which remained fragments and were published now from the estate. All that lived in the last time in this tragic personality of Nietzsche and shows how one can suffer in our time if one does not rise to a spiritual view. He himself expressed this in a poem Ecce homo in which he shows his riddle of life to us:

Yes, I know where from I hail!
Ever-hungry like the flame
I glow and consume myself.
Light becomes all I can catch,
Coal all that I leave behind:
There's no doubt, a flame I am!

In the talks on the basic concepts of theosophy I have allowed to myself to outline a picture of the nature of the human being and the so-called three worlds: the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world. It will be my task after New Year to develop the most important theosophical insights about the origin of the human being, about the origin of the earth and the heavenly bodies generally. With it the big outlook presents itself for the theosophical world-picture.

Today, however, I would like to make some remarks how the inner development of the human being has to take place if he himself wants to get to a conviction of the matters that the theosophical world view announces. But I ask you to take into consideration that a big difference has to be made between that development of the human soul and the human mind which enables someone to understand what the theosophist announces as his truth, his knowledge and experience, and a second level. A higher level is only that which enables someone to get to such insights and experiences. I would like to say that one must make a distinction between an elementary level of the development which leads so far that one becomes able to say to that what the experienced mystic says: I understand, I can mull over it in myself, I can empathise and accept it as truth within certain limits and a higher level with which one is enabled to make experiences in the soul-world or the spirit-land. Today the first level should occupy us. The second level concerns the real clairvoyance, and as far as generally remarks can be publicly made about this real clairvoyance, it occupies us in a later lecture.

So, how one gets to a kind of own understanding of the theosophical truth, this is the question which occupies us today. Do not believe that I can give more than only few remarks; for that education which the human soul and the human mind have to go through in order to get to that understanding to some extent is an encompassing one. It requires a long, long time of an internal study, and, needless to say, all necessary details cannot even be touched in the course of a short lecture. What I am able to say to you is related to that what the personal lessons give in this field like the instruction how to use a microscope or a telescope which you can receive in the laboratory or on the observatory.

For the time being, I want to note that for most people real lessons in this field can only be attained by a personal teacher. It may appear to somebody, as if the human being could get it by own attempts to develop internal abilities, soul forces, spiritual view with himself and it may seem deplorable that in this important field of life personal instructions should be necessary. Only the way how such an instruction is gives a sufficient guarantee that the human being can get by no means to an anyhow natured dependence on another. The esoteric teacher appreciates and honours nothing more than human dignity and self-esteem. Someone who teaches mystic and theosophical development gives nothing else than advice, and the loftiest teachers in these fields gave nothing else than advice and instructions, and it is completely up to the discretion of the human being to what extent he wants to obey them or not. It depends on the human being himself which task he sets to his own soul and mind; the appreciation of the human freedom is so strong that by the teachers nothing else is given than advice and instructions. With this reservation everything must be understood that can be said anyhow in this field.

The most important education in this field does not consist in particular external measures but in a quite intimate development of the human soul. All important levels of this development take place in the deepest inside of the human being. The human being is transformed, and nobody, not even the most intimate friend, needs to notice anything of it. Thus the mystic develops in rest and seclusion, thus somebody develops who wants to get to the understanding of the worlds of soul and spirit. Nobody this must be emphasised again and again needs to change his everyday profession, needs to neglect his everyday duties even in the slightest or to take away any time from them if he devotes himself to an internal mystic education. On the contrary, someone, who believes to be supposed to use a special time to his mystic education who neglects his duties and, hence, becomes a bad citizen, a bad member of the human society because he tries to get a general idea of the higher worlds, soon convinces himself that the least is achieved in such a kind in this field.

This inner development takes place not tumultuously but calmly, in completely internal rest. And I definitely mention today that I give no “particular” instructions, but only a description of such a way whose observance, however, demands one thing from the human being, and this one is at the same time that without which never own higher experience is attained: this is patience. Who does not have steadfastness and patience, who cannot endure and cannot obey the internal rules again and again calmly achieves nothing at all as a rule. There is only one possibility by which somebody can achieve something without observance of these rules. Then, however, one has advanced very far in the development of the human being. This is the case if one was in former lives already on a certain level of clairvoyance; then the way is much shorter and completely different. The teacher, who has to give the concerning instructions, soon knows that and he has only to eliminate the corresponding obstacles towering as an embankment there.

Therefore, it is no good idea as a rule to seek for a mystic development without personal instructions because almost for every human being the right way of this development is different, and because someone who gives the instructions must know his pupil exactly not in the usual sense of the word, but in the spiritual sense of the word. However, the esoteric teacher needs to know nothing about profession, life-style, members of the family or experiences of the pupil; he needs to obtain an intimate knowledge of his soul and mind and the corresponding level of them. The way how the esoteric teacher gets this cannot yet told today but in the talks on clairvoyance. Moreover, the internal development is linked with particular results for every person. Who starts his path must be clear in his mind that in his being particular qualities will appear. These qualities are symptoms of the internal development. They are, so to speak, evidence of this internal development, and they must be observed carefully. The esoteric teacher must know how he has to interpret these symptoms. Then only the development can take place in the right way.

The development of the inner human being is a birth, the birth of soul and mind. This is not meant figuratively, but in the true sense of the word as a fact. And a birth in this field is not without results, and one must know to treat these as an esoteric teacher. I had to say that first.

Now you will approximately be able to put the questions to yourselves which are normally put as first if one hears of the basic teachings of theosophy, of the teaching that the human soul was embodied already often, returns often, of the teaching of reincarnation and of the balancing justice, of karma.

You will ask how one can understand this. This is the big question which approaches every human being. There is a golden rule which one has to obey; then everybody gets to this understanding once. This is a common experience of those who have really undergone the concerning exercises. There is no human being who cannot obtain this understanding of reincarnation and karma in the easiest way. However, one would like to say with Goethe: “it's easy, to be sure, but easy tasks take effort” (Faust II). For few people find the right decision, the steadfastness and the patience to acquire particular processes of soul and mind that are necessary for this understanding. This golden rule is: live in such a way, as if reincarnation and karma were truth; then they become truth for you. It seems as if this has to be attained by self-suggestion. But this is not the case. You know the mystic symbol of the snake biting its own tail. This symbol has different profound meanings; one of them expresses itself in this golden rule.

You see that the precondition gets intertwined in certain way like the coiling snake does it. How is one able to do this? If reincarnation is a truth, it may not be vain that certain human efforts have an effect on the human soul, and these effects must later become nature. One of the big laws which the human being establishes and has to test intimately with himself is expressed in an Indian writing with the words: what you think today you become that tomorrow.

Who believes in reincarnation has to realise that a quality which he develops within himself, a thought which he memorises bearing it again and again, becomes something permanent in his soul and has to appear in this soul time and again. Above all one who looks for a mystic development makes the attempt with himself to give up inclinations he had before, to get new inclinations only by the fact that he looks after the thought intimately and connects it with this inclination, virtue or quality and incorporates it into himself, so that he is thereby able to transform his soul by his own will. This has to be attempted exactly as a chemical experiment has to be attempted. Who has never tried to transform his soul, who has never come to the first decision to develop the qualities of perseverance, steadfastness, and of the calm logical reflection and has never remained firm and if he does not succeed in a week, then he has to use a month, a year, or a decade-, such a human being can recognise nothing of this truth with himself.

This is the intimate way the soul has to go. It must be able to incorporate qualities, thoughts, and inclinations. The human being must be able to appear in the course of a certain time with whole new habits by his will-power. The human being who was careless before must have got the habit of being precise and exact, not by external coercion, but by his own will. If this happens with minor qualities, with minor things, then it is particularly effective. The clearer the things are which he recognises with himself, the more surely he gets to true knowledge in this field. As soon as he is able to objectively observe a movement of the own hand, a facial expression, an unimportant habit with himself at first, as if he observed it with a fellow man, then he can incorporate something that he wants only by his will-power instead of the habit, of the inclination et etcetera. Someone who does this is on the way of understanding the big law of reincarnation. Just as an experienced chemist can give instructions about the processes in the laboratory, someone can also give you such instructions which he has attempted. The highest is achieved by minor changes.

Now, we deal with karma, the big law of fair balance. We get to know it if we live in such a way, as if karma were a truth. If you are hit by any accident, by pain or anything like that, try once to have the idea again and again: this pain, this accident stands there not like a miracle in the world, but must have a cause. You do not need to investigate the cause. Only someone who can overview karma can really recognise the cause of a stroke of luck, of pain et etcetera. But you must have a mere feeling to devote yourselves to it and to feel that such an action, such a pain or such a joy must have a cause, and that it must be a cause of future events. Who penetrates himself with this sensation and considers his life and that which overwhelms him from without in such a way, as if karma were a truth, will see that it becomes comprehensible to him. Someone attains the knowledge of karma who is not angry if anything happens to him, but is able to stop the annoyance and imagines that just as a stone gets rolling if it is pushed and is detached according to a necessary principle in the world that that which annoyed him must have a necessary cause. As certainly as you wake up tomorrow morning if all circumstances remain as they are and you keep well and fit, as certainly you get to the understanding of karma looking at life in this sense.

These are two preconditions for somebody who wants to experience a spiritual education. These are two preconditions for every pupil that he considers life this way. He does not need to devote himself to the thoughts immediately in such a way, as if they were truth. He has to leave it open: maybe they are true, maybe they are not. He should have neither doubt nor superstition, because these are the most important obstacles. If anybody is qualified to observe life in this sense, then he is qualified, actually, only to receive mystic lessons. And still a third thing is necessary.

No esoteric teacher gets involved in teaching a human being who is inspired by superstition, by the prejudice of the crudest kind or is inclined to judge without reason or devotes himself to any illusion. This is the golden rule that before the human being wants to attain the first level he has to attempt to free himself from any aimlessly wandering thought, from any superstition and any possibility which could take illusion for reality. Above all the esoteric pupil has to be a reasonable person who devotes himself only to the strict sequence of his thoughts and observations. If you devote yourselves in the sensuous reality to a prejudice, a superstition, it is soon corrected in the sensuous reality. If the human being does not think logically, but fantasises, then the correction is not so easy. Hence, it is necessary, before you enter the soul-world and the spirit-land, to be absolutely certain in your thought-life and to be able to practise strict control of your thoughts. Who is easily inclined to speculative fiction, superstition and illusions is not qualified to enter the nursery school of spiritual science. One may easily reply: I am free from speculative fiction, superstition and illusion. One is easily mistaken about this. Absence of any prejudice, speculative fiction and illusion, and absence of superstition, these are the matters which must be acquired by strict self-discipline; these are matters which are not to be got so easily by any individual human being. Imagine how most people have aimlessly wandering thoughts and are not able to strictly control their thoughts by their own will-power.

Now we consider life. You cannot free yourselves completely from the external impressions. Hence, it is necessary to select a short time every day. The short time suffices which is necessary without interfering with your duties even if these are five minutes, still less, they suffice. But then the human being must be able to tear out himself from all that the sensory impressions offered to him that he has taken up with his eyes, with his ears, with his sense of touch. He has to become blind and deaf toward his whole surroundings for a while. Everything that pours in us from without connects us with the sensuous, with the everyday life. This must be silent for a while. An entire internal rest must take place. If this internal rest, this removing of all sensory impressions has taken place, then all recollection of previous sensory impressions must be quiet. Consider once how the human being is always connected with everything temporal and spatial that I have mentioned, with that which comes into being and goes by. Try once to test this for a little while. Take the thought which passed your head one minute ago and test whether it does not contain anything transient. Such thoughts are good for nothing for the internal development.

All thoughts which connect us with the limited, with the passing must be silent. If this rest is produced in the soul if that which surrounds us as age, century, people et etcetera is removed, if the internal silence has taken place for a while, then the soul begins speaking by itself. Not immediately; but it is necessary that the human being gets it to speak first of all. There are means and instructions which engender this inner language of the soul.

The human being has to dedicate himself to such thoughts, ideas and sensations which are not descended from the temporal, but from the eternal which have not been true only today, yesterday and tomorrow, not only a century ago but are always true. You find such thoughts in the most different religious books of all peoples. You find them, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita, the song of the human perfectioning. Also in the New and in the Old Testament, in particular in John's Gospel from the thirteenth chapter on. You have such thoughts, which are especially effective for human beings who belong to the theosophical movement and are given to them in the little book Light on the Path, also in the first four sentences of this book.

These four movements, which are engraved on the internal walls of any initiation temple, these four sayings do not depend on time and space; they do not belong to any human being, any family, any century, any generation; they extend to the whole development. They were true before millennia and are true after millennia. They wake the slumbering forces and get them out from the inside. Indeed, this must be made correctly. It does not suffice that one thinks to understand the sentence. The human being has to make such a sentence revive in his inside. He must allow radiating the whole force of such a sentence in his inside, he has to dedicate himself completely to it. He must learn to love such a sentence. If he believes to understand it, then only the right point in time has come to let light up it again and again in him. It does not depend on the intellectual understanding, but on the love of the spiritual truth. The more the love of such internal truth penetrates us, the more force of the inner beholding arises to us. Such a sentence must occupy us not for one or two days, but for weeks, for months and for years; then such soul-forces awake in us. Then there comes a particular moment when still another illumination happens.

Who announces theosophical truths by own experience knows this inner contemplative life. He announces theosophical truths to you today, tomorrow. They are part of a big theosophical world picture which he beholds with the internal force of his mind and soul. He turns the look into the soul-world and the spirit-land; he turns the look away from the earth to the solar systems investigating them. But this force would soon expire in him unless he gave it new nourishment every morning. This is the secret of the esoteric researcher. The big picture of the world and humanity, which he has let his soul penetrate hundred upon hundred times, penetrates his soul every morning again. It does not matter that he understands all that, but that he learns to love it more and more; that he ministers every morning looking up in devotion to the great spirits. He has learnt to overview the whole picture in few minutes. Gratitude runs through him for that which it has given to his soul. Without this path of devotion one does not get to clearness. However, from this clearness he has to coin his words. If this is the case, he is only destined to really speak about the truth of mysticism, to speak about the truth of theosophy and spiritual science. The spiritual researcher does it that way, and everybody has to do it that way, and begin in the simplest, most elementary way until he gets to the understanding of these teachings. The human being and the cosmic beings are profound, infinitely profound. You achieve anything in this field only with patience, endurance and love of the world powers. These are forces that are powerful in the inner world like electricity is in the external world. They are not only moral forces, but also forces of knowledge. If the pupil allowed such truths to live in him for a while, if he has exercised and accepted them in gratitude toward those who revealed them to him, then a moment comes, which happens for everybody once who allowed rest and calmness to develop. This is the moment when the own soul starts speaking when the own inside starts beholding the big eternal truths. Then the world is suddenly illuminated round him with colours he has not seen before. Something becomes audible for him that he never heard sounding before. The world gleams in a new light; new sounds and words become perceptible. This new light and this lustre shine to him from the soul-world, and the new sounds which he hears come up to him from the spirit-land. One sees the soul-world, one hears the spirit-land. This is a feature of these worlds.

If you yourselves want to look for the development in this field, the observance of many single rules belongs to it because only in general lines I could indicate how such a thing takes place, how you get to know it. These single rules should be strictly observed as the chemist must weigh and measure the smallest substances with the subtlest instruments which he needs for a compound. You find a description of those rules which can be given publicly in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? These rules are special instructions how you have to go this way. They also demand the most intimate patience and endurance. These rules were never published before. Realise that the esoteric lessons have been given only in secret schools, and also today they are given only in secret schools because they are intimate going from person to person.

It does not help to look for instruction by special things, which you read or hear as fragments, and to try them independently. That is useless to you as a rule. All instructions you can receive from the most different sides there are almost shops which recommend such instructions! are nothing else than small fragments of the big book of the esoteric education. Who uses them has to realise that he gives himself up to certain dangers. It is not advisable to the single person to let these things approach him by economic activity, things which refer to the internal transformation of the soul, which refer to the greatest, to the most significant of the soul.

All that approaches you in this field by recommending for money is not only worthless but also dangerous in this case. This must be said because today so much approaches the human being in this field. Those rules, which are given in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, are descended from ancient traditions Because it is necessary today to give a picture of truth compared with the things which press forward from all sides to the human beings, because it is necessary compared with these instructions to give a picture of truth once. Therefore, the masters of wisdom gave the permission to publish such rules. There is only the possibility to publish a bit; everything else must be excluded. The most important can be told only from mouth to ear.

What you find in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? is harmless in contrast to a lot of other instructions. Only such things have been informed which do not harm to the human being even if they are not carried out with patience and steadfastness. Even if they are not carried out with steadfastness, they cannot do harm. Nobody can suffer damage from them. This had to be said because I have been asked how it is that recently a sum of such rules have been informed. It depends whether you have organs for the soul-world to become conscious in the soul-world like for the sensuous world. As you have eyes and ears in the body, you must have organs in your soul and spirit to be able to perceive the soul-lights and the spirit-sounds. Who is experienced in this field and is able to see sees these organs developing in the aura of anybody enclosed like in a cloud of light who is engaged in internal development. With undeveloped people the aura is formed cloud-like.

If the human being sleeps, it hovers above the physical body because the astral body separates from the physical body. Then it is visible like two spirals curled into each other like nebulous rings. They coil themselves into each other that way to disappear in further spirals in the uncertain. Such two interwoven rings form the aura with the sleeping. If the human being experiences an esoteric development, the aura becomes more and more distinct. The ends of the spirals disappear going to the indefinite, and both spiral formations fitted into each other organise themselves. More and more they become a particular, enclosed structure, and then they show certain organs which appear in this aura, and which one calls chakras. These are the senses of the soul which are developed. This development takes place under no other circumstances. The structures are tender, they must be nurtured. Who refrains from this will never really be able to enjoy a mental view. This soul-eye must be nurtured by the human being suppressing all negative sensations and feelings within him. The chakras cannot come out if the human being becomes angry at every opportunity. He must stay equanimous, he must have patience. Annoyance and rage do not let the soul organ come out; also hastiness and nervousness do not let them develop.

It is also necessary that the human being takes off in particular what is exceptionally hard to be taken off in our civilisation, namely the desire to perpetually find out the newest. This has a big influence on the soul-eye. Who cannot grasp fast enough at the newspaper, and if he has found out anything must immediately inform another, who cannot keep to himself what he hears and sees and who cannot suppress the desire cannot get to the development of his soul. It is also necessary that the human being learns a particular way of judging the fellow men. This is hard to achieve: absence of criticism. Understanding is necessary instead of criticism. If you immediately confront your own opinion with that of your fellow man, it suppresses the soul development. We must listen to the other first, and this listening is an exceptionally effective remedy of developing the soul-eyes, and who attains a higher level on this path has to owe it to the fact that he has stopped criticising everything, judging everything. How can we see into the soul? We are not allowed to roundly condemn the criminal, but also to understand him, understand the criminal like the saint. Understanding everybody is necessary. This is the higher, occult listening. If the human being persuades himself this way by firm will not to assess his fellow men, also not the remaining world according his personal judgement, according to his opinion and his prejudice, but to take in them silently, then he can receive occult forces. Every moment where the human being intends: now I do not think any bad thing that I wanted to think about my fellow man every such moment is a gained one.

The loftiest sage can learn from a child, and the simplest human being can say: what does the child talk to me, I know this much better! However, he can also say: what does the sage talk to me, what is it of use to me? Not until he listens to the stammering child like a revelation, he has created in himself the force that streams from the soul.

You must also not expect that the soul-eyes are there already tomorrow. Who combats rage, annoyance, curiosity et etcetera, removes obstacles at first only which lie as embankments before his soul. This must be always repeated. Always new efforts are to be done. The occultist can assess how the tender structures develop. If the human words have forgotten “wounding”, if they are no longer sharp and harsh, if they have become mild to understand the human being, then the chakra awakes in the larynx. However, the human being must practise for long time until that is perceptible to him. In the human being only an ocular point, then the first attempts developed to form a lens, and quite slowly and bit by bit the physical eye came into being in millions of years. The soul-eye does not require so long. With the one it lasts few months, with the other longer time.

You must have patience. Once the moment comes with everybody, when these tender structures can be seen and if the human being continues these exercises properly, in particular if he develops certain virtues which can develop now and again also in the life of a long-suffering human being. There are three virtues that he must still develop, and that make him almost a seer. They must only exercised in proper strength, with intensity: self-confidence with humility, self-control with mildness and presence of mind combined with steadfastness. These are the big levers developing the spiritual organs. However, these three virtues lead to gruesome negative virtues if they are not paired with three other virtues, with humility, mildness and steadfastness.

These remarks can be made. These are picked out examples how the esoteric pupil experiences them on the three levels which one calls preparation, enlightenment and initiation. In the esoteric training there are these three levels: preparation or catharsis, enlightenment and initiation. The preparation is suitable to equip the human being in such a way that the tender structures of the soul can come forth. He attains the possibility to behold in the soul-world by enlightenment, and by the initiation he attains the ability to express himself in the spirit-land. It may appear as something difficult that I have described today. Indeed, it is easy, however, it also applies to it that the easy is difficult.

Everybody can walk the esoteric path, it is closed to nobody. In the breast of every human being are the secrets. It only requires serious, internal work and the fact that the human being can free himself from all obstacles that inhibit this intimate inner life.

The most distant and biggest in the world comes to our knowledge most intimately. We must be aware of that. The greatest sages of humanity attained the great truths in the same way as I have described it to you. They attained them because they found the way in their inside, because they knew that they must practice patience and steadfastness in these performances. If the human being deepens his inside this way, if he rises from the external thoughts to the thoughts which signify eternity, then he stokes the flame up in himself that shines over the soul-worlds. If the human being develops the higher qualities of calmness, rest and peace inside and the qualities which we have mentioned, then he fans the flame, so that it will maintain. If the human being is able to be silent and no longer sends words into the world but love so that that which should be life becomes a service, then the world begins sounding to him. This is the Pythagorean music of the spheres. This is not a symbol but reality. I could make remarks about the path which leads to a narrow gate. Everybody can come to the narrow gate, and it is opened to him who does not save means and pains, and he finds what he has got to know in the great world views of humanity: the eternal and only truth and the way of life.

Note to the reader:

The text of this lecture is not to be regarded as literally spoken that way. It is rather a more or less extensive summary based on two incomplete transcripts.

In this lecture, I want to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatism, while I want to show its characteristics with the help of some phenomena of our Central European cultural life. It is not a matter of importing any foreign oriental world view but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is no new Gospel, but the renewal of sensations deeply rooted in the human soul.

We have to be interested most of all how geniuses, affiliated to us, are filled with the theosophical world view. Thus Lessing believed in reincarnation. In Herder's writings, we find ideas of reincarnation. We find them with Schiller in his Philosophical Letters (1786), in the Letters from Raphael to Julius (Christian Gottfried Körner in Schiller's Thalia) and in On the Aesthetic Education of the Man in a Series of Letters (1793/94). Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical world view in the later works of Goethe. Indeed, this can surprise at first, but who occupies himself with the study of Goethe, especially with the profound Faust drama, immerses himself more and more into that which I try to explain. What I try to tell now has arisen very easily to me.

Goethe was a theosophist according to his whole nature, to the innermost sense of his life, because he did never accept any limit of his knowledge and work. Goethe was determined by his whole disposition to the world view we represent here. He was convinced that the human being is deeply connected with the world, and that this world is nothing material, but active, creative spirit; his world view was not an uncertain pantheism, but he believed that we can attain a living relation to God.

As a seven-year-old boy he collected the sunbeams and enkindled a little candle; he wanted to enkindle a sacrificial service by the fire of nature. In Poetry and Truth he says: if we oversee the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. The sages of all times always showed the swing of a pendulum between the higher and lower self,

When Goethe had returned home after his Leipzig study and after a severe illness, he devoted himself to mystic studies. He decided to express what took place in him, the whole urging, in the Faust drama; in the legend in which the Middle Ages wanted to describe the fight between the old and the new world views.

The 16th century did not think that one could progress to redemption by the own soul force; it let Faust perish. However, Goethe did it. After he had represented Faust as a striving human being, in the first version of Faust, he put him on a new basis in the nineties of the 18th century. In his Faust Goethe shows the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and as we will still see also in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

His view was: only somebody who has passed the stages of development, who has felt attracted to the divine, who has passed doubts, has the full conviction, has gained the confidence and has brought himself from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We need not to seek for the way to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita. We find the big problem also in the Faust. Goethe sets himself the task in his Faust to uncover the secret of evil.

Goethe uses the Prologue in Heaven to show the intention of his drama. The physical world is a reflection of force relations of the super-sensible world. With the words of the Prologue in Heaven Goethe describes the world of devachan, the sounding world. He represents it in the picture of the Pythagorean music of the spheres:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song...

Who says there that it concerns a superficial picture only says something superficial.

He also says at the end of the Ariel scene:

Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae!
In these sounds we spirits hear
The new day already born.

Goethe always speaks of the sounding of the spiritual world.

Theosophy speaks of three worlds: of the dream world, of the astral or soul world and of the mental or spiritual world. The emergence of the spiritual eye produces immense changes in the dream life first. If the new beholding, the new world becomes accessible, it is very regular. Of course, one must not found any science on what the human being experiences there. The student or chela has to learn to take this consciousness of the astral world along with him from the dream into his day consciousness. Later then he experiences the spiritual world in the dreamless sleep.

The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in pictures, the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called it the music of the spheres.

Still an important principle of the human being appears in the Prologue: the principle of karma. Who knows that Goethe knew the mystics of the Middle Ages thoroughly, does not speak of external pictures if Goethe says:

The spirit world is not sealed off
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!

Dawn or “aurora” is an expression which is familiar to the mystics. Jacob Böhme's first work was called: Aurora or the Rising of Dawn.

From the start, Faust strives beyond the limits of the physical life. The portrayal of the earth spirit is completely given in technical-mystic terms, a wonderful portrayal of the astral body of the earth, of the imperishable soul cover spiritually created from the fruits of life. The earth spirit is no symbol; Goethe considers him as a real being. He supposed that in the planet planetary beings are and have their bodies, like we have our bodies of flesh. Goethe's creed was: the earth spirit taught him not only to consider but to feel and sense the uniform being of stone, plant, and animal up to the human being. He taught him the brotherliness of everything created up to the human being, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed as 35-, 36-year-old man in The Secrets. A pilgrim walks to a cloister. He sees a rose cross at the gate. The rose cross is the symbol of the realms of nature; stone, plant, animal = cross, roses = love. Goethe himself says later that each of the twelve personalities represents a great world view or world religion in The Secrets. The aim of the pilgrim was to seek for the true core of the world religions.

In the first part, we see the young Faust being full of sensation and disharmony. With the help of the tempter Faust has to lead his lower self through all mistakes. In Mephistopheles Goethe created the picture of an ancient idea that is included in any profound wisdom. He tried to solve the problem of evil. Evil is the sum of those forces which oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists of the further development, any obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is called the spoiler, mephiz, the liar tophel in Hebrew. He leads through all kinds of experience of the lower self.

At the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the earth spirit; he attains the insight that it is possible to really recognise the self. After he has finished the errors, he gets to the spiritual world by purification.

Faust dies at an old age, and there he becomes a mystic. In the conversations with Eckermann (Johann Peter E., 1792–1854) Goethe says: for the initiate will be soon evident that a lot of profound is to be found in this Faust.

The descent to the mothers: in any mysticism the highest psychic is female; cognition is a conception process. The fire on the tripod is the primary matter. The realm of the mothers is the primary source of all things; the spirit comes from there. A moral qualification is necessary to enter the spiritual world devachan in the language of theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to lead the human beings upward. The human being must make himself appropriate and worthy of that. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he breaks out in consuming passion and, hence, Helena disperses.

Faust should fathom the profound secret of the human nature, how body, soul and spirit combine.

Spirit is the eternal; it was before birth and will be after death; soul is the connection between spirit and body; it tends more to the body first then to the spirit in the course of development, and with the latter to the everlasting. The development of the spiritual eye supports that.

In Faust you are now led into the laboratory in which Homunculus is generated; Homunculus becomes wonderfully understandable if he is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. Homunculus has to receive a body. Goethe shows the gradual development of the bodily in a magnificent picture at the Classical Walpurgisnight. Proteus is the sage who knows how the physical metamorphoses proceed. Homunculus has to start with the mineral, and then the realm of plants follows. For going through the plant realm Goethe uses the expression “es grünelt so.” [ Note 1 ]

Sexuality appears only on a certain stage. Eros combines with Homunculus: The human being comes into being from the connection of the male aspect of the soul and the female one.

Faust's loss of sight shows: the physical world dies for him; the internal vision rises in him. A magnificent picture of this process: “And as long you do not have this dying and becoming ...” The mystics express it in such a way: “for death is the root of all life.” And: “who does not die, before he dies perishes, before he dies.”

In the final picture of Faust the Chorus mysticus says:

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here is seen done;
what's indescribable,
here becomes fact:
The eternal-female
shows us the way.

In any mysticism the striving human soul is female. The connection of the soul with the world secret: the spiritual connection is expressed with the mystics as a wedding of the lamb. Goethe expressed this view even deeper in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

Goethe himself said of the last passages of Faust in the conversations with Eckermann that he wanted to show Faust ascending the Montserrat. In the poem The Secrets it is indicated. Parzival, the traveller through the valley. When Faust lost his eyesight, he got the possibility to quickly develop. There he came to the higher regions, to the devachan, we would say. However, Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. Thus he let Doctor Marianus appear in the “neatest cell.” This indicated: the release from anything sexual, being above man and woman. That is why he also added the female name with masculine ending to him. Now asexuality takes the place of uni-sexuality. He had completely awoken in buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth member, had got the upper hand over all the other members.

Note:

Es grünelt so: the verb “grüneln” is a nonce word: being or becoming something that reminds of green; the translation of this sentence reads: “the air smells fresh and green.”

Before Christmas, in the first cycle of these talks, I discussed the basic concepts of theosophy so far that I can probably venture to begin with the discussion of the most important question which there can be for the human being that of his own origin and goal. In the last two talks I tried to show that the theosophical world view is the basis of Goethe's works, and I try to deepen this Goethean world view from the theosophical point of view in the next talks. Today, I have inserted this talk because it probably joins both talks, which I held during the last fourteen days, about the theosophical idea of the origin, of the descent of the human being, spoken in the modern sense of the word.

Somebody who speaks today about the origin of the human being has to take that into consideration which the present natural sciences have compiled about this topic in the second half of the 19th century. You may assume that the results of the natural sciences are something absolutely certain that they are something against which one cannot struggle. Just this scientific idea about the origin of the human being has undergone such a fundamental change in the course of the last years that hardly one of the younger serious researchers stands even today on the same point of view on which the Darwinist research stood. Somebody who concerns himself with this science knows how strong these changes are. You know that the scientific materialistic point of view still took for granted more or less before short time that one has to derive the human being generally, the whole human being from lower animal ancestors that one has to imagine that our earth was once inhabited by imperfect beings and that the human being himself gradually developed through slow perfection of these beings without any influence of other forces up to his present summit. Today this purely materialistic point of view is shocked by the natural sciences.

One has believed that this scientific point of view has one single counter-pole. One has only regarded these two cases as possible until the foundation of the theosophical movement: either the natural evolution theory in the sense of the materialistic world interpretation or a supernatural creation history, as well as it is shown in the Bible. The Bible and the natural sciences are still established like two polar opposite matters. One has also imagined that the biblical idea of six creation days would have completely controlled the old times and that only the modern times which have progressed so marvellously far substituted it for a natural creation history. However, one left aside one matter. One did not know that the ideas, which the opponents of our so-called supernatural creation have formed to themselves in the last time and with which they struggled against the Genesis, the Six-day Work, are also for the so-called orthodox Christian doctrine and its adherents not older than at most 300, 400 or 500 years. All those who have generally concerned themselves with the investigation of these matters scholarly did not really take the Bible as it is available to us literally before this time. Taking the Bible literally, the view that its contents are to be taken literally was never shared by the serious, also Christian, researchers in the former centuries.

We can go back to the times in which Christianity originated. It arose from older world views. However, we cannot enter into discussion of that today. I would only like to point to the fact that we have in the outgoing age of the Greek philosophy a creation doctrine which goes back to the name Plato, and that this doctrine is most nicely developed with Aristotle. Plato says: God forms the bodily world according to his ideas, which are the models. Also the human body came into being from the archetype, the idea of God. What lives in this body as human consciousness is an after-image of the divine consciousness. The goal of human knowledge is recognising what God recognised. Striving for this goal the human being realises that his spirit must be eternal, because it is an eternal idea of God. Aristotle, the neo-Platonism, the Christian Gnosticism, they all live in such ideas of the origin and the goal of the human being. In the Christian Gnosticism we have a creation doctrine which I have to characterise to show you how little applicable the ideas were which the opponents of the supernatural creation history have recently still formed.

One imagined that in the course of times, since primal times, the human being was developing, that he did not have the same figure, not the same being as today, that he developed up to this being finally. In the end, one imagined that in different lower animal forms reminders of the former shaping of the human being exist. It is somewhat difficult to make these ideas clear to anybody because they are unfamiliar to the modern human beings. What faces us as a physical human being did not exist always in such a way as it is today. It was more similar to animals, and those animals who are most related to the human being also show such a condition approximately as the human being had at that time. If we go back to still older times, we come to more and more imperfect creatures. This was the view of the Gnostics. They did not suppose as the materialistic view does it that the human being came into being by himself from the lower animal kingdom; but they were clear to themselves about the fact that from a being that was still similar to a monkey the human being could never have developed unless a higher being had grasped and developed this being up to a higher figure. One could make that quite clear if one wanted to talk about it out of former ideas. But it suffices to show that the Gnostics had another creation doctrine than one normally states.

You find it clearly expressed with St. Augustine. He did not teach the faith in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but he imagines the development of the beings in such a way as I have just demonstrated. He imagines the influence of a spiritual world which achieves a perpetual rise of the being, while the external process is really that we were physically imperfect beings first, that then a spiritual influence took place and we became physically advanced beings, that then a spiritual influence came again and that we became then again higher beings until the highest spiritual influence took place and the human being developed as a human being. This approximately is the view of St. Augustine. He considers the Six-day Work in the Bible as a beautiful allegory. He is of the opinion that one can no longer pass such a view, as I have developed it as a gnostic one, in the purely gnostic form. He imagines that in the concepts of the Bible external allegories must be given because the large mass cannot understand it if one speaks in such abstract higher ideas. Hence, the creation history should be revealed figuratively, as well as it is commensurate with the popular ideas. You can find the same with Scotus Eriugena, with all great church teachers of the Middle Ages, also with Thomas Aquinas and up to the 14th century. You can explain the real course of the Western scholarship and science to yourselves if you get it clear in your mind.

Then, in the 14th, 15th centuries, this old evolution doctrine disappears. More and more it becomes apparent that the faith in the literalness of the Bible becomes authoritative in the church. We have to retain these facts. In the following centuries the human being is no longer familiar with them. All memories of such interpretations of the Bible had got lost, so that in the 19th century people believed to give something quite new with a natural creation history. Indeed, according to the materialistic way of thinking of the newer time, this creation history completely became materialised, while one faced it with spiritual concepts once. The creation history by Darwin and Haeckel has nothing to do with the real scientific facts, has nothing to do with that which one might investigate. There was also a natural creation history once; it was interpreted in the spiritual sense only, so that one deals not only with material processes, but also with a spiritual impact.

The facts have clearly spoken during the very last years, and numerous researchers have returned again to a more non-material view of development. However, there we have another researcher, Reinke, who has made his discussions about development in an anti-Darwinist way, significant in particular for us, because he returned to the old ideas without knowing the old evolution doctrine. He speaks of perpetual “impacts” of spiritual kind which evolution has experienced. He called these impacts dominants. This is a scanty outset of a return to former ideas. Development is said to progress no longer by itself, by purely material forces from imperfect to more perfect beings, but a more perfect being can only originate from an imperfect one because a new dominant strikes, a new force impact of spiritual kind which causes the progress, in contrast to the materialistic doctrines of Darwin, Lamarck, Haeckel et etcetera This term exactly reminds someone who looks deeper at the matter of something that Heine said: “poverty comes from pauvretè.” It is the paraphrase of the matter with another word. Only the theosophical world view again gives a creation history which faces up to the documents of the religious confessions in such a way, as the researchers till 13th, 14th centuries faced up to them, and let us now develop this creation history with some words.

If one wants to recognise the human being concerning his origin, one has to get clear about the nature of the human being. Someone who takes the view that the human being is only the connection of these physical organs: hands, feet, lung, heart et etcetera up to the brain has no other need to explain the origin of the human being than from material forces. That is why the question becomes different for him than for someone who considers the human being as an entirety. He considers the human being as a being that consists not only of body, but also of soul and mind. We have already seen to what extent the human being consists of three members: body, soul and mind. Body, soul and mind are the members of which the human being consists. What one calls psycho-spiritual has been subsumed by the modern psychology in one single concept, in the concept of the soul. The confusion of the modern psychology is that it does not differentiate between soul and mind or spirit. Theosophy has to point to this over and over again. What is soul-being from one side, what feels and imagines and thinks about the everyday things, all that is also soul for us theosophists.

The spirit begins only where we notice the so-called eternal in the human being, the imperishable. Plato said of it that it feeds itself with spiritual food. Only the thought that is free of the sensuous that rises to the character of eternity that is seen by the spirit if the spirit does no longer see through the gates of the senses outward but looks into his inside, this thought only constitutes the contents of the spirit. The Western researcher knows this thought only in one single field, in the field of mathematics, of geometry and algebra. There are thoughts which do not flow towards us from the outside world which the human being creates only from his inside, intuitively. Nobody could obtain a mathematical theorem only from observation. We could never recognise from observation that the three angles of a triangle amount to 180 degrees.

However, there are thoughts that do not refer only to space, but are pure thoughts that are free of sensuousness and refer to everything else in the world, to minerals, plants, animals and in the end also to the human being. Goethe tried in his morphology to give a botany of sorts which has such thoughts free of sensuousness. There he wanted to fathom how nature lives in its works. Someone who sinks and delves with feeling and sensation in that which Goethe gives in his theory of metamorphosis experiences something in it like a big raise to the etheric heights. If you are raised higher and higher to the recognition of such thoughts which are modelled on the mathematical in space, you get to the great mystics who inform us about soul and spirit. Hence, the mystic also calls mysticism “mathematics” – mathesis , not because mysticism is mathematics, but because it is built up corresponding to the sample of mathematics.

Goethe was such a mystic. He wanted to establish a world which raises us from the only psychic to the spiritual. What the human being does with his reason in the everyday life this sensible understanding of the immediate temporal and transient reality is raised to a higher level, into the pure thought-world. You can there experience something in yourselves if you rise to the pure thought if you can abstract from the sensuousness-imbued thoughts what belongs to the eternal. Theosophy calls this first element of the spirit also manas. I have tried to translate this term with “spirit-self” in my Theosophy. It is the higher self that separates itself from that which is limited only to the earthly world.

As well as now the thought can be raised to a higher sphere, the world of feelings can also be raised to a higher sphere. That world of joys and desires is apparently a lower world than the world of thoughts, but if it is raised to the higher regions, it is even higher than the world of thoughts. The eternal in the feeling is higher than the thought. If you raise the feeling to the higher spheres like the thought in mathematics, then you experience the second being of the spirit. The academic psychology only knows the lower feeling. It acts as if everything amounts to nothing more than the lower feeling. But in our world of feelings this eternal lives as a rudiment, and theosophy calls it buddhi. I have given it the name “life-spirit”, as the second spiritual being of the human being. Raise your thoughts up to the recognition of an eternal, and then you live in manas. Raise your feeling and sensation up to the eternal, and then you live in buddhi.

This life in buddhi exists only as a rudiment with the present human beings. The human beings can already think manasically sometimes if the thinking is regulated, is subjected to the logical world principles. However, there is also a thinking which wanders around aimlessly, that has got a thought and immediately another thought, always alternating. This is the everyday thinking. There is a higher thinking that is logical and coherent that feeds itself from the eternal according to Plato and is blessed with the eternal. If now a feeling has risen to this world, to such a world principle, it lives in buddhi. This means nothing else than a kind of eternal principles of feeling. Who lives in the everyday life can also err, can also stray with his feeling. However, someone who experiences the eternal norms of feeling in himself as the thinker experiences the eternal norms of the manasic thinking has the same certainty and clearness of feeling in himself as the thinker has clearness of thinking. Theosophy describes this as a spiritual human being who experiences the spirit in himself. This was also the deeper substance of Christ. The human being experiences Christ, lives with Christ, and participates in Him. Christ is the same as buddhi.

If the mere external will which is the mostly unconscious in the human being rises to the highest world principle it is hard to talk of this highest development of the human spirit, one can only indicate it then one speaks of the true spirit, of the spirit-man or, with a Sanskrit term, of atma. For the human will can be purified from the personal. These are the three members of the spiritual: manas, buddhi, and atma. As a substance is dissolved in water, these three members are dissolved in the soul. Where everything intermingles, the human being cannot normally make a distinction of that which wanders there aimlessly. Hence, the modern psychologist describes a real chaos as soul.

If that which lives out as the highest spiritual in the soul intermingles with the lower qualities of the soul, if it appears as a lower feeling, if it enjoys life in desire instead of love, we call it kama. Kama is the same as buddhi, only buddhi is the selflessness of kama, and kama is the selfishness, the egoism of buddhi. Then we have in ourselves our everyday reason which wants the satisfaction of our personal needs. We call this reason, in so far as it expresses manas, ahamkara, the ego-consciousness, the ego-feeling in the soul. So that speaking of the human soul we can also speak of buddhi which enjoys life in kama, and if we speak of manas or the real spiritual of thinking, we speak of the reason which enjoys life in the ego-consciousness, in the ahamkara.

I tried to show the gradual education of the human being, the purification of the human being from the psychic to the spiritual, in a book that I wrote some years ago, in my Philosophy of Freedom. You find there in the concepts of the Western philosophy what I have shown now. There you find the development of the soul from kama to manas. I have called ahamkara the ego, manas the “higher thinking”, the pure thinking, and buddhi not yet pointing to the origin the “moral imagination.” These are only other expressions of the one and the same matter. With it we have recognised the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being. This psycho-spiritual nature is embodied in that which the external natural sciences describe to us. This psycho-spiritual nature is, actually, the human being. It has something like a cover around him: the external physical corporeality.

The theosophical view is that the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being existed sooner than the present figure, than the physical corporeality of the human being. The human being did not originate in the physical but in the psycho-spiritual. This psycho-spiritual, atma, buddhi and manas, forms the basis of all physical creation. Plato also speaks of it if he says that the spirit of the human being must be eternal, because it is an idea of God. What develops as forms on earth approaches the eternal spiritual part of the human being.

We can imagine now that we are in a very distant point of the past. There we have the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being on one side. I believe that the materialistic thinking of the present is hardly able to imagine this psycho-spiritual nature. That is why since centuries the modern thinking is not accustomed to imagine the psycho-spiritual. On the other side, we have the sensuous life in the very distant past. How have we to imagine the sensuous life? The natural sciences teach us that we come to a human being of imperfect figure investigating the beings in the relics of the layers of earth. Going back farther we find times in which the human being was not in the present figure on earth. Only monkeys and related animals existed. Going back still farther we find that also the monkeys were absent and that only lower mammals existed. Still sooner there were reptiles and birds, and still sooner we find animal species of immense size and mightiness, the saurians, the ichthyosaurs. They lived in other way than today. Then, farther back, we find even more imperfect animals, until we come to an age where we cannot prove that there was any living animal. Physical life must have existed there in a still plant-animal form.

Theosophy points to conditions of the earth development of which is also spoken in science: the earth was not always the solid mineral ground, on which we walk today. It was in a liquid-soft condition once. If you look at certain earth formations, at mountains, you can still detect how they became hardened from a soaking-liquid condition. The whole earth was once still in an igneous-hot condition like an immense fire body. Theosophy points to the fact that still sooner a gaseous, an etheric condition of the earth existed. Everything that exists now in solid or liquid or airy condition on earth existed also at that time in a quite subtle etheric condition. You can imagine it approximately if you take a piece of ice; this is a solid matter. You melt it, and then it gets to a liquid, watery condition. You evaporate the water, while you heat it up. Then you have again in an airy-vaporous condition what was liquid before.

The whole earth was once in a much finer, thinner etheric condition. Akasha is the finest form in which before primeval times everything was in the etheric condition that meets us now as solid, liquid et etcetera on earth. The solid granite of our primeval mountains, all metals, all salts, all kinds of limestone, everything that is on our earth now also all plant and animal forms existed at that time in this subtle akasha. Akasha is the subtlest form of matter.

The human body is composed of all substances of the earth. All the kinds of matter are found in any chemical composition in the human body. At that time all these substances were in the akasha state and in this akashic matter now the psycho-spiritual being of the human being incarnated. This was another figure than that of today. In this akashic matter everything was still undifferentiated that differentiated later. Everything was in it that became mineral, plant, animal forms later. In this akashic matter in which the human being incarnated all animal forms were still contained, just as everything that became human form later.

If one wants to form an idea about the processes within the earth development which happened in these primeval times, one must strictly distinguish the duality. The human being is a duality; he is composed of two beings. On top is the divine-spiritual core of the human being: atma, buddhi, manas. In this divine-spiritual human being, the desire lives to become a human being. It drives him down. Descending he forms a cover from this desire, an astral body. On the earth animal-like beings formed, resulting from the still uncertain earth masses. These beings came from a still earlier earth state, the old lunar state, and a previous incarnation of the earth.

When this old moon had finished its cosmic existence, beings remained like a seed which had lived on the old moon; these were beings which were neither animals nor human beings, they were between animal and human being, a kind of animal-humans. They came out again, when the earth started to form. In these animal-humans the wildest impulses, instincts and desires lived. They could not yet take up the higher spirituality in themselves at first; they had to experience a purification of their astrality to be able to take up the higher principles in themselves. These are the physical ancestors of the human being of which Gnosticism, St. Augustine, and the scholastics speak. These were animal-like figures which lived in a more malleable body material than the physical matter is today, much softer than the lowest animals have it, for example, the jellyfishes and molluscs. These were beings which lived in a translucent corporeality, partly in very beautiful forms, partly in quite grotesque forms. They had no upright posture, they lived in swimming-floating posture; they had no marrow, this formed only later, still no warm blood, they did not yet have two sexes. They lived with all that later became plant, mineral, and animal like in a common astral state of the earth. At that time, the astral body of the earth had all earthly beings in itself. This astral earth consisted of the astral bodies of the human animals and was surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere where the monads, the spiritual human beings lived. These spiritual human beings waited above, until they could unite with the astral bodies below. But at first these astral bodies were not yet purified enough; everything impulsive of the animals, the instincts and passions had to be largely separated. They were eliminated as particular astral structures. These isolations took place repeatedly. These isolated structures hardened, and the other realms of our earth came from them.

We have to imagine that two astralities were there, an upper purer one and a lower denser one. The upper one, descending deeper and deeper, has an effect on the lower one. Thereby this separates the coarser parts from itself. The separated parts are condensed. The other realms of nature, which are now round us, come into being that way. The human being himself keeps the finest parts to himself. Thus the whole environment was connected with the human being; he separated them from his nature.

The astral matter below was condensed to reptile-like animal forms; they were still cold-blooded. They were not shaped like for example an ichthyosaurus from which we find leftovers even today. There are no leftovers of these formations at all, because these bodies were fine, soft bones only existed much later. The psycho-spiritual being unites first with these formations from above; both fertilise each other. More and more a densification of the matter takes place. It merges into an igneous-liquid state. This was about the middle of the age which we call the Lemurian one. This age preceded the Atlantean one. This igneous-liquid mass is criss-crossed by currents which condense gradually more and more to the later bones; the respiratory organ and heart organ with the bloodstream, the different organs of the human body form from these currents. Everything that is too coarse for the human being is separated repeatedly. For example, the wildness of the lion is separated. Outside an animal form of coarser substance comes into being: this later becomes the lion. In the human being his courageous, his aggressive qualities remain. The cleverness and cunning is separated; it forms the being fox outside, and the human being keeps to him what he can use of cleverness.

Then another developmental state of the earth follows. It became more compact, more solid. The human being was thereby forced to adapt himself to this more solid structure of the physical life on earth. He was able to do this only because he handed over a part of his being to the coarser materiality. From this part of the human being the first most imperfect animal world originated. Thus this is as it were a shell which the human being cast off once. It originated from the human nature. However, the true human nature thereby ascended to a higher level. The human being was freed from the impact which he had from the lower animal world. We see these last creatures which the human being repelled deposited in the first layers of earth. These are crustaceans, shellfish which the human being separated from himself. He became a somewhat purer being that way. It is like in a solution in which coarser parts have settled down. The further development takes place in such a way that the human being again hands over a part of his nature to materiality. Worms and fish originated from that. This is a cover again which the human being cast off.

In the second state, the human being had taken on a matter which is like our airy matter. The human being was incarnated there as an aerial being. It may seem peculiar to the materialistic thinker, but someone who familiarises himself with theosophy finds that the other creation history is a speculative fiction and that this theosophical creation history can already be evident to the everyday reason. Because the human being embodied himself with his soul in more delicate matter, in aerial matter, it was possible that he cast another cover off, that he separated animals from himself. At that time, the earth had already built up a somewhat more solid skeleton, and the human being formed in that which one calls fire mist. One speaks there of the sons of the fire mist. This came about because the human being cast his covers off which developed then to birds and reptiles on the other side. However, when the human being had advanced so far when he had advanced to this fire matter, he was able to take up a new impact from without. As well as we have seen in the outset of our earth how with the physical matter that united which the psycho-spiritual human being had cast off as the coarser nature, he united in the period of which we speak now and which already parallels states of strong densification of our earth, with higher spirit. At first this happened because buddhi descended and became kama. The human being thereby became warm-blooded differing from the lower cold-blooded beings. Also other creatures became warm-blooded on earth.

Up to a certain point of development there were only cold-blooded and passionless beings; the others originated in the middle of the Lemurian age. Also the two sexes developed from one. The human being repelled the lower beings which still live on as reptiles and when he was already warm-blooded, he repelled the birds from himself. Because of these separations he became mature to take up the spirit in his first figure. This is the race that appears as mind-endowed for the first time. In the Lemurian age, the human being came to a densified materiality, he became fleshly. This is the Lemurian human being. He lived on our earth at a time in which a lot of the old fire matter still existed. In this Lemurian age, the whole race completely perishes by volcanic catastrophes caused by the fire. Only some remain and live on.

The Atlantean period took place in the regions that are today covered with the floods of the Atlantic. Here once again something is separated from the human being: the higher mammals come into being. The human being still had the nature of the higher mammals in himself at first. He still had in himself what one calls apes. They all are separations of lower parts of his nature. The human being developed to a higher level only because he cast off the lower parts. What I called ahamkara came to the fore. In the first Atlantean time, ahamkara appears with the corresponding development of memory and language in the human race. Self-consciousness became consciousness of egoism. Hence, the first Atlantean time is also a time in which more and more the harsh egoism developed. We will still hear and read to which excesses the developed ahamkara led. The higher mammalian nature was cast off, so that we must not regard the apes as ancestors; rather we have to regard the human being as the first-born on our earth.

The human being exists incarnated in akasha, and everything that exists besides him was gradually eliminated by him. The human being and the animals adapted themselves to the relations and circumstances and became what we can get to know today. Paracelsus knew this and said that the human being himself has written down the letters of his whole being. So we must not regard the ape as an ancestor, but as a descendant of the original human being. It is strange that this theosophical approach reminds, quite elementarily, of a remark of the naturalist and botanist Reinke (Johannes R., proponent of neo-vitalism, 1849-1931). He says in his book The World as Action that the ape does not appear as an ancestor of the human being but as a degenerated human being dropped out of humanity.

This view agrees quite exceptionally with that which the natural sciences teach in these fields. They teach that the very first rudiment of the human brain, of the childish human brain in particular, is very similar up to a certain degree to an ape brain but that the developed human brain differs from the ape brain. So that the ape brain looks like something that takes a completely different course of development. However, the Darwinist view wants to base its theory of the relationship of the ape with the human being on the first impression. At that time, the human being cast off the ape nature, so that he could develop freer, upward to nobler qualities. The apes thereby degenerated and developed in another direction. The ape is not at all to be regarded as an ancestor of the human being. However, this furthers the human development.

After the human being had developed buddhi, kama and ahamkara, he was able to receive the first principle of the spirit again in himself: manas. Manas, the logical thinking, the inferring thinking developed since the last time of the Atlantean age and in our whole fifth age from this refined human nature. Thus the human being had to experience wisdom in egoism, in ahamkara, after he developed buddhi first up to kama; thus he had to lead a selfish life. But then wisdom developed again in purer form, so that the human being is able today to think logically. He ascends once to a higher kind of spirituality working out the buddhi nature from the kama nature and from the everyday feeling in order to ascend to even higher levels of spirituality. We speak of it later after we have got to know the levels of development still more exactly.

I could only outline the theosophical view generally speaking. This is the evolution theory, the theory of the origin of the human being in the theosophical sense. This is the descent theory which is destined to substitute that which has suffered essential losses by the real scientific facts in the last time.

Nevertheless, I would still want to read out some words of the botanist Reinke to show that my explanations do not completely contradict the scientific ideas and that today it is necessary to think a new kind of “creation history”. He expresses the following there: “It is clear from the start which deep contrast exists between this view that I have just explained and the view and research method of our science. We do not look for theories generally but rely on facts. Hence, the natural sciences would have to bring themselves to confine themselves to facts only. Up to now, the facts do not at all exist. I must protest against it if the case is shown as if zoology, anatomy etc. have delivered the facts. If a picture should be derived from it, it is fancy.”

At the same time, this naturalist does not yet understand that it is impossible to receive a view of the origin of the human being from the external facts one day. One is never able to do this, because the origin of the human being was not in the sensuous but in the psycho-spiritual. Not before one ascends from the sensuous to the psycho-spiritual if one ascends to a view that is no longer fantastic but spiritual, we can get again to a descent theory really satisfying the human being. Leading the human being to a satisfying descent theory is the task of theosophy. The “natural” creation history can no longer give satisfaction today. On one side, the need for spiritual knowledge makes itself noticeable, and, on the other side, the facts have disproved the evolution theory. The natural sciences are never able to say anything about the origin of the human being. If the origin of the human being is to be recognised, it can only happen in the sense of spiritual knowledge. Leading the present again to such spiritual knowledge is the task of the theosophical world view.

Answer to question

Question: Were the crustaceans the first living beings which were separated?

The crustaceans were not the first living beings, which were separated. Of course, these were mono-cellular living beings. However, these were not like the present-day mono-cellular living beings, they were in quite different conditions.

Question: How has one to imagine the fiery-liquid surface of the earth in the Lemurian age and the existence of beings on it?

Not the total surface of the earth was in the fiery-liquid condition, only the residential place of the beings was fiery-liquid. With the separation of the mineral beings something existed like a kind of leftovers, already almost like an impact of a skeleton which could accommodate beings that have taken on any solid shape. Palaeontology can only verify what had taken on solid shape.

Question: Is the future separation furthered by vegetarianism?

It is hard to speak about that because this question, even more than other questions, challenges the human feeling. However, I would like to speak impartially about the question. Indeed, the further refining of the human being is eminently supported by vegetarianism. With it should not be said that it is possible and good for any person to live as a vegetarian. The question is another if one asks whether one should become a vegetarian, than if one asks: what does vegetarianism achieve? Vegetarianism fosters the spiritual intuition and is also advantageous for the actions. At the same time, it is also a question of heredity. However, I would like to oppose a prejudice.

Indeed, in these fields the materialistic thinker can have an experience reaching up to a certain degree, but not a sufficient one. One says that people have become weak due to vegetarianism that they cannot stand the vegetarian way of life. This is right and is wrong. It is right that many people who occupy their thinking only with kama manas who have merely sensuous objects as content of their thinking and to that the usual scholarship, law, physiology or also medicine belong where the content of the ideas are merely taken from the sensory world , do not find everything in vegetarianism that they need. For all those who think, imagine and feel in the area of reason which is directed upon the sensory world, come to a point where they can collapse due to vegetarianism. There are many people of such kind. However, it must not be. I have got to know people in this field who themselves were learnt thinkers who were physiological, historical thinkers with whom it was not possible that the brain was properly nourished if they lived only vegetarian.

But the case changes immediately if the human being develops spirituality. As soon as he gets to the spiritual cognition, as soon as he lives in the spiritual, then it is possible that he can exist with vegetarianism. Then vegetarianism furthers the spiritual life, and the human being advances so far that he has an even higher future in prospect. I speak of this higher future in the next talks, on the 16th February, 23rd February and 2nd March where I speak about Goethe's Secret Revelation.

Question: What has one to understand by a psycho-spiritual being?

We will still see where the spirit has its origin. We have to imagine this spiritual impact within the human development as an influence coming from without. With it a view of nature is not injured or the opinion is justified that this is a dualism. Also hydrogen and oxygen give water. But someone who knows that does not need to be a dualist.

Question: What was there really as a human being, before the spiritual impact took place?

Up to a certain point the human being is the triad: mind, soul and body. If we advance somewhat upward, we have the bodily-psychic human being on the earth, connected with the physical of the earth. This bodily-psychic human being is incarnated there at first in a much finer and brighter matter than the later human being. A densification perpetually takes place there. That is why we also speak of the so-called “sons of the fire mist.” We deal there with a configuration of the human being. However, I would not like to portray this figure in a public lecture because if one puts it just like that it looks bad. The preconditions do not exist to understand this figure.

In the "fire mist" the incarnations happened in akasha at last. Physics of our time has no knowledge of this akasha. What we now have as an impact is the rudiment of eternity, the spirit, if we speak of spirit with the present-day human being, we speak of eternity. The consciousness which it concerned at that time was not at all the same as the consciousness in the hypnosis or in the trance states. It exists, approximately, in an especially lively dream. This was the condition of consciousness before the impact of the spirit.

Question: Why has any progress to happen by densification of matter, whereas we consider the delicate matter as progress?

The general form of consciousness was illuminated, but also limited by densification up to the material development of the senses.

Question: Is the akasha substance an etheric or astral substance?

The astral substance is the higher substance. The akasha substance stands between the physical and astral matters. It is the most delicate physical matter, in which the thought can develop immediately.

Question: How could one perceive the human being in these delicate conditions?

In the time when the human being was still aerial it was possible to perceive him by hearing, as a vibration, but not with the eye.

Question: Which influence did the impact of the spirit have on sexuality?

With the impact of the spirit the single beings became uni-sexual. Before both sexes existed in one being, it was hermaphrodite. At that time, the reproduction was similar to that of our mono-cellular beings.

Question: What is the origin of the theosophical world view?

One taught in pictures once. This is no longer possible today. Hence, one has to express the ideas in a language understandable to the reason, especially for our scientists. One should consider these matters as the physicist considers his, as a useful working hypothesis. This gives conviction bit by bit.

When Dr. Steiner was asked to tell some additional details about the process of the separation of the ape, he answered approximately in such a way:

Imagine an ancestor who has two descendants. One of these descendants can take up the divine spark in his form. He develops upwards and becomes a human being. The other descendant has a form created from coarser substances; he cannot take up the spark. He develops downwards and becomes an ape.

In this and the two following talks we want to occupy ourselves with what Goethe called his apocalypse, his secret revelation.

We have seen, among which lofty brotherhood Goethe counted himself. He was convinced that knowledge is not anything that is ascertained once from a human point of view but that the human cognitive faculty can develop and that this soul development is subjected to principles about which the human being needs to know nothing at first, just as little as the plant knows the principles according to which it develops. The general theosophical teachings of the developing cognitive faculty comply completely with the Goethean approach to life. In various ways Goethe expressed this view.

He now answered a question that he tried to answer in infinitely deep way that he approached when his friendship with Schiller became closer and closer. This friendship was hard to make because both personalities stood spiritually on quite different ground. Only in the middle of the nineties (of the 18th century) they met forever and complemented each other. At that time, Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to the Horen (Horae), a magazine in which the most beautiful products of German cultural life should be made accessible to the public. Goethe promised his cooperation, and his first contribution in this magazine was his apocalypse, his “secret revelation:” The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1794/95).

It concerns the great connection of body and spirit, of the earthly and the super-sensible he wanted to demonstrate, as well as the way which the human being must take using his developing cognitive faculties if he wants to ascend from the earthly to the spiritual.

It is a question that the human being must always put to himself. Schiller had demonstrated this problem spiritedly in his way in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. This treatise, little known and studied, is a repository for somebody who approaches this riddle. Goethe was thereby inspired to comment the same question and he did it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily which he annexed later to the Conversations of German Emigrants.

This fairy tale leads deeply into theosophy. Theosophy says also that the contents of knowledge of our soul are dependent any time on our cognitive faculty, and that we can develop this cognitive faculty higher and higher, so that we gradually do not have anything subjective as contents of cognition in our souls, but that we can experience objective world contents. The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily shows the development of the human soul to higher and higher insights, because all human soul forces can develop not only the human intellectual capacity. All soul forces, also feeling and willing, can penetrate into the objective world secrets. But you have to eliminate everything personal.

This fairy tale is so profound that it is worthwhile to consider it more intimately. It leads us into the depths of Goethe's world view. Goethe himself said of it to Riemer (1774–1841, Goethe's secretary) that the same applies to it as to St. John's Book of Revelation that only a few find the right thing in it. Goethe put his most profound ideas into it that he knew about the human destiny. He was always very reserved about it: he said if hundred human beings were found who understand it correctly; he would give an explanation of it. They were not found up to his death, and the explanation was not given. After Goethe's death, a big number of attempts to explain were made which were collected by Meyer-von Waldeck (1824–1899, German writer). They are partly valuable as building stones, however, cannot fathom the profound sense.

The question could appear: why did Goethe put his real life secret into such a fairy tale? He himself said that he could speak on such a question only pictorially. He did the same with it as all great teachers of humanity who did not want to teach in abstract words who treated the loftiest questions in pictures, symbolically.

Up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society it was only possible to give this highest truth pictorially. Thereby comes about what Schopenhauer so pleasantly called the “choir of the spirits,” if the spark is enkindled in the souls like by hieroglyphics. Where the world view became completely personal, completely intimate to Goethe, he could express himself only in this form. One finds two important clues in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann.

Later Goethe still expressed himself in two other fairy tales more intimately, in The New Melusine (1807) and then in The New Paris (1810). These three fairy tales are the most profound expression of Goethe's world view. In The New Paris he says in the end: “whether I can tell you what happens further, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I do not know.” This should be a hint to the sources of this fairy tale.

These fairy tales are revelations of Goethe's most intimate approach to life and world view. The fairy tale The New Paris points clearly to the sources from which it comes. It begins: all clothes drop from the boy's body, everything drops from the human being that he has acquired within the culture in which he lives. A man, young and nice, approaches the boy. This welcomes him joyfully. The man asks: do you know me? The boy answers: you are Mercury. This I am and I was sent by the gods with an important order to you!

Let us look at these three fairy tales as Goethe's most profound revelations. At first the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The fairy tale immediately begins mysteriously. Three fields are brought forward to us, a this-worldly one, a yonder one and in between them is a river. It shows the world of body, soul and spirit, and the path of the human being to the super-sensible world. The near side bank is the physical world, the yonder one, the country of the beautiful lily, is the spiritual world; in between is the river, the astral world, the world of desire.

Theosophy speaks of the soul life in the physical world, of this mortal world, then of the devachan which the soul experiences after death, but also if it got free of anything personal by means of an esoteric development already here in the physical world. Then it can ascend to the beyond, to the kingdom of the beautiful lily; then it finds the way to the yonder bank, where the human being constantly strives for, the way to the home of his soul and spirit. The river in between, the astral world, the current of desires and passions separating the human beings from the spiritual world must be overcome.

A bridge is now built across the river and the human being gets to the kingdom of the beautiful lily. This is the goal the human being strives for. Goethe was completely familiar with the significance of the lily in medieval mysticism. He was, so to speak, initiated in the secrets of the mystic world view and knew the alchemical efforts of the Middle Ages. After he had recognised the deepness of mysticism on one side, he also met the trivial reflection of it in the caricatures of literature.

In the first part of Faust, he still shows us humorously that the problem of the connection of the human being with the beautiful lily stood before his eyes. In the Easter walk you read before he makes the acquaintance with Mephistopheles of the efforts of the human being in a distorted alchemy.

My father was a worthy commoner,
who in good faith, but in his own eccentric way,
laboured at fanciful speculations...
...
...
there a mercurial suitor, the Red Lion,
would in a tepid bath be married to the Lily...

This is a technical term of alchemy: lily signifies Mercury. According to the theosophical world view Mercury is the symbol of the wisdom the human being strives for, and lily that condition of consciousness in which the human being exists if he has obtained the highest. The marriage of the male with the female in the human soul is shown here. “In a tepid bath” means in the alchemical sense “being released from the fire of desires.”

We speak of ahamkara in theosophy, the striving of the human self which wants to enclose the highest. This human principle striving at first in selfness is shown in alchemy as a lion which has been freed from selfness, from desires and passions, and is allowed to combine with the lily. Even if one did no longer know a lot of the true alchemy in mediaeval times, one had preserved the names. All higher truth stands in the etheric shine before us if we approach it, released from stormy desires, from the lion of desires which were cooled down in the tepid bath. Then the human mind can find the lily, the eternal-female, which attracts us; he can have the union with these truths of the spiritual worlds. This is a way which the souls have always gone in the fullest clearness. Mystic is somebody who strives for the clearness, the highness, and the purity of the views.

There must not be sympathy and antipathy of wisdom, but only an unselfish being merged in it. Because one does not feel any passion with the truths of mathematics, no quarrel is possible; if human sensations came into question, it would be also argued whether two times two are four. In the same etheric shine all higher truths stand before us if we express this attitude. It was this serenity in all that Pythagoras called catharsis, purification. Goethe described this whole way with its intimate secrets in his fairy tale because our colloquial language is not really suitable to show these matters. Not until we succeed in describing that in coloured pictures which lives in the soul of the mystic, we find the language to describe the highest form of the human consciousness, the lily.

One likes to represent mysticism as something unclear. But unclear is only somebody who does not find the way to the heights. The mystic strives for the most precious clearness of the concepts in pure etheric height, free of harsh immediate reality. We need to acquire the concepts only which lead us to this country of clearness. Goethe looked for this country of clearness, he strove for mathematical knowledge. In Goethe's estate I found a notebook fifteen years ago. This confirmed that Goethe concerned himself with mathematical studies even during later years, even up to the highest problems. Like a real gnostic he made his studies on nature and the human soul. Because of his intuitive spirit he could also behold the archetypal plant, for example.

But as he was hard understood concerning the archetypal plant and animal, he was still less understood concerning the soul-life. I remind of the conversation with Schiller in Jena in 1794. Goethe expressed himself to Schiller in such a way that he said that an approach of the world and its contents could be probably found which does not pick the things to pieces, as science does, but which shows the connecting band of all forms, which points to something higher, something uniform behind all sensuous phenomena. Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a formation which was similar, indeed, to a plant, but not to living ones which you can perceive with outer senses, and he said to Schiller: this is the essentiality of plants, the archetypal plant, this is the connecting band of the plants; but this archetypal plant lives in no single plant, but in all plant beings. It is the objective of all plants.

He answered to Schiller's objection that his archetypal plant were an idea: “If this is an idea, I see my ideas with eyes.” At that time, Goethe showed how he stands to the spirit; there is an intuitively beheld plant for him which lives in every plant being. Only an intuitive beholding can perceive the objective behind all sensory things, only thinking free of sensuousness can attain this. The will-o'-the-wisps of the fairy tale show us how thinking can develop to objectivity. Who cannot rise toward Goethe's view does not understand what he means; at that time even Schiller did not correctly understand what Goethe meant, but he did his best to penetrate into Goethe's world view. Then the letter of the 23rd August, 1794 came. This broke the ice between both spirits.

Goethe hid a lot of his higher spiritual beholding in this fairy tale. Let us now try to penetrate into the fairy tale.

You read: In the middle of the night, two will-o'-the-wisps wake up the old ferryman who sleeps on the other bank in the spiritual world, and want to be ferried over. Fro the kingdom of the lily he ferries them over the river whipped by the storm. They behave discourteously, dance in the small boat, so that the ferryman must say to them that the small boat topples over. Finally, after they had arrived at the bank with effort, they want to pay him with many gold pieces which they shook off from themselves. The ferryman rejects them and says sullenly: It's a good thing that you have not thrown them into the river which can stand no gold and would have wildly foamed and devoured you. Now I have to bury the gold. However, I myself can be paid only with fruits of the earth. He does not let them loose until they promise three cabbages, three artichokes and three onions. Then the ferryman hides the gold in the abysses of the earth where the green snake lives. This consumes the gold and becomes radiant from within. It can now walk in its own light and sees how everything round it is transfigured by this light. The will-o'-the-wisps meet it and say to it: you are our aunt of the horizontal line. The will-o'-the-wisps are its cousins who stem from the vertical line. These are ancient expressions, vertical and horizontal, which were always used in mysticism for certain soul states.

How do we come to the beautiful lily? - The will-o'-the-wisps ask. Oh, it lives on the other bank, the snake answers. Alas! We have nicely made our beds, from there we come! The snake informs them that the ferryman is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank but not back to the other. Are there no other ways? Yes, at midday I myself form a bridge, the green snake says. But this is not convenient to the will-o'-the-wisps, and that is why the snake points to the shade of the giant who himself is powerless, but is capable to do everything with his shade. At sunrise and at sunset the shade lies down as a bridge across the river.

The snake tries, after the will-o'-the-wisps had gone away, to satisfy a curiosity which had tormented it for long. On its wanderings through the rocks it had discovered with its feeling smooth walls and manlike figures which it hopes to recognise now with its new light.
It creeps through the rock and finds a room in which the portraits of four kings are put up. The first of the kings is of gold, he is decorated with a wreath of oak leaves. He asks the snake where from it comes: from the abysses where the gold lives! What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? The conversation, the snake answers. Then it looks at the remaining kings, the second is of silver, decorated with a crown, the third is of ore, he is decorated with a laurel wreath, the fourth king is misshapen and composed of all these metals.

Now a bright light spreads; an old man with a lamp appears in the vault.

Why do you come, although we have light? The golden king asks. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. Does my empire end? The silver king asks. Late or never, the old man answers. The bronze king begins: when will I get up? Soon, the old man answers. With whom should I combine? The silver king asks. With your older brothers, the old man replies. What will become of the youngest? He will sit down.

During this conversation the snake looked around in the temple.

Meanwhile the golden king says to the old man: how many secrets do you know? The old man answers: three. Which is the most important? The silver king asks. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to reveal it to us? The bronze king asks. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man says. What do I care, the composed king murmurs to himself. I know the fourth, the snake says, approaches the old man and hisses something in his ear. The old man shouts with booming voice: the time has come! The temple resounds; the metal statues sound, and at this moment the old man disappears to the west and the snake to the east, and both roam the abysses of the rocks very quickly.

So far for the moment the contents of the fairy tale. Schiller writes to Cotta: “The public will still find out something, one reads the resolution in the fairy tale.” We are in a point where we want to begin with the resolution. Because we do not want to go too far afield, we have to get some ancient expressions of the secret doctrine clear in our mind to understand the pictures: flames signify something certain to the mystic. What did Goethe show in the flames, the will-o'-the-wisps symbolically? The flames which are the will-o'-the-wisps represent the fire of passions, of the sensuous desires, of the impulses and instincts. This is the fire which lives only in warm-blooded animals and in the human being.

Once there was a time when the human being did not yet have the same figure as today. This fire was not there before the Lemurian race; before it was incarnated in the human body, there were any desires and impulses in this race. The human being became a longing, wishing being by the penetration with the warm-bloodedness, kama manas. The fish and reptiles belong to the cold-blooded animals. That is why mysticism makes an even stronger distinction than the natural sciences between cold-blooded and warm-blooded beings.

At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, a moment happens at which the human being develops from lower to higher stages. This moment is called in the myths, in the Prometheus legend, the bringing down of the fire. About Prometheus it is told that he had brought it down from heaven, and he was forged to the rock the physical, mineral human body.

The sum of the desires, emotions, instincts, and passions is the fire which pushes the human beings to new actions. In theosophy this flame is called the emergence of the human self-consciousness, of the ability to say "I" to oneself. If the human being did not get round to becoming the flame, he could not have developed the self-consciousness and with it he would not be able to ascend to the knowledge of the divine. There is a lower self-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and a higher one. The lower nature of the desires and the higher one of the consciousness are linked in the human being. The physical human being originated by the penetration of his self with the blood, with the flame. The flames of the will-o'-the-wisps show the emergence of the self-consciousness within the impulses, desires and passions. This is kama manas as we say in theosophy. With it the human being lives in the physical world at first, on this side of the river.

But the home of the human being in which he stays before he is born is beyond the river, in the spiritual world. The ferryman ferries the human being from this spiritual world over the river of the astral world to the physical, this-worldly existence. However, the seeking soul strives incessantly again back to the land beyond the river; but the ferryman nature cannot bring them back. That means: if they found him also on this bank, he would not accept them, because he is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank, but nobody to the yonder bank. The snake says this to the will-o'-the-wisps. Natural forces have brought in the human being by birth to the physical world. If the human being wants to be brought back to the higher worlds during life, he must do this himself. There is a road back. The self can collect knowledge. Gold is the occult symbol of knowledge. Gold and wisdom knowledge correspond to each other.

The lower humanity also has the gold of knowledge represented by the will-o'-the-wisps and becomes a will-o'-the-wisp if it does not find the right way. There is a lower wisdom which the human being acquires within the sensory world, while he observes the things and beings of this sensory world, makes ideas of them and combines them by his thinking. However, this is wisdom of mere reason. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with this gold which they take up easily and cast off easily again. But the ferryman rejects it. Wisdom of reason does not satisfy nature, only that gift can have an effect on nature which is connected with the living forces of nature. Immature wisdom makes the river of the astral foam, it does not accept it. The ferryman demands fruits of the earth as a pay. The will-o'-the-wisps did never enjoy them. They did never strive for penetrating into the depths of nature, but they must still pay tribute to nature. They must promise to fulfil the demand of the ferryman soon. This demand comprises fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three big onions. What are these earth fruits? Goethe takes these fruits which have skins representing the human covers.
The human being has his three covers, his three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Within these covers the core of the human being lives. In these bodies which surround it like sheaths the self has to gather the fruits of an incarnation after the other. Earth fruits must be gathered. These fruits do not consist of the knowledge of reason. The ferryman demands these three bodies as a contribution to nature. Goethe hid this teaching intimately in his fairy tale.

The gold comes to the snake. This is the gold of real wisdom. The snake was always the symbol of the self that does not keep to itself, but is able to take up the divine in selflessness, to sacrifice itself, gathers earth wisdom unselfishly, creeping in the “abysses of the earth.” It ascends to the divine not unfolding egoism and vanity, but trying to make itself similar to the divine. The snake in its unselfish striving takes up the gold of wisdom, it penetrates itself completely with the gold and thereby it becomes luminous from within. It becomes luminous as the self becomes if it has advanced to the stage of inspiration where the human being has become internally luminous and full of light and where light radiates toward light. The snake notices that it had become transparent and luminous. Before long one had asserted to it that this phenomenon is possible. It was green before, now it is luminous. The snake is green because it is in sympathy with the beings around, with the whole nature. Where this sympathy lives, the aura appears in bright green hues. Green is the colour in which the aura of the human being appears if mainly unselfish, devoted striving lives in the soul. Now when it itself has become luminous from within, the snake does see, before it felt only in its striving endeavours. All leaves seem to be of emerald, all flowers are glorified most marvellously. It sees all things in a new, glorified light. The things appear in such luminous emerald hues to us if the spirit flows from them toward us, if light radiates toward light.

Now after it has become luminous and has taken up the higher divine nature in itself, it also finds the way to the subterranean temple.

The sites, the mystery temples, in which in former times the truths were announced, were deeply hidden in the caves and abysses of the earth There light faces light.

Indeed, up to now the snake was compelled to creep without light through these abysses; but it could probably distinguish the objects by feeling. It perceived objects by feeling which revealed the forming hand of the human being, above all human figures. Now it is in the possession of light, and light faces it. It finds the temple and four kings therein, and the old man with the lamp approaches it. The man with the lamp signifies the ancient wisdom, the ancient wisdom of humanity which is only light and does not shadow which contains something that modern natural sciences cannot understand. Goethe says profoundly that the lamp of the human soul only shines if another light which the soul must produce is shown. It is the same view which he expresses in the saying which he placed in front of his theory of colours and about which he says that these are the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

Theory of Colours. Didactic Part

After the snake's eye has become sun-like because the light of the divine is enkindled in the snake, the light of the ancient wisdom of the world shines toward it.

The fire of passion has changed to the light. The fire which has changed in the earth to the light of wisdom is able to shine toward the bringer of wisdom, the “old man with the lamp.”

The snake looks at the four kings with amazement and reverence. Amazement and reverence are always the soul forces that bring the human beings forward and upwards. It beholds the golden king first, and he starts talking: where do you come from? From the abysses where the gold lives, the snake answers. What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? He asks. The conversation, the snake answers. In the conversation wisdom comes to the fore intimately for the human being, this is more refreshing than the great revelation. Does one not think of the Platonic dialogues in this discussion of the king with the snake? There were world secrets expressed with few words, few sentences. Goethe wants to explain: what is in the temple and happens there concerns the highest secrets of human development.

Which alchemy transforms the things that way? It is the initiation. Even the modern theory of evolution takes the perpetual transformation of the things as basis. The temple has to be subterranean at first, it is closed to the most human beings; but now the moment approaches when it is open to all human beings. It wants to send the gold of wisdom which has become light from human being to human being.

Who is the golden king, and who are the other three kings, the silver one, the bronze one and the mixed king? The golden king is manas, wisdom itself which could only develop higher in the mystery temple up to now. This is that soul-force which the human being can gain with purified thinking free of sensuousness. The silver king indicates an even higher element than wisdom: it is love, the creative word of the world buddhi, the god, being aglow with love. Its kingdom is called the kingdom of appearance; Christianity calls it glory (gloria in excelsis). It is pointed to a time which becomes later accessible only; then buddhi has the mastery over humanity. The bronze king whom the snake does not see at first and who is apparently little valuable is of huge seize. He looks rather like a rock than a human form. This is the king who expresses the willing-like soul-force which rests in the human being covertly.

He represents atma with which the striving human being is endowed last what he finds last.

Thus Goethe showed in a beautiful picture the endowment of the human being with the three highest virtues which are given to him one day. Without having attained this maturity, nobody was admitted to initiation in former times.

Then there is still the fourth king, of cumbersome figure; he consists of a mixture of gold, silver and bronze, but the metals seemed to have not correctly melted with the casting, nothing correlates with each other. This is the soul of the undeveloped human being who does not yet develop higher striving, in who thinking, feeling and willing are chaotically disorganised and which give “the picture a disagreeable appearance.” The fourth king shows the force of thinking which is still clouded with the sensory impressions, the fire of the soul which does not unfold love but lives in desires and impulses, the disordered will of the human being.

Remember the discussion of the kings with the man with the lamp. The golden king asks the old man: how many secrets do you know? Three, the old man replies. Which is the most important one? The silver king asked. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to disclose it also to us? The bronze king asked. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man said. I know the fourth one, the snake said, approached the old man and hissed something in his ear. The time has come! The old man shouted with penetrating voice.

There are three secrets the most important one is the obvious one. If this is disclosed, the fourth one can be known! This is the most important word of the whole fairy tale and at the same time the key of it as Goethe said in a discussion with Schiller. The old man knows three secrets; these are the secrets of the three realms of nature. The realms of nature have become steady in their development. However, the human being develops perpetually. He is able to do this, because the spirit, the self lives in him. The three secrets which the old man knows explain the principles of the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal realm.

With its own forces the soul has to find the principle which must live in the human soul if it wants to obtain the maturity of initiation. The snake has found it. It hisses it in the ear of the old man. What did the snake say to the old man? That it wants to sacrifice itself! Sacrifice is the principle of the spiritual world. – Somebody can walk the path to the higher knowledge only who does not regard this knowledge as an end in itself, and seeks for it in the service of humanity. All true mystics know this soul path; they all have gone through this experience of sacrificing like the snake. As soon as the words sound in the temple: I want to sacrifice myself! The old man shouts: the time has come!

The words of the old man, the time has come, point to the distant future when the whole humanity has attained the maturity. Then the time has come that the temple rises up above the river, that the whole humanity takes part in wisdom, in the initiation which was otherwise given to few people only in the temples, in the abysses.

To somebody like me who concerned himself with this fairy tale for twenty years deeper and deeper profundities appear, time and again the lines point to an even more profound primary source. Here are treasures to be found; however, we have to find them. We must only take care not to permit ourselves something in view of Goethe that Goethe lets Mephisto characterise in his Faust in such a way:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together!

(Faust's Study, verses 1936–1939)

Let us seek for this spiritual band in Goethe's creations.

Note:

The text of this and the following lectures are based on two incomplete transripts which were complemented with handwritten notes of two other participants.

Already eight days ago, I pointed to the fact that the basic question should be solved in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily how the human being develops from his lower self to the higher one, and that a big view of the future underlies the fairy tale.

How can the human being get to the gate which leads into the spiritual land? This was a basic problem for Goethe. He seizes this problem emphatically and tries to explain in many ways how the human soul forces develop.

Starting from this great point of view, he tries to show as a knowing man in all details which inner ways the human being has to finish.

We have stopped at the moment when the old man with the lamp and the snake meet in front of the statues of the kings, the representatives of the highest spiritual powers. We have to regard the temple as a symbol of the great occult schools which have always existed and exist even today. Into this temple the human beings are led and come gradually so far by the teachings and instructions which they receive there if they exercise them really that, finally, the initiation can be given to them.

We have seen that the snake hisses a word into the ear of the old man. We know that this is the resolution of the riddle, the most important word of which Goethe and Schiller said: “One reads the resolution in the fairy tale.”

In these words is the resolution, the behaviour of the old man reveals that to us. Immediately after the snake has spoken the words, the old man replies significantly: “The time has come!”

The snake knows the fourth secret; this is why the old man says: “The time has come!” When later the beautiful lily is informed about these words, she regards them as a ray of hope, as an indication of her redemption.

The old man returns home; he finds his wife upset. She tells him that two will-o'-the-wisps were there which did not behave adequately, licked off the gold from the walls, and then cast it off from themselves. The pug has eaten the gold and died. Then the wife still had to promise to pay the debts of the will-o'-the-wisps to the river. The old man approves this, because the will-o'-the-wisps would turn out grateful now and then. At first he neatens the house while he lets his lamp shine and covers the walls with gold anew that way.

A contradiction seems to be here. The golden king says to the old man: why do you come, although we have light? The old man answers: you know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. The human being must obtain an internal light first of all which he shows to the ancient wisdom; then only it can shine to him. However, when the old man has sunk to the west and walks with his lamp through the veins of the earth, one reads: all veins filled with gold behind him straight away; for his lamp had the miraculous quality to transform all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones and to delete all metals. However, it had to shine all by itself to show this effect. If another light was beside it, it only caused a nice bright light and refreshed everything living.

Thus you can understand this contradiction that it only shines if it meets with light; however, if no other light is there, it shines particularly and transforms everything that is round it: the stones become gold; the dead pug becomes an onyx. In such a way an interpretation results that gives the gist.

The old man now says to his wife: go to the ferryman, bring him the three kinds of fruit, and carry the dead pug to the beautiful lily; as she kills life, she brings the dead animal back to life touching it. His wife starts on her way. The basket with the dead pug is quite light; it becomes heavy when she adds the fruits. This is a significant feature.

The giant crosses her way; his shade robs one of each fruit and he consumes them. The ferryman cannot be contented with the remaining fruits; within 24 hours he must deliver the toll to the river. The woman commits to the river and dives her hand in it. Her hand becomes smaller and smaller and black and, in the end, it becomes invisible, while it is there according to her feeling; if the woman brings the toll, she will receive her hand again.

Just as the old woman arrived, the ferryman ferried a young man over who is like paralysed. Finally, both get across the bridge, which is formed by the snake at noon, to the kingdom of the lily. They find her surrounded by three servants, harp playing. She is of miraculous beauty, but sad, because the bird whose singing delighted her has fled from a hawk to her and has been killed by her touch. She is sorrowful about this new fright. Also the old woman complains her grief; however, at the same time she announces the message of her husband that the time has come.

Meanwhile, the snake and the will-o'-the-wisps have also arrived. The snake comforts the beautiful lily. The old woman asks for the missing fruits; however, in the kingdom of the lily nothing grows that blossoms and yields fruit, hence, she cannot receive them.

The point in time of something important seems to have come closer; there the young man tries to embrace the lily and sinks down dead. The snake draws a magic circle around the body to protect it against putrefaction which must meet it, otherwise, at sunset. Finally when the sun sets, the man with the lamp, led by the hawk, comes as well as the will-o'-the-wisps which the old woman has summoned.

Everybody prepares himself for contributing his part so that the harmonious resolution can take place. The will-o'-the-wisps have to open the temple; however, they cannot find the way to the temple. The dead young man and the body of the bird are carried off, the snake spreads about the river; when they all are over this bridge, it agrees to sacrifice itself.

All events are changed due to the sacrifice of the snake. The ancient wisdom once worked in all religions which were given to humanity by initiates. The religions brought refreshment to the souls which joined them vividly. The old man sinks to the west; he goes to the realm of the human beings. The snake, the intellect, which strives for enlightenment, sinks to the east, because from the east the spiritual light of the sun always shines bringing knowledge to the human soul.

The temple resounded, the metal statues sounded , this is a picture of the soul condition that takes the principles of the spiritual world upon itself by the sacrifice. In devachan everything sounds, expresses its being in sounds. Goethe speaks of a sounding sun in his Faust in the Prologue in Heaven this is devachan:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song.

Goethe means the spiritual sun, for the physical sun does not sound.

As long as the intellect strives only for enlightenment, as long as it acquires more and more inner light to itself by its striving one is able to do this also with the reason which becomes brighter and brighter , the old man with the lamp must have a soul light in which he can shine his light. Because the soul wants to sacrifice itself, the enlightenment takes place and everything changes. Everything is beheld in its spiritual condition, no longer in its physical one. Here conditions are described that the human soul goes through in the initiation.

The young man is reanimated by the sacrifice of the snake; however, he is still lacking consciousness. The body of the snake disintegrates into beautiful precious stones which the old man throws into the river. From them a nice constant bridge to the other bank comes into being. Thus a free transition from the sensuous realm to the spiritual land is created.

However, we have to hear first what happens within the temple. The gate is opened, the old man says again: the time has come! The temple lifts itself above the river; the hut of the ferryman forms a nice small temple within the other, an altar of sorts. The old man becomes a young man again; also the ferryman and the wife of the old man are rejuvenated. The latter joins the three companions of the beautiful lily and is the fifth in the alliance. The young man experiences the initiation in the further course of the fairy tale. The three kings give him what they have to give. The bronze king gives him the sword with the words: the sword on the left, the right hand free! The silver king presents the sceptre to him, speaking: graze the sheep! While the golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on his head and reminds him: recognise the highest! He is endowed with strength, beauty and knowledge.

Now the young man is not only alive, but is also mind-endowed. Hitherto he followed the old man with the lamp mechanically as it were from the world into the temple which is still subterranean. Then the temple rises upward. The man with the lamp gives light to the young man; he always stays on his side and leads him, finally, to the three kings who give him their gifts. You read then: “His eyes shone out of inexpressible spirit” , then the initiation is carried out! The young man is now allowed to unite with the beautiful lily, to embrace her in love, to consummate the marriage with her.

The fourth king collapses in himself, after the will-o'-the-wisps have licked all gold out of him. The giant arrives on the scene; in the beginning the young man is astonished, however, the shade does no longer cause damage. The giant becomes a kind of obelisk; he serves as a sundial with which artificial human figures instead of the numbers display the time.

The bridge and the temple are admirable buildings; people come in flocks, the bridge seethes with travellers, and the temple is the most visited on earth.

This is the end of the fairy tale.

This point in time is neither a present one nor a past one; it is one of a distant future of the human development when the consciousness of the present humanity which is directed completely unilaterally to the sensory world has gone through the soul path. This is described in the fairy tale; when the human being has got the wisdom, the initiation which grasps the things not only but also masters them. Then the whole humanity is able to receive the initiation.

What does this mean now? The old man with the lamp is, as already explained, the ancient wisdom, that wisdom which works by means of intuition which has the power to develop divine force not human force, to master the things, and to transform all things. It imprints the spirit into all things. It knows how to transform the stones into gold, how to destroy the metals. These are all qualities that are attributed to the elixir of life of the true alchemist. A profound knowledge is indicated with it. In the whole progress of the events which are shown in the fairy tale, Goethe shows a future condition of humanity and indicates how to attain this condition. If we consider Goethe wants to say what happens round us, we see the human development in a perpetual transformation; also nature changes perpetually. It is the task of the human being to penetrate the whole physical nature with his thinking.

The human being is able due to the progress of technology to transform the raw product of nature into something that serves the civilisation. In his art he breathes his mind into the lifeless marble. The human being converts nature into an art product; he transforms everything that nature presents to him into something that carries his character. Today nature is rationally spiritualised that way. The human being becomes the creator of a higher nature.

This is the development of humanity, this alchemy: bit by bit the human mind is imprinted on everything lifeless. Goethe looks in big perspective at a world where everything in the world is transformed, is infiltrated with the human mind, so that nothing of the realm of nature exists, but everything is converted by the human mind in such a way that everything lifeless is infiltrated with it.

This external transformation of the lifeless matter is shown in the fairy tale with the light that shines from the lamp of the old man and changes the stones and metals. However, if this light shines into the human soul, it has attained a quite different power, it not only controls the dead matter but it spreads also over life. The human being becomes able, taking up the ancient profundities in him and obtaining internal knowledge, to attain quite different forces. He will not only rule over the lifeless matter in future times but also over life. He will also change living beings by his spiritual alchemy. He takes up the same wisdom which once created the world, the ancient wisdom of the world, and that is why he is able to transform dead matter into living matter.

Wisdom transforms the plant which is lignified and withered. The dying plant realm becomes silver, the glamorous appearance. However, the living, the feeling, the animal goes another way; its lower nature is sacrificed, must die to ascend to the height. What Jacob Böhme said who probably knew these secrets of the alchemists: “death is the root of all life” and:

Who does not die, before he dies,
Ruins himself when he dies.

And what Goethe puts into the words:

As long as you don't have
This dying and growing,
You are any dull guest
On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan)

Hence, the human being is able to attain the ability to develop his higher self in himself if he deadens the lower one in himself. The human being is only able to approach the godhead if he has overcome his lower nature.

Only the prepared human being who has experienced the hard ordeals, the internal purification, and the catharsis can understand the divine. Hence, the young man is killed who approaches the lily, before he is prepared and purified.

Who lifts the veil of Isis, who walks through guilt to the image of the goddess must perish. Only after he has slowly prepared himself, has familiarised himself with all probations, he is able to receive the initiation. The young man, who faces us in the fairy tale at first, has not yet purified his inside. He is paralysed when he wants to get to the spiritual world with such a soul constitution, and later when he forces entry, he is killed by the lily. In Faust we find how Faust can probably get to the spiritual world using magic where those are who are no longer in the physical existence: Paris and Helena. But he is led by Mephistopheles, not by own internal soul work, and he is paralysed. Only the human being, purified by grief and pain, carried by serious desire and striving can find entry, after he has been well prepared by the “lamp.” Only then he can hope to get to the initiation.

The old man with the lamp returns to the hut. The will-o'-the-wisps have been there in the meantime. He finds his wife in big distress, because the will-o'-the-wisps were ill-behaved to her and have licked off all gold that covered the walls since ancient times. They have called her their queen wantonly, and then they have shaken off the gold licked from the walls. The pug has eaten of it, and now it lies there dead. The will-o'-the-wisps are the representatives of the lower personality full of desire; they take up all gold of knowledge wherever they find it, but in futile, complacent, selfish attitude. They cannot recognise the high value of the gold; they do not respect it and cast it off from themselves. They spread the gold to the ferryman. The ferryman is terrified from this gold in which the personality full of desire is involved. He says: the river the pure cosmic astrality cannot use it; the river wildly foams up.

However, the snake transforms the gold; it uses it for its searching striving. It feels that it has to bend its head to the earth to stir from the spot. Thanks to the gold the will-o'-the-wisps have ideas and concepts, but these are abstractions, are rigid; the will-o'-the-wisps themselves are unproductive. The snake makes the gold valuable; it becomes luminous from within. It makes the gold fertile; the gold changes its thinking, so that it can penetrate the nature of the things. With the will-o'-the-wisps it leads only to the vertical line, to the soul constitution, flitting about, without life. It loses the relation to that which is below.

The animal, the pug, cannot take up wisdom; it is killed. Now the effect of the lamp comes to the fore. As long as the pug lived, the lamp could not lead it to God; this is only possible by deadening the lower qualities. The old man with the lamp can transform the dead pug into a nice onyx. The change of the brown and black colours of the precious rock makes it the rare piece of art but he cannot reanimate it. Wisdom only cannot give life; other forces must be added. The pug can only receive life if it has gone through death. Death means deadening everything, all lower desires. Thus Goethe points to the fact that also the animal is developing, even if not the single animal; the animal type is determined to perfection.

Goethe was a theosophist; that is why he knows this ancient wisdom of ascending; from the purification of all beings which all religions contain in their core. The ancient wisdom of the world gleams in all religious systems; its truth shines on all confessions of the different peoples of the earth. Goethe shows this wisdom in the old man. But what suppresses the lower desires and passions only does not suffice. An even higher wisdom must come; the ancient wisdom will be replaced by an even higher wisdom. The events in the hut of the old man point to it: “The fire of the fireplace had burnt down, the old man covered the coal with a lot of ash, put the luminous golden pieces aside and now his lamp shone brightly again.”

The secret doctrine in which the ancient wisdom is hidden is a property of humanity since many thousand years. There was the strictest secrecy of it; only to somebody who was prepared the light of wisdom was allowed to shine. The snake sacrificing itself represents the higher self of the human being which gets to knowledge. The lamp must not illuminate the dark; the wisdom of the teacher is not allowed to approach anybody who wants to accept it only, but anybody who meets it with inner life. But this refers only to the highest enlightenment. The great teachers of humanity, the great initiates are always active. The effect of the ancient wisdom always takes place, takes also place if no other light shines unless it is disturbed. Thus we find profound significance in this apparent contradiction. Everything that happened in the course of human development was caused by the ancient wisdom. The administrators of this ancient wisdom, the initiates stood behind everything that happened from culture to culture by human beings; they direct the destinies and events that happen on the external plane of world history.

We look now at the wife of the old man; we face a female figure. Mysticism shows the different soul states of the human being as different female figures. The old woman is the soul state of the present humanity remaining in the sensuous life. With it something low is meant; it is the general condition of the human beings. She is married to the old man with the lamp. humanity is married to the ancient wisdom. The ancient wisdom also works on the present-day humanity; humanity could not survive without it. This ancient wisdom has always combined with the sensuous humanity.

The woman goes to the ferryman who represents the natural forces. She must clear away the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The present humanity owes something to nature. The lower self, the human being who feels himself gifted with the body has to pay the price to the remaining nature which also belongs to him even if he does not feel it belonging to him. The flickering soul-life of the will-o'-the-wisps does not accept this; they cannot get to such concepts. Nevertheless, the law has an effect: “they feel chained to the soil in incomprehensible way, it was the most disagreeable sensation which they ever had.” The will-o'-the-wisps represent, as already mentioned, the lower knowledge. The human being who is gifted with sensuousness has become this only because he has gone through the whole nature. This is shown in the picture of the river

The river, the passing current of passions, must receive the toll in form of “earth fruits.” Three bowl-shaped fruits are the single covers which surround the true human being, the real self. This self descended from the kingdom that is beyond the river. The river must be crossed in order to land in the astral kingdom; the river has to get the skinned fruits. The old woman the healthy prudent human soul-force is able to give the toll to the ferryman, the representative of the unconsciously active soul forces, but she cannot pay the complete one; for the present general consciousness does not suffice for that. Because the old woman remains in debts, the sense-perceptible disappears. It can reappear to new life only if she penetrates to the spiritual.

The giant hindered the old woman to pay the debt to the ferryman; he robbed and ate a part of her fruits which she wanted to carry to the river. Previously the snake said to the will-o'-the-wisps when they required knowing how they can get to the kingdom of the beautiful lily: “The giant is capable of nothing with his body; his hands lift no straw, his shoulders would carry no faggot; but his shade is capable of a lot, of everything. That is why he is most powerful with sunrise and sunset, and one needs only to sit down on the nape of his shade in the evening; the giant then gently approaches the bank and the shade brings the traveller over the water.”

The will-o'-the-wisps refuse the way over the snake which wants to lie down as a bridge over the river at the bright midday. What is the giant? About the snake that soul gets to the spiritual world which developing its own forces is able to devotedly cross the threshold with bright daytime consciousness. However, there is a second way, when this bright daytime consciousness is lessened, in the somnambulistic states. The human being is weak there, without own consciousness. Lower forces then work on the human being; the soul itself is without own forces, is powerless. Nevertheless, the human being can also experience something of the spiritual world that way even if it is subjected to errors.

There is grief in the kingdom of the beautiful lily. The lily is desolate; to her feet the canary, her last joy, lies dead who usually accompanied her songs. The lily is mourning; for the bird is dead which reminded her of the sensuous. However, the spiritual and sensuous realms belong together; harmony is there only where both penetrate each other. But a new harmonisation between both should be attained; this is why the memory of the sensuous has to go through death to become new afterwards.

In the companions of the lily again three beings face us. We hear about them next time. They complement each other with the lily. The old woman represents the present condition of consciousness, the human intellectual soul, the lily the higher consciousness that the human being obtains if he sacrifices himself like the snake. The old woman is the bright daytime consciousness, the lily the clairvoyant consciousness that will be given to the human being. Before humanity got the present consciousness, three former states of consciousness which are shown as the three companions led the way. These are states, like they appear in trance today; still appear in certain atavisms sometimes, dreamy, vague, but comprehensive states of consciousness. The human being experienced other conditions of consciousness, before he got his present waking consciousness. In them the harmony between sensory being and spiritual being was given by nature. The three companions sleep, while the transformation takes place; they live over into the new state without noticing the transformation. They already got by nature what the other soul forces have to acquire for themselves.

With the rise of the temple the lily also brings the old woman with her. Then the human being will combine all five states of consciousness, the previous ones and the future ones, in him. The young man attains the highest consciousness in the last scene which can be given to the human being for the time being.
The hawk has killed the canary. The harmonisation of the sensuous and the spiritual has no longer to be sought looking back at old achievements of humanity, but looking at the future. The hawk is the herald of the future, of the prophetic. He collects the last rays of the setting sun with his crimson chest. The sign leads the old man with the lamp who causes the transformation and leads all to the temple of initiation. The hawk hovers about this temple and throws the light of the newly rising sun to the temple, so that it is illuminated with a heavenly shine. Thus the hawk connects a setting world day with a newly dawning one. The hawk is that in the human soul which senses in advance what should come true in future.

In the temple the initiation takes place. There is shown how the young man is gifted with the three forces: manas, buddhi and atma. We see next time why Goethe depicts these three forces just as the three kings,

The temple was once in the abysses of the earth. One had to join an occult school which deeply hidden from the external world unfolded its effectiveness in order to get to the higher secrets. However, the time comes when the temple of the esoteric training does no longer rest in concealed depths, but ascends, is there open and free in front of the whole world, accessible to all human beings. When does this time come?

Remember the mystery word which the snake whispers into the ear of the old man in the subterranean temple; the solution of this mystery word is reserved to our time. What did it answer to him on the question what it has decided? I want to sacrifice myself, before I am sacrificed.

The time comes for humanity when the human being is really ready to sacrifice himself, to enter the whole nature, to feel effective in the elements of the whole nature, not in his narrow own being; when he will be ready to give up his self as single egoistic self and to enter the all-embracing self, to regard himself as part of the all-embracing self. Then the human being has achieved his goal, the gate of higher knowledge uncloses itself to him, as well as he gives up everything that closes him from the remaining world. The true initiation can now take place for humanity.

This time is when “the three are there who rule on earth: wisdom, appearance and power.” – The old man with the lamp says who brings about this state. The initiation is now described: “With the first word the golden king got up, with the second one the silver, and with the third one the bronze king slowly stood up, when the composed king suddenly sat down clumsily.” The golden, silver and bronze kings are the three highest forces of the human being in their purity. In these three forms the human being experiences the divine in himself. Only when the human being can survey the forces in him and in their origin worlds in full purity and integrity, he is ripe to initiation. These are the pure, divine forces which experience themselves in the human being as human thinking, feeling and willing. The course of the fairy tale shows the purification of these forces from the lower personal.

All that still lives chaotically in the human being. As long as the human being is still undeveloped, chaos prevails in the interaction of these forces. The fourth king is a representative of the present humanity; but he collapses in himself, that means that this state of humanity is replaced by the new state which the initiation of the young man shows. Everything is transformed. Then that happens which the hawk prophetically announces, while it collects the rays of the sun which shines to the new world day: “the king, the queen and their companions appeared in heavenly shine in the twilit vault of the temple;” there will be peace and the harmony which will bring the rest in the all-embracing consciousness of humanity.

The representative of humanity, the young man, is endowed in the temple with this new consciousness of humanity. He is endowed with a new life; previously he was directed mechanically by other forces, so to speak, not by his own forces. Now he has gained these new forces, he can get married to the beautiful lily, the clairvoyant consciousness, and this world and the next world can be combined with each other by the sacrificing snake which establishes the foundation of the bridge on which all human beings can walk to and fro.

The young man receives the force for that from the three kings. He is led by the old man first to the third, the bronze king. He receives a sword from him in a bronze scabbard; this is the symbol of the highest human force: atma. The king shouts: “the sword to the left, the right hand free!” In the left hand that should be which represents the human strength, where it does not serve quarrel, but only defence. The right hand should be free to the work, to the service of humanity. The young man is endowed by the silver king with that which buddhi can give the human being: wisdom in harmony with feeling is true philanthropy. With this love the young man should live among people and graze the sheep. The golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on the head of the young man and speaks: “recognise the highest.” The young man receives the knowledge of the most perfect kind, manas, from the golden king. Now he can enter into the bond of marriage with the beautiful lily and the bond is much influenced by love: “love does not rule, but it cultivates, and this is more.”

The subconsciously working soul forces the giant have lost their destroying force; the giant damages for the last time when he staggers about the bridge to the temple. He is seized by the soil and is only a pointer of a past human cycle, a gigantic statue which displays the course of the hours and days and human cycles like a sundial.

If we want to summarise what Goethe wanted to express with his fairy tale, we can say: Goethe wanted to show the development and final redemption of the single human being and the whole human race in poetic pictures. The fairy tale contains the secret of the decay of the lower and of the rise of the higher human being and of the condition of the final union with the divine which any mysticism strives for as its loftiest goal, as salvation, as rest in salvation, as union with God. When this moment of sacrifice has come, when this “dying and growing” has become fact, then not only the spiritual comes to the sensuous, but also the sensuous to the spiritual. When this time has come, not only single esoteric students, single inspired mystics are able to get to the temple, but all human beings walk to it, to and fro, to the spirit-land.

Goethe pointed to this great moment in the evolution of humanity in his fairy tale. A lot could still be said that is included in this fairy tale. But one can indicate a lot only. If one can usually say of the poet:

Who wants to understand the poet
Has to walk to poet's land,

we must realise speaking of Goethe that we apply this saying to Goethe in such a way that Goethe's land is the land of spiritual reality. Only somebody who knows the mysteries and the mystery knowledge can completely penetrate into the rich contents of this fairy tale. What has only been indicated here can serve as a signpost to a more and more intimate understanding of the contents of this fairy tale.

In the two preceding talks I tried to explain the basic symbols in Goethe's profound fairy tale. We have seen, how Goethe, how the mystics of all times have given the truths which they counted among the deepest ones in characteristic coloured symbols.

Today you allow to me to add two other fairy tales: The New Melusine and The New Paris. It may seem that something unnatural, something worked out is in these fairy tales, but you will see, if you delve in these pictures that also here only an esoteric, mystic interpretation enables us to give an explanation.

Goethe inserted the fairy tale The New Melusine at a typical passage of Meister Wilhelm's Journeyman Years (1807, 1821, 1829). Who penetrates into Goethe's mind will never abandon himself to the superficial view that Goethe deals only with putting pictures next to each other like in a kaleidoscope, that it concerns a mere play with pictures. But he realises that Goethe expressed his most profound inside.

A man relates it who wants to develop his soul to higher capacities and, hence, “refrains from speaking as far as speech expresses something ordinary or accidental, however, another talent of speech has developed to him that has a intentionally prudent and pleasant effect.” Like this man, also Wilhelm Meister deals with secret societies, is directed by mysterious guides.

The man repeats and arranges the rich experiences of his life calmly. Imagination combines with it and gives life and movement to the events. He is a philosopher who speaks in this fairy tale to us, and at the moment when in the end of the story he gets the longing for developing his soul to a higher condition, he also understands the ideals of the philosophers.

Let now the fairy tale of The New Melusine pass our souls in its main trains which deeply lead us into Goethe's nature.

A young man gets to know a strange woman in an inn who deeply impresses him. He sees her carrying a small box and keeping it carefully. He asks whether he cannot do anything for her, to oblige her. She asks him to continue the journey with the small box instead of her because she has to stay here some days. However, he should always take a special room for the small box and close it with a special key, so that the door cannot be opened with any other key. He departs. On the way his money runs out; the lady appears and helps him. Again he spends the money; he believes that in the small box something could be that may be sold for money. He discovers a crack in the small box, looks into it, something bright gleams in it. He sees a chamber with many dwarfs, a girl among them. It exists in double figure (as lady and as dwarfish girl), outside in a big, inside in a small size. He is deeply horrified; the lady appears again, and he receives explanation about the small box. The lady says that her true figure is that of the dwarfish girl.

This race of dwarfs has been there long before the human beings, when the earth was still in the igneous state. It had not been able to hold their ground because a race of dragons waged war on them. To save the dwarfs a race of giants is created, however, these soon position themselves on the side of the dragons. Hence, for the protection of the dwarfs who withdrew into the mountains still a new race of the knights or the race of heroes as it is called in the original version had to originate. With it dragons and giants, on the one hand, dwarfs and heroes, on the other hand, face each other. However, the dwarfs become smaller and smaller, so that it became necessary that every now and then somebody of them comes to the upper world to get new force from the realm of the human beings.

The young man wants to combine with the lady, and after some other adventures she says to him that he himself must become a dwarf. She slips a ring on his finger, the young man becomes small like a dwarf and enters into the world which he has seen in the small box. Now he is united with the lady. But longing for the land of the human beings soon awakes in him, he gets a file, saws through the ring, shoots up suddenly and is a human being again.

Goethe makes an interesting remark at the end of the fairy tale when in the young man the longing awakes for being a human being again. This remark is important to understand the fairy tale. He lets the young man say: “now I understood for the first time what the philosophers might understand by their ideals by which the human beings are supposed to be tormented so strongly. I had an ideal of myself, and appeared to myself sometimes in the dream as a giant!”

We want to see now what Goethe wanted to say with this fairy tale. The race of dwarfs, created before dragons, giants and human being, leads us to the track. The people of the dwarfs “is still active and busy since time immemorial. But, in olden times, their most famous works were swords which pursued the enemy if one threw them to him, invisibly and mysteriously binding chains, and impenetrable shields. Now, however, they occupy themselves chiefly with things of comfort and finery.” There it is pointed to that which the mystics call the “sparklet” in the human soul, to the self of the human being, which God sank in the human body. This self of the human being had magic powers, secret magic forces once; now it serves to make the earth in all cultural works subject to the human being; in all that the human mind, the self works.

What is the small box? A world, a small world, indeed, but an entire world. The human being is a microcosm, a small world in a big one. The small box is nothing but a picture of the human soul. The human reason, the present consciousness, as we have got to know it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake in the wife of the old man, designs pictures of the whole big world, pictures on the small scale. What is summarised in the human soul as the sum of the thoughts? It is the spiritual spark. If we saw into the human soul, we would discover the spiritual spark with the seeds of the future stages. This spark was enkindled in distant past in the human being who was only gifted with a vague dream consciousness. This spiritual spark which smoulders in the human soul preceded all physical states. Compared with the future size, with the perfection of the human being is that which lives today in him only seed, only something dwarfish.

There were other human races once; before our age the Atlanteans and the Lemurians lived et etcetera In the middle of the third, the Lemurian race the endowment with the spiritual spark, with the consciousness occurred. The self is in the human being the seed of the eternal which is able to rise by development of the human being to self-conscious life.

This consciousness came from another world, preceded the origin of the human being and was there earlier than the other components of the human being (kama manas). This self-consciousness is paired with passion even today. The true philosopher strives for freeing the divine in the human being from the sensuous, so that it realises its divine origin; manas is released from kama. Then this released manas develops buddhi from itself, the consciousness of being in the divine world to strive then to atma.

We know that this spiritual entity of the human being experienced the most different forms. One of these stages is called that of the dragons. Also in the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky we hear of igneous dragons as symbols of the time in which the human being descended from his higher spirituality .

The way through the raw physical figure is shown with the giants. The human being must be refined, he rises up to finer and finer figures, he becomes the hero, the knight. These spiritual knights have always tried to form an alliance with the ideal of true humanity; they should live with the dwarfs in good harmony. “And it is found that afterwards giants and dragons, as well as the knights and dwarfs have always held together.”

Now the woman tells “that everything that has been big once must become small and decrease; thus we are also in the case that we always decrease since the creation of the world and become smaller, above all the royal family.” Hence, a princess of the royal house must be sent “every now and then to the country to get married with an honourable knight, so that the race of dwarfs would be refreshed again and saved from total expiration.” For the later-born brother has been so small, “that the attendants have lost him even from the nappies and one does not know where he has got to.”

Now a ring is brought the ring is always a symbol of the personality and by this ring the dwarf becomes a human being and combines with the spiritual knight.

In what way does the race of dwarfs develop? It goes through the physical humanity, through the different states of consciousness. In what way does the present consciousness develop? By the law of the karmic human development. We consider it at an example at first. The child learns to read and write; the efforts, the exercises which it does, all that passes; what has remained is the ability to read and to write. The human being has taken up the fruit of his efforts. What was outside at first, in the physical nature, has become a part of his.

“You are tomorrow what you think and act today” or as the Bible (Galatians 6:7) expresses it: “everyone reaps what he sows.”

We are the products of past times. Our soul would be empty if it did not collect experience from the external world. The soul would die away if it did not take up the lessons from the outside world.

If we want to make the things which we experience really our own, we must process them. This is the law of evolution and involution by which we increase our being. We have to collect force from the surroundings. We collect experiences in the outside world to make them our spiritual property. Then the mind processes the experience, which he has collected to return over and over again to the outside world, in the hours of leisure. Our concepts would atrophy if we withdrew from the outside world. It is a spiritual respiratory process, a “giving and taking.” We develop our inside world outwardly, we soak up the outside world. Goethe showed this evolution and involution process in this fairy tale in important way. The words of the young man concerning the ideals point to it. Ideals are what is not yet, what should be realised in future. What the human beings lifts out above all is the possibility that he puts ideals, is the possibility to approach a higher future. Because the human being gives reality the possibility to grow into a higher future, he cares for idealism.

Goethe also nicely expressed this truth in the fairy tale The New Paris. In this fairy tale Goethe speaks of himself. You find it in the outset of Poetry and Truth. Shortly before, in Poetry and Truth, the young child Goethe tries “to approach the great God of nature, the creator and preserver of heaven and earth” setting up an altar. “Natural products should represent the world allegorically, about these a flame should burn and signify the human soul longing for its creator.” The boy lights the flame of the little aromatic candles in the light of the rising sun. But he damages some things, and concludes that “it is generally dangerous to want to approach God on such ways.” It was a certain fact to Goethe that one can approach the divinity only if the human being awakes the abilities slumbering in him as we could show that in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Also in The New Paris he points to this way.

In the outset of the fairy tale, Goethe describes how the god Mercury appears to him as boy at Whitsun Sunday in the dream and gives him three nice apples, a red, a yellow and a green one. They change in his hand into precious stones and he sees three female figures in them for which he should select three worthy young men at Mercury's behest.

While he admires them, they disappear from him; the fourth female being appears, dances on his hand and gives him a slap on the forehead, because he wants to catch it, so that he loses consciousness.

When he awakes, he dresses himself festively to make visits and comes before the gate where he finds a strange gate in the wall. It has no key.

A man with a long beard opens from within; he resembles an Oriental, however, he crosses himself and shows in such a way that he is a Christian. He shows the marvellous garden to the boy. From the bushes the birds shout quite clearly: “Paris, Paris”, then again “Narcissus, Narcissus.”

The new Paris now sees an even more marvellous garden behind a kind of living wall. He asks whether he is allowed to enter. The old man permits it, after he has taken off hat and sword. Led by the hand of the old man, he sees even more marvellous things. He sees behind a fence of swords and partisans an even nicer garden, surrounded by a canal. Now he must put on another robe; he receives a kind of oriental costume. Three strange ropes are shown to him as warning. Now the swords and partisans put themselves over the water and form a golden bridge, and he enters. Over there the girl meets him that he has had dancing on his hand and which has escaped from him. It leads him to the three young ladies from the apples who are dressed here in suitable garments and play certain instruments.

The girl who he has recognised as belonging to him refreshes him with fruits. He delights in marvellous music. Then he and the girl begin a game with little warriors. Against the warning he and the girl gets in zeal; he destroys her fighters; they hurl themselves into the water, this foams, the bridge bursts on which the play took place, and the boy finds himself sodden and thrown out on the other side.

The old man comes, threatens with the three ropes which should punish that who betrays his trust. The boy escapes, while he says that he is chosen to find three worthy young men for the three young ladies. Now he is politely led out of the door. The old man shows him different marks to find the gate again. The significance of their positions to each other points to the medieval astrology/astronomy.

When the boy returns, the gate is no longer there, the three objects, plate, well and trees are differently positioned to each other. However, he believes to note that after some time they have changed their positions a little bit, and he hopes that once all marks will coincide. He closes typically: “Whether I can tell to you what takes place further on, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I cannot say.”

The fairy tale, which is written in 1811, shows in every line that we have to search something deeper in it. Not without reason Goethe tied it on the legend of Paris, changed it in such a way not without reason. The legend of Paris and Helena, of the Trojan War, is known. Paris has to pass the apple to the most beautiful one of three goddesses; in return he wins Helena. Goethe reversed the matter, three, later four young women are there for whom the new Paris should choose the young men. The boy is led into a kind of mystery that is triply enclosed, he must always meet new conditions. A kind of war game develops, an image not a real war. Let us now pursue the fairy tale step by step.

While Goethe says that the contents of the fairy tale come from the god Mercury, he points to the fact that he perceives that which he experiences in this fairy tale as a message of the divinity. Mercury says to the young man that he were sent by the gods to him with an important order.

Goethe always wants to represent the states of human consciousness by women. In this fairy tale are also four young women who meet the young man immediately in the beginning, as sent from the god Mercury. Significantly, Mercury gives him apples at first. The apples change into wonderful precious stones, namely a red, a yellow, and a green one. Then the three precious stones become three beautiful young women whose clothes have the colours of the precious stones. However, they waft away from the young man when he wants to retain them. But instead of theirs a fourth young woman appears who then becomes his guide.

Also in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily Goethe points to four states of consciousness of the human soul using four female figures. In The New Paris these four women are characterised even more intimately by the mystic colours which they wear. If we want to understand the nature of these women closer as well as the colours which they wear, we have to look at states of consciousness which the human being has presently, and those which he can acquire to himself developing his soul forces.

Today, humanity lives on the earth in the mineral cycle; the human being is related to the mineral by means of his physical body. All substances that are found in the physical human body in chemical compounds may they be salts, sorts of lime, metals et etcetera-, are also found outside in nature. The human soul lives within this physical body. From incarnation to incarnation the human soul lives a life between birth and death again and again in a body that it receives at birth or already at conception.

In every incarnation, the human soul has to go through a plenty of experiences. It thereby becomes richer and richer. One can also say that it thereby becomes purer and purer, because the soul living originally in raw desires and impulses appears then within a cultural world in a new body again, lives differently in this cultural world than, for example, within a body that belongs to a savage tribe. The human soul lives now in kama-manas, that is in a spirituality that is still used, indeed, to satisfy the impulses and passions of the human being. But more and more the longing also arises in the human soul to ascend to a higher spirituality. This soul state is expressed in esotericism with the red colour which shines through from within no dead red colour , a bright one, illuminated from within. The red colour signifies the consciousness for the astral world in the initiatory knowledge. If the human being takes his soul contents, his inner soul-life less and less from the physical surroundings, if he kindles an internal, spiritual life in his soul, this life of the human soul is signified yellow, again a bright, beaming yellow colour.

If the human being has achieved to live no longer in his narrow stubbornness, if he feels linked in sympathy with the whole world, if he feels like merging in the universe, this state of the human soul is signified in esotericism with a nuance of green, with a bright green colour. This is the colour which shows the human soul in the aura if the single consciousness pours out itself in the whole world.

Thus these women who are also precious stones, are signs of that which the young man should make of his soul. The present consciousness that leads us to all knowledge produces the connection with these soul conditions. It is symbolised by the fourth figure, by the small figure that “steps dancing to and fro“ on the finger points of the young man. This is the usual reason. The human being penetrates to something higher with the help of his present consciousness, it is the guide in the sanctum. Only the fourth state of consciousness that is represented by the girl already exists; the other three exist only as rudiments, are to be developed. There is something that appears like remembrance in the soul; something lives in the soul that points back to former states. At especially ceremonious moments the human being penetrates into these former soul conditions. The young man has got a particular order from Mercury. Goethe points here to his mission. He remembers former initiations.

In the fairy tale it is now told how the young man is led in miraculous way to a place that he has not entered up to now nay, at which he has never looked in the surroundings well-known to him. An old man meets him, leads him in the inside of a nice garden; at first he leads him within the garden in the round of an external circle. Birds call to the young man, the chatty starlings in particular; “ Paris! Paris!” the ones call and “Narcissus! Narcissus!” the others. The young man would also like to penetrate into the inside of the garden, he asks the old man for it; this accepts his request only on condition that he takes off his hat and sword and leaves them behind.

After it the old man leads him closer to the centre of the garden. There he finds a golden lattice. Behind it he sees a gently flowing water which shows a big number of golden and silver fish in its clear depths. He wants to go further to find out the state of the centre of the garden. The old man accepts it, but only on new conditions: the young man must change. He receives an oriental garment which he likes. Besides, he notices three green little ropes, any tied in a special way, so that it seems to be a tool to just not very desired use. On his question for the meaning of the ropes the old man says that it is for those who betray his confidence which one would be ready to give them here. Now the old man leads him to the golden lattice; these are two rows of golden spits, an external one and an internal one; both fall mutually, so that a bridge originates on which the young man comes now into the centre. Music sounds from a temple, and when he enters it, he sees three female figures sitting in a triangle; the miraculous music sounds from their instruments. Also the little guide is there again and takes care of the young man.

These are three fields of existence in which the boy is gradually introduced by the old man. He enters into the first region, the astral world, coming from the world of the everyday life; there he finds the animals who call to him. But he wants to go further into the centre of existence. Something in his soul pushes him that he should develop higher and higher. He brings the disposition of this rise with him since his birth; there he has come from a world, in which he was a psychic-spiritual being, into the darkening of his psycho-spiritual being caused by the physical world. But the urge for the spirit has remained awake in his soul it points the soul to the fact that there is something that it remembers at solemn moments of life. There also the memory of former stages of existence appears and that from these a mission results for the present stage of existence. The boy feels that this mission is based on experiences of his former incarnations. “I once received the initiation,” he has brought this initiation from former stages of existence with him. The memory of a previous initiation appears in him he got in a previous life. There the master took him also with the hand and led him from stage to stage. There he also had to perform the symbolic action: taking off the hat and sword. He had to take off everything that connects him with everyday things of life in the physical world. Somebody who ascends to a chela, to a spiritual student has always to do that; in his inside he has to do it. This is why he/she is called a “homeless human being;” he has put away what the usual human being calls his home. This does not mean tearing out from life; he/she stands firmly on his/her position, but his/her own life is lifted out from the surrounding world.

When he wants to be led by the master further on, he gets to the second stage; he has to completely get changed to put away all clothes of his present existence. He is fitted with a new set of oriental clothes. This is an indication that all impulses to attain new wisdom have come from the East to humankind. (Ex Oriente lux.)

The boy in his oriental clothes is endowed with the ancient wisdom which the old man with the lamp represents in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; he is endowed with a soul capacity remembering ancient initiatory states. He is led to the river that the soul world separates from the real spiritual world. The river of passions, the astral world, does not rage and roar, it is the “gently running waters which let see a big number of golden and silvery fish in its clear depths which gently moved to and fro, partly single ones, partly shoals of them.” This is an image how the human being can find valuable knowledge instead of raging passions if he has quietened down the astral world in himself.

Swords tilt downwards across the river separating the astral world from the internal, the spiritual realm. The human being has to sacrifice what he has, otherwise, for his protection. He has to sacrifice his personal ego; it has to become the bridge to the spiritual realm. He has to experience the “dying and growing.” Two rows of swords, an internal and an external row, tilt downwards and form the bridge which the boy crosses. This is an image of the fact that a lower and a higher ego-consciousness must join with each other to make the transition into the spiritual world possible to the human being.

Now we can also see why this fairy tale bears the name: The New Paris. It is Paris about whom the Greek mythology tells that before his birth the parents were scared by the prophecy that the fire of the boy, who is born, consumes everything. Hence, he is abandoned after his birth; a bearess nurses him for five days. He grows up and after various adventures he is recompensed, he got married to Helena. However, Helena is synonymous with Selene the daughter of the light of wisdom. Selene is the symbol of the moon. Thus the Greek mythology shows the union of the human being with the consciousness which should lead him to higher and higher stages in the marriage of Paris with Helena.

Narcissus is the other word which the chatty starlings called to the boy. About Narcissus it is told that he is the son of the river god Kephissos and a nymph. So Narcissus is not of earthly, but of supernatural origin.

One tells also that he once saw his image in the mirror of a spring. This delighted him so much that he always stared at himself only. He rejected all temptations of a nymph, approaching him, and he completely sank into his own image.

Narcissus is a symbol of the human ego which wants to insist on its separate existence, on its own self. If the human being remains concluded in his ego, hardens in his ahamkara, if he is not able to get out of his own little human being, if he looks always only into himself, has fallen in love with his own ego, then he does not get beyond himself, then he loses the consciousness that his ego has its real home in a spiritual world, then he cannot ascend to his spiritual home, he remains “a dull guest on the dark earth.” Then he cannot develop the higher consciousness in himself which leads him upwards, he must pine away. Only somebody who can combine with the higher female principle in his soul will thereby ascend. Paris gets married to the daughter of the light, to Selene-Helena. However, Narcissus fell in love with his own nature and rejects the union with the spiritual being, which approaches him as a nymph.

While the birds call the boy: “Paris – Narcissus,” he finds himself faced with the choice: what do you want to bear in yourself, the Paris nature or the Narcissus nature? This question is put to everybody who wants to become a chela, a spiritual student. Everybody must choose the way himself which his soul has to go.

The boy chooses the way of Paris, according to the urge working from a former incarnation in his soul; he wants to become the “new Paris.” Hence, he must also get to know the so-called threats of initiation if he chooses the way of initiation. They are shown symbolically with three ropes. In the initiatory schools, the ropes, which lie around the neck of the neophyte, show different symbols. Among other things, they represent the threefold nature of the human being in the world. What is due to this threefold nature of the human being laces itself around his neck if he breaks the confidence which is put in him with the initiation.
Since the young man wants to become the “new Paris,” he is allowed to be led by the old man who leads him over the bridge. He comes into the second circle which is flowed around by the river, the water of the astral world. There he finds a wonderful garden which appears to him like an image of heaven on earth. In the midst of this wonderful garden, he sees the innermost centre, a temple surrounded by porticoes from which a heavenly music issues forth. He has arrived at the region of the spiritual world which manifests itself sounding: in the region of the creative world word, which sounds through the world as the sphere-harmony. Here he finds the three women again who were sent to him by the god Mercury at first.

In the image which now the boy experiences is expressed what the human being can experience if he has attained the stage of initiation. The human being is able there to receive messages from higher worlds.
The woman in red turns first to the boy; the red stone gives him the strength that he can have insight in the spiritual world. This is the first stage of initiation. The second stage is not mere imagination, but life in the spiritual world. Indeed, there the human being still feels as a special being, he feels as a spirit among spirits, but still separated. He feels, so to speak, like a sound which is not yet part of a symphony. This stage is shown in the yellow robe.

Then the human spirit learns to adapt itself in the sphere-harmony, it learns to regard itself as a member of the spiritual world, as a sound that resonates in the world symphony. Then the human being gains the green stone; this represents the woman in green pictorially. You read in the fairy tale about this woman in green: “she was that who seemed to care mostly for me and to turn her play to me; however, I was not able to figure her out ..., she could behave howsoever, she gained little from me, because my small neighbour ... had completely taken me in for herself ... and although I saw the sylphids of my dream and the colours of the apples quite clearly in those three ladies, I probably understood that I would have no cause to retain them.”

Although the boy gets insight in those lofty realms by initiation, he feels that he has hard to work for the life in them. At first he must still dispute with his small guide, the fourth woman, the human reason.

This happens by a war game. You read in the fairy tale: the little one led the boy to the golden bridge; there the war game should take place. They put up their armies. Against the warning he and the girl get into zeal, the boy overcomes the troops of the little lady, “which running forth and back disappeared toward the wall finally, I do not know how.”

The Paris of the Greek mythology is the cause of the Trojan War, in which symbolically the decline of a human race and the rise of the new race is shown in which the ego of the single human being has to show its effectiveness. “The new Paris” is victorious in a fight which is, actually, a game that is only the image of a fight, which is nothing that has external reality. This war game between the human reason and that in the human being which carries the consciousness that issues from the divine is not anything that has external reality; it is something that lives only in spirit that is in such a way that it takes place like in the mirror image of spiritual events in the human soul. Goethe should announce the higher things which he beheld not in life but in the art. He should speak in mental pictures, in images.

After the fight, the boy meets the old man again, his first guide, and now the consciousness of his own deepest nature is kindled within him with such certainty that he can call the words to the old man which should live from now on in his inside. “I am a darling of the gods!” he calls. But he still wants to live with that what he requests from the old man as reward: he wants his guide, the small creature. He wants to lead his life as a human being striving for knowledge in such a way that the good human reason becomes his guide at first.

Then he is outdoors. The old man “indicated some objects at the wall, beyond the way, at the same time pointing backward to the little gate. I understood him well; he wanted that I memorise the objects to find the little gate again which shut behind me all of a sudden. I noticed thoroughly what faced me. Above a high wall, I saw the branches of ancient walnut-trees. ... The branches reached up to a flagstone; however, I could not read the inscription on it. It rested on a corbel; a niche in which an artificially worked well poured forth water from bowl to bowl... that disappeared in the ground. The well, the inscription, and the walnut-trees stood vertically about each another.”

The young man stands outdoors; looking back he remembers the experiences of his previous incarnation, and at the same time he looks at a moment in future. A second initiation follows after this one which he remembers; once the spiritual initiation followed the initiation of wisdom.

In the image of the tree, the flagstone with the inscription, the well from which the water flows, a symbol of knowledge is dressed which found its expression in mediaeval times in old astrological mysticism. It gives the boy the view to the future: if the same constellation of the stars happens again which allowed you to find the place where the human being is initiated, if the constellation of the stars in the future recurs for you, the gate is opened to you again, and then the initiation on higher level is repeated for you.

He looks at a moment of reality where he will live through what he has experienced as a prelude with the initiation. He looks at a distant future in which he appears on the scene and explains what he has experienced in former incarnations.

A certain constellation existed at the moment when he was initiated. These signs must recur if on a higher level the initiation is possible. Then the gate is visible again, and it depends on the permission, whether one is able to tell more about the future events.

One must take into consideration this fine mood, the intimate forces which play a role there speaking about this fairy tale.

As we see, Goethe also depicts the evolution of the human soul in these both fairy tales. On the one side, he expressed his conviction of soul development in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in coloured pictures which is valid to all human beings, on the other side, he puts the initiation of the higher secrets before our souls in these both fairy tales, The New Melusine and The New Paris, a Fairy Tale of a Boy, as it was commensurate with his own nature. An individual way of his own soul development is represented by Goethe in these two fairy tales. His whole later soul striving adequate to Goethe's attitude is included in the Fairy Tale of a Boy in particular.

In a fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons it was begun in 1792, but was not continued , Goethe likewise wanted to show a developmental way of the human soul. Also this fragment indicates the greatness of what he had to say, also here he points to a constellation. “Venus” and “Mars” are the last words of it which are kept to us.

A father sends his seven sons on a far journey in foreign countries that are not discovered by others. These are the seven basic members of the human being which theosophy refers to. The father gives his sons the wish with them: “happiness and welfare, good courage and glad use of the forces.” Every son has received own talents from nature; now he should apply them and seek his happiness and perfection by means of them, every brother in his way. In this fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons, the journey to the spiritual land of ancient wisdom should be shown that the human being can attain if he develops that from the basic members of his nature which is predisposed as rudiments in them; if he attains higher states of consciousness by this development. A found piece of the plan of the spiritual journey shows how Goethe wanted to depict this voyage.

So we have done some looks only at Goethe's most intimate inside and have discovered more and more profundities which shine through his marvellous poems.

So it is comprehensible if his contemporaries looked up at him like to a signpost to unknown worlds. Schiller and some others, they have recognised or, nevertheless, have anticipated what lived in him. However, many have passed without understanding him. The German still has a lot to do to exhaust what is manifested in his great spirits. But the words can apply to them only too well, which Lessing (1729–1781 expressed about Klopstock (1724–1803, German poet):

Who does not praise Klopstock?
But does anybody read him? No.
We want to be praised less
But be read all the more.

Our great spirits want to be recognised, and then they lead to intense spiritual deepening.

They also lead to the world view which theosophy represents. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of those who anticipated what lived in Goethe's soul welcomed the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1823) with the deepest understanding. “It is worthwhile”, he says “to have lived so long to take these treasures up in oneself.”

Thus those human beings who learnt from Goethe were prepared for the theosophical world view.

Oh, a lot can still be learnt from Goethe!